Photo: James Duncan Davidson

“Democracy is in trouble,” announces political theorist Benjamin Barber as he makes his way onto the TEDGlobal stage. He continues: “We live in a  21st-century world of interdependence and brutal interdependent problems. Yet when we look for solutions in politics and democracy, we are faced with political institutions designed 400 years ago.”

What can one do about this asymmetry between contemporary challenges and archaic, increasingly dysfunctional political institutions? “My suggestion is we change the subject,” says Barber: It’s time to start talking about cities. Urban areas, after all, are the place in which civilization and culture were born, the home of public spaces of culture and protest. Think Zuccotti Park, Tahrir Square, Taksim Square, or even Tiananmen Square in Beijing. (This last mention raises a whoop from the audience.) ”Those are the public spaces where we announce ourselves as citizens, participants, as people with the right to write our own narratives,” says Barber, who points out that more than half the world’s population  now lives in cities. “Cities are where the action is. Cities are us.”

And given that cities are run by mayors, maybe, just maybe, it might be time for mayors to rule the world. This idea also raises a murmur from the crowd, but Barber promptly pushes the idea further. “Actually they already do.” Now the question is how to create a world in which they play an even more prominent role. He has some reasons for his theory:

Mayors are pragmatists: They get things done, or they’re out of a job. Barber quotes Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia, who described how he would never get away with the paralysis and inaction of Washington. Mayors have to put matters of ideology, religion, or ethnicity aside to draw everyone in a city together. He references Teddy Kollek, legendary mayor of Jerusalem, who quashed religious squabbling in his office by telling the assembled clerics, “Gentlemen, spare me your sermons and I will fix your sewers.” That’s what mayors do, adds Barber. “They fix sewers.”

Mayors are homeboys: In general, mayors are from the city they govern. Barber cites Ed Koch, who legendarily asked New Yorkers how he was doing. “Imagine David Cameron wandering around the UK asking ‘how’m I doing?’ He wouldn’t like the answer,” he says, to laughs from the audience.

Mayors have higher trust levels: In the United States, only 18% of Americans approve of Congress. But rates for mayors are generally over 70%. “A mayor is more likely to get out of car and pull people out of burning building or intervene in a mugging in the street because he sees it,” he says, referring to Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, who legendarily did the former. “No head of state would be permitted by his security detail to do that.”

Cities are profoundly multicultural, open, participatory, and democratic: They work together on big issues that national leaders are apparently only able to fight about. “There is lots cities can do even when opaque stubborn nations refuse to act,” says Barber.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

So what’s the bottom line? “The bottom line is we still live politically in a world of borders, boundaries, wars — where states refuse to act together,” Barber says. “Yet we know that the reality we experience day to day is a world without borders, a world of diseases without borders, doctors without borders, of economics and technology without borders, of education without borders, of terrorism and war without borders. That is the real world. Unless we find a way to globalize democracy or at least democratize globalization, we will not only risk failure to address transnational problems but risk losing democracy itself, locked up in the old nation-state box and unable to address global problems democratically.”

It’s a sobering thought. But Barber is not here to depress us. “Democracy was born in the ancient polis; I believe it can be reborn in the global cosmopolis,” he says, as he calls for the creation of a global parliament of mayors.”I love that idea,” he says. “A parliament of mayors is a parliament of citizens, and that’s a parliament of us, of you, of me.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

As urban areas have exploded, a dramatic stratification is taking place. While some parts of cities have become playgrounds for the privileged, others have become home to the poor and marginalized. Often these two very different ways of life exist in close proximity, says Teddy Cruz on the TEDGlobal 2013 stage.

Cruz studies the Tijuana and San Diego border region, where some of the wealthiest communities in America exist just 20 minutes from some of the poorest communities in Mexico. Cruz examines the flows that happen across this border. From south to north, there’s a steady flow of immigrants crossing over into the United States. From south to north flows used materials — like bungalows deemed by wealthy Americans too small for posh neighborhoods, or car parts from vehicles that have been replaced by newer models. “Entire chunks of one place flow to the other,” Cruz says. Cruz is fascinated by how these materials are reconfigured in Tijuana neighborhoods, using incredible creative intelligence. Discarded small homes are placed on stilts, leaving room for a business in a trailer underneath. Old tires are stitched together to make retaining walls. Garage doors become the siding for emergency centers. Space is used for multiple purposes, and it’s used socially instead of the one-house-with-lawn model.

“The slums of Tijuana can teach a lot to the sprawl of San Diego,” says Cruz.

Cities of the wealthy grow selfishly, says Cruz. They suck up oil, consume tons of energy and divide space into single uses, often of the personal variety. But in communities of scarcity, like those in Tijuana, Cruz sees inspiration for how we can peel back this selfish urbanization.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

“I don’t want to romanticize poverty,” says Cruz. “But I want to suggest that this informal development … is a set of social and economic procedures that we can translate.” To put it bluntly: There are other ways of constructing cities.

This transformation is already in progress, says Cruz. At the Tijuana and San Diego border, he looks at how the immigrants flowing north are transforming homogenous American single-family neighborhoods, retrofitting the large with the small. They launch businesses in their garages, add on (sometimes illegal) in-law apartments to make room for multigenerational families, build houses of worship in what used to be single-family homes. Cruz wonders: Could this kind of creative retrofitting be the DNA for new land-use policies in cities? And doesn’t this mean that citizenship is a creative process?

Cruz hopes that cities of consumption will give way to neighborhoods of production. “This could become the framework for producing a new social and economic structure in the city,” he says.

Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia leads the pack on Bike to Work Day 2013. Photo courtesy Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia.

What would the world be like if it were run by city mayors? Benjamin Barber will pose this question as part of Session 8 at TEDGlobal, themed “State of the Nations.” The quirky yet powerful figure of the local mayor — cycling to work while battling civic corruption — inspires Barber in his upcoming book, If Mayors Ruled the World, and in his work as a senior research scholar at The Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at CUNY. We talked with him last week in the run-up to TEDGlobal. An edited version of our conversation follows.

So how are preparations going for your presentation at TEDGlobal?

Well, the great thing about thinking about global cities is that every day there are horrendous and exciting news stories that suggest just how relevant cities are to the modern world. Just this morning there was a story about the mayor of Moscow falling out with President Putin. Quite literally we see around the world the way in which cities and the politics of cities are seizing the headlines. I’m suggesting it’s time to change the subject from nations to cities. And the thing is, the subject has already changed.

Mayors sure are getting an awful lot of press at the moment. Up in Toronto, Rob Ford is getting a lot of attention he’s likely not enjoying much. Any thoughts on what’s going on up there?

I don’t want to comment on particular mayors, but let’s just say it’s a fact that the mayoralty is transparent. When mayors get in trouble, you know about it right away. There’s a good deal of corruption in cities, but we learn about it immediately, it’s out there and those responsible have to deal with it. Whereas corruption in higher offices, by presidents and prime ministers, goes unseen for years and only comes out later. Mayors are home boys, they’re locals in their own neighborhood, and their sins stand out like the sins of a difficult uncle. Mr. Ford is encountering some of that now.

Why do you think the sins and corruption of national politicians are easier to conceal?

I make a contrast between the immediacy, transparency and availability of mayors versus the isolation of prime ministers and presidents and the PR and security silos they control. The White House is a kind of prison, where Presidents lose touch with the country and the country with them. All we know about Presidents is what the presidential staff is willing to tell us. But [former New York mayor] Ed Koch was on the streets every day; Boris Johnson bikes to work in London so we see he lost weight or he seems tired out. Knowing the strengths and virtues of mayors also means that we tend to know about it right away when corruption happens.

I don’t know if you saw, but a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal recently went ballistic over the introduction of Citibikes to New York City. Her critique was particularly noteworthy because she seemed so vitriolic and antagonistic towards Mayor Bloomberg. She really seemed to be taking things very personally. Any thoughts?

I don’t think I saw that particular piece, but I’ve seen plenty like it. The critique is of Bloomberg as a head of some kind of nanny state, banning sodas in 16-ounce containers, introducing the bike-share program and so on. I’m of two minds on it. On the one hand, almost everything he has pushed hard for has been I think a good idea, in the public interest. The fact is that bike-sharing, bike lanes and pedestrian zones are good for cities. And many New York children are obese, as they are throughout America. There’s so much sugar in diets, and god knows the cola companies aren’t going to do anything about it. So these are very good ideas. On the other hand, part of what it takes to be an effective mayor is not just to do what’s right but to get public consent to do what’s right. This mayor comes out of business and has not been good at getting public consent for good and virtuous ideas. You need both. You can’t say you don’t give a damn; it takes patience and buy-in. And with Bloomberg, many of his very good ideas get shot down in courts or through the political process because he has not gotten that buy-in. The mayor’s office has to be a very democratic office. You have to have public support for what you’re doing. So The Wall Street Journal couldn’t be more wrong in attacking the ideas themselves, but they’re right in implicitly saying that the mayor tends to push ideas down people’s throats.

Harks back to that idea that ideas themselves aren’t enough… you’ve got to figure out how to execute and implement them, too.

Exactly. Good ideas aren’t enough. At least, they might be if you live in an authoritarian state. China has done great things in regard to pollution, but entirely by fiat. In a democracy we hope to persuade people of the good of an idea.

What impact do you hope to have with your TED Talk?

The ultimate aim of my work in recent years is to change the subject from nations to cities, to signal a shift from top-down to bottom-up decisionmaking. I hope I can explain why it’s important we do that. But this isn’t just suggesting a change of subject. When you read the headlines, you can see that cities and mayors are already on the front page, because that’s where the action is. More and more we see cities and citizens taking the lead in solving global problems. My hope is to get people to see that this ought to be happening, it is happening, and through the support of this democratic, global movement, some of the worst global problems are finally being addressed.

In the noise of a city, peace and quiet can be hard to find. Australian composer and sound artist Jason Sweeney has a solution — Stereopublic, a free smartphone app that lets users geo-locate and share their favorite tranquil city spaces.

This week, in advance of TEDGlobal 2013, Stereopublic has launched a custom Edinburgh version of the app — making it the first city in Europe to be charted. This City 2.0 award-winning app made its way to Scotland with the help of Sweeney’s partners, UK-based sound artist Emma Quayle and frequent TED speaker Julian Treasure.

Quayle and her team have been busy charting the quiet crooks and bends of Edinburgh. She describes how it works: “You have a map of the city that locates you using Google Maps,” she says. “You select your spot and take a 30-second recording and picture so people know where it is. You can choose a mood that reflects how you’re feeling in a space, request whether you want it to be a quiet space, or whether you want someone to create a sound composition for it.”

On top of raising awareness of the importance of noiseless zones, Stereopublic’s quiet riot also inspires healthier communities. Stereopublic describes the platform as “a sonic health service for built environments,” and suggests that quiet and solace, paradoxically, actually create more vital communities.

Julian Treasure: The 4 ways sound affects usUnpleasant noise triggers the release of stress hormones and also brings other physiological reactions in the body. So Treasure, who gave the TED2009 talk “The 4 Ways Sounds Affects Us,” likens quiet mapping to an act of public service and describes Stereopublic as “the citizen journalism of sound.” He says, “If we can mobilize people to record quiet spots in cities, we can protect them from the harmful effects of noise.”

This month, Stereopublic’s self-proclaimed “earwitnesses” are fostering mindfulness about the power of sonic peace across the globe, activating metropolitan soundscapes in Sheffield for Doc/Fest and Sydney for the International Symposium for Electronic Art.

Are you on a quest for quiet? Sweeney wants city dwellers to join his “quiet revolution” by working with Stereopublic to activate their own cities. To get involved, e-mail stereopublic@soundslikesweeney.com.

And for TEDGlobal attendees, Edinburgh residents, and other folks living in quiet-mapped cities, go to the iTunes store to download the free Stereopublic app.

Snow was a 19th-century English doctor who’s credited with proving that cholera, a sometimes deadly infection that attacks the small intestine, spreads through contaminated water — and not by “bad air” as was generally believed at the time.

Steven Johnson tours the Ghost MapAs described in Steven Johnson’s 2006 TED Talk, “The Ghost Map,” a particularly vicious cholera outbreak in 1854 at a popular water pump in London killed an astonishing 10 percent of the people who lived nearby. Snow created a map showing which people had consumed the water from the pump and whether they had gotten sick. His map helped convince local health authorities that his theory was the correct one, and by the next severe outbreak in 1866 they officially recommended that people boil water before drinking or using it, curbing the spread.

March 15 marks the 200th anniversary of Snow’s birth, which the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and affiliates are celebrating in a series of meetings and exhibits. Our present to Snow? We spoke to author Steven Johnson about the impact the doctor has had on the sustainability of modern cities.

When did you first discover the story of John Snow and his cholera map, and what was your first reaction to it?

I first came to it as an information design story in Edward Tufte’s amazingly beautiful design books, and then I kept encountering it in other fields. I’d be reading about a history of epidemiology and I’d stumble across it, or I’d be reading about the history of disease and would stumble across it. I think that is what makes the story and Snow’s role in it so interesting — the way it connects to so many fields.

What were other characteristics of the story that made you decide to write The Ghost Map?

It turned out to fit my expectations or visions of a beautiful story about the interaction between different scales of experience. It’s a story in some ways about the collusion of bacteria and the flow of water: the clean drinking water, contaminated drinking water, and waste in this huge stinking metropolis — the biggest city the world had seen at that point, with two and a half million people. Between those two scales — basically the smallest form that life takes on the planet and in some ways the largest form, the metropolis — you have this individual who’s trying to make sense of patterns that are happening in the city and trying to connect them to patterns and behavior that is happening on a microscopic scale that he can’t even see. That’s crucial to the story — that he cannot see the bacterium. He has to infer its existence from the patterns he’s detecting in the streets of London.

Once I actually sat down to research it, there were a number of things that I found that surprised me and that had not been in the traditional telling of the story. It’s conventionally told as: Snow made the map, he saw the pattern of death pointing to the pump, and he developed the waterborne theory. But in fact, he’d been working on the waterborne theory for a very long time. The map was a marketing vehicle for his idea.

The other thing was the important role, which is very relevant today, of public data. The city had begun releasing more complex mortality reports a decade before the outbreak, and instead of just listing so-and-so died on this date, they would list so-and-so died of this age, this gender, this disease, this exact address. Whatever data they had, they would release in these reports. The whole premise was: You create more data, you release it to the public, and the city is filled with all these interesting amateurs who don’t work for the government who might detect patterns in it. Snow ended up using a lot of that data, in addition to his on-the-ground detective work to build a map, to build his case for the waterborne theory. It’s very much connected to the kind of open data, transparency argument of today. Snow was doing it without computers, but it’s the same idea. So that was a cool surprise.

Finally, Henry Whitehead, Snow’s collaborator. I mean, almost nobody talks about him, and he was crucial to the story. The more I dug in, the more I realized that Whitehead had done all this work Snow really couldn’t have done, because Snow was not a great social connector. A lot of the investigation needed Whitehead’s social intelligence to track down additional data on people who had left the neighborhood. And there’s an argument that without Whitehead’s contributions, the authorities might not have come around to Snow’s theory. I love that because it’s a great example of multidisciplinary collaboration where you have two very different types of intelligence coming together to solve a problem.

In your TED Talk, you mention that modern, massive cities that exist today wouldn’t be possible without Snow’s contributions to epidemiology. Can you elaborate?

This is why the period is so interesting in a sense. There were all these people looking around London in 1854 and saying: This is not sustainable. Human beings are not meant to live in this state, two and a half million people is just too large for a city to work. And they were right on some level — certain things had to be figured out that hadn’t been yet.

One of the biggest was how to deal with all the human waste that is created with two and a half million people so densely populated. [Snow helped make] it clear that the separating of drinking water and waste was an absolute imperative for the city to grow. Making it clear that that could happen — and conquering cholera within 12 years — is just a staggering achievement. And that became a blueprint for every big city in the world. It enabled us to build cities of 10 million and 20 million people without necessarily having to battle these diseases.

Now, developing-world megacities are trying to figure it out with 25 million people. And we haven’t solved all those problems. But one of the things that is so important about Snow’s achievement is that it wasn’t all that long ago. You look back 160 or 170 years and you can point to how awful London was as a city, and compare it to the amount of progress we’ve made since then, and use it as a kind of inspiration for what we need to do now.

That nicely leads to my next question. What are the main challenges these new megacities face?

The root cause is that the growth in these megacities is coming in areas without traditional infrastructure. When you look at the favelas in São Paulo, you have millions and millions and millions of people without a traditional electric grid, without traditional sewage, in improvised communities. It may be that the way to deal this is to just build infrastructure and support them in a traditional way that we pioneered in the 19th century. Or maybe there are new solutions.

Are there mapping tools that are the modern-day, John Snow/cholera equivalent that are helping solve some of these problems?

There are actually. There are a million examples of things like this, precisely because we now have Google Maps where we can drop datasets and anybody can do new dynamic maps of interesting social problems. There were some great improvised maps that were created after the earthquake and cholera epidemic in Haiti.

You just got back from TED2013 in Long Beach, California. What was the most memorable moment for you?

There was a talk by Alastair Parvin about this kind of open-source Creative Commons kit for building small houses, where two people with a 3D printer can assemble one in 48 hours. It was really cool, and his point was about releasing tools so that anyone can build a structure in those developing world megacities that we are talking about. An overwhelming number of the houses are actually built by members of the community cobbled with existing materials. If you have this kind of technology, it helps produce more reliable housing. And I kind of thought, that is a great. That fits perfectly with the Ghost Map.

Additional reading:

Haven’t had enough John Snow? For more, check out the UCLA Department of Epidemiology’s John Snow archive, which has original writing and images, as well as other treats, or try these books:

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump: John Snow and the Mystery of Cholera by Sandra Hempel

Cholera, Chloroform and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow Peter Vinten-Johansen et al.

Gaus has contributed an essay to the new TED Book, City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There, an anthology born out of The City 2.0 TED Prize and produced in partnership with The Atlantic Cities. In the essay, he writes about the need for better local food sources in cities and the exciting potential of aquaponics.

Here, we ask him a few questions. 

So, what is aquaponics and why is it good for cities?

Aquaponics is the combination of commercial fish rearing (aquaculture) and cultivation of plants in water (hydroponics). Aquaponics does not require extensive land use or fertile soil to grow plants. This makes it particularly attractive for urban agriculture, where both space and fertile soil are limited. 

You launched your company with the idea that it was time for aquaponics to grow up. What does that mean? 

Growing up means becoming a competitive force in the way food is grown in the city.

Aquaponics and its application in urban agriculture is a relatively new phenomenon. The technology and its commercial scale are still in an early stage of development. In order to provide a meaningful contribution toward food security and global awareness on urban resilience, we need to drive solutions that are robust and scalable.

Why is it so important to find large-scale urban food solutions?

In order to meet the global demand for food by 2050, The Food and Agriculture Association of the United Nations estimates that food production needs to double. While access to new arable land can only increase this by 5 percent — and agricultural intensification and efficiencies are peaking — new technologies and solutions are required to help solve the problem.

Urban agriculture has the potential to transform city-dwellers from “suckers” of natural resources to better-balanced consumers and producers — with local food production and greater resilience. This makes a lot of sense for both the planet and the people; it would have a big impact on the way cities are becoming more self-sustainable.

How do you envision aquaponics taking off in the future?

We are getting a lot of requests from all over the world for our solution. Our goal is to provide the tools, services and the brand for urban farming in the city. I think we need both a bottom-up as well as a top-down approach to achieve scale. Of course, community-based initiatives are important, but enterprise-level activities as well as public and governmental support are also required. Why shouldn’t a large supermarket chain or a large public hospital grow on its own rooftops? We see market-based initiatives or “urban farmers” as true entrepreneurs in their cities. The eco-net of financing, technical support and distribution networks needs to be created as well.

City 2.0 is available for Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone. A subscription costs $4.99 a month, and is an all-you-can-read buffet.

The City 2.0 is an online forum that showcase stories and projects for urban innovation, and also doled out 10 grants for thinkers with great ideas for cities throughout 2012. Here, meet 8 of the winners and hear their fascinating ideas »

Do city people really like to share more? Emily Badger of The Atlantic Cities suggests a new and fascinating phenomenon in urban areas — that city dwellers are moving toward a culture of shared ownership of everything from cars to power tools.

Badger shares this thought in an essay from the new TED Book City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There, an anthology that suggests bold ideas for how we can create thriving cities. Born out of The City 2.0 TED Prize and produced in partnership with The Atlantic Cities, the book features essays from 12 authors, tackling topics ranging from transportation to food to public art.

Yesterday, we heard from City 2.0 essayist Diana Lind on why cities should be highway-free. Today, we asked Emily Badger to tell us more about her vision of sharing within big cities.

In your essay, you suggest that a culture of sharing has arisen in cities because of limitations of physical space. What’s created this culture?

All over the world, the populations of cities are swelling. This is the acceleration of a long-running transition as societies everywhere become less rural and more urban. So the question then becomes: Where do we put all of these people? And how will they live together? Ideally, we need cities to grow in population without expanding at an equal rate in geographic size. We need urbanization without sprawl. And so this means we need to try to accommodate more people within the footprint of existing cities. That means more people living in apartments instead of detached homes. That means using a car-share instead of individually owning cars. That means using public parks instead of private backyards — all simply because there just won’t be enough space in crowded cities for everyone to individually own all of these things.

Is there also an economic reality causing all this sharing?

A lot of people learned during the recession that it was financially unsustainable to have a 4,000-square-foot house and two or three cars. The “sharing economy” sounds like a nice idea for altruistic people willing to give rides in their cars to strangers. But sharing is also fundamentally a way for people to cover car payments or monthly rent bills. I suspect there are a lot of people on Airbnb who wouldn’t be able to afford their homes if they couldn’t make some money each month renting out a spare bedroom.

Sharing isn’t a new idea. Tell us a little about the history of urban sharing and how we drifted away from it.

We have always shared a lot of things, especially in cities. We share books at the library. We share transportation in a subway car. We share washing machines at a laundromat. Cities in many ways are historically a kind of shared commons. But, particularly in the U.S., we started to move away from that mentality after World War II — and a lot of the rest of the world, especially the developing world, has followed our lead. A lot of people moved out of cities for a more spacious, suburban lifestyle that simply didn’t require us to share assets in the same way. Culturally, we came to prize large private homes over apartments, multiple cars over public transit, and personal appliances over laundries. Now that demographic trends are shifting back into cities, though, this story is starting to change.

What are some of the downsides of sharing?

I don’t want to sound like sharing is awesome in every way! Obviously, we give up some comfort and convenience when we don’t individually own things, and there’s a tradeoff there. I live in an apartment, and sometimes I have to listen to my neighbors through our shared walls and ceilings. If you do Zipcar or have a bike-share membership, it is entirely possible that there may not be a car or a bike waiting for you exactly when and where you need it on short notice. Sharing always implies some kind of risk: that you may not be able to get what you need, that you may not like the person you’re dealing with, that someone may damage your power tool while they’re borrowing it. But for a whole variety of reasons — including financial, environmental and physical-space considerations — we know that more and more people are opting to take this risk with a lot of things no one thought anyone would share 20 years ago.

City 2.0 is available for Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone.

The City 2.0 is an online forum that showcase stories and projects for urban innovation, and also doled out 10 grants for thinkers with great ideas for cities throughout 2012. Here, meet 8 of the winners and hear their fascinating ideas »

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There is a new TED Books anthology that seeks to answer some of the key questions about how to develop thriving cities — tackling everything from issues of sustainability to infrastructure to the happiness of urban dwellers. Born out of The City 2.0, a broad initiative for citizen-powered change that began with the 2012 TED Prize, this collection of essays offers potential answers to the question: How can we ensure that our cities are sustainable, efficient, beautiful and invigorating? Produced in partnership with The Atlantic Cities, the 12 authors featured in this book offer fascinating ideas, from transportation to food to public art.

Over the next three days, we’ll hear from three City 2.0 essay authors. Today, we sat down with Diana Lind, the editor-in-chief and executive director of Next City, to discuss her essay that envisions cities without highways.

Why do highways have a bad effect on cities?

While highways connect cities that are hundreds of miles apart and allow us to move people and goods across this vast country, many highways were built at the height of suburban development. They are not designed to bring people into cities so much as to allow people to drive past them. As a result, these highways often bisect neighborhoods, cut cities off from their waterfronts and obstruct the natural development that occurs along boulevards and streets. The land beside or under urban highways is often underdeveloped, creating no-go zones that are bad for the city’s economy, safety and appearance. Highways carry loud, polluting cars, and research has shown links between road pollution and asthma. The impervious highway surface creates stormwater runoff and heat-island effects, which are bad for a city’s resilience in climate change. And unlike other kinds of property, highways don’t generate tax revenue, preventing dozens of acres from being productively used. Simply put: highways are a blight on livable cities.

I don’t think we should keep investing in highways. In this era of climate change, downtown revitalization and population density, they can no longer be the solution. As cities see their highways become structurally obsolete, it’s a perfect time to start thinking about how to connect cities through other modes of infrastructure.

What are some of the alternatives to highways?

Any plan to replace a highway needs to account for the cars that will be displaced. Ideally, you replace a highway with more transit options so people can take a bus or train instead of a car. In New York, when the city decided not to replace the West Side Highway, it cleverly took federal highway funds and used them towards improving transit. In San Francisco, a former highway was replaced with a trolley line. The footprint of the highway itself might become a boulevard, property for new development, a park or a bike lane. On a larger scale, our national network of highways should be replaced with a better rail network that allows people the option of taking a train between cities rather than having to choose between driving or flying.

You say in your essay that more walkable neighborhoods contribute to lower foreclosure rates. Why would that be?

It’s plain math. Imagine a couple that has to pay for two cars in addition to a mortgage; they’re less likely to be able to handle their monthly bills. Each car costs the average driver nearly $9,000 a year. Compare that with a monthly MetroCard pass in New York City — it’s less than $1,250 a year, and that’s as expensive as public transit gets. If you can bike or walk to take care of your daily needs, life gets even cheaper. The money saved on not owning a car actually helps keep people in their homes.

You also say that there’s a connection between highways and obesity. Share more on that!

It’s really a connection between obesity and driving. Researchers have found that driving and obesity have a shocking 99 percent correlation. The more you drive, the more likely you are to be obese, because you have less time to walk for daily errands and otherwise be active.

What have been some of the benefits of replacing highways in New York and San Francisco?

There have been many. Removing the highways has increased area property values, significantly reduced car traffic along these thoroughfares and reconnected both cities to their waterfronts. Local gems such as San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Hudson River Park in New York are just two examples of how improving the area instead of improving highways has resulted in deeper investments in the city’s assets.

City 2.0 is available for Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone.

The City 2.0 is an online forum that showcase stories and projects for urban innovation, and also doled out 10 grants for thinkers with great ideas for cities throughout 2012. Here, meet 8 of the winners and hear their fascinating ideas »

So now you’re a bureaucrat. 

I’m a bureaucrat! I still can’t believe it. I’ve been a bureaucrat for a whole week. I would have never thought. I’ve worked in the independent space for mostly my whole working life. And suddenly in a weird, serendipitous, strange zigzagging road, TED led me right into the bureaucratic structure of Mexico City government.

How did it happen? 

About six months ago, I organized a TEDx with two good friends of mine. And we decided to invite Dr. Miguel Angel Mancera, our then mayor-to-be, to speak. He was running for mayor at the time, but everybody knew that he was going to win. We also chose as other speakers people that we thought it would be fascinating for him to hear about – people who have really great ideas for Mexico City. And as well as seeing a huge richness that already is, we also feel that there is enormous potential to make it an even more exciting city.

After that, I got an invitation to propose a project. At first, I thought they would be willing to fund some things on the outside, but it turns out that he invited me to jump on his team.

What did you propose?

It was a project that is called Laboratory for the City. This would be Mexico City’s new creative think tank. This is not a space that exists in any other government in the world.

One of the things we will be doing is to incubate good ideas and create pilot programs. We’ve been very much inspired by, for example, a project in Boston called New Urban Mechanics that’s directed by Nigel Jacobs. They are creating an incubator of good ideas from civil society and inside of government, working as a more experimental space that can mitigate risk. They’ve done amazing stuff, from working with a mother whose kid has autism to create all sorts of tools that she’d been working on informally that will now be implemented in public schools, to, for example, these apps where you can report if there’s a pothole.

If and when ideas prove successful in the experimental space, then we can actually work with other departments to inject these ideas into a more formal structure.

I’m also super excited that this is going to become a space to think about the city in a multidisciplinary manner. It’s very much akin to what I had been doing with Tóxico Cultura, and it also very much incorporates what I’ve learned from three years as a TED Senior Fellow.

I met my mayor because of a TEDx, but the reason why I got offered this job is because, through TED, I’ve been put through a three-year school dealing with things that not only have to do with art and culture, but a lot to do with technology and innovation – basically pushing forth a series of conversations that are not only related to arts and culture.

So what’s your vision?

We’d like for this to become a vortex to think about the city as a concept, and a place to invite people in from all over the world, across disciplines, to try out new ideas. In a conversation with a friend recently, we discussed how it hasn’t been since modernism that the concept of what a city is has been so much up for grabs. What is a digital city? What is a smart city? Is densification a good thing?

Mexico City, which has been a megalopolis since Aztec times, was the poster child of everything a city should try to avoid. We have all the problems of an emerging-world city: social divide, pollution, problems with water, you name it. But now, Mexico City has a great potential to be the epitome of a city that can prototype ideas. It has an absolutely enviable infrastructure, and it’s the eighth largest city economy in the world. This is not something that a lot of people know. Because there’s densification, there are many interesting minds that are there to clash and meet and breed ideas, as Matt Ridley would say. And we just got a prize for sustainable transport, competing against smaller cities like Copenhagen.

Basically TED has been fundamental in pushing this forth in a strange serendipitous way, preparing the mindspace for all that is coming. How can we create cities together? What is needed for Mexico City to become one of the world’s sexiest, most interesting cities?

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Saskia Sassen thinks deeply about the world’s cities, and she’s on the TED stage to share some of her provocative theories about how we should think about urbanizing technology, that pervasive force that has impacted so much of the way in which we live and work.

She starts by pointing out an amazing fact: there are firms that will lease you a city. And those cities are highly technologized. She’s worried about that. But Sassen isn’t here to get under the skin of engineers. The author of books such as Cities in a World Economy and The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Sassen is a technophile. Her point is more subtle: that while technologies become increasingly obsolescent, our cities endure for centuries. As such, how can contemporary policy makers balance the lure of the new with the extended pressures of the long-lasting. In other words, are the “intelligent” buildings we celebrate today really as smart as we think they are?  A bold idea to announce to a room full of geeks.

Dialogues with cities

Today’s cities are complex systems that interact with the biosphere, and she asks a startling question: “Can technology hack the city, or can cities hack technology?” For the first the answer is clearly yes. There are many examples of high-tech cities. But the other way around? To illustrate it, Sassen shows an oil rig that has been transformed into a mini city. A remarkable case of a city colonizing old technology.

But it goes further: Does the city talk back? Yes, she thinks it does.

There’s a great example in New York City. Consider Riverside Park on Upper West Side in the 1980s, when NYC was formally broke. The city had incredibly high rates of murder. That area beside Riverside Park was run down and dangerous. No one wanted to go in there. Then newcomers, young people with ambition and education, wanted those beautiful spaces with the beautiful view. They bought apartments there. They didn’t arrange together to buy, but it was a self-evident great place to be. Then, because it was dangerous, they would buy a dog, a big dog, tall enough you can look in its eyes. If you have a big dog you have to walk it, every day. So all those people all went to walk their dogs. Out of that walking, the park became safer, so other people began to come. “A mix of people’s practices connected to urban space produces a public good: the park is now safe.”

The danger

But the high-tech city threatens the evolution of cities. She thinks we need to leave cities incomplete, not planned as tightly as we would like, because of something which we are all very familiar with: obsolescence. We all know technology’s rate of obsolescence is increasing rapidly, but cities can endure for centuries. And it’s their messiness and evolution that are remarkable. ”The city, messy, anarchic, and has been a place where those without power get to execute a project. They get to make history.” Urban spaces, she says, have enabled many people, such as immigrants, LGBT people to make their own spaces. “Is it a surprise that many of our minorities tend to live in our cities?”

But technology is threatening that ability. She shows map of government and private surveillance agencies in the US, where over 10,000 buildings are doing full time surveillance to capture 5 to 7 terrorists. This deurbanizes — and dehumanizes — any situation.

Her question is, “What are the spaces where we can create a bit of distance between that and us?” Cities are her answer — but not perfect technological spaces, such as those cities with advanced surveillance systems. “The logic of the engineer and the logic of the citizen are quite different.” We need, she says, room to hack the technology. She has an image of a kind of “open-source urbanism.” It is important, argues Sassen, to keep our cities complex and incomplete.

“One of the things I have found, in global cities you have a kind of production of something that I call urban knowledge capital.” What’s there is much more than the sum of its parts. She is not sure that quality will remain if cities are too technologized. But keeping it is essential, “otherwise we will have  a lot of dead, obsolete cities.”