A security proposal for 21st century cities

by Tony Brown, Director of the Ecosa Institute, September 2009

"Make No Small Plans, For They Have Not The Magic To Stir Men's Blood. "
Attributed to Daniel H. Burnham, whose 1909 "Plan for Chicago" is said to have been our nation's first comprehensive urban planning document.

mindset that changes the conversation from regulation to innovation. We must change our institutions to be radical, to throw out the rulebooks, to stop finding reasons why things can't be done, and to encourage innovative ideas.

Why must we think differently about the way we do things? The figures are compelling:

• With estimated US population growth at approximately 125 million by 2050, we will need to create more than 41 cities the size of the current Phoenix metropolitan area in the next 45 years. Almost one city for 3 million people has to be built every year just to keep up with an increasing population.
  

• Globally the majority of people now live in cities, and by 2030, this is expected to swell to almost 5 billion. The towns and cities of the developing world will make up 81 percent of urban humanity. With a projected population increase to 9-12 billion people by 2050, the issue becomes magnified.
  

• A landmark study released by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Synthesis Report, states that, "the challenge of reversing the degradation of ecosystems while meeting increasing demands can be met under some scenarios involving significant policy and institutional changes. However, these changes will be large and are not currently under way."
  

What is clear is that business as usual is not a survival strategy and that unless we seriously address the challenges of housing, feeding, and sheltering billions of people without destroying our natural support systems, we face an uncertain and potentially dire future. To deal with the increasing drumbeat of alarming environmental news, we must address, as a central cause of many of the problems, the development of our urban and suburban cities. This is critical for the following reasons:

2. The way in which we create these urban habitats has a major impact on the natural resources of planetary biological systems.
3. The high level of additional construction needed to house human population growth will further stress the capacity of natural systems and resources.
4. If US cities continue to be developed on existing models, there is a certainty that natural systems will collapse.
5. When natural systems are no longer viable, social systems deteriorate.

In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond identifies a number of factors leading to the collapse of past civilizations. These were sophisticated cultures with complex organizations and structures that failed. Of all the factors, the degradation of the environment is a central pre-condition of this collapse. Degradation creates the conditions where other factors have a greater negative impact. Of these factors, I believe two are vital lessons to take from Diamond's history:
1. Societies that fail to change their values in the face of changing circumstances are prone to failure.
2. The failure of the elites of these societies to recognize the dangers, and to act for the benefit of their cultures rather than self-interest, is a large contributing factor to collapse.

If it is accepted that the quality of our natural environment is critical to a healthy society, and that the city is critical to civilized society, we must make significant policy and institutional changes. If it is also accepted that we are currently damaging, if not destroying the biology we depend on for survival, then it is clearly of paramount importance that we investigate ways in which growing human populations can be housed that are compatible with both nature and culture.

There are those who argue that housing the growing US population is not an overwhelming task and that our current building, real estate and banking industries have the capacity to continue to grow and create more and more cities like Phoenix. Existing cities could continue to grow at their fringes. However, external forces will bring into play scenarios we have yet had to deal with as a society. The world is at a transformational point, more dramatic than the upheavals of the industrial revolution. Transformation inevitably brings in its wake social disruption and challenges, as the past has clearly shown. In the case of the current transformation, it is not only because of new technology and globalization, but because of new limiting factors we have never faced during the incredible transformation brought about by industrialization and technological change. These limitations are not necessarily negatives, but, if ignored, they can lead to decline. On the other hand,if they are understood and faced with courage and innovation, they can lead to opportunity.

We currently design and build our cities in a form that is essentially 300 years old. However, our suburban developments created just after World War II are a new development pattern critically linked to cheap energy, land, and cheap automobiles. Cities of the current scales and projected future sizes are unprecedented; urban populations of 25 million people, surrounded by favelas and slums, continue to grow, pollute, and create stark living conditions. We have different materials and construction technology, but we are trapped in nineteenth century thinking as we move into an uncertain 21st century. If we continue to develop cities in their current form, it is clear that in the not too distant future we will run wall of problems of our own creation.

While there has been a vast amount of literature written about the city, and thousands of studies and essays on transportation, sociology, economics, structure, energy, and many others, the way in which we have addressed the development of our urban systems has been incremental, conservative, risk averse, cautious and obsolete. To create new options requires a different approach. Engineering and product design, for example, require the development of prototypes. Prototypes are created to test theoretical concepts to discover if theory and reality match. While there have been a handful of prototypical cities, on the whole, cities have been the concept of individuals or small teams of designers. City prototypes have never been created and have never been investigated as a total system by empirical means.

If the American experiment is to continue into the 21st century it is imperative that we as a society address the fundamental form and function of the city as a major national security issue. We must remake the city and identify the creation of new urban models and prototypes a national priority. How can a proposal of this scale be implemented? First it is clear that there are precedents for successful large-scale federal government programs once they are seen as a national priority. For example, the space programs of the 60s and the interstate highway system in the 50s were both supported by the American people.

The goal of the SCOPE project is to create a federal, state, and private partnership to develop 50 new cities - one in each state, each with a population of 50,000. These cities will be required to meet criteria that will ensure that they are self-perpetuating habitats that can function at a vastly higher level of efficiency than current metropolitan areas well into the foreseeable future. These cities will operate with minimum damage to ecosystems and reduce resource consumption to a sustainable level without compromising the quality of life for the inhabitants.

How might such a program be created? Who might be involved? What are the economic incentives?
The SCOPE project in broad outline would engage the best of government incentives with the skills, talent, and vitality of the private sector. The overarching goal would be to determine the best innovative forms for urban structures that provide human services and further economic growth without degrading the broad environment as a whole. This goal would be accomplished through a process of prototyping that would provide empirical data, new thinking, jobs and economic opportunity in each state of the union.

Creating the design criteria for this effort will involve leading thinkers, planners, developers, scientists, designers, economists and a host of others with expertise in areas critical to gaining an understanding of the proposals and their results. I believe, however, it is central to the process that it begins with no preconceptions or restrictions on broad creative thinking, but simply by posing the questions: How can we house 9-12 billion people on this planet by 2050? What form of human habitat is healthy for both people in terms of a civil society and for the environment at large?

The broad structure of the program would work something like this: The federal government provides $1 billion in development funding and loan guarantees to each state along with a mandate to build a sustainable city to house a specific population and meet measurable criteria. This would provide initial seed money to each state to identify and acquire land, establish the research infrastructure, and provide loan guarantees to developers to encourage innovation. The development of each state's design would ideally be through a collaborative, multi-disciplinary, research and development program in which, among others, social scientists, architects, planners, biologists, agriculturalists, construction companies, developers, and financial companies would play an equal role. Throughout the process, the projected goals of the design would be recorded for comparison with actual results. As populations occupy the cities, the projected parameters will be monitored against actual performance to determine the level of success.

The question comes to mind - Is this just another give-away to real estate interests? I believe that challenging the real estate, development, and construction industries to think in new ways is the fastest way to finding solutions. These industries tend to be conservative and risk averse for very good reasons, which is why loan guarantees and other incentives would be required. This work would pose both a mental and physical challenge that would require innovation while also creating jobs for increasing populations.

The implementation of a program as broad and far reaching as SCOPE will not be simple, but the alternative - to do nothing and continue on our present path - holds dire consequences for the survival of the United States. The current equating of terrorism with national security blinds us to equally important national security issues. These include energy security, health security, water security, and food security, which are overwhelmingly dependant on scarce resources. We must secure our long-term food supply, which today is intimately tied to our dependence on oil. We must provide local energy sources to power our 21st century civilization. We must secure clean drinking water supplies for growing populations. And we must create secure and healthy populations by eliminating toxic materials in our air and water. Choosing not to act on these broader issues is not only short sighted, it is ultimately disastrous. For if we continue to ignore nature and be destroyers rather than stewards, we will, in the not too distant future, create the perfect storm.