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.”

Pankaj Ghemawat coined a new phrase in his talk from TEDGlobal: “globaloney.”

In other words, Ghemawat takes issue with the idea that national borders are eroding and that we are all just living in “one world.” It’s a notion Ghemawat says was first floated in the 1850s by David Livingston, the Scottish explorer who traveled the Nile, and that persists strongly through today. And yet, says Ghemawat, data shows that it isn’t necessarily true.

“I’m going to suggest that globaloney can be very harmful to your health,” says Ghemawat, the author of Global 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It, in his talk. “If we thought we were already there, there’d be no particular point to pushing harder … Being accurate about how limited globalization levels are is critical to being able to notice that there might be room for something more that would contribute further to global welfare.”

Here are 11 stats that suggest our world is semi-globalized, as opposed to fully globalized.

• Of all the telephone-calling minutes placed in the world last year, only 2% were cross-border calls. As Ghemawat shares in his talk, if you add in calls made online, the percentage boosts up to 6% or 7%. Still, when 400 readers of the Harvard Business Review were asked to guess the percentage in 2011, they estimated a much higher 30%. [HBR Blog]
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• When it comes to online news, the average person does just 1% to 2% of their reading on foreign news sites, says Ghemawat. [Knowledge@Wharton]
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• Even on Facebook, we aren’t as global as we think, says Ghemawat in his talk. Typically, between 10 to 15% of your Facebook friends are from another country than the one in which you live. It’s not a negligible amount, but still not as high as one would expect. Robin Dunbar’s TEDxObserver talk contains many more stats like this. Watch it now >>
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• Most of us also assume that there is significant movement between countries, given that immigration is such a hot-button issue. But as Ghemawat shares in his talk, just 3% of the world’s population are first-generation immigrants. Harvard Business Review readers estimated the percentage at over 20%. [HBR Blog]
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• Globalization seems to be truly at work in education, with international students a presence on many campuses. But, says Ghemawat, only 2% of university students are studying in countries where they are not citizens. [Knowledge@Wharton]

• As the saying goes, “investment knows no boundaries.” But of all the investments made in the world in 2010, not quite 10% were direct foreign investments. Again, Harvard Business Review readers greatly overestimated the percentage at a touch over 30%. [HBR Blog]
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• While official statistics show that the export-to-GDP (gross domestic product) ratio is about 30%, Ghemawat says that this stat double-counts and triple-counts some goods that contain parts that traveled between countries. Ghemawat consulted with Pascal Lamy, director of the World Trade Organization, who estimates that the real figure would be just under 20%. [HBR Blog]
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• In France, where tensions run high over immigration, people guesstimate that immigrants make up 24% of the population. But the real figure is actually 8%, says Ghemawat in his talk. He believes that knowing the real breakdown might help ease a lot of fears.
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• Meanwhile, Americans greatly overestimate the percent of the federal budget that is devoted to foreign aid. In a study published last year, the median estimate was 25% percent, with survey respondents saying that 10% would be an “appropriate” amount. However, in reality, just 1% of the U.S. federal budget goes to foreign aid. [WorldPublicOpinion.org]
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• In fact, while people estimate that their countries give large amounts of aid to the poor in other nations, a survey by Branko Milanović of the World Bank finds that the ratio of aid given per domestic poor person, when compared to aid given per foreign poor person, is 30,000 to 1. [HBR Blog, MPRA]
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• Ghemawat says that people may even overestimate the effects of globalization on the environment. While people estimate that international shipping and air transport account for 20% of all energy-related CO2 emissions, he says many would be surprised to find that international shipping accounts for 2% to 3% of emissions, while air freight accounts for just 1% to 2%. [Ghemawat.com]

While these stats are fascinating, Ghemawat admits that the data on this topic is limited.

He says, “I would urge you to go away and look for your own data to try and actually assess whether some of these hand-me-down insights that we’ve been bombarded with actually are correct.”

Read more on Ghemawat’s blog.