11: Post-traumatic urbanism and radical indigenism

This is counter to much of the efficiency logic of recent decades; witness the growth of super-hospitals, versus more distributed patterns of healthcare. This, despite exemplary work like Stroke Pathways demonstrating the folly of that centralised, efficiency-led thinking.

The story of humanity is an urban one, a slow 20,000 year drift towards a largely urban condition. A city does the same thing to individualism that a natural ecosystem does to a tree — thriving there is about living well with people who are not like you. Just as a tree revels in those multifarious interdependencies, so we do with cities.

Cities are not about efficiency, and never have been. The most meaningful urban experiences are generally the most inefficient. But this lack of efficiency is also why they are naturally resilient, if their design patterns follow the purposeful redundancy described above.

This means not just one large pharmacy or baker or police station, for example, but many small ones, a more dispersed distribution pattern mimicking what network designers would call ‘redundancy’ (if one goes down, there’s another within reach.) In the context of cities, that kind of effectiveness also generates community, health, diversity, and lo... See more

It is in the collision of such contrasting ideas — the agonistics of design philosophies, almost — that we can endlessly generate a diversity of responses, and thus build ongoing resilience.

If we then fundamentally reorient that around a hugely increased emphasis on biodiversity i.e. not just human-centred design, stretching from the street corners out to the distant fields of agriculture and landscape that support them, we solve for climate, health, social justice, and pandemic simultaneously. That extends the ideas of social life to... See more

In her essay “There are no cars in Wakanda”, Arieff suggests a balance of culture and technology, equitable development and innovation, density and super-green-and-blue walkability, that even the most ambitious urban development projects might learn a lot from. Perhaps most importantly, it describes an alternative future told in different voices, v... See more

New forms of architecture, infrastructure, and organisation will emerge from this, relying on a rebalanced relationship between participatory cultures and corporate interest, public sector and private sector, and the reinvigorated institutions of trusted government. It emphasises shared resources and civic relationships, yet recognises individual d... See more

“Think of efficiency as a high-performance engine. Under perfect conditions, it delivers maximum power and minimum waste. However, that very efficiency makes it less robust. Highly efficient systems have no slack, no redundancy, and therefore no resilience and no spare capacity.” — Helen Lewis, The Atlantic, 26 March 2020