Are cities resilient?

Sander E. van der Leeuw < vanderle@asu.edu>

ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems, Arizona State University and Santa Fe Institute

ABSTRACT. … [T]he driving force behind the aggregation of human settlement, throughout the centuries, has been the ever-increasing need for collective problem solving. Villages and cities have emerged in ‘dissipative flow structures’ in which organization (information processing capacity) spread out from cities into their hinterland, enabing energy and other resources to increasingly flow into cities to meet the needs of the population. Information processing is thus the driver of urbanization, and energy is the constraint. With the Industrial Revolution, the growth of such dissipative flow structures accelerated very rapidly due to the fact that fossil energy became available and lifted the constraint. Hence the urban explosion of the last couple of centuries.

…[S]ome of the potential consequences of this explosion are discussed. First, whether the ever accelerating increase of global urbanization will continue or not, and then what might be the consequences of that acceleration for urban planning and architecture, emphasizing that cities need to become pro-active rather than re-active. They need to start designing for change rather than responding to it. In a final section we discuss some of the risks to urbanization that are posed by the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Revolution, and conclude with a suggestion how, in developed countries, information technology might reverse the trend to increasing concentration of the population in cities, whereas for the moment, this is not likely to be the case in developing countries.

I am writing this now as Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and So- cial Innovation at UCL’s STEaPP, and as a fellow at Demos Helsinki. Before that I was CEO of Nesta (2011-19), CEO of the Young Foundation (2004-11), and director of the UK Government Strategy Unit 2000-2004. I have had quite an active involvement in social imagination over the years, including the creation of many new organisations and policy approaches; running teams working on the practical side of social design and strategy; writings (eg on utopias in The Locust and the Bee, and on futures work in The Art of Public Strategy); commissions, including Nesta reports on participatory futures, and several surveys of futures practice globally over the last 20 years. I have also been involved in some large-scale futures exercises for whole nations, such as Australia 2020. I’ll leave to others to judge whether that makes me well qualified to comment, or too trapped by the assumptions of the recent past.