One of the best things I read on Black Lives Matter was written by a 20-year military officer. In the conservative National Review. He knew what he needed to tell them, and he knew he’d have to build the argument slowly.

Rewriting the New York Times with an eye to colour. Artist and critic Alexandra Bell takes her sub-editing lessons onto the street. (Video, 8 minutes, with an ad halfway through).

How the wealthy have changed London. Not for the better: “it is a landscape of riches built on dodgy money”.

The COVID-19 crisis has opened the door to a herd of ‘black elephants’. A set of challenging futures that are all but certain–but which even now politicians are choosing to ignore.

Kraftwerk were bigger than the Beatles. They were certainly more influential.

The playlist Love Will Save The Day marked its third birthday. 30 songs of despair, anger and hope for these times, as a full mix on Mixcloud. Or also, without the mix, on Spotify.

‘This whole time you were hollow’. The current Bristol City Poet, Vanessa Kisuule, on the toppled statue of Edward Colston. (Video, 1.57)

“The whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me.” (Thornton Wilder)

The regenerative city applies ecological principles to urban redevelopment to make the city environmentally viable. It should make the city socially viable as well.

The great urbanist Herbert Girardet introduced the idea of the ecological footprint of the city more than 20 years ago. In the current edition of Resurgence he has an article about “the regenerative city”, based on his most recent book, ahead of the next UN city summit, Habitat III, in October this year in Quito, Ecuador.

As the planet has urbanised, so the ecological footprints of the city have also grown. As Girardet notes:

Urban populations use the bulk of the world’s resources, and they are prime contributors to pollution. environmental damage, biodiversity loss, and climate change.

And more:

Urban resource demands and outputs define human impacts on our home planet more than any other factor.

Managing flows

Buried in this observation is a deeper observation about the history of the city: that their ability to manage the flows caused by density defines both their size and their impact. By flows, I mean flows of food and water and power (or energy), of sanitation and waste, and of people and goods.

And so, looking back at 19th century London, Bazalgette’s vast sewer project followed the “Great Stink“, caused when raw sewage from a growing city had overloaded the Thames. London’s repeated cholera outbreaks in the 19th century followed the city’s expansion, pre-Bazalgette, to a point where the night-soil men could no longer cart (literally) the sewage away overnight.

The 19th century solution to these problems of flows was to build new networks, or grids, which engineered scale and speed into the system. The sewage project is only the most spectacular example of this; rail and roads, electricity grids, and reservoir-based water systems did the same thing for other flows, moving from municipal to regional and national scale.

‘We move more stuff’

In case you’re thinking that digital and ICT changes this, think again. It might, but not any time soon. As John Thackara reminds us memorably in a fine passage about the Barcelona-Marseille motorway in In The Bubble,

The traffic is a solid line of sixteen-wheeled trucks, nose to tail, a couple of meters apart. In front of me is a Croatian truck: ‘‘Engine parts from Zagreb.’’ Behind me is a Spanish truck full of tomatoes. The lines of trucks stretch as far ahead, and as far behind, as the eye can see. From the crest of a hill, I can see hundreds of trucks flowing in each direction… That torrent of trucks was a reminder that thanks to all the design we do, man-made flows of matter and energy all around us are growing in volume. We buy more hardware than ever. We print more paper. We package more goods. We move more stuff, and ourselves, around at ever-increasing rates.

Trucks, motorways, trains, power lines: these engineering solutions, and the mental models that sit behind them,  are why the ecological footprint of cities is so large. (London’s is larger than the whole of the UK). They mean that cities can export the costs of scale–usually ecological costs–to other locations. Indeed, if you look at the geography of the Thames Estuary, whole chunks of the Essex coast are there to process London’s waste, downstream both literally and metaphorically.

The urban metabolism

I’m writing about London because I know it, but most cities are built on the same intensive, ecologically expensive principles. As Girardet put it:

The urban metabolism currently operates as an inefficient and wasteful linear input-output system. It needs to be transformed into a resource-efficient circular system instead. The only way to overcome notions of ever-greater scarcity is for cities to continually regeherate the living systems on which they rely for their sustenance.

That’s where the idea of the regenerative city comes in. It is the reconnection of the city to ecology. Girardet quotes Barry Commoner’s “four laws” of ecology, summarised like this:

1. Everything is connected to everything else
2. Everything must go somewhere
3. Nature knows best
4. There is no such thing as a free lunch

Cities and nature

To make the regenerative city, therefore, it’s necessary to reimagine these flows of production and consumption, of transport and construction, through an ecological lens, and then to re-engineer them. This involves remaking the links that once existed between cities and nature (think of the orchards and market gardens that once ringed London), between urban systems and ecosystems.

The regenerative city is more than just being “sustainable.” Ecological debt has already degraded the soils, forests and watercourses that cities depend on. “Sustaining” implies no improvement on this degraded state, just as “carbon neutral” makes no inroads into our carbon debt.

Regenerative and regeneration

One of the questions that all of this raises is the relationship between regenerative and regeneration. I’m not a fan of much urban regeneration: it’s often based on an economic model that depends on creating clusters of work, leisure and retail that usually also enriches developers, privatises public space, and prices out local communities. It often increases flows.

It seems clear that the regenerative city should be an attractive place to live. If cities are “magnets and glue“, to use Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s resonant phrase, there’s quite a lot of quality of life “glue” in there.

It feels, for example, more like a “happy city” than a “smart city,” for example, drawing on some of the thinking of Lancaster’s Institute of Social Futures. This is probably worth a post in its own right another time, but the discourse around the happy city emphasises the small scale and the local, whereas the smart city emphasises connection, “always-on”, and notions of global connectness and competitiveness.

Happy city

A paper by the late John Urry for the ISF, which I can’t find online, noted some of the features of the “happy city.”

• “Happy cities thus involve a smaller scale system of neighbourhoods, indeed with cities fragmented into more self-sufficient neighbourhoods without rigid zoning.”
• “Collective ownership would also be key. Car-[and bike-] sharing schemes are an example of a new ‘access’ economy incorporating wider systems of mobility.”
• “A liveable city would involve much less energy use through enabling social practices on a smaller scale.”
• “Happy cities involve re-designing places to foster higher density living and shifting towards practices that are just much smaller in scale….There should be a systemic reduction in distances travelled by people, objects, goods and money.”
• Finally, and this is an important point: “Such a city would be one with reasonable levels of wellbeing although in terms of normal economic measures most people would be ‘poorer’.”

Of course, most of the examples of such urban innovation are from the richer world–Copenhagen always gets a namecheck here–although the largest bike-sharing scheme in the world is in China and there has been significant public transport innovation in Latin America. Girardet expresses the hope that in emerging markets cities can be “smart from the start”, and there’s some evidence elsewhere that in places like Vietnam the energy model is more likely to be based on the distributed production of renewables.

Being smart from the start requires more than just being persuaded of the industrial, social, and ecological logic of the regenerative city. It also requires that this model of the future city is seen by politicians and policy makers as a desirable vision of the future. As Sohail Inayatullah reminds us, the last time Asian cities made a choice about the future, in the ’60s and the ’70s, they opted for the “used future” of cars and highways. That model is discredited now. But getting to the future, especially to a large-scale complex urban future that involves long-term planning and investment decisions, still requires making choices.

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Resurgence is available now from the publishers.  There’s a good short introduction online to the regenerative city in the shape of a report (opens pdf) written by Herbert Girardet for the World Future Council. I have written before about Girardet’s work, here and here.

Roll forwards to 2013. For a moment, let me leave to one side the social cleansing represented by the housing benefit cuts. the bedroom tax, and the unwillingness of the GLA to enforce its own affordable housing policy, and the long-term consequences that has for the lower-wage service workers on whom a city depends.

Parking the money of the rich 

I started writing this post a couple of months ago, and recently there’s been several articles on London’s housing crisis. In the New York Times, Michael Goldfarb wrote about his middle-class London neighbours, moving out to to cities such as Bristol and Cambridge:

This is what happens when property in your city becomes a global reserve currency. For that is what property in London has become, first and foremost. The property market is no longer about people making a long-term investment in owning their shelter, but a place for the world’s richest people to park their money at an annualized rate of return of around 10 percent. It has made my adopted hometown a no-go area for increasing numbers of the middle class.

Or Ian Jack, on the way that housing prices are squeezing the middle class out of the inner city:

A report into Islington’s future published this month by Cripplegate Foundation concludes that its middle class will slowly disappear, leaving the population polarised between the very wealthy and the poor, with “a youthful transient and childless sector” somewhere in between.

And although it’s hard to find pity for high waged bankers who are still living very well off the taxpayers’ largesse, the recent reports that some would be looking for help under the government’s Help to Buy scheme because they couldn’t afford to live in the nicer parts of town was another symptom of the same trend.

Ghost towns

The absurdly ostentatious development represented by One Hyde Park encapsulates the problem, as Vanity Fair observed (interesting that there’s more coverage of this from New York than from London.)

“Those people who do buy these houses, particularly the bigger ones, in many cases don’t buy them to live in permanently: they are part of a portfolio,” said [the Chelsea Society’s Terence] Bendixson. “That doesn’t add much jollity to your street: houses with the shutters down and nobody there.” Edward Davies-Gilbert, of the Knightsbridge Association, sees the area gaining the flavor of “a ghost town, peopled by ghost blocks.”

Or another version in the same article, by the social commentator Peter York:

It’s absentee money: the kind of money that has bodyguards. … These people have no substantive relationship with anything British at all. It’s everywhere: I can’t emphasize enough how everywhere-ish it is.”

‘Distinctive new developments’

In passing, it’s also unclear to me why the reputation of Lord Rogers, whose company designed One Hyde Park, hasn’t been more tarnished by it, given his pretensions to being a public intellectual in the realm of urban development. And, oh look: here it is on Rogers Stirk Harbour’s website described as “a distinctive new residential development.”

The data underline the gaps symbolised by One Hyde Park. The richest 10% in London are 270 times wealthier than the poorest 10%.

And in practice, there are similar, if less expensive, blocks of upmarket new property strung out across the centre of London, along with houses that are lived in for only a few weeks of the year. My twitter feed today mentioned a new development in still-not-that-fashionable Hammersmith offering a £5m penthouse, and with no affordable housing, neither built onsite nor elsewhere in the borough, because of the number of ways in which developers are allowed to weasel out of such commitments to the social needs of the city, while remaining behind the veil of “commercial confidence”. No wonder that the government felt the need to criminalise squatting, to protect absentee owners from any inconvenience.

‘Spaces for experimentation’

Several things are being squeezed out of the life of the city by this economic dominance. The first is urban innovation. An intriguing blog post by Alistair Livingston, reviewing a seventies book by Astrid Proll – exiled in London during the middle of the ’70s while on the run from the German authorities – quotes her as arguing that the 100,000 empty properties in London in the middle of the decade were “open spaces for experimentations of all kinds towards a life lived without economic  constraint.”

In other words, and maybe it is worth spelling this out, they created spaces for public and social innovation which reinvigorated a city in decline. As I’ve written before, how this works is spelt out in Joe Boyd’s memoir White Bicycles, where he writes of the innovation in Notting Hill generated by those “open spaces” in the late 60s, from free schools to the Notting Hill Carnival.

Hollowing out the future

The second is the kind of governance that comes from people who believe that they are going to stay around an area for a while. A few years ago I did some work with an inner city London borough – not one of the poorest – and one of the concerns of the politicians in the council cabinet was that house prices had hollowed out the next generation of people like themselves who had a long-term commitment to the borough.

While such narratives can be driven by an over-developed sense of one’s own civic indispensability they seemed to be right; it was hard to see the next generation of aspirational professionals who would be able to afford to move into the borough in their 20s and stick there. Rosabeth Moss Kanter explained in her book World Class that one of the ingredients for urban and economic development is leaders who live and work in the location who are in it for the long haul.

Forty year cycles

I have a heuristic about public change which suggests it works on cycles of forty years and eighty years – crisis to crisis in four generations. The theory isn’t really there yet, though readers of the Fourth Turning will recognise the generational learning patterns that sit behind it. If so, London is halfway through that cycle at the moment, forty years on since the crisis of the mid-’70s.

Another rule of thumb is that there’s nothing so dangerous for a policy maker as a mental model that describes the world wrongly, certainly in the longer term. In Whitehall and City Hall, I suspect that there are policy makes who believe that London’s growth, and its attractiveness as a place to live and work, has been driven by the deregulation of the financial sector in the mid-80s. They’re looking in the wrong place. Loose housing, not loose money, is the ‘secret sauce’. And right now all of the housing trends are heading in the wrong direction.

The image of One Hyde Park is from the website of the project managers, Laing O’Rourke, and it is used with thanks.