Ideas - What Should Cities of the Future Look Like?

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

Right now, more than 55% of the world's population live in cities. In a few decades, that percentage will rise to 70%. But with rising sea levels and mass migration, not to mention the state of geopolitics, where does all this leave cities of the future? Three experts weigh in.

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Good evening, everyone. Thank you all for showing up tonight. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. We're recording this event for Ideas, so yes, please, if you don't mind turning off your phone, unless you want to make a national broadcast. I was in Stratford, Ontario for an event we staged with the Provocation Ideas Festival called Shaping Tomorrow Cities. Scholars tell us that the city is about 6,000 years old. That's a pretty recent invention, given the scope of human evolution. And right now, more than half the world's population,

about 55%, live in cities. That's about 4.5 billion people. And in a few decades, that percentage will rise to 70%. But with climate crises causing higher sea levels, wildfires, and what we euphemistically call extreme weather events, and increasing levels of refugees and migrants, not to mention the creaky state of geopolitics, where does all this leave cities of the future? And inside that question is an even more fundamental one about the idea of the city itself.

Let me begin with this. What is a city for? Jay? I think that when people think about a city, they think about infrastructure, dense demographics, or local amenities. But more than anything, I believe that a city is a promise. Okay, that's a teaser if there was one. That teaser, which gets fleshed out later in the discussion, was from Jay Pitter. Jay's an award-winning binational placemaker,

an adjunct urban planning professor and author whose work bridging urban divides has brought her to over 35 cities throughout North America. The panelist sitting next to Jay was Greg Lindsay. Greg Lindsay is a futurist, urbanist, currently a senior fellow at MIT, and his passion, in his words, is helping people understand how our cities, workplaces, and ways of getting around are all evolving in this rapidly changing world. And a bit of trivia, he is not just one, but a two-time Jeopardy champion. And trivia questions are not allowed tonight. But I did ask Greg Lindsay to describe the ultimate

purpose of the city. Greg. The description I love the most, the one that makes sense to me, is by Luis Betancourt, who's a nuclear physicist. And he argues that cities are stars, that they are social reactors where you compress social networks, not social media and your phones, but how we know each other, all of our network connections together, where you compress them together in space and time. And instead of heat and light, you get ideas, you get opportunity, you get everything that comes out of that. And that echoes with Jane Jacobs as well, where her arguments about why cities work focuses on the psychological impact that the design and dynamics of cities have on us. Robin's a postdoctoral fellow with the Future Cities Institute at the University of Waterloo. Robin, what is it that a city makes possible? When you think big and dream and imagine, what is it that a city makes possible? When you think big and dream and imagine, what is it that a city makes possible? I think the concentration of the people, the proximity allows for innovation that can lead

to solutions to some of the problems that we face as a society. At the same time, cities might be the source of those problems. So it's this kind of funny uroboros or the snake that eats its own tail. But I'm optimistic about it, and I think that, you know, especially talking to kids, like my niece, she's three now, and it's so wonderful spending time with her and getting her perspective on the city. I think cities make the dreams of children possible.

The dreams of children possible. Or they can. Yeah. One thing I've been thinking about a lot is the concept of maybe extending the playground beyond the barriers of its physical structure. So if cities were to be seen as large playgrounds for kids, what would that mean for brain development?

We know play is necessary for healthy brain development, whereas kids are exposed to speeding cars and loud noise that all have, I think, pretty significant, as per their research, impact on their brains, which have downstream effects like mental illness and physical illness. We'll come back to those thoughts in a moment. Back to you, Greg. What is it that a city makes possible? I would argue cities are serendipity machines.

They're serendipity engines. They are where, when you compress those social networks in space and time, you produce all of these unplanned outcomes out of this. This is the great urban experiment where you are able to, you know, not only have, in narrow economics terms, for example, you could talk about GDP and wages. And Paul Romer won a Nobel Prize for his theory of information spillovers, which solved these questions about why do people cluster in cities in the first place?

Why don't they just go where the land is cheapest? This drove economists crazy for decades, and then they figured it out. But to me, it's about that potentiality of life and how do you transform it. And so going back to what it's for and what it makes possible, I'm a big believer in the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre and the English geographer David Harvey who talk about a right to the city, that we have a human right to the city because we should all have access to that possibility

to remake the city itself and remake ourselves, is what he puts it. So that's what it makes possible. To reinvent yourself, you have to go to a city. You can't do that in the small town you grew up in because that's your small town, that's your family. You can only remake yourself in a city. Jay, percolating under all of this

is the word you use, which is promise. So if promise is kind of what underpins what a city. Jay, percolating under all of this is the word you use, which is promise. So if promise is kind of what underpins what a city is, how well has the city kept that promise? It's doing a terrible job. It really is. There are so many broken promises in the city. I'll give you an example. Let's just look at housing. My grandmother immigrated here from Jamaica in the late 1960s. She was a trained seamstress. When she came to Canada, she worked in a very hot hotel laundry room, but she also sewed on the side and she baked something called black cake. Does anyone know what that is? No. All right. So it's a combination between a Scottish sort of pudding, black pudding, and a Jamaican cake. And she sewed and she baked cake, and she was able to buy our family's first home in Toronto. Fast forward 40-something years, that promise is no longer possible. It's no longer

possible for an immigrant. It's no longer possible for hard-working individuals like the working class. It's not even possible for young people who have invested four to six years in a university education. And if you cannot establish home, the city's promise has fundamentally been broken. Can you just follow that up with a quick comment on how important it was to find that home for your family? It was critically important to find that home because home and home ownership, it really, again, is not just about a place. and home ownership, it really, again, is not just about a place. It's really about pride and pride of place and laying down roots. And so I grew up in public housing as a child, but in the back of my mind, I knew I too could own a home. I too could transcend the margins of public housing and poverty. And by the time I was 30 years old,

I was a young professional, I was a single mother, I bought my first home because my grandmother modeled that it was possible and because the city created the context for that promise to be delivered. You know, there are serious problems that cities face. The ongoing housing crisis, the increasing homelessness, you know, the tent cities that that cities face. The ongoing housing crisis, the increasing homelessness, you know, the tent cities that we're all seeing and so on. Greg and then Robin, how responsible is the city itself as it's presently configured for these problems? Oh, wow. Okay, let's get to it then.

Yeah. Well, I was going to say, I mean, yeah, from a North American perspective, Canada and also the United States to an say i mean yeah from a north american perspective canada and also the united states to an extent is is that from a governance standpoint cities are effectively at war with their larger uh government structures states provinces and then of course the federal government which do control much of the power uh when it comes to block grants when it comes to funding when it comes to these things so cities have a responsibility to go to housing as i agree with jay a million percent on this.

The housing theory of everything about housing is the keystone of this. Obviously, there's zoning and there's local regulations as well, but the power that Canada keeps in the provinces and denies to its cities holds them back from fulfilling that potential. In the United States, we're about to see blue cities go to war with the red federal government,

as we use in the colored terminology there. So the geography is all out of whack, among other things. Cities are failing at their own promises to keep. And then, of course, they're actually at war with the culture, with the national mythology, and with the governance structures of the places they're in. Robin? You know, I was reading a paper in preparation for this

around what we do about polarization and getting into the neuroscience of polarized societies. But fundamental to the solution to polarization is contact. You know, we're living in an increasingly isolated society where you can literally order anything you need to your door. You have your community online on Reddit, which is an echo chamber of drastic proportions. But the physical realm is really what needs to be focused on. And I think, you know, as we're digitizing and as we're

moving towards a futuristic society, that the bare bones of a good, well-designed public space is so necessary to solve the problems that we have with our divisions. Jay, you wanted to say something. I did. I think that Robin is being more gracious than urbanism deserves. So some of the underlying problem is that it is indeed intentional that lower income communities, racialized communities are purposely not given the same type of mobility infrastructure, not the same type of tree canopy, not the same type of dignified housing. In addition, urbanists are extraordinarily arrogant and technocratic. And so the fact that we have cities that don't work, and some of the things that you talked about from a public health standpoint is that urbanists don't understand that creating a wonderful city requires everyone. It requires public health professionals. It requires people who work in food and artists.

It requires absolutely everyone, including people who live in these places. And urbanists historically have used a very top-down model to dream up communities for the minions on the ground. And that absolutely is condescending, and it hasn't been successful, and it has indeed contributed to some of the dire public health conditions that you're talking about and that you address with your expertise every single day, Robin. Robin, you and I had an interview last year after you delivered a lecture at the University of Toronto

in which you had encountered someone on the street who said, the city is trying to kill me. Could you pick up from where Jay just started and also bring in cars? Yeah, cars are the thing that no one really wants to talk about, but I think are a big part of the problem, not just from the danger they pose on our streets, but the amount of space that's required to not only move them, but store them. That statement, sometimes I think the city is trying to kill me was uttered by a man who was visibly homeless and using his using a shopping cart as a as a walker and it was the

winter time and I was riding my bike to work minus 40 in Edmonton really regretting it as I was doing it but I was at a stoplight and waiting for this light to change, and I see him to my right, and just really, it felt, I felt bad for him, and I was actually kind of concerned that he was going to be stuck, because the car ruts at that temperature, like, you're kind of screwed, you know, so basically the stop hand of death, you know, stopped too soon. And we were both stuck in the middle of the road. And, you know, this is like one of my many pet peeves with cities, but I think one of the low-hanging fruit is giving people more time to cross the street. It's just the... Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you've all... It resonates. Yeah, right? You see five seconds, you're sprinting.

You know, even just last week, I was on a panel for the City of Kitchener's 2051 Visioning Exercise on Community Inclusion and Accessibility, and there was a woman on the panel named Kathleen who was talking, and sorry, she discussed her having vascular dementia and having some physical disabilities,

and she is terrified of going out because she's scared of getting stuck discussed her having vascular dementia and having some physical disabilities, and she is terrified of going out because she's scared of getting stuck in the middle of the street. Obviously, it's done, I think, to maximize the efficiency of car movement, which comes probably from the aboves, as Jay was saying, like a top-down approach. Well, yeah, at every level. I mean, we can talk about some of the, I mean, you know, in the history of the city, we can look at, you know, cities like Brasilia in the 1960s, or Neom now in Saudi Arabia, where, you know, complete bird's eye view, 30,000 foot view of what a city should be with no concerns for humanity. And, you know, and I mean, seriously, I mean, Neom is consuming a

fifth of all global steel production right now. They're using it to build two mirrored skyscrapers, supposedly to go 170 kilometers. I mean, more seriously, this goes back to this idea when Jay's talking about planners. The late sociologist James C. Scott talked about legibility. What made Brasilia inhuman is that it was designed not to be pleasurable for a human at eye level to be able to cross the street,

but that you could look at it from 30,000 feet as a president, as a dictator, as a general, and understand its layout of this and lay it out this way. And, you know, the worst cities are the ones that make these mistakes, but all planners, as Jay put out, make this bureaucratic decision to design cities and systems that are legible to them, not necessarily from the perspective of all of us who have to use it,

let alone the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society. Jaya, you've consulted in cities, big and small, in all kinds of places. Is the problem with cities, in your experience, a people problem, or is it more of a city problem? Well, the city is people. So I'm going to say that it is indeed a people problem. I think that, you know, you talked about a little bit about right to the city. And I think that this is going to sound a bit counterintuitive. I think that's a dangerous dated idea without responsibility for the city and people being stewards of the city because people out here have too many friggin rights like that's a part of why there's so many polarized conversations

and let me just say for quick uh you know full disclosure um having a black lady challenge the notion of rights is a little tricky right it? It really is. So let me just say this. Fundamental human rights are critically important. I'm talking about the day-to-day interaction, right? People feel like they have the right to decide who gets to use the park, or if they have a right to decide if there's a shelter in their neighborhood. if there is a shelter in their neighborhood. So much articulation of rights and not enough articulation of shared responsibility and a social contract

that binds us to some sort of stewardship together and some sort of care, care for each other and the places that are beloved and important for all of us to thrive. I don't know if this is a fair question, but was there ever a sense that that, especially in some of the bigger cities, that that existed at some point, and it's sort of being lost with the size, or is it, what's your sense? I mean, that sort of sense of civic

responsibility and not just rights. I'm not sure that it is lost strictly due to size. I'm not 100% sure. I think we're pretty, I don't know, do you want to help me out? Yeah, I mean, low trust, decline in trust, of course. You know, political polarization. I mean, ultimately, a loss of faith in institutions and state capacity. Like,

people don't believe government. People don't believe in the institutions. And I totally agree with you, though, on the right about rights, because I'm reminded by Richard Sennett, another urban sociologist who wrote many books, the last time I saw him, he said he stopped using the word community. He refuses to use it with cities now, because communities have in-groups and out-groups, and that a city is not a community. A city has to be available to everyone and that communities inevitably define themselves and to some respect or another who they're in opposition to and so therefore he had like sour on the word. I thought of that when you mentioned that just now because yeah otherwise you can create in-groups and out-groups. Do you have thoughts on community? I have thoughts on why

it's difficult to care for each other in cities. So I don't own a car, but I rented one to drive here. And so it was a very revelatory experience to me looking at people as objects that got in my way. So will you tell me why I go insane when I drive occasionally? Sorry? Will you tell me why I go insane when I drive occasionally? Well, there's so many factors. I mean, you're sitting behind a wheel. You have to be hypervigilant to the people around you, but you don't see them as people. You see them as objects. Obstacles in your way.

Obstacles, exactly. And I mean, the same thing can happen on sidewalks, which is sad. You know, that happens as well. I mean, there's a term that was coined a few years ago called manslamming. I think it was like in a Vogue article or something regarding, you know, women just holding their ground as men would bash into them because they would expect them to

get out of their way so there's different levels of objectification and i think dehumanization but but our surrounding our lives around automobiles i think plays a role in in not seeing the person you know and then you pull up to them at the light, and you're like, oh, okay. They look like a nice person, but I really wanted to kill them. I never thought about dehumanization in a city context. Usually you think about it in global conflicts and that kind of thing, but not in a city environment. Jay, you wanted to say something.

I'm going to build on your idea here about community. I think that the way that we talk about cars and drivers is absolutely wrong. So you have a bunch of wacko cycling advocates. I know I'm going to get in trouble for this. I don't give a shit. Okay. So you have like cycling advocates and so they talk about drivers. So they've made being a cyclist or someone who uses a bike an actual identity, much like a racial identity, which then creates this very polarized discussion with people who happen to use cars, when the reality is that most human beings are multimodal animals. We use cars, we cycle, we roll, we bike, and I think the premise of the conversation is really problematic going back to this lens of

community. I'm not a cyclist. I am someone in a city with other people in a city and my number one desire is for all of us to be safe and to be able to navigate our cities in a way that is responsive to our needs yeah I'm really I'm really um as I'm listening to all of you really interested in understanding how this all affects us and how it it prevents us from having sleep, from having clear minds, from living the kinds of fulfilling lives that we want in a big city or in a little city. And so, Robin, you have been, including in our last conversation, very open about your struggles with mental health. Could you talk about the relationship between, you know, that you see between the city, as we've all been talking about it, and mental health, both your own, but also writ large? Yeah, so in my last, in our last

conversation, I disclosed that I live with bipolar disorder, and it's been an interesting journey. I mean, I started becoming interested in how mental health and cities were connected long before I was diagnosed, which is just a few years ago. But fundamentally, I think, you know, people, especially with the more recent conversations on neurodivergence, I think people are appreciating that people experience the world differently. And if I was to reflect on my own experience, I don't like the term bipolar disorder. I would consider it a bipolar constitution, and that I live in a disorder society that makes it difficult to regulate how I feel sometimes. So you can need, you know, medication and mood stabilizers and all sorts of things that help your brain but also can harm your body. So

you're kind of taking a hit to basically exist in cities. If, you know, if I lived in a hut, I mean, I did meditation retreat in the middle of nowhere for 10 days, and it was like the best I ever felt in my life. Maybe not talking for 10 days was good, but just being removed from the city. But I love cities, you know. But your own research has pointed to, you know, kind of pick a person in the crowd. The effect of living day in, day out, running, as you say, from the crosswalks that are too quick and the cars that are trying to kill you. I mean, it has an effect. Yeah, it's, I think, you know, from a neuroscientific perspective, if you really boil it down, it's just, it's about stress. Stress is one of the main precipitators. Neuroinflammation is related to stress. There's a Finnish, I think, biologist, philosopher, I think

he has like two PhDs, Marcus Rantala, and he has a theory of bipolar disorder specifically, and he talks about it as an issue of Western society, which cities are a part of, and, you know, like sleep disruption, noise pollution, you know, light pollution. I try to fit two earplugs in for a year every night living in downtown Kitchener, and I have to cover my eyes with a night mask because ambient light just throws me off. So I'm just a very sensitive person, and one of the outcomes can be a bipolar episode.

All of the stuff that we've been talking about places a great amount of pressure on cities and people who live in cities, but then there are all these outside factors that also play into what a city is like. You know, we have mega cities, you know, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and smaller cities, you know, out there. We have sea levels rising. We have geopolitical convulsions. And, of course, all of that means we have more refugees and displaced people and migrants coming to cities. How is that affecting the chaos of a city or the state of cities today? Jay?

I think one of the things that is top of mind for me is the way that global conflicts are coming to roost at the front doorsteps of municipalities, and cities are absolutely ill-equipped to address it. So what you have are mayors issuing a statement on Twitter, what you have are mayors issuing a statement on Twitter, then they get dragged. For everyone in the audience, that means they get attacked. And then they have to delete the comment, and they have some comms person rewrite the comment again. Rather than actually leveraging our public spaces,

our public squares, cities are fundamentally sites of democracy, and so when global conflict comes to bear on municipalities, we should be gathering in coffee shops and parks and recreation centres to not take a side on an issue necessarily, but to build solidarity across difference and to have a conversation where people have the opportunity to learn and to ask questions. And fundamentally, we don't have that anymore. And I think that's a huge issue that

cities are facing now. They're just not equipped. No. And they're agitating global conflict. And I think that, in fact, it's very dangerous. I think it's a very scary time because of their ineptitude. And we've seen that in a number of cities on a number of different conflicts, right across North America and Europe and beyond. So there's that manifestation of the outside world coming in. What about the issue of migrants and the movement of people looking for opportunity

but looking for a safe place to live? Yeah. Huge pressure. Well, yes, and it echoes Jay's points as well, and what I was referring to earlier about, you know, cities versus their governance. I mean, in the United States, you have the governor of Texas deliberately fomenting a political crisis in New York City

by basically busing migrants from the border there and sending them to New York City and deploying National Guard troops to oppose federal troops. You're watching governance chasms open up here where cities become the recipients of this, and New York City moved 10 points to the right voting for President Trump because citizens there were angry about the new migrants. So this polarization, this reactionaryism is happening because of this too. But then for the people themselves, yeah, I mean, you know, we could expect this to happen at even more massive scale.

C40, the international organization of mayors for climate, put out a report just before COP29, basically looking at the fact that for every, I think, 0.10th of a degree above the 1.5 Paris Accord, it will lead to X percentage more migrants going into cities. And I'm a migrant myself. I am the kind of high-skilled American migrant that, you know, that you see in the political discourse here about the good migrants versus the bad migrants. So they predict that Karachi, Pakistan will be a city of 30 million people of internal migrants in Pakistan because of conditions there. This is a country that, of course, was mostly underwater a few years ago because of flooding there. So we can imagine how this crisis will develop because I did some work with the New England Complex Systems Institute

where they tried to put together this causality to argue that it was climate change that created drought conditions, that created famines in the Middle East, that led to the breakdowns in the Syrian civil war, the bombings of cities and the migrant crisis into Europe. And now you have fortress Europe where the EU pays $8 billion a year to run a gulag archipelago in Libya. So we can start to see how all of this, the walls that are being built and

how, of course, President Trump will build the wall anew for this. So cities are these places where even when people get through finding that opportunity, they're the places that are attacked by those governments as well. You're listening to Ideas and to a panel discussion recorded in Stratford, Ontario called Shaping Tomorrow's Cities. Ideas is heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, on World Radio Paris, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. and wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nala Ayyad. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. ShortSighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities.

Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. The Provocation Ideas Festival has as its aim, quote, to bring together disparate voices working for positive change. And our three panelists have dedicated their careers to doing that work, specifically on what the city of the future could and should look like, as you're about to hear. Greg, one problem the city has right now is the way it's viewed. It's used to be that being urbane was a good thing, but now with the rise of the extreme right and authoritarian leaders,

we're seeing a lot of anti-urbanism and the targeting of so-called coastal elites or latte-sipping cyclists, as Doug Ford described them. What accounts for this animosity towards the city? Yeah, I mean, well, it's age old. I'm less familiar with the Canadian context. Again, there was a good Stephen Marsh essay about this, about the American dream is to tame the wilderness, the Canadian dream is to be one with wilderness, to go out into nature. But in the States, it goes

back as far as Thomas Jefferson versus Alexander Hamilton. You have the slave owner in Thomas Jefferson who believes in the gentleman farmer, a lie from the very beginning, and then Hamilton, I've not seen the musical, Hamilton, you know, is the conniving banker who sets up the bank of the United States, who's a merchant and a city person first and foremost. I mean, that goes back to the founding fathers of the States. So it's always been there.

I mean, I also think the current animosity is the media landscape. It's the infosphere in which people are in. Again, I don't have Canadian stats at my fingertips, but in the States, surveys are relentless. That when you ask people, how are things for you right now? How are things going for you?

They're like, oh yeah, things are pretty good for me. It's going okay. How are things going in the rest of the country? Or like New York. They're like, New York is a no-go zone and the rest of the country is falling apart. This isolation is leading people to create these incredible disparities

in how they conceive of things. So yeah, I'm trying not to just point the finger at Fox News, but also there is a media environment there because of these political constituencies, which now, I'm sorry, we exported this to you, Canada. So it's playing out here as well, obviously. I see this in Max Berdier and some of the other commentary. So yeah, I think it's that. I think it's a weaponized thing to basically treat cities as the enemy.

Jay, have you seen examples of anti-urbanism? Yeah, absolutely, and some of it's valid. You know, sometimes I listen to some of the conversations, like the way that people in downtown Toronto speak about people who live in the suburbs, or likeampton or Etobicoke or Scarborough. Sometimes I look at the movements like even the cycling advocacy that's happened recently pertaining to the provincial government's absurd overreach and dangerous as well. You know the people who spoke about it they didn't represent the range of people who use bikes. They didn't represent the newcomers working in the suburbs with newcomers riding bikes or the workers delivering food on bikes. It really was a bunch of bros, you know, at City Hall, you know, beating

drums slightly off beat. So, yeah, there's some truth to it. There's some truth to it. I think something that we need to be mindful about is, and then you talk about also people coming to this country, they don't just need like a home or a hotel to stay in. They need mental health care. They need networks that actually support them. Like I think we need to be planning for new demographics and populations in a way that is considered and mindful and like holistic and it falls to the cities in the end it does in the end fall to the cities but the decision is often made by the feds and then they just you know they duck out and so then you have all these folks in cities without the required uh supports and then you have all these folks in cities without the required supports, and then you have all of

these long-standing populations in cities saying, wait a minute, like, we're not getting the proper resources, and so I think then you have a structural condition that pits people against each other. Definitely. Because when you put good people in a bad situation, they will behave badly and operate from a scarcity mentality. And I think we need to have that difficult conversation publicly without it skewing to a far hateful, dangerous right. Yes, because I want to raise that discussion because I do think I agree with you. But the larger point to me is really sort of

where it ends up, so separate from the really racist dog whistling about it is just this larger notion of well we admitted more people than we could house the pressure on housing prices this really to me speaks to the conversation that we cannot have in Canada or in the United States where I grew up

which is the notion that we have a housing crisis we can't build enough housing but we also have a housing conspiracy because that is where our wealth is parked, we are a home ownership society, so we need housing prices to go up forever, and really the ultimate immigration policy, when you reach that point for cities, would be one that adds just enough people to keep the housing prices going up and no more, and that is where you'll end up at a migration rate, which I think is too low, and arguably immoral, I think we would have there. So that's like the polite version of it, which I think is also bad in addition to the really racist argument. Greg, you made the point about homeownership as being kind of a key part of cities. On the opposite end of that spectrum is

homelessness and something, I mean, I live right across the street from the encampment in downtown Kitchener and see the reality of that on a daily basis. And something that, so when I was in grade nine, I was assigned a short story by someone named Shirley Jackson. I don't know how, yeah, the lottery. Yeah, it's a story about a fictional city where people basically choose someone to stone to death. And that was just part of their society. It was normalized. And that comes to mind every time I see a homeless

encampment. It seems like it's passive stoning. And one of the things I've kind of reflected on is whether capitalism requires homelessness to be so visible as a consequence to fear, should you not want to participate in that system. Wow. There's a thought. Yeah. One more point for Robin, and then I'm going to change gears. I think it's a really complicated conversation about who we let in and how many people we let in, and I think one of the arguments for letting people in is the imminent population collapse that people are talking about.

Another solution of the population collapse is giving single people opportunities to meet each other. What are you doing for? You know, I'm not speaking from experience here, but the apps aren't working. But it's seriously, like, I think people are tired of dating apps. Meeting, you know, not everyone wants to go and get drunk on a Friday night. You know, you don't want to approach someone at a yoga class because that's a safe space for people to practice health. It's really tough, you know. So I have lots of friends that are, you know, in this situation, like, I want to meet people I can't.

And, you know, they're scared they're going to, you know, die alone, basically. It's an excellent point. This feels personal. I've got you after this. Okay, all right. So cities are places where this sort of thing should be easy, right? And there's centers of innovation, they are, you know,

they are refuges for people, they are places of progress, all that stuff. And increasingly, I'm sure you've all heard this recently with the COP29 meeting about climate change that just happened, that cities are increasingly kind of at the forefront of making those big decisions, not only about who comes and goes or who is taken care of, but how to fight climate change, for example. I wonder,

Greg, just starting with you, if you could see cities increasingly assuming bigger and bigger roles where national governments used to lead. That's a wonderful dream. It's a wonderful dream. Benjamin Barberb the late benjamin barber had this idea of a parliament of mayors that you would have a global parliament of mayors and you have these great mayoral organizations but i mean certainly we saw with the pandemic the pandemic itself was the revenge of sovereignty of state borders and state control um you know my children get to see their grandmother for two years because of the closing of the canadian border which you know i once said the longest undefended border in the world that could never

close, but their sovereignty reared its head. And, you know, I live in Montreal as an Anglophone, and so there we see, you know, Montreal is the political thorn in the side of the province. It goes on and on and on. These cities are constrained by the places they are in, and those local political contexts shape what's open to them. So, you know, cities, of course, have so much to learn from each other, and those knowledge networks are key, and you can see this globally, you know, North America, through networks like C40, on the opposite side of the world, you know, the Gulf monarchies, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, have been sending teams for years to Singapore to learn how to be a good, high-functioning city-state themselves, democracy aside, there, to say the least. So, yeah, so there's a lot to learn how to be a good, high-functioning city-state themselves.

Democracy aside, to say the least. So there's a lot to learn there. Singapore itself was cast out of Malaysia. We point to that example. It was a rump state. It was a leftover British colony, and then Lee Kuan Yew really moulded it in his own image. I'm not sure we're going to see city-states return to this.

They are the front lines of these problems, but they're so hamstrung. I'd be lying to you if I said I knew a way that we could somehow gain our own immigration policies, gain our own abilities to have this control at an international scale. Our nation-states will not let us. I'm hoping to... Cities are not fighting climate change at all. And in fact, it's a climate crisis. And cities, you know, since the little blue box and the green box, cities have not really come up with anything meaningful. If we were really invested in addressing the climate crisis, we'd be building more dense housing. We would be building public transit. We are seeing extreme weather events year after year where people's homes are floating away, like right

across this country, where people's homes are being burnt to the ground. And we would rather respond with aid than be proactive in terms of investing in infrastructure, including green infrastructure, which would really fight the climate crisis and also invest in local food networks and local businesses. So we're not doing the real things. We're just putting out little reports, planting a few trees, patting ourselves on the back, because, you know, we're Canadians. We like doing that kind of thing. I heard about this great underground tunnel idea, though.

That is the subject of the next panel. Please, Robinin go ahead yeah i mean i would say i know what i don't know so i'm not an expert in climate change or the climate crisis by any means but i did live in a city state last i checked at berlin i think it has its own city charter it's considered um autonomous to some degree from Germany. And from what I observed, and this probably might also be part of German efficiency or something, but they had a really good public service system. Transit was really good.

They had bike lanes everywhere. It was a very homogenous city. There wasn't much diversity, and so I chose not to stay there longer than I was planning to. But the idea of a city-state, I think, offers opportunities to really embody the principles that we have, I think. I do wonder about that idea being a potential, a promise, as opposed to describing the situation that we're in right now and I'm thinking specifically of something called the 15-minute city I don't know if you you guys are familiar

with it but it's this concept where everything is supposed to be you know Paris apparently is trying to remodel itself around the idea of a 15-minute sea where everything is within 15 minutes I wonder if if that the promise of a city as a city-state is something that could change how we fight climate change and deal with refugee issues, etc., etc. Greg? Well, those are two separate things. We could talk about the 15-minute city, of course. The 15-minute city is a seductive idea, this idea that you can, you know, that you should be able to walk or bicycle to 15 minutes from the center of your life to the periphery, which is half of historically about how much humans have travelled. But really, when you look at it more closely,

it becomes an inequality machine very, very quickly, privileging those who can live that kind of life as knowledge workers, and denies people on the periphery of the cities, those who need that opportunity, that access, that right to the city, well, they're cut off from it. They're cut off from the core of the opportunity. A 15-minute city is really, you're taking a city and you're dicing it effectively. I'm really glad that you said that, Greg, because what the 15-minute city does not consider here in North America

is the legacy of amenity inequity, tree canopy inequity. And so if you draw a 15-minute line around particular communities, some communities will have lush green parks, a university, health care, and other communities will have none of those things. And so it's really etching inequity into the urban landscape more than it's already etched into the urban landscape. And I think this is why urbanists who point to Europe a lot annoy me. I think that we need to operate, and again,

Canadians have such low self-esteem. I think that we need to respond to our situation, how our cities have emerged, the policies that have driven how Canadian cities and American cities have come to be, and start from that place. I'm not saying that we can't get good lessons from Berlin or from China or other places, but far too often Canadians, again, the low self-esteem, the hyper humility, looking out to these other places versus looking in at our own capacity and expertise and knowledge as well. So Jay, let's just continue with you for a minute. Can you provide an example of a city that, again, in the bigger picture, writ large, didn't work, that transformed into a city that did? I think there are two cities that are transforming right

now, and that would be Detroit and Hamilton. And they're very similar, very different demographics, but they're very similar in that they are a comeback city. They are a working class city. They are a city where people have, from the ground, had to take on that stewardship when the state failed them. They are cities where people are just working so collaboratively, and they also have a really proud culture, both of those cities. And so I really love those cities. People talk about Toronto. I'm from Toronto. They talk about Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver and New York. It's always the big cities,

but I'm actually a big fan of those scrappy, small, and mid-sized cities. I think that that's where a lot of the potential and the promise actually lies. And we could learn a lot from those cities because they have no option other than to collaborate and cooperate and steward those places. So I think those are really exciting for me.

Okay, Robin and then Greg, and then we're going to switch gears again. Yeah, I like Edmonton. I mean, I lived there for six years, and it was interesting. I got there just as Mayor Stephen Mendel left his post, and Don Iveson, who was a relatively, I guess, younger politician, he, I think, spent a couple of terms on council, came in. And over the course of five years, I just, it was amazing.

I mean, it's not perfect by any means, but it was impressive what they were able to do in a city that like their big trucks and bike lanes were seen as a maybe not particularly preferable. But what I liked about it was they were bold about it. And that is something that I think in politics can be lacking sometimes, particularly for people who want to see a lifetime career in it. You know, you don't want to ruffle feathers. And so I think our best political leaders do that to serve the people. And I think Edmonton is a really good example of that, where you have the changes like bike lanes or snow clearance and, you know, investment in public libraries and parks.

We hear the term smart city a lot, and we almost had one here in Canada, and that opportunity passed us by. What goes through your mind when you hear that term? Well, my first thought is that opportunity didn't pass you by. It was rightly rejected by the team of Block Sidewalk and others. Beware of geeks bearing gifts, as they say. The smart city, I mean, yeah, the smart city, the idea of a technologically enabled city, what does that mean? What does smart mean?

What does it mean to optimize a city? Like I said at the outset here, that cities are serendipity engines. So a smart city is one that attempts to use algorithmic control to basically take processes and refine them and make them better. And there's a use for that, right? Our plumbing should work better and spotting leaks in pipes, great.

But the smart city is ultimately about power. It's about who has power, and who has legibility, and who is able to see these things. And this is a project that I've been working on at Cornell Tech for the last few years about thinking about augmented reality and AI. And so I think about this, for example, that, you know, Meta has a new pair of sunglasses, the Meta Ray-Ban Wayfarers. You can put on a pair of sunglasses. It has cameras. It has a microphone. It has an onboard large language model.

So you can talk to it, but it also listens to what's happening. It's also watching everything. And so in addition to being able to ask the questions, what am I looking at? It's also building a map for Meta at all times of your home. They showed a demo, for example, where you can ask, where did I leave my keys? To know where you left your keys, it has to have a complete interior model of your house that Meta knows. And of course, Meta has that with all of your likes from your Facebook and then marrying those things together. It's a level of power and control and

also just flagrant irresponsibility by that company and others based on the lawsuits against Instagram and others. So I worry about the smart city because, you know, there's a great line actually from Harry Potter. It's one I think we should remember more. It's never trust a thing if you don't know where it keeps its brain. That's in a reference to the Marauders map, this idea of a map that shows where everyone is at all times.

And, like, yeah, it's not a question of, like, having that ability. It's, like, who controls the ability? Who owns it? Where is it? And right now, the screen continues to eat away with us. All the little black mirrors that we have in our pockets that we can't put down, that continues to eat away at real life and public space by moving all of that interface behind the screens, the Amazon distribution centers, the logistics systems, the online dating. I have been back on the apps recently. It is so not pretty out there.

Let me tell you. It's brutalizing. It's true. It is true. Because it turns human interaction. It is hilarious. But it is also brutalizing because what I thought about online dating in this regard is someone pointed out, you're not having an interaction with another human being.

It's a game you play on your phone. It's a game you play on your phone. These kinds of combinations of life disappearing behind the screen, it's eating game you play on your phone. It's a game you play on your phone. These kinds of combinations of life disappearing behind the screen, it's eating away with us. It's been eating away with us for years. I don't know if it's terminal yet, but it's something we actually have to have a program to address because the real world

is becoming vestigial to the digital one. Thank you. There you go. Jay, I don't want to pit smart cities versus you know traditional ways of designing cities but i wonder if you could um make a plug for what you do being a placemaker in a city and how that makes cities better yeah i i was to come in very old school anyway. So I'm going to say that nothing can replace public space and what it generates and the promise, again, that it can fulfill.

So when I work in cities right across North America, one of the ways that I start some of my most complex projects, whether it's reimagining a Confederate monument site or working on a mobility project where there's been gender-based violence, I always start around a kitchen table. I cook with community members. We share food. The internet can't replace that, that sort of person to person contact. And one of the things that I have found is that there are things that people will say online that they would never say to a human being sitting right across from them,

no matter how much they disagree. And I think that that will always be true, and the public square will always be sacred. You're here. Absolutely. Last round, a minute each. Robin, is there any specific city that you've been to that gets it right? From a neuroscientific point of view, I'm wondering what that is,

that city that embodies the best of what cities can be for you. Yeah, so I mean, no city gets it right, I guess, is the first thing I would say. But I did enjoy, and I mentioned this in our last conversation, but I really enjoyed my time in Barcelona. I found that, I guess, from a neuroscientific perspective, there was enough breaks from the traffic. Communities were built, so there were kind of artillery roads. And like in the Eixample, it was very quiet. You could hear birds. In areas where they didn't have that kind of infrastructure, they built the super blocks. So they shut down

entire neighbourhoods and threw paint on the ground and playground structures for kids. And what I liked about that was it was basically overnight, you know, so it was a form of urban experimentation, I think, that worked because they still exist. So it provides an example of, you know, how do you make change quickly? Apparently, the residents weren't too informed about it, which wasn't the most welcomed at the beginning, but over time, they saw what the benefits were from the threat of cars to just noise pollution. Okay. Greg, when you think about an ideal city, what comes to mind? I'll cheat by grading on the standards of several hundred years ago. So, mine is Venice, which if you think about it by the standards of its time,

it was a republic in a time of kings. It was a trading empire, not an agricultural one. It was about exchange and cosmopolitanism. And it was a place where confederations of free men, definitely all men, of course, free men, not nobles, formed their own school of grande, and they hired artists like Tintoretto to decorate them where the highest calling of all the wealth they generated

was to build incredible public works and state capacity unlike the billionaires we have today. So I go back to Venice and if you've been, it's the kind of place where it's fantastical. You go down narrow corridors and you squeeze through and then you see the most amazing church you've ever seen in your whole life and then you do it again five minutes later.

Okay. Jay, as a final question to you, when has the city, both as an idea and an ideal, meant most for you? So about seven years ago, when I signed my first book deal with Penguin, I had the opportunity to travel across this entire country. And I was on my way to the Okanagan Valley on this airplane. And you have to understand that I

didn't travel as a child. I didn't even go to summer camp. And so I'm on this plane, and I'm looking out the window through the clouds, and I can practically, you know, touch. It feels like I can touch the peaks of those mountaintops. And they're clay-colored, and they're vibrant, and I can see the texture. and in that moment and I'm not a crier I wept because I realized that I had a certain type of spaciousness a mobility a certain type of privilege traveling from the margins to being in that plane traveling to a very far away place that I didn't even know existed. And so at that moment, I knew that the city had kept the promise for me. And also, I felt a great sadness and a dedication to ensuring that it keeps its promise, not only for many other people like me, but perhaps most importantly, or as importantly, for people who are nothing like me at all.

And so when I think about that promise, it's about wanting the promise for ourselves, but not stopping there. Understanding that the work is securing, fighting for the promise for all of us. Beautifully put. Thank you. Jay, Greg, and Robin, we could talk for hours, but this was a great start. Thank you so much. Thank you for your insights. Thank you.

On Ideas, you're listening to Shaping Tomorrow's Cities, produced by Greg Kelly. Special thanks to Mark Rosenfeld, director of Provocation Ideas Festival, and for on-site production and technical help, John Hazen, Kendra Fry, Andre DiPlanti, and Michael Fisher. Lisa Ayuso is our web producer. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nikola Lukšić.

The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.