Urbanity, Revised: To Imagine the Future We Must Rethink the Meaning of a City

Do you have any idea how much your buildings weigh?

—Buckminster Fuller

We have no art, we do everything as well as we can.

—Marshall McLuhan, quoting the people of Bali.

Riyadh—We are in the midst of a global reimagining. Practically everything we do is in flux. The cities we live in—our greatest cultural works at the biggest scale, and the highest synthesizers of all of our technological, scientific and artistic accomplishments—are being fundamentally reinvented. However, the old urban paradigms still dominate our collective imagination— cars, buses, streets, parks, suburbs and central business districts. Traditional forms reach further back to city walls, city gates and city halls, and still inform the conceptual models of governance, the behavior of mayors and civic officials and even the definition of the citizen. Unconsciously, these concepts tie us to our past in the walled cities of Mesopotamia. They bind us to the boulevards of Hausmann, and the postwar suburbs of Levittown. When we think about the future of cities we still think with these outmoded mental models. Even though we know these cultural forms are being profoundly rethought, in the absence of new norms and forms, we maintain the old. While we may be in the process of reinventing the car and questioning the suburb, reimagining the park and redesigning the street, radically empowering the citizen and connecting the world into a single global urban system—all processes that continue to rock and reshape our cities—there is still no new consensus on the future of any one of these new forms that can be shared and broadly understood. In the absence of a new pattern that we can understand and embrace, we cling to what we know.

At a recent meeting in the Middle East, leading architectural urban design firms from around the world presented their work. Each spoke the new language of the sustainable future with impressive technical knowledge and beautiful renderings. But in the end, the development models presented had an almost bizarre sameness. It was as if there was an algorithm of relationships that produced a carpet pattern of "walkable neighborhoods" and "dense, transit-friendly development" that could be laid down no matter where in the world they were building. Although they were embracing the technological capacities, they were using them to re-build Paris—in a bizarrely modern, reconditioned world—everywhere.

However, massive change is upon us, and it opens onto an extraordinary vista of opportunities—and challenges. Contrast urban inertia with the clock speed of technological change where we are doubling our capacity every 12 months, inventing new products, systems and language. Paradoxically, in this time of great change and potential abundance, we must reinforce stability in order to allow citizens—individually and collectively—to support and engage new and fresh possibilities.

The other great paradox of this moment of massive change is that the greatest challenges we face are problems of success, not failure. If we had failed more, we would not have nearly as many problems. Had we failed more frequently, there would not be nearly seven billion of us. If Malthus was right, there would be fewer than a billion citizens on the planet, and we could behave like frat boys and never concern ourselves with our impact on the global ecology. But with a growing population expected to top more than 10 billion by mid-century, what we do adds up. And the impact of our success generates new, demanding and even life-threatening challenges.

Massive Change

Under these conditions, the urban potential of the global revolution of possibility that we call Massive Change is twofold:

First, create wealth—embrace the extraordinary new capacities of the 21st century so that we can fully experience our collective potential for a brilliantly creative, abundant and equitable future.

Second, get to perpetuity—design a beautiful way of living that is equal parts ecology and economy; a way of being on the planet that is thriving—voluptuous, thrilling and plausible in the long term. Perpetuity...