The future of cities | Challenges & trends

Opening conference keynote given by Tim Stonor at ‘Aberdeen: transforming our city’ on 17th March 2022.

I’m very pleased to accept this invitation to speak today about the challenges facing cities around the world and some of the trends in urban planning and design that are addressing these challenges.

1. The three emergencies facing cities

Cities everywhere are facing three emergencies. First, on climate, to reduce their carbon footprints. Second, on health, to tackle the physical health pandemic of obesity and the mental health pandemic of loneliness, caused by car-dependence coupled with low-density planning. And third on providing basic shelter: decent homes for sometimes the most vulnerable people. These challenges are so significant that some (so called) urban thinkers are suggesting we abandon cities and disperse to the countryside. So it’s worth reminding ourselves of some basics…

2. Why do we have cities in the first place?

The essential performance characteristics of cities are:

- to generate wealth

- to nurture cultures

- to reproduce the species

- to generate ideas.

On this last point, cities are crucibles of invention. Let’s explore how this process works.

In the first instance it comes down to being in the company of other people, which is a blend of:

a) social being — being with friends & family

b) business being — being with work contacts that create new opportunities, ideas, inventions and innovations

c) and then there’s a third element, being with strangers who might or might not become friends but who add to the experience of city living.

Taken together, this is the stuff of cities — it’s what great cities do best. It’s the lowest common denominator across all great places. It’s what makes cities memorable. It’s what makes them hip. It’s why we have cities.

Indeed if I’m asked to define a city, I use two words. I call them transaction machines. Cities are concentrations of people that provide the best opportunities for the interactions and transactions that sustain our species.

To put it bluntly, when they’re built effectively, cities attract talent. When they’re built badly they lead to brain drain.

3. How do cities work? What are the key urban mechanisms that affect their performance?

The first key urban mechanism is the mobility network of the city. This network connects the hubs and centres — the major attractions and the principal transport nodes — to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts? Made up of streets, parks & public spaces, the mobility network facilitates access to the hubs and centres and it then radiates the benefits of those attractions back into local communities.

Think of the mobility network like the blood vessels of the body, connecting the organs together.

And, as well as facilitating access, the mobility network performs a second, even more important role: it becomes the stage for urban interaction between people.

The buildings that front onto the mobility network — the humble bars and cafés that bring people together for social and business events — aren’t just nice to have. They’re essential. The coffee houses of London fuelled the growth of its financial services sector. And of course London wasn’t alone. This happened in every city.

Consider an everyday image of people having a good time at a street café and you can likely spot 8 crucial behaviours that underpin the society and economy of the city…that deliver the essential human needs I mentioned earlier.

First, people choose to be present in these places. They then share the space with others: there's a ‘copresence’. This leads to a third behaviour - communication — a nod or a wave that, in turn, might develop into an interaction: a conversation, short or long. Then things get interesting. The conversations lead to a transaction - perhaps social, “I’ll see you later” or maybe commercial — a business deal is being done.

The sixth kind of behaviour is fundamental: the process of introduction. You bring a friend to an event and introduce them to people they don’t know. Basic but essential because these unplanned meetings often lead to inventions and innovations — ideas that no one had had before.

And then, finally, cities are the best places to broadcast your discoveries because the audience is already there on your doorstep.

These everyday behaviours create what my colleagues and I like to call the Urban Buzz. You know it when it’s there and you feel its absence when it’s not. Cities work better or worse depending on the quality of their human interactions.

And the most important interaction space of all is the street with its pavements and pedestrian crossings.

Consider La Rambla in Barcelona. It’s the sort of place people choose to go for a mini-weekend break. What’s so special about it? Well, look closely and see how this amazing street mixes pedestrians and vehicles: pedestrians at the centre, vehicles at the edge. Look at how the buildings mix different land uses: shops and galleries at ground level with offices and apartment above. And then consider the wonderful trees, providing shade from the sun, shelter from the wind and a touch of class.

Caring for streets is where every discussion on cities should start and finish. But very few do because we tend to get obsessed by one-off, set-piece, iconic buildings. To the client that wants to build a 1km tall iconic tower I tell them I’d rather they built a 1km long iconic street: a new Ramblas, a new Champs Elysées.

Of course we need iconic buildings. It’s great to have set-piece attractors. After all, Bilbao has its Guggenheim. But, if the connective tissue of streets, corner shops and cafés isn’t there nearby, the attraction of these iconic buildings underperforms.

This is why Bilbao invested in its streets and public transport networks as well as its Guggenheim.

The spatial network of the city therefore matters as much as the iconic buildings. So it needs equal investment.

The challenge I often see for civic leaders, property developers and investment bodies is that the iconic buildings are tangible and ‘sexy’ whereas networks of streets are seemingly rather dull in comparison.

But a heart without a supporting network of healthy veins, arteries and capillaries is a weakened heart!

4. What is the biggest challenge for city actors?

I think one of the greatest challenges has been the inability of professionals to accurately forecast the future. We’ve not been particularly good at it, hence the failure of post-war housing schemes and, the failure of entire urban areas such as Cumbernauld, Skelmersdale, Bracknell and just about every other New Town that was built in the UK.

And this is because we haven’t been very good at predicting human behaviour. For example, we’ve assumed that people would prefer to drive than to walk or take the bus. To fly rather than to jump on the train. And we’ve then designed our cities so that driving in many cases becomes the only option most of the time.

As a consequence we’ve become addicted to cars.

5. How did we get to be so dependent on cars?

After all, over 10,000 years of urban progress, from prehistoric Mesopotamia to Renaissance Florence and onwards to the 19th Century Boulevards of Paris, our cities evolved to be walkable, mixed use environments where your home was never far from your everyday needs.

But then, at the start of the 20th Century, town planning went off the rails.

In the imaginations of architects such as Le Corbusier, slow, walkable streets were demolished and replaced by fast highways. Why did this happen?

The answer is simple. Le Corbusier’s designs were sponsored by the Voisin car company. He drove one of himself.

The rest is history. The centres of our cities have been progressively hollowed out by vehicle-dominated infrastructure that has eroded the walkable movement economy that preceded it.

6. What are the Consequences of car-dependent cities?

The consequences are massive.

Take obesity. By comparing data on walkability with data on obesity we can see how people are less healthy in the less walkable parts of the city.

In a similar vein, and rather worryingly, we can see how places that are more car-dependent can also be places where people feel more lonely.

And of course these outcomes of bad planning place enormous costs on our health systems.

In other words, badly planned cities are causing and then exacerbating the health emergency.

7. What can we do differently to reset our approach to cities?

The answer is not to keep building more ‘relief roads’ for cars. As the the urban thinker Lewis Mumford said, tackling traffic congestion by building more roads is like tackling obesity by loosening your belt. Instead, in my experience:

a. the way forward is to study people, observe them, understand the principles of convenience and connectedness that guide the decisions we take about the routes we choose through cities — this is the approach that was followed in the highly successful redesigns of Trafalgar Square in London

b. next it’s to harness the power of digital technologies to turn the learnings from these observations into algorithms that see the world through the eyes of the individual person: are the opportunities of the city close to me? Can I walk, cycle or take public transport to where I want to be?

It’s to use new computer software to test if the layout of the building or public space is easy to navigate and, if it isn’t what design changes can be made to simplify it for people?

c. it’s to recognise that these basic human needs translate into land values that can create greater returns on investment. Investment in the Central Business District of Darwin, Australia has been underpinned by the use of an Urban Value forecast model that demonstrates the commercial benefits of putting people first, not cars.

d. and, it’s by designing with a people first, streets first mind set, when the values generated can sometimes eclipse what conventional wisdom thought was possible. In Melbourne, an Urban Value model was used to test the effectiveness of a proposed pedestrian footbridge. In the end, the values generated were sufficient to support not just the pedestrian bridge but a much broader ‘living bridge’ lined with mixed-use buildings and carrying a tram, a cycle path and cars.

8. When we do this, what do we learn about how to design cities?

Here are 4 key findings of international practice:

a. to connect streets at the pedestrian scale, with a fine grain of ‘permeability’

b. to mix land uses so that people are closer to opportunities. It means living and working above the shop

c. to slow traffic speeds to 20mph, not just in small areas but across entire urban footprints as in the masterplan for Nur-Sultan, the capital city of Kazakhstan. And, alongside this, to remove one-way gyratories and take down elevated roads. These things are happening from Birmingham to Beijing

d. and lastly, to integrate nature by bringing plants, insects, birds and other species into our cities through a process of natural restoration.

9. So what’s next?

That’s for us to discuss in the four panel sessions to follow. Here’s some thoughts…

When it comes to transitioning and decarbonising, we tend to think about decarbonisation in terms of energy supply, energy usage and energy loss — mostly to the buildings we live and work in. But I hope we can also consider the contribution of walking, cycling and public transport to the total carbon emissions of a city.

For example, by building Pedestrian Movement Models we can test in advance whether proposed developments will be disconnected, car-dependent and inefficient like or connected, pedestrian-friendly and efficient.

As for the themes of live and visit and work and invest, I hope I’ve offered something about the importance of the placein attracting and retaining talent. Likewise about the importance of living close to the action, whether that’s close to where you work or close to where you take your leisure; the importance for your health and wellbeing and also the importance in terms of land value and return on investment.

This is where, for example, a Walkability Index can show whether there is enough land use diversity to encourage pedestrian-based lifestyles.

Lastly, I hope we can see the city itself as a learning and development machine, with the interactions and transactions it creates leading to inventions and innovations that support the formal learning, research and development activities of the schools and universities that are fundamental to the make up of our cities.

In summary I hope you can find something in all of this for Aberdeen. Of the importance of everyday connections, of a people first, streets first approach to the city. And I’ll be interested to discuss these thoughts with you across the day ahead.

Thank you.