Posts filed under ‘cities’
“We are where we are”
Rachel Kelnar writes:
I went to two really interesting futures events last week and was struck by the extent to which some emerging learnings were common to both, despite having expected beforehand that the topics would have little in common.
First, I attended a debate at the London Transport Museum (LTM) on the future of transport – ‘Survive or Thrive: What will urban life be like in 2055?’ The LTM used the intelligent infrastructure scenarios which my colleague Andrew Curry and I wrote for the UK Government’s Foresight Programme as the starting point for this discussion. I also participated in ‘Museums in the Long Now’ – a roundtable exploring the future of the museum, organised by the Cultural Leadership Programme at City University and Compton Verney, with funding from the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise (LCACE).
An emerging theme of both sessions was ‘we are where we are’ – that if we were to design a transport system for the UK, we would not set out to design what we currently have, and neither would we fund or develop our museums in the way we do now. However, ‘we are where we are’ – and we therefore have to temper our views of the future with the reality of this starting point. We don’t have the luxury of a blank slate.
However, it’s important that this doesn’t limit us in terms of what we strive for, and both sessions used scenarios to help participants resist the temptation to think too short term, or too negatively.
Another interesting reflection for me was the potentially changing role of museums. They are generally considered windows to the past and this is pretty uncontroversial. But, if museums are to remain relevant in the future, they perhaps need to do more than reflect on what has already happened. They need to start providing a window on the future as well. The LTM has certainly embraced this idea, with the Future Generator, which allows every virtual or real museum visitor to explore how their choices can impact the future of London and the type of city we will all live in. It’s about putting the Museum at the heart of the debate about our transport system, sustainability and the London we might have in 2055, and pleasingly, it’s also based on the scenarios we were involved in writing.
Discussing the Museum of the Long Now, it became increasingly clear that many museums may well be a natural home for such futures exploration. They are naturally places where people go to learn – to be challenged, provoked, and to understand a culture, a society or a particular event in our history. This mindset is a good one for thinking about the future of our culture and our society – because thinking about the past is the first step to thinking more effectively about the future.
This shift is not without its challenges – it requires, for example, that museums get a bit more comfortable with conflict than many are at the moment. If museums can successfully place themselves at the heart of our future – regardless of the issue – than they are helping to cement their role in our lives going forward. We are where we are – but we don’t have to be stuck here.
Liverpool Street freeze
The Liverpool Street Freeze was a few weeks ago now, but Denise’s post somehow got lost in the machine. Better late than never.
Denise Hicks writes:
Flash mobbing and its variations, such as ImprovEverywhere, have been around anecdotally for years now, but I’d never participated in one – believing that it was the preserve of the select few. Although there was an air of irreverent young trendies about the Liverpool Street Freeze, what surprised me was the inclusivity and breadth of the nature of participation. Alongside the BAPE-clad creative types with oversized headphones sat elderly women in mid-page turn of their daily paper, city types with briefcases stopped in mid-swing and construction workers pre-coffee gulp.
Preceding the Freeze was a strange sense of the anticipation of performance, but years of training on the underground have helped to perfect the art of being motionless and devoid of expression. As I stood, there was a strange sensation of being connected to the many people around, all with the same purpose and associated anticipation and sense of breaking the rules, doing something different, and yet you’re still anonymous to one another. It’s refreshingly uncomplicated in a world of hi-tech and complex ‘connections’.
While it would have been more poetic to end the four minutes as subtly and as nonchalantly as we’d begun, the Freezers couldn’t resist acknowledging the sense of achievement with a round of applause. Even for those of us who believed it should have ended in silence, leaving the viewers dumbfounded, we were secretly sharing in the celebration that for four minutes, we’d turned just another day into an extraordinary day and given hundreds of people something to talk about.
Dubai and the cities of the future
Andrew Curry writes:
I chaired a session this week at the Building Futures ‘Futures Fair‘ at the RIBA in London at which Reinier de Graaf, of the architectural practice OMA, talked about the development of Dubai – and some of its implications. The city has grown (been grown) from nothing in 15 years, and every significant architectural practice in the world, OMA included, is building something there. de Graaf described the city as a “multitude of competing theme parks”, as the “monotony of the exceptional”. He added that “there are as many billboards as buildings, and the billboards hold the promise of the finished city”.
The city is – famously – building out into the sea, and before long more than half of the population of Dubai will be living on sea rather than land. This isn’t because of a shortage of land, for there are miles of desert inland. de Graaf observed laconically:
One prefers to make projects in the sea, because they are more expensive and more difficult, and therefore more marketable, because one markets their difficulty.
But this isn’t just a story about urban ostentation. The development of Dubai followed a long-term decision by the Emirates to reduce its dependence on oil, and the last year in which oil contributed more than half of national revenues was in 1985. The three property companies which are building Dubai are each half-owned by the UAE Royal Family, and the men who run them all hold positions in the Emirates government. Property is now one of the Emirates’ biggest exports, and its property companies are now building in all of the fastest growing cities in the world, from Morocco to the Philippines. As Reinier de Graaf noted, ‘the Dubai model’ represents a challenge to our received wisdom that democracy represents the best guarantee of economic prosperity.
