TED Radio Hour - Listen Again: The Life Cycles Of Cities

Episode Date: April 2, 2021

Original broadcast date: November 13, 2020. Cities are never static; they can transform in months, years, or centuries. This hour, TED speakers explore how today's cities are informed by the past, and how they'll need to evolve for the future. Guests include archaeologist Alyssa Loorya, architects Marwa Al-Sabouni and Rahul Mehrotra, and landscape architect Kotchakorn Voraakhom.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it's Mnuch, and I am recording this from New York City, where most of the buildings in Midtown are still pretty empty. And lots of folks are avoiding taking the subway if they can manage it. My hometown has changed a lot over the past year. But really, cities are always changing. And that's what this episode, one of my absolute favorites, is all about. We explore how cities transform over months, years and centuries. as buildings rise and fall, and people come and go. This episode is called The Life Cycles of Cities,

and originally aired in November. Thanks for being here and enjoy. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world.

To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speak and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person.

Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From Ted and NPR. I'm Minouche Zamoroti. If I asked you to picture a farm in New York City, you might say... I mean, come on, there are no farms in New York City. And Lord knows as a child, I was like, there are no farms in New York City.

New York City's all steel and concrete. But 100 years ago, the city looked a lot different. The surrounding areas were just farm after farm after farm. This is Alyssa Luria. I am a historical archaeologist focusing on New York City history. And I recently met Alyssa for a tour of the historic Hendrick I Lott House. Let's go for a walk. Let's go for a walk.

Welcome to the lot house. Thank you. It's a 300-year-old farmhouse in urban Brooklyn. We are in the middle of the block. The oldest portion of the house was built 1720. The newer portion of the house was built 1800. So if we were standing right where we're standing right now, say, 200, 250 years ago, what would be surrounding us?

Farm fields, dirt roads, cows, chickens on Fillmore Avenue, there were two large barns, and it was a farm. It was an active... Alyssa and her team have spent the last decade excavating and cataloging the lot house, finding artifacts from generations of the lot family. A tiny slice of life helping Alyssa trace how New York City came to be New York City. And all of that is one piece of a larger puzzle that is the fabric of a house. It is the fabric of a house.

a neighborhood, the fabric of a community, and that just grows and expands one onto the other until eventually you have an entire city. Okay, can I have a tour? Yes, you can. Okay. Okay, I'm going down some steep stairs into what looks kind of, I'll say it, a dingy back room, and it's got a sink that looks like it's from a hundred years ago. It is. Is it? Okay. This is the original sink and wash tub. No kidding. Yeah. As you would expect, with a 300-year-old house, they discovered some surprises. You just shown the flashlight up into the ceiling, and there is no ceiling. It goes right up into another room.

So there was a trapdoor there. It's hard to see, and it's extremely dirty and precarious. It turns out that the Lott family enslaved 12 people. Yeah, you know, we have some of their names. Paul, Harry, Mary, Hector, Hannah, Mall, Kate, Powell, Tyrone, Tom, Hannah, and Jacob. You know, these were men and women. And several years ago, we realized that there were two garret spaces, two attic spaces, above this kitchen.

And it was on either side in these garret spaces that we found materials that we believe were placed by enslaved persons beneath the floorboards. This included things like a pouch tied with hemstring. cobs that were placed in the shape of an X or a cross representing the Bacongo Cosmogram, which is a West African religious symbol. Half an oyster shell. And a child shoe, a very crude, handmade child shoe. When you found those things, though, what did that tell you about who was using the space?

It tells us that the enslaved person or persons who occupied the space maintained a spiritual life that was connected to the place they came from originally. And I think that's important to recognize because the goal of the enslavers was to break a connection with the home because you wanted to break that person. But the reality is they maintain that cultural tie. They maintain that heritage in their own way. And that's part of what this represents, that they did have their own cultural and spiritual life. These artifacts are just a glimpse into the worlds of the people who live there. And of course, it's the people who form the character of a city. It's like a time capsule. Life in and around the Lott House changed so much over the course of 300 years.

Alyssa and her team found out that in the early 1800s, Hendrick Lott freed the 12 people he'd enslaved. And it's believed the house later became a stop on the underground. railroad. The top of the stairs is the room with closet within a closet, and that's where they hit the slaves. And is this it right here? And this is it right here. Fast forward another hundred years, the city was rapidly developing with fewer and fewer farms. And then came the 1918 pandemic. You know, we've been kind of going through the house and packing a lot of the artifacts and remnants and among the things that we found was an old surgical mask. At another hundred years, and here we are standing in the same house dealing with another pandemic in a

city that looks completely different. You know, we can point out three centuries of architectural fabric. And, you know, it's just how often do you have a house that has that? You know, I take a moment and I take a step back and I think about the last person to live in the house, Ella Saddam, she grew up on a farm. I, you know, I have a picture of her. her in a cart being pulled by a pony with her cousin and there's nothing but farm fields, open fields around them. And then between 1920 and 1930, the population around her increases 1,600%. Whoa. How overwhelming was that to grow up on a farm and then literally she had 7,000 people move in and become her neighbors.

A city is never static. It can transform in months or centuries, rise with an influx of workers and industry, or fall because of war, weather, or plague. And after this past year, a lot of us are wondering, what will happen to urban living this time? So today on the show, ideas about the life cycles of cities, how the cities of today are informed by the past and how they'll need. to evolve to survive in the future. For Alyssa Loria, even though cities constantly change, some things do stay the same. Here she is on the TED stage. When people think of archaeology, they usually think of dusty old maps, far off lands, ancient civilizations.

You don't think New York City and construction sites. Yet that's where all the action happens. And we're never sure exactly what we're going to find beneath the city street. Archaeology is about everyday people using everyday objects, like the child who may have played with this small toy, or the person who consumed the contents of this bottle. This bottle contained water imported from Germany and dates to 1790.

Now, okay, we know New Yorkers always had to go to Great Lentz to get fresh drinking water. Small island, you really couldn't drink the well water. It was too brackish. But the notion that New Yorkers were importing bottled water from Europe more than 200 years ago, truly a testament to the fact that New York City is a cosmopolitan city always has been where you could get practically anything from anywhere. I'm still amazed, you know, when I'm in the middle of Manhattan streets and we're digging and there's all this early 20th century and mid-20th century infrastructure. And how could anything possibly be left?

Yet, you know, there we are. We find, you know, the remnants of an old water well that dates to 1790. And that's fabulous. It's, you know, these little pieces that just get left behind. And, you know, as modern-day New Yorkers in the early 21st century, we're leaving our mark. our mark might look a little different. We certainly aren't leaving our trash where we used it. You know, garbage gets shipped out now. So archaeology will definitely look different in the future. And a lot of it probably will revolve around the built environment. It'll revolve around our infrastructure,

our buildings. And, you know, how do we inhabit our spaces? And we are in many ways. We're like caretakers for, you know, this part of the city's history. this chapter of the city's story. And I think New York City has many more chapters left. I'm wondering when you, you know, when you talk about this, does it make you feel sad or do you see it more from a scientific, documentarian perspective? I think the only thing that makes me sad is how fast some of the historic fabric can be lost in New York City. You know, we really are a city where you can have an entirely new skyline in less than a decade. And that was never more apparent than right after 9-11.

Yes. Where the whole skyline, you know, the skyline changed overnight. And then less than a decade later, we built a new one. So New York City is amazing in that way. And New York City has always been changing. But I also feel hopeful because I know that these are just chapters in a story and that cities, you know, let's face it, sometimes cities do fail, nations fail. And they're reinvented, they're reborn. People are still there. It's just, it's a different form. And I think that's a hopeful thing, not a sad thing. I guess finally I just want to ask, you know, all the work that you're doing, thinking about the lot house, city hall park.

is another site that you mentioned in your talk, the water bottle imported from Germany, all the things that you've found. Why is it important to learn about the farm? And I guess just all the things that happened before we were here in this city, what's the significance of that, do you think? I think having, in a way, a well-understood past is the best way to help build your future. There are all these, you know, classic comments about don't repeat the past that we need to learn from our history. It's one way of learning from our history. But it's like, how did the city become what it is today?

It's important good, bad and ugly. It's important not to ever forget any aspect of our history. And I think we are such a multicultural fabric. The human population is a multicultural fabric. It's important to know how we've treated each other in the past. You know, most people will not do something so fabulous that their name gets listed in a history book down the road. Yet we are all part and parcel of the fabric in the community that enables, our cities, our communities, our neighborhoods to turn.

That's urban archaeologist Alyssa Loria. You can hear her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, the life cycles of cities. I'm Minnuch Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Minnush Zamorodi. And on the show today, the life cycle of cities. including some very difficult chapters in one city's history.

So let's start, just if you wouldn't mind, just tell us where you are right now. Well, I'm in my home and Homs, Syria. And how would you describe it, Homs, I mean? At the moment, you mean, or, I mean, dead. Dead. Just dead, yes. It's a dead city with every sense of the word. This is Marwa al-Sabuni.

You know, my city in Homs was predominantly on international news for almost five years. We turn now to Syria where three years of civil wars, the capital of the revolution. The rural city of Homs. Ate-free Syria is track for more than a year. Mar was referring to the Syrian civil war when between 2011 and 2016, government and rebel forces fought each other from strongholds inside the city. The violence that happened and the conflict that went on for several years, almost five years of shelling and killing and destruction,

ended by having more than 60% of the city in rubble. While the city was being shelled around her, Marwa stayed indoors, raising her two young kids. We were trapped for almost two years in our blood. And she was also working. I have a PhD in Islamic architecture. and basically my professional life started during those 10 years of war. I mean, I lived in the city for five years of destruction. Now, I mean, the other five years are of decline.

I mean, you say that the city is dead, but I hear a lot of traffic nearby as well. Well, the definition of this city is that trade is dead, production is dead in that sense. but I mean people are moving. It's good that you are hearing traffic, but you should see how many days those cars are queuing now for a few days, not hours, around the neighborhood, like in loops. It's a daily challenge to deal with all the problems that the situation is bringing into our lives

and the drain of not only the resources, not only the nature, but also the drain of people. And when they are that tired and when you lose all of those resources, it brings the worst in people. In 2016, Marwa gave her TED Talk via Skype from her apartment in homes, which was still under siege at the time. When I look at my destroyed city, of course, I ask myself, what has led to this senseless war? Syria was largely a place of tolerance, historically accustomed to variety, accommodating a wide range of beliefs, origins, customs, goods, food. How did my country, a country with communities living harmoniously together?

How did it degenerate into civil war, violence, displacement, and unprecedented sectarian hatred? There were many reasons that had led to the war, social, political and economic. But I believe there is one key reason that has been overlooked and which is important to analyze. And that reason is architecture. Architecture. Marwa believes that architecture lays the foundation for how people live and interact in cities. And she says that sense of harmony and community that came from different people living side by side, it was because of how traditional Syrian cities were designed, like homes. Yeah, basically, I mean, you had centuries of Islamic civilization and the remnants of the remnants of,

different rules and different styles from the Memluk, a Yubid, Ottoman, but also you will find other layers like Roman, even Hellnistic. All of these layers are intertwined into one urban fabric that reflected itself also on a social fabric. So what was interesting for me is to see how different religions live side by side. You have the mosque built and of the church and you have the Christian neighbor living next to a Muslim neighbor. The old Islamic city in Syria was built over a multi-layered past. People lived and worked with each other in a place that gave them a sense of belonging and made them feel at home.

They shared a remarkably unified existence. But over the last century, gradually this delicate balance of these places had been interfered first by the urban planners of the colonial period when the French went enthusiastically about transforming what they saw as the unmodern Syrian cities. They blew up cities. In 1923, French colonialists took over Syria and within 20 years reshaped and redesigned the old cities. So what they wanted is to tear as much as they can from the Islamic city, which they thought is too intertwined, too chaotic for them. And they wanted, you know, more of colonial rule.

They wanted to expand the roads so their tanks could go in. They wanted to create gaps in the density of the city, so they have more control. They called them improvements, and they were the beginning of a long, slow unraveling. The traditional urbanism and architecture of our cities assured identity and belonging, not by separation, but by interwining. But over time, the ancient became worthless and they knew coveted. The harmony of the built environment and social environment got trembled over by elements of divisive urbanism that zoned community by class, creed, or affluence.

The communities started drifting apart from the very fabric that you used to in Alpem. Okay, so between 1923, 1943, the French redesigned the old cities. And they start building neighborhoods outside the city walls. And in your talk, you say that this was the beginning of a long, slow unraveling. Yes. What do you think was kind of the domino effect? I mean, this is the beginning of the class division. Before that, you had the rich and the poor. You couldn't tell by the exterior of the house how much wealth the resident had.

But when you built the posh villa and the boulevard housing, the appearance is that there is a line that you are crossing here. And the same happened also to sex. So you had a neighborhood that will be for the Orthodox Christians and another one for Catholic Christians and another one for Muslims. So this segregation and urbanism also reflected itself on the social life. And with that comes antagonism. It was the perfect atmosphere for a civil war. And how did you see that people were divided?

Like how did that play out? I mean, this war is very complex. And I don't want to simplify it. But then also you had people who were killing each other on the basis of religion and also belonging to which party or to which faction you belong to. And based on the answer of this question, people killed each other. But you had just started a family. You had just started your career as an architect. Why did you stay when all of this was going on?

Well, you have to imagine. I mean, it's a very long period of time that each day sometimes brought a new challenge. So, I mean, if you ask me why didn't you leave? Because there is no way anybody could leave. I mean, people flee in that phase. They left everything. They couldn't take a shoe, a shirt. They couldn't take a backpack sometimes.

They fled in the trunk of a car. I mean, it's the danger that was outside was greater than the danger of the danger of. the input. But also, over time, a sense of responsibility. I mean, this war put us in existential threat and you have to ask what is the purpose of my life, why I am here, what should I do? And the answer was to have faith and to try to bring in some good towards those who are around you. That was kept us where we are. Hopefully the war will end. And the question that as an architect I have to ask is,

how do we rebuild? There is a neighborhood here in Homs that called Babam, that has been fully destroyed. Almost two years ago, I introduced this design into a UN habitat competition for rebuilding it. The idea was to create an urban fabric inspired by a tree, capable of growing and spreading organically, echoing the traditional bridge hanging over the old alleys,

and incorporating apartments, private courtyards, shop, workshops, spaces for parking and playing and leisure, trees and shaded areas. Even simple things, like shaded places or fruit plants or drinking water inside the city can make a difference in how people feel towards the place and whether they consider it a generous place that gives or whether they see it as an alienating place full of seeds of anger. I mean, it's pretty amazing. You submitted this design to rebuild one neighborhood in homes while all the shelling was taking place around you. So can you tell us more about your vision, like how you are imagining that this new design can change life in this neighborhood? I think people would be more connected. I mean, neighborliness is one of the prime aspects that we should as architects and planners seek to.

reinforce and seek to introduce in our designs. Moreover, the connection with nature. So when you surround yourself with the two, I think the cycle of thriving in the city becomes enabled. I mean, the trends of, you know, sustainability and green architecture and all sorts of what seems, I mean, very benign concept. Sometimes simplify those connections into a mere facility. which I think is not at the heart of the matter of settling people in.

You have to find links between the life of the people and the life of, like I said, neighbors and nature. Do you have hope that homes can rebuild, even if it is just one of those integrated buildings at a time that you have designed? Definitely. I mean, after the destruction, usually, there comes the phase of really. reconstruction of rising out of the ashes. And people survive by those moments, right?

And countries are rebuilt in that way throughout history. So I think we are here to have hope. And we should never stop trying. This is the leaf I go by in my life. And sometimes, like I said, get you tired but not defeated. So of course I have. hope. And I would like to think I'm one of those who are dreaming of this better future for my country. That's Marwa al-Sabuni. She is an architect and author of the book The Battle for Home.

You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, the life cycles of cities. And up until now, we've talked about how cities change based on how we humans build them. But for some cities, the natural environment has just as much to do with their rise and fall, literally. At this very moment,

with every breath we take, major delta cities across the globe are sinking, including New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, New Orleans, as well as my city, Bangkok. This is landscape architect Kachekorn, Varakum, on the TED stage.

The reality of Bangkok metropolitan region is a city of 15 million people living, working, and commuting on top of shifting muddy river delta. Bangkok is sinking more than one centimeters per year, and we could be below sea level by 2030. Delta cities lie on soft, river soil, soil that's slowly compressed by the weight of the skyscrapers and city life above. Eventually, these cities begin to sink. And Bangkok is sinking fast. Years of pumping up groundwater has left the soil even more unstable. And worse, climate change has intensified the rainy season. And more rain has meant more floods. As a child, I remember I really have fun with the flood water. This is Cotchicorn on Ted's pin drop podcast.

I would just play. My dad would just have the boat for us, and we just play with the flood. And it's such a significant, fun part of my childhood that I'm able to, like, swim in the flood and all that things. And it's like a joyful moment for me. But after the cities grow more dense, we have even more problems with how we deal with floods. And it's become a big disaster. In 2011, Thailand's monsoon floods were the most damaging in its history. Millions of my people, including me and my family, were displaced and homeless.

Some have to escape the city. Many were terrified of losing their home and their belongings. So they stay back in the flood with no electricity and clean water. For me, this flood reflects clearly that our modern infrastructure had made us so extremely vulnerable to the climate uncertainty. While Bangkok's soil is soft, its surface is covered in concrete and pavement. And that means there's nowhere for all the water to drain. And so now during the rainy season, the streets fill up like bathtubs and they can start to flood in just 30 minutes.

But in 2012, Bangkok's biggest university held a design competition for 11 acres in the heart of the city. And Koch had an idea to slow the flooding and sinking. And her idea was inspired by monkey cheeks. The monkey's shake, when the monkey eat its food, it store its food in the sheik. And when the monkey is hungry, they eat it. this little food that they store. Koch proposed turning the land into a park with giant tanks installed underneath. This way, when the rains come, the water fills the tanks and can get used later during the dry season.

So the monkey chic is like the big retention area that will help the city hold the water. Koch won the competition and Centenary Park opened in 2017. It has an amphitheater, playgrounds, a huge green roof, and native wetland plants that filter the water. And there are water bikes. People can pedals and help clean water. Their exercise becomes an active part of the park water system. When life gives you flood, you have fun with the water.

Centenary Park gives room for people and room for water, which is exactly what we and our cities need. This is an amphibious design. This park is not about getting rid of flood. It's about creating a way we can live with it. And not a single drop of rain is wasted in this park. This park can hold and collect a million gallon supporter. Thank you.

Koch admits that her project is just one tiny solution for a huge problem. But she says architecture can help Delta cities slow their sinking and cope with climate change in small but strategic ways. They just need to be open and nimble. Yeah, this is our life. In a sense, we are like a Buddhist country as well. And the foundation of this Buddhism, the culture is really adapt to change. And as a landscape, we deal with change all the time. Kachachachorn, Fora Akum, is a landscape architect and founder of the Porous City Network.

You can watch her full talk at TED.com and check out Ted's podcast, Pindrop. Kach's interview came from their episode about Bangkok, and many thanks again to our friends at Pindrop for allowing us to share it with you. On the show today, the life cycles of cities. I'm Manus Zamoroti, and you're listening to... to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Minnush Zamorodi. And on the show today, ideas about what cities have been and what they could be.

And how one of the world's largest cities isn't really a city at all, at least not a permanent one. The Kumb Mela is a Hindu festival, which occurs every 12 years and in smaller versions every four years. It is located at the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna rivers, two sacred rivers. And this festival celebrates a belief in Hinduism that if you bathe at the confluence of these two rivers, during the celebration of the kumb Mela, you were freed from rebirth. Now, this festival is sort of set up for 55 days at the confluence of these rivers. For this celebration, a temporary city is set up. It's a city that houses five to seven million people, depending on the cycle and the demand.

And it is believed about 120 million people visit. And so it is considered to be the largest gathering of human beings on the planet. This is Rahul Marotra. He's an architect and a professor at Harvard, and he attended the Kumela Festival. festival in India a few years ago. The largest gathering of human beings on the planet. I mean, that just, it's, I don't think my brain can actually comprehend what having a hundred million people in one place at one time.

Like, what, what is that like, Raoul? Yeah, it's incredibly. I know. No, it's mind-blowing because, you know, it's like all of Mumbai or all of Mexico. Mexico City descending to one kind of spot for a day. So the numbers are absolutely mind-boggling. But I think also what's really mind-boggling is the fact that a settlement is set up in many ways to replicate a real city for 55 days.

And what's fascinating is in India, the monsoon is in its full fury till the end of August and into September. And so the waters of these rivers at that confluence recede only in October and early November. And this festival opens around the 15th of January. So between six and eight weeks, an entire city and its infrastructure is established to accommodate seven million people. And that's what's really mind-blowing.

Now, this is not a pop-up city, as one would tend to call it, but it's a deliberate state enterprise. It's the government that plans for a year in advance and orchestrates infrastructure, orchestrates the management of the production of the city. So it's rather deliberate, and that's what's also rather amazing. Here's more for Mahul on the TED stage. What is fascinating is this city actually has all the characteristics of a real megacity.

A grid is employed to lay the city out. The urban system is a grid, and every street on the city goes across the river on a pontoon bridge. incredibly resilient because if there's an unseasonal downpour or if the river changes course, the urban system stays intact. The city adjusts itself to this terrain, which can be volatile.

It also replicates all forms of physical as well as social infrastructure. Water supply, sewage, electricity. There are 1,400 CCTV cameras that are used for security by an entire station that is set up, but also social infrastructure, like clinics, hospitals,

all sorts of community services that make this function like any real megacity would do. 10,500 sweepers are employed by this city. It has a governance system, a Mela Adhikari, or the commissioner of the festival, that ensures that land is allocated, their systems for all of this, that the system of the city, the mobility, all works efficiently.

You know, it was the cleanest and the most efficient Indian city I've lived in. And it's a city that sits on the ground very lightly. It leaves very little mark. There are no foundations. Fabric is used to build this entire city. What's also quite incredible is that there are, five materials that are used to build this settlement for seven million people. Eight foot tall bamboo, string or rope, nails or screw, and a skinning material.

Could be corrugated metal, a fabric or plastic. And these materials come together and aggregate. It's like a kit of parts. And it's used all the way from a small tent, which might house five or six people or a family, to temples that can house 500, sometimes 1,000, people. I mean, as an American, I just keep thinking about all the garbage that must be left behind by this. But actually, you say the footprint is very minimal. Absolutely. And, you know, there are a couple of reasons for this. One is, of course, they are very efficient in terms of collecting garbage,

where garbage is placed for every block and who collects it. It's incredibly efficient. But there's also another aspect which is worth considering, which is that, you know, this is a religious retreat. So people go with very little. They consume very little and they're very mindful of waste. So it's not only an example of a city which treads on the planet

very lightly because there are no foundations everything is just built on the sandbar but also people, human beings tread in the city very carefully, nimbly, lightly and minimizing waste and minimizing consumption. I mean, I,

You present this case study as an architect, as a professional, as an expert in your field. But I wonder, did you feel a spiritualness there that surprised you in any way? Very much. And the one thing that stays with me is it was incredibly noisy. I mean, in every block, there are groups chanting and praying and celebrating. And, you know, I mean, I think for those of our listeners who know anything about Hinduism or have gone to a Hindu temple, you know, it's about bells being rung, it's people chanting, and it's about celebrating life in all its glory and creation, right?

As opposed to that, when you go to a church, it's very solemn, this silence, this grief, right? You know, these are kind of diametrically opposite experiences. So imagine going to a city with 7 million people with about 500 Hindu temples, all celebrating simultaneously. It was a city that was alive 24-7. There was something happening everywhere all the time. And, you know, the camaraderie, the sense of community, you feel this intensely. You know, for example, you could walk into any block that belongs to a religious subgroup. and there is a dining facility 24-7, community kitchen that's in operation.

Anyone can walk into any block and just sit down there and you'll be served a meal. It's an amazing sense of a feeling of community, of belonging. And that was really very moving in some ways. And when it's time when the festival comes to an end, what happens then? The last days of the festival, intense celebration. It's about offering thanks to, you know, the mother Ganges and the rivers, the sacred rivers. And within a week, the entire city is dismantled. And it's dismantled very easily, almost as easily as it's constructed.

Because what's interesting is that the entire city that's above the ground, that is all the space that makes for dwelling, is made out of four or five materials. That's why it's built so quickly, but that's why it's also disassembled so quickly. And if you go back there in a week's time, which is what we did, all you see on the sandbar is maybe coir mats at the most, which are all degradable.

And when the monsoon arrives three months later, I mean, all of that is flushed off the land. And really, there is no memory. there is no trace. This is a stunning example, and it's worthy of reflection. Here, human beings spend an enormous amount of energy and imagination, knowing that the city is going to reverse, it's going to be disassembled. It's the ephemeral mega city.

And it has profound lessons to teach us, lessons about how to touch the ground lightly, about reversibility, about disassembly, And, you know, we are as humans obsessed with permanence. We resist change. It's an impulse that we all have. And we resist change in spite of the fact that change is perhaps the only constant in our lives. Everything has an expiry date, including spaceship Earth, our planet.

And so if we reflect about these questions, I mean, I think many come to mind. But an important one is, are we really in our cities, in our imagination about urbanism, making permanent solutions for temporary problems? Are we locking resources into paradigms that we don't even know will be relevant in a decade? This becomes, I think, an interesting question that arises from this research. I mean, look at the abandoned shopping malls in North America, suburban North America, retail experts have predicted that in the next decade of the 2,000 malls that exist today,

50% will be abandoned. Massive amount of material capturing resources that will not be relevant soon. Or the Olympic stadiums around the globe cities build these under great contestation with massive resources, but after the games go, they can't often get absorbed into the city. Can these be pneumatic structures, deflatable?

We have the technology for that that get gifted to smaller towns around the world or in those countries or move, are stored and moved for the next Olympics. A massive use of inefficient use of resources. You talk about urban planning in terms of what you call the kinetic city, that cities don't all have to be made from cloth and designed to wash away like the Kamella, but that cities should have some degree of elasticity. And that really reminds me of how cities have been responding to the pandemic in the past few months. Like, for example, allowing restaurants to take over the streets for outdoor dining.

It strikes me as kind of a new way of thinking, though, about cities and structures around us. Absolutely. And, you know, whether it's cities or buildings, we lock ourselves in an end state imagination of something. almost assuming we're doing this to last forever. But we don't accept that the intent or what we aspire to use it for might actually change. And what the pandemic has done is completely unsettled that sense of predictability. And it will be important and I think it's critical for us as a species to now ask how much of our resources we are locking in to serve what purpose. And I think the other way I might kind of frame that is to say that even as designers and planners and architects, we tend to think in absolute solutions and in absolute terms, right?

This is the absolute solution for something. But I think we've got to begin to start engaging on this planet with designing transitions, designing ways we transit from one state to the other. when we plan for or respond to questions related to climate change, we've got to use the temporal scale because they are things that happen in the short counts, right? Because of climate change, a drought somewhere, movement and a flux of demography, and you suddenly have to deal with refugees or other issues or wildfires, you know, things that happen suddenly. But we've also got other problems that are looming, which are on a much more stretched kind of which is how the oceans are going to rise or what the implications of that might be.

And we've got to calibrate this as a society carefully as designers, planners, architects, and society more generally, because we otherwise have these knee-jerk reactions and only either focus on the short term or as a country or a society or a city focus on the long term. And that leaves us sometimes unprepared for one or the other. Earlier in this episode, I went to visit Alyssa Loria. She's an archaeologist who studies here in New York City. And I went to visit one of the sites where she's working. And this is a farmhouse that's about 300 years old.

And it's funny when I went to visit her and she showed me all these artifacts that were left behind by generations past. and I felt a real appreciation for the permanence of that structure, for all that the way people lived can inform us about how we live now. But I think what you're saying is we also need to adapt the leave-no-trace mentality as we think about the future of cities. And I see that now in a way that I didn't when I went to visit this old farmhouse. Absolutely. And, you know, I think it's not a matter of one or the other.

It's not that we should only be making impermanent cities, but I think we've got to calibrate what we do in ways that we don't lock resources and make more permanent things that we don't need to. So one way of looking at it is through the life cycle of materials, right, that go into making buildings or the life cycle of buildings by extension, right? What if we actually imagined that we needed a convention center, but in its present form, just the way society is organized and what our needs are, maybe we might need to renew our thinking about this in 15 years or in 20 years.

And what if we set ourselves the challenge that we make something that could be dismantled and recycled in 20 years? Now, that is a completely different imagination of building, right? Yeah. All of that will have to get nimble. And so I think it's a combination of both. It's not a choice between a permanent or an impermanent city, but it's a choice between how we can configure both those together. And I think we as human beings and as societies and as nations tend to swing from one end to the other, right? It's too much capitalism or too much communism.

We very rarely tend to kind of let that pendulum rest in the center. We are restless as human beings, right? And I think that's also true for our atyism. to planning and to design. And I think we need to calibrate this better so that we embrace both the permanent and the impermanent when appropriate. That's architect Rahul Marotra.

He's the author of Kumala, mapping the ephemeral megacity. You can find his full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week about the life cycles of cities. To learn more about the people who were on it, go to ted.npr.org and to see hundreds more TED talks, check out TED.com or the TED app. Our TED Radio production staff at NPR includes Jeff Rogers, Sanaz-Meshkenspur, Rachel Faulkner, Diba Motisham, James Delahousie, J.C. Howard, Katie Montalione, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Christina Kala, and Matthew Cloutier, with help from Daniel Shukin. Our intern is Farah Safari.

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