{"id":89,"date":"2018-01-03T03:34:47","date_gmt":"2018-01-03T11:34:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/layeringplace.wordpress.com\/2018\/01\/03\/forget-smart-we-need-context-cities\/"},"modified":"2018-01-03T03:34:47","modified_gmt":"2018-01-03T11:34:47","slug":"forget-smart-we-need-context-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/2018\/01\/03\/forget-smart-we-need-context-cities\/","title":{"rendered":"Forget \u2018Smart\u2019 \u2014 We Need \u2018Context Cities\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

How do we fuse the old and the new in a rapidly changing\u00a0world?<\/h4>\n
In Lisbon, where the vernacular meets the new. Credit: Charles R.\u00a0Wolfe<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Since September, I have worked in, or visited, 18 cities in Europe, Australia, and the United States, listening throughout for common messages of harmony or discord. I have been waiting for modern Sirens of the Odyssey<\/em> to divert me, with some divine melody of urbanism or common thread to make sense of it all, to wed, for instance, Brisbane with Cleveland, or Lisbon and Cairns.<\/p>\n

Instead, I see cities united in a search for context, and how to wed old-world identity with the global forces of change.<\/p>\n

With each visit, consultancy, book talk or class lecture, it\u2019s been uncanny to watch nearly every city struggle to integrate the challenges of globalism with a vernacular, even unique history. The menu of wants is never-ending: technology hubs, light rail, bike paths, upscale housing, \u201csmart city\u201d dashboards and data, variations in height and scale. And then there\u2019s jobs, housing, incubators, data, lifestyle, tourism, and more!<\/p>\n

In this seemingly uniform climb toward the Green Light of Gatsby<\/em>, the quest for context is understandable. The undeniable human response of nostalgia is a symptom of city-dwellers everywhere, whether in the new, old, or war-torn urban worlds.<\/p>\n

I was well-familiar with the downside of creative class urbanity, and perhaps its most contemporary extreme in the post-Amazon Seattle. It\u2019s my hometown, so I\u2019ve watched Seattle closely, including the \u201cbe careful what you wish for\u201d admonition to bidders seeking Amazon\u2019s coveted \u201cHQ2\u201d (second, co-equal headquarters) award.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou think you can shape Amazon?\u201d asked Timothy Egan<\/a> in the New York Times <\/em>on October 20. \u201cNot a chance. It will shape you. Well before Amazon disrupted books, music, television, furniture\u200a\u2014\u200aeverything\u200a\u2014\u200ait disrupted Seattle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Try taking this story around the world, where often, an apparent angst for economic preservation and success wrestles with lofty identities of place that pre-date Seattle\u2019s identity by hundreds, if not thousands of years.<\/p>\n

For other cities, in search of pride and prosperity, their classical positions in history now seem oddly reshuffled, more relegated to tourist guides than I had remembered, and nudged aside by generic issues from elsewhere\u200a\u2014\u200aor perhaps, everywhere. The empire once based in seafaring Lisbon, an American rust-belt city, Sydney\u2019s penal colony roots\u200a\u2014\u200aall appear more as artifacts of history, merging with the ubiquitous needs of jobs, capital, and the data engines that feed the global economy and make \u201cuniqueness\u201d a less relevant word.<\/p>\n

In Portugal, reporters engaged me with questions, with intense voices trying to bound the undefinable. During one interview following presentation of my book, Seeing the Better City<\/em><\/a>, I fielded scattershot, anxious inquiries that seemed to never end. \u201cWhat is a better city? What is a good city? When is a good city a smart city? Can a smart city be a good city without technology? Can a smart city have no technology?\u201d<\/p>\n

In another interview, a reporter from a municipal television station asked me whether her city was \u201cready to be a smart city.\u201d Amid castles and the stuff of legends, innocence seemed lost.<\/p>\n

When I left Seattle in September, the fastest-growing big city<\/a> in the United States wrestled with the now well-documented consequences of becoming a creative class champion of the educated\u200a\u2014\u200aa dramatic uptick in homelessness and dramatic rise in property values. When I tell this story elsewhere, the response ranges from indifference to wonderment, because concerns\u200a\u2014\u200afrom mere survival to successful adaptation to global trends\u200a\u2014\u200asubsume stories about the pace of change or my hometown\u2019s loss of soul.<\/p>\n

Amid my search for harmony\u200a\u2014\u200aand discord\u200a\u2014\u200aI am sometimes buoyed by approaches that mix generic trends with a vernacular past. Citizen engagement is evolving everywhere, through conventional, face-to-face methods, social media, or new approaches to co-creation. Two examples follow.<\/p>\n

First, in Melbourne, Australia, I met with members of CoCreate Cremorne<\/a>, a neighborhood-based small-business group advocating to retain the special character of a tightly connected city neighborhood slated for adaptation to technology businesses. Well-organized volunteers have built an advocacy effort around the goals of neighborhood members: \u201cstreets as places, adding greenery, quality art, residents and businesses mixing and common spaces to work\/meet\/play outside, with free WiFi.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, last month in Guarda<\/a>, Portugal, I met municipal leaders who hope for new jobs, to offset exodus to larger cities such as Lisbon. Alongside technology company representatives, I participated in a municipally-sponsored \u201csmart city\u201d conference<\/a>\u200a\u2014\u200aattended by residents, students, and city elected officials and staff\u200a\u2014\u200aand discussed my book\u2019s methods of urban exploration for everyone, based on the human visual sense.<\/p>\n

In response to my panel colleagues who instead touted smart city monitoring applications and data-gathering tools, an animated municipal employee pushed back. \u201cYou can\u2019t forget our history, our geography and our culture in favor of approaches meant for everywhere,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, and perhaps ironically, as the American from Seattle, I impulsively took the microphone before the others could respond. \u201cYou are right,\u201d I said, and tried my best to explain the role of context\u200a\u2014\u200aand the fusion of old and new\u200a\u2014\u200ain a rapidly changing world.<\/p>\n

Seattle and Internationally-based author, consultant and attorney Chuck Wolfe spent the fall in multiple engagements in several Australian, American and European cities, including teaching and research as a guest of KTH University\u2019s Centre for the Future of Places in Stockholm, where he will continue as a part time Visiting Scholar next year.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

This article first appeared on Planetizen<\/em> at www.planetizen.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How do we fuse the old and the new in a rapidly changing\u00a0world? In Lisbon, where the vernacular meets the new. Credit: Charles R.\u00a0Wolfe Since September, I have worked in, or visited, 18 cities in Europe, Australia, and the United States, listening throughout for common messages of harmony or discord. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pc03Hh-1r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}