Tag: future cities

MetroLabs visit: Sharing experiences of implementing smart cities

Posted on by janet.crompton
Image credit: CarriAyne Jone, (Head of Science and Innovation, British Consulate-General, Atlanta)

In December 2017 I was invited to take part in the Metro Lab Annual Summit, taking place in Georgia Tech in the United States. I thought it worthwhile to share a few of my own thoughts about the meeting and what can be drawn from the experience.

The MetroLab Network includes 41 cities and 55 universities within the United States that have formed city-university partnerships that focus on research, development and deployment projects to offer solutions to many of the challenges facing urban areas. These allow decision makers and researchers to work together within their cities to achieve better urban living, while being able to share best practice from each other’s experiences.

The visit was facilitated by the UK Science and Innovation Network, part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who provide opportunities for international collaboration. As well as delegates from the University of Bristol and Bristol City Council, we shared the visit with delegates from Glasgow and Strathclyde and from Innovate UK. Bristol has been designated as the UKs ‘smartest city’ according the smart city index commissioned by Huawei UK. A number of current innovations at Bristol are helping to develop the smart city capability including Bristol is Open, a joint venture between the city and university providing a digital infrastructure; and the Digital Health strategy (including IRC SPHERE ) that utilises sensing technology to facilitate healthier living. My own future work plans fit into this agenda, as I am trialling air quality and meteorological sensors that will help inform when and where I can run my gas tracer and aerosol measurement experimental campaigns.

In the morning of the day before the Summit, our delegation was introduced to the Consulate General and staff in their Atlanta office. Afterwards, we visited Southface, a company that promotes sustainable development and green building. Their offices included buildings designed to be exemplars of the type of technologies that they promote. I look forward to finding out more on some of the work they are doing in the monitoring of pollutants indoors from outdoors. After this visit we attended the launch of the Smart city and data-driven energy policy program, within which presentations were given on how a city could increase energy efficiencies, and the net gains that could be achieved.

The first day of the summit was held in the Georgia Institute of Technology Historic Academy of Medicine. The sessions included round table discussions from civic leaders, including mayors and chief technology/data/information officers (or similar variations of that title) about the challenges facing cities in the future, and how technologies can be used to address them, particularly in the gathering of data. Hearing civil leaders emphasising their commitment to action on climate change and public health independently of national policy was an encouragement to me.

Throughout both days, a number of research and development projects were highlighted that showed the benefit of smart technologies. One such technology was Numina, demonstrated in Jacksonville, which tracked traffic, bike and pedestrian movements so that cities have a better idea of what is happening on their streets. An 18 mile stretch of highway near Georgia has been turned into a living lab known as the Ray C Anderson memorial highway (The Ray) incorporating a driveable solar road surface, EV charge points and tyre safety checks. Another presentation described an ambitious attempt to link Portland, Seattle and Vancouver in the larger ‘megapolitan’ region of Cascadia, which would provide better management of transport over the area.

James Matthews (second from left) participated in a panel discussion on Air Quality Sensing in Smart Cities.  Image credit: Melissa Wooten (Vice Consul for Prosperity and Economic Policy, British Consulate-General, Chicago).

On the second day, there were, among other things, discussions on data privacy and an update on the Array of Things. The Array of Things is a project by Argonne Labs and Chicago University that is building a platform by which an instrumented ‘node’ can be connected to an urban network, collecting environmental sensing data which could include air quality, traffic and meteorology. These are currently being trialled in Chicago and will soon be sent to participating partner cities, including Bristol.

In the afternoon it was my privilege to participate in a panel discussion on Air Quality Sensing in Smart Cities, where I provided the perspective of a researcher in urban meteorology and pollution dynamics who is attempting to use the Bristol is Open smart city technology to assist with my research. The other panel members were Vincent McInally from Glasgow City Council who provided his experiences addressing air quality in Glasgow, including maintaining air quality measurement networks in the city, and Don DuRousseau from DWU, Washington DC who has many years experience in real-time systems, cybersecurity and informatics and has worked to set up high speed connectivity in many MetroLab partners.

The discussion included concerns about low-cost, (or low-accuracy as Vincent suggested we  call them) sensors in reflecting true values of pollution in the city, and whether we can use the higher specification instrumentation to validate their usage and the related discussion on sensor placement and temporal variability or their output. The dangers of false positives, in particular from citizen sensing initiatives, was brought up in relation to these reliability concerns, and how these limitations can be communicated with the public such that the information can be better interpreted. There is certainly value in giving real time air quality information to the public, and it is something I have discussed with many project partners within Bristol, but this leads to the dilemma of whether the data needs to be filtered in some way so as to account for the errors, or whether the public have a right to all the data as a matter of course. The discussion also included some examples of how sensor measurements, and other initiatives, have been used to make a positive difference in city life.

Overall, the experience was a positive one for our delegation and shows the value of both using new technologies to affect positive change in city life, it underlined the merits in strong communication and collaboration between city leadership and the universities, and furthermore, showed the value of civic leaders and university academics from different cities coming together to share each other’s experiences of implementing smart cities. It may be time to consider how those cities in the UK could also bring together our own experiences.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr James Matthews, a Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol.  James is interested in the flow of gases in urban environments, and use perfluorocarbon trace gas releases to map the passage of air in urban cities.  He is currently running an extended field campaign measuring air quality for four months in Bangkok.
James Matthews

Contemporary Eco-Cities: An improvement on previous work?

Posted on by janet.crompton

History offers up many grand ideas for how urban planning and design can be used to improve cities and society to be more sustainable and liveable. These ideas include early urban reforms by David Dale, Robert Owen, and Titus Salt, Benjamin Ward Richardson’s City of Health, Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City and Le Corbusier’s Contemporary City, amongst others. The eco-city, as an idea that initially developed out of the 1960s grassroots environmental movement, should be considered within this long tradition of ideas for the betterment of cities. The construction of ‘eco-cities’ in the recent decade has also been controversial. The aim of this article is to introduce the ideas and practices of contemporary eco-cities and to discuss the extent to which they can be regarded as an improvement on the work of previous urban reformers.

Eco-city concept and development stages of eco-cities

The term ‘eco-city’ was first coined in 1987 by US-based eco-city pioneer Richard Register as ‘an urban environmental system in which input (of resources) and output (of waste) are minimised’. As the eco-city concept began to be used more extensively, it became more broadly defined, ergo, there is no single accepted definition in the literature. Recognising and permeating ideas of nature in the city into the concept of sustainable cities should be considered essential in setting a framework for eco-cities. This idea can be seen as a continuation of planning trends which attempted to reconcile the nature-city relationship, beginning with Howard’s Garden City movement. The approach is also novel, in that it represented a wide range of factors which coalesce around sustainability in the contemporary context of global climate change, environmental degradation and environmental politics.

There are three stages in the development of eco-city. Early initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s were locally-oriented, bottom-up approaches which aimed to improve environmental conditions, with only few examples of practical projects. The period of 1990s to early 2000s marked the emerging stage of eco-city development, when balanced sustainable development was adopted as a principal objective. At this stage, national and municipal governments started to develop eco-cities and eco-towns, most of which were redevelopments or expansions of existing towns and cities as demonstration projects. Successful examples include eco-towns in Japan and small-scale ones in Europe. Since the mid-2000s, a number of ambitious built-from-scratch eco-city masterplans have emerged, aiming to make entire towns and cities highly sustainable. These top-down proposals are occurring predominantly in Asia, including the highly publicised Dongtan Eco-City, Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City and Caofeidian Eco-City in China and the Masdar City which was proposed as a zero-carbon city in the UAE. The latter two stages of eco-cities are the foci in the following discussion, considering the development scale and significance.

General visions and planning of contemporary eco-cities

Contemporary eco-cities and eco-towns are, in general, an improvement on previous ideas and works in terms of their visions, planning and objectives.

Almost all smaller eco-town plans and holistic eco-city blueprints in recent years are emerging as reflections of and responses to the global context of climate change and environmental degradation, with emphasis on cutting-edge technology, clean energy, and circular economy to achieve sustainable living. This indicates that the finiteness of resources as well as the ecosystem itself has been more extensively recognised. This is an improvement from earlier works. Earlier works targeted urban problems including sanitation and personal health in the case of ‘Hygeia, City of Health’ by Richardson in 1876, and poor working and living conditions in the case of Saltaire and New Lanark, but hardly realised the limits of the environment. An example was Howard’s claim in his 1902 book Garden Cities of Tomorrow: ‘…to a more noble use of its infinite treasures. The earth for all practical purposes may be regarded as abiding forever’. Today’s improvement leads to the consideration of intergenerational ecological justice, being an essential principle of the development of eco-cities.

Moreover, there are three forms of eco-city projects identified: new developments, expansions of urban areas, and retrofits where existing cities adopt eco-city principles. Unlike earlier visionaries such as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier who tended to reject the idea of gradual improvements to the conditions of existing cities in favour of comprehensive transformations of the urban environment, the planning of contemporary eco-cities/towns includes various forms of urban development and redevelopment. Whilst the ambitiously proposed built-from-scratch eco-cities in China and the UAE belong to the first type, most examples of smaller-scale ones in Japan, Germany, Scandinavia, and the UK are expansions of urban areas and retrofits, which is an improvement in terms of development forms.

Implementations and outcomes of contemporary eco-cities

The implementations and outcomes of contemporary eco-cities at early stage of the development in the 1990s and early 2000s are an improvement upon early urban reformers in many aspects, while those at current development stage may vary in light of different contexts. It is doubtful that the prospects of these newly-built eco-cities might be an improvement.

At the early stage, contemporary eco-cities and eco-towns were mainly developed in Japan and central and northern Europe, exemplifying the eco-cities in Germany. During this stage, a distinctive characteristic of small-to-moderate-scale developments is that they gave equal weighting to the environmental, economic and social aspects of their design and integrated them well.

The Eco-Town Program was launched in Japan in 1997 through national initiatives and municipal redevelopment planning in order to deal with waste management issues, industrial pollution and to stimulate new industry development during a time of economic stagnation. The Eco-Town concept in Japan originally focused on Industrial Symbiosis—the iconic 3R application of Industrial Ecology which concerns ‘the productivity and environmental impacts of resources in industrial societies’ (McManus 2005). The theory then extended to Urban Symbiosis to become part of the Eco-City concept, focusing on overall urban planning and urban ecosystems, civil society and greening of cities. The implementation of this program and the successful development of 26 eco-towns, which focused mainly on circular economy and environmentally conscious planning, highlight three major aspects of improvement on earlier urban reformers. First, the government put in place a comprehensive legal framework for becoming a recycling-based society. This action provides a legislative foundation, imposes a sense of duty, and reduces the risk for further transition and development in industries and society, which is a practical improvement on the ideas of earlier reformers which were often hard to carry out (in a large scale) without legislative basis. Second, the program emphasised a combination of initiatives from public sector, business sector and, especially, civil society. There were a number of citizen activities emerging during that period and engaging in the program, which stands in contrast to places like Saltaire that were largely paternal. Third, the program was carried out mainly in the form of redevelopment and retrofitting projects, which faced less trouble than those early built-from-scratch ideas because it could take advantages of existing social capital.

There are also two smaller-scale eco-town examples in Freiburg, Germany: Vauban and Rieselfeld. These two district-scale projects are expansion of the city in response to the increasing population. They were carefully planned and developed with foci on public transport, dense but diverse housing, and environmental buildings. A major improvement on earlier works includes the emphasis on public transport, as these two districts were designed to minimise car dependency, given that 35% of residents in Vauban have abstained from driving (Beatley 2012). Le Corbusier’s fetishisation of the automobile in his La Ville Radieuse (1967) is of little relevance considering today’s traffic congestion, the high energy consumption, and air quality concerns associated with automobiles. These two examples successfully demonstrate how public transport can contribute to urban and environmental sustainability.

At the current stage (since mid-2000s), contemporary eco-cities are primarily proposed to be built from scratch, on a grand scale. They would represent highly sustainable, experimental flagships, most of which are promoted by the Chinese national and municipal governments including examples such as the Masdar City in the UAE. The characteristic of these projects is they are predominantly entrepreneurial cities and tend to prioritise economic concerns over environmental ones. In terms of implementation and outcomes, these new cities sometimes fail to demonstrate improvements on previous works, with uncertainty remaining considering that many of them are still under construction.

Due to rapid population influx, emissions pressure and pollution issues, the Chinese state government encourages local governments to experiment the ‘eco-city’ as a flagship project for new technologies and ‘sustainable’ economic and ecological urban development. Highly publicised projects include Dongtan Eco-City on Chongming Island, Shanghai, Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city and Caofeidian Eco-City. The first project, Dongtan Eco-City, has already been stalled due to issues of land quotas. The subsequent Caofeidian Eco-City, claiming to be a renewable energy city, has only completed a few buildings and failed to attract residents, suffering from huge debt and being indefinitely postponed. The only project that has come close to completion is the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city, which has not been developed without issues and is still of little improvement upon earlier urban reformers. It is being developed according to 26 sustainability indicators (Fig. 1), demonstrating the progressive practices within the Chinese context, although many of them are taken for granted in the West. There are many problems in the construction. The city claimed to promote green transport but the implementation of numerous highways are still the dominant transport structure in the city, accompanied by high-rise residential buildings, which is a strong resemblance of the type of city Le Corbusier imagined for ‘the contemporary city’. There is even less open green space compared with Le Corbusier’s ideas. Additionally, this city has only managed to attract 6000 residents thus far—far less than its objective. There is also hardly any inclusion of social sustainability, where there should be relevant viable attempts, as Caprotti states (2015), ‘the view of sustainability which is concerned purely with a city’s environmental footprint, or with its economic success is severely limited’.

26 Key performance indicators to measure success (Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City Investment and Development Co.,Ltd 2015)

In the case of Masdar City, the so-called ‘carbon-neutral city’ (recently modified to be ‘low- carbon city’) initiatives are just a part in making Abu Dhabi a leader in the industry of renewable energy technologies, which does not include many real actions with reconciliation of the nature-human relationship. An exception to the Asian ambitions of the eco-city is the Eco-town plan in the UK, which may constitute an improvement on earlier works. Those eco-towns proposed by the North West Bicester, which are an expansion of existing urban areas, aim for affordable housing and promoting social justice.

In conclusion, the contemporary eco-cities, from the early emerging stage of the1990s till today, are in general, an improvement upon the work of earlier urban reformers in terms of their ideas and planning. Whilst the early-stage developments such as Eco-towns in Japan demonstrate an improvement in terms of practical implementations and existing outcomes, brand-new built-from-scratch eco-cities may not be sustainable in reality in light of different contexts.  They tend to prioritise economic goals instead of environmental concerns. Whether these newly built eco-cities will be an improvement on those of earlier reformers remains uncertain. The developments which have begun, however, provide lessons for future urban developments which can be introduced to improve future designs and the redevelopment of existing cities.

Blog by Cabot Institute Masters Research Fellow Shiyao (Silvia) Liu.






Further reading

Beatley, T., 2012. Green cities of Europe: global lessons on green urbanism, Washington DC, Island Press.
Caprotti, F., 2015, Eco-Cities and the Transition to Low Carbon Economies, Palgrave.
Howard, E., 1902, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, London: Swan Sonnenschein.
Le Corbusier, 1967, The Radiant City (La Ville Radieuse): Elements of a doctrine of urbanism to be used as the basis of our machine-age civilization, New York, The Orion Press.
McManus, P., 2005, Vortex Cities to Sustainable Cities: Australia’s Urban Challenge, UNSW Press, Sydney.
Register, R., 1987, Ecocity Berkeley: Building Cities for a Healthy Future. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Richardson, B.W., 1876, Hygeia, A city of health. MacMillan & Co., London.
Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City Investment and Development Co.,Ltd. 2015, Tianjin Eco City website,  http://www.tianjineco-city.com/en/index.aspx

COP21 reflections: What next for the University of Bristol?

Posted on by janet.crompton

If you have read my previous blogs on my COP21 reflections (see links at bottom of this blog), that brings us to the University of Bristol and the Cabot Institute.  I hope that this year we also have made some steps towards being a trusted participant in shaping our city’s future. I have lived here over 15 years and so I know that has not always been the case.

We must contribute via our role as a business.  With the NHS, we are the largest employer in the city and our behaviour should lead by example.  This is why we have developed a district energy strategy with BCC and the NHS.  This is why we are planting trees all over the city.  That is why we collaborate with Bristol City Council and fund community initiatives. But we do need to do more.  We will be judged on how we build our next buildings.  We will be judged on how we procure our goods. We will be judged on how we engage with the other citizens of Bristol.

We must contribute via our role as an educational institution.  We are already committed to pan-University Education for Sustainable Development (and thanks again to Chris Willmore for championing that). Now we are exploring a new initiative to build sustainability, enterprise and global citizenship across the student experience; those of us in the Cabot Institute are very excited to have been asked to play a role in translating our ambitions for multidisciplinary, challenge-driven, environmental research to our Undergraduates.

Students working with a local organisation in Bedminster, Bristol.

Of course, those students are driving us as often as we are leading them!  In the words of Hannah Tweddell of Bristol’s Student Union:

‘Our students and young people are the future. We’ve seen the amazing work they’ve done in partnership, helping Bristol Green Capital transition towards a more sustainable inclusive city. We’re committed to getting 100,000 hours of student engagement with the city to help make our city more sustainable every year – real action on the ground to tackle climate change, inequality and sustainability.’

And finally, the Cabot Institute will continue to conduct ambitious research in this area. Being at COP21 with Bristol City Council showed me the power of academic contributions.  Our Mini-Stern review and the STEEP Project sit at the foundation of Bristol’s Climate Change and Energy Security Framework.  Bristol is Open was repeatedly cited as an exemplar in Future Cities thinking. These partnerships were embedded in the argument by ICLEI and others that cities must be taken seriously as partners in this endeavour. Our climate change research was also on display and invoked at key stages as ambitions were raised.

It is not all about the Cabot Institute.  Sustainability policy is increasingly linked to health issues, whether it be the benefits of cycling and walking or of cleaner air; as such, the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute is also a central part of this conversation. The Brigstow Institute will explore the role of self, identity and community in the 21st century, issues that will be central to the social transformations that the Paris Agreement requires.  And there is no doubt that Big Data will be key to understanding, managing and navigating the future city; our new Institute (currently the Bristol Institute for Data Intensive Research) is poised to make major contributions.

Our research must continue and become more ambitious because we do not have all of the solutions – yet. So we will continue to innovate, whether it be exciting new functional nanomaterials to underpin the next generation of renewable technology or the mathematical expertise that will help us best extract tidal power from the Severn. We will have to help explore new financing tools to fund a new kind of global development; and there is a role for Bristol in shaping the emerging new forms of governance and economy. But new solutions require an engaged and interested public – and we do not intend to develop them in isolation or in our old disciplinary silos.

As our train pulled into Temple Meads, Alex Minshull told me that what he took from the Conference was a renewed awareness of what he already knew – do not get ‘locked in’ to the future you do not want. We must make the right choices today, choices that do not pile future carbon debt onto the future.  We must invest in our young people today so that they are prepared to lead tomorrow.  We must invest in new technology today so that it is ready when we need it.

It starts today.

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Prof Rich Pancost

This blog is by Prof Rich Pancost, Director of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol.  

For more information about the University of Bristol at COP21, please visitbristol.ac.uk/green-capital

Other blogs in this COP21 reflections series include:

What have we achieved and how do we go forward?
What next for our planet?
What next for Bristol?
What next for the University of Bristol?

This blog is part of a COP21 daily report series. View other blogs in the series below:

COP21 daily report: Reflecting on the science of climate change

Posted on by janet.crompton
Cabot Institute Director Professor Rich Pancost will be attending COP21 in Paris as part of the Bristol city-wide team, including the Mayor of Bristol, representatives from Bristol City Council and the Bristol Green Capital Partnership. He will be writing blogs during COP21, reflecting on what is happening in Paris, especially in the Paris and Bristol co-hosted Cities and Regions Pavilion, and also on the conclusion to Bristol’s year as the European Green Capital.  Follow #UoBGreen and #COP21 for live updates from the University of Bristol.

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Bristol’s presence at COP21 started with a bang, with some of its most important contributions being showcased as it opened  the Bristol/Paris/ICLEI Cities and Regions Pavilion.  There is a lot to digest from that and that will be the focus of tomorrow’s or Friday’s blog.  Today, however, I am going to take a step back and revisit the climate science that is the basis for the political, entrepreneurial and social actions currently being discussed in Paris.

When I started by PhD in 1992, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere was about 355 ppm and already a huge source of concern to climate scientists.

About one year ago, depending on the station or the season, CO2 levels passed 400 ppm for the first time in human history.  And for the first time in ice core history, extending back nearly 1 million years.  And – based on our recent work using chemical proxies to reconstruct atmospheric carbon dioxide – probably for the first time in about 3 million years.

If we continue burning fossil fuel, even with reduced emissions, we will reach 550 to 700 ppm by the end of this century. Our work and that of others reveals that these are values that the Earth has not experienced for at least 10 million and maybe even 30 million years.

This is causing the Earth to warm.  That relationship is derived from fundamental physics and first articulated by Svante Arrhenius over a century ago.  Our climate models elaborate and clarify this relationship.  Earth history validates and confirms it – when CO2 was higher, the planet was warmer.  And consistent with that, this year is on track to be the warmest in recorded history, with human-induced warming now thought to have warmed our planet by 1C.

This is half of our agreed limit of 2C; and due to the slow response of the climate system, more warming will come.

These are some of the truly eye-opening facts surrounding climate change, the challenge we face and the need for this week’s negotiations.

There are many who will argue that the science of climate change is too uncertain to act upon.  The observations listed above, and many others, reveal that to be a manipulative half-truth.  There is an astonishing amount of knowledge about climate change – and global warming in particular.

Moreover, as Steve Lewandowksy (and Tim Ballard and myself) discussed in an article in the Guardian yesterday, the uncertainty that does exist in our understanding of climate change impacts is cause for mitigative action not complacency.  This was based on our recent volume in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, in which a great diversity of researchers highlight the impact of uncertainty on the economy, cooperation, action and creativity.

This has long been a focus of the Cabot Institute; Living with Environmental Uncertainty is a central tenet of our mission. ]We have hosted consultations and workshops on understanding, constraining and communicating uncertainty; advised decision makers and leaders; produced papers, reports and even handbooks. This year as part of the Green Capital, we framed much of our own activity, as well as our contributions to the Summits, Arts Programme and Festivals, around this theme: The Uncertain World.

A great example of this research is that of the Bristol Glaciology Centre.  Tony Payne was a Lead Author on the IPCC report on ice sheets and sea level rise.  Glacial biogeochemists, Martyn Tranter, Jemma Wadham and Alex Anesio, are studying how surface melting can create dark patches of algal growth which could absorb light and accelerate melting.  Jonathan Bamber led a fascinating expert elicitation study which suggested a wider range of potential sea level rise than previously thought.

All in all, this work is consistent with the most recent IPCC report that sea level rise will likely range from 0.7 to 1.1 m by the end of the century.  However, that range belies deeper and more frightening uncertainty. Professor Bamber spoke about this yesterday at COP21 as part of the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative and Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research session on Irreversible Impacts of Climate Change on Antarctica.  Their presentation highlighted that the IPCC range of potential sea level rise is largely a function of the 2100 time frame applied.  Longer timescales reveal the true magnitude of this threat. The projected ~1m of sea level rise is probably already inevitable. It will be even higher – perhaps several metres higher – if we warm our planet by 2C, and even more so if it warms by the 2.7C that current Paris commitments yield. The geological record suggests even more dramatic potential for sea level rise: 3 million years ago, when CO2 concentrations were last ~400 ppm, sea level might have been 20 m higher.  These changes almost certainly would take place over hundreds of years rather than by 2100.  But their consequences will be vast and irreversible.

Flooding in Clifton, Bristol 2012. Events like these are likely to
become more common. Image credit Jim Freer
This uncertainty is not limited to warming and sea level rise.  Uncertainty is deeply dependent in rainfall forecasts for a warmer world; we know that warmer air can hold more water such that rainfall events are likely to become more extreme.  However, how will that change regionally?  Which areas will become wetter and which drier?  How will that affect food production?  Or soil erosion?

Of course, climate change is about more than just warming, sea level rise and extreme weather.  It is also about the chemistry of our atmosphere, soils and oceans.  Again profound concern and uncertainty is associated with the impact of coastal hypoxia and ocean acidification on marine ecosystems. In fact, it is the biological response to climate change, especially when coupled with all of the other ways we impact nature, that is most uncertain. Unfortunately, Earth history is less useful here.  Even the most rapid global warming events of the past seem to have occurred over thousands of years, far far slower than the change occurring now, a point that emerges again and again in our research and frequently emphasised by the Head of our Global Change Theme Dani Schmidt.

What is happening today appears to be unprecedented in Earth history.

We are creating an Uncertain – but also volatile, extreme and largely unknown world.  Some of that is inevitable.  But much of it is not.   How much will be largely decided in Paris.

But not just by nations.  Also by mayors and councils and LEPs, NGOs, citizens, businesses and other innovation and transformation leaders.  This is why the actions being proposed in the Cities and Regions Pavilion, not just by Bristol but by hundreds of cities and local authorities across the globe, are so very exciting.

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This blog is by Prof Rich Pancost, Director of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol.  For more information about the University of Bristol at COP21, please visit bristol.ac.uk/green-capital
Prof Rich Pancost

This blog is part of a COP21 daily report series. View other blogs in the series below:

COP21 daily report: Setting a more ambitious agenda – Bristol’s Transformative Action Plans

Posted on by janet.crompton
Cabot Institute Director Professor Rich Pancost will be attending COP21 in Paris as part of the Bristol city-wide team, including the Mayor of Bristol, representatives from Bristol City Council and the Bristol Green Capital Partnership. He will be writing blogs during COP21, reflecting on what is happening in Paris, especially in the Paris and Bristol co-hosted Cities and Regions Pavilion, and also on the conclusion to Bristol’s year as the European Green Capital.  Follow #UoBGreen and #COP21 for live updates from the University of Bristol.

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On Monday, the Bristol Team arrived in Paris for the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference (COP21).  The Bristol cohort includes not just the Mayor and Bristol City Council, but also representatives from the Green Capital Partnership and an independent group from Love the Future (15 stalwarts who cycled from Bristol to Paris through typically British November weather). I’ll be joining them on Sunday… but some of the most exciting activity will happen today.

Bristol’s primary engagement with COP21 will be via the Cities and Regions Pavilion, hosted by Paris and Bristol and facilitated by ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, with support from over 40 partners.  It is testimony to the stature of Bristol as 2015 Green Capital that it is able to share this venue with Paris. Moreover, the Pavilion is a fantastic opportunity for Bristol to share, connect with and learn from hundreds of cities from across the globe.

Bristol is one of 88 cities and regions in 42 countries to present innovative projects aimed at placing local and regional governments at the heart of positive and long-term climate action.  These Transformative Action Plans (TAPs) represent a 10-year initiative that aims to transform the lives of their citizens.  They arise from ICLEI’s recognition that local entities must take the lead in delivering but also extending the commitments emerging from the national-scale negotiations.  Bristol is pitching two projects, one on energy efficiency and one on smarter future planning of cities. The University of Bristol, including its Cabot Institute, has been closely involved with the development of both and former Bristol Professor Andy Gouldson will be sharing the stage with Mayor George Ferguson today.

George Ferguson, Mayor of Bristol, said: 

“Bristol’s innovative plans, boosted by our year as European Green Capital, have been rated amongst the very best across cities and regions around the world thanks to their potential to transform the lives of our citizens. We’re proud to be among the world’s pioneering sustainable thinkers at COP21 and we look forward to bridging the gap ahead of the expected 2020 agreement with immediate actions that help reduce emissions, tackle poverty, improve lives and create new jobs through investment in low carbon projects.”

The first proposal, entitled ‘Energy efficiency for everyone’ (or Bristol Billion), is for a $1B (or £700m) investment to make Bristol’s buildings more energy efficient, thereby achieving significant carbon, energy, economic and even health savings. It will involve refurbishing 56,000 homes in Bristol – 30% of the city – and crucially it will not only make our city more sustainable but it will lift these homes out of fuel poverty and reduce health costs.  This proposal is based in part on a Cabot Institute-commissioned report that has also been released to the public today: The Economics of Low Carbon Cities: A mini-Stern Review for Bristol. This research shows that Bristol can achieve marked reductions in its emissions while saving money; in fact, the whole project could pay for itself in under a decade.  However, such a bold endeavour requires bold financing and hence the Bristol Billion proposition.

The Economics of Low Carbon Cities – report commissioned by the Cabot Institute

The Bristol Billion should achieve the energy efficiency gains necessary for the city to meet its 2015 to 2025 emissions reductions targets, but Bristol must also establish a foundation for the more challenging emission reductions to occur beyond 2025 and especially 2030.  Whether it be transforming the South West energy supply chain via the Bristol Energy Company or transforming its transport system, these changes will be more challenging and controversial. And that is the basis for the second project, the ‘Bristol Brain’, which seeks to reimagine how citizens and planners can work together to shape a sustainable future for the city. The Bristol Brain is ‘a physical and digital city model, on top of which, real-time data and sophisticated analytics can be projected and visualised, creating environments that can be explored through virtual and augmented reality. This will allow different scenarios for future developments to be explored as if they are real, and for the impact on energy, transport, air quality and other factors, to be fully understood.’

The Bristol Brain could facilitate city-scale planning decisions ranging from emergency services, road maintenance, and new public works. It could allow the social and economic impacts of major investments to be assessed and justified. Most importantly, it is a tool for testing and thereby empowering the radical reimagining of Bristol. It is the type of tool that citizens can use to justify maintenance of the M32… or its conversion into a bus-exclusive route… or even closing it and turning it into a city-scale garden.
This type of creative imagining is vital. Professor Colin Taylor, the head of the Cabot Institute’s Future Cities research theme, has argued that robust future city planning requires a city emulator so that we can truly explore the potential costs and benefits of truly transformative change. Crucially, the Bristol Brain would also support the more real-time interactive experiments that will be enabled by Bristol is Open and ensure that Bristol remains at the cutting edge of creative technology.
There remain challenges.  According to Bristol City Council, ‘The critical next step is to ensure these projects receive adequate financial resources to address urgent and evolving local needs to create a sustainable future.’ 

Another challenge is ensuring that such projects, especially the Bristol Brain, create an open and inclusive conversation about Bristol’s future. The University is committed to supporting these efforts.  If the Bristol Brain were to be made available to the public, perhaps via an allotment of the University’s High Performance Computing facility, then it becomes not just a resource for planning and consultation but for citizen-led propositions and inclusive innovation. 

The COP21 ambition, expressed by national governments via their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), is very likely to fall short of the global target of 2 degrees C warming. As such, it is crucial that other actors, including cities, take the lead in driving a more ambitious emissions reduction agenda. Moreover, they must work with universities, industry and civil society to stimulate, incubate and test new innovations. 

Bristol recognises that it can do more than follow an emissions path set by others. It can be a Laboratory for Change.
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Note: This blog is based partly on and includes text from a Bristol City Council press release.

This blog is by Prof Rich Pancost, Director of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol.  For more information about the University of Bristol at COP21, please visit bristol.ac.uk/green-capital
Prof Rich Pancost
This blog is part of a COP21 daily report series. View other blogs in the series:
 

Delivering the ‘Future City’: our economy and the nature of ‘growth’

Posted on by janet.crompton

In Bristol’s European Green Capital year, the University of Bristol and its Cabot Institute have been working with the Bristol Green Capital Partnership and its members to convene a series of four conversations between Bristol academics and city ‘thinkers’ from across public, private and civil society exploring how Bristol delivers the ‘future city’ –  what capacities it needs to be resilient, sustainable and successful and how it can start to develop these in times of changing governance and tightened finances. The conversations will be reflected in a series of four blogs (the fourth below) and then brought together as a policy report as well as discussing at the Festival of the Future City in November.  You can connect to the other blogs from this series at the bottom of this blog.
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Wordle of what we thought we’d talk about…

Cities such as Bristol are increasingly prominent in national growth strategies. The economic growth that Bristol helps to drive plays a fundamental role in shaping many aspects of life within the city. Different sectors, areas and social groups participate in and feel the impacts of growth in different ways. For some, the need for growth is unquestionable, particularly in an era of austerity, with the assumption that growth somehow underpins the pursuit of all other objectives. But for others, the pre-eminent growth logic is divisive socially and unsustainable environmentally. Growth therefore needs to be at least managed and possibly challenged more fundamentally. In this fourth conversation we considered what economic models make sense for the city and what capacity the city has to make changes in the context of a national and international economic system.

Growth – the elephant in the room?

In considering the future economy of the city, growth is the dominant idea but does this have to be economic growth with the associated ongoing increase of resource consumption? As we saw when discussing austerity, GDP growth is not contributing to long term stability environmentally or societally.   This debate was an opportunity to further explore growth and other measures of prosperity and how much is within the city’s control.

One participant drew an analogy with the natural environment and the way that living organisms are born, develop, mature and die – there isn’t enough space for everything to grow indefinitely. If we only talk about growth then we are only talking about half of life and missing the bit where some things die in order to make space to develop and nurture other life or something new.

There are two big reasons for needing growth, one is to service (interest bearing) debt – to pay back more than was borrowed needs growth. The second reason that growth is the mantra, particularly internationally, is that if a population is growing, you need economic growth otherwise by definition living standards are declining – and population growth is something else that is difficult to talk about. There is a common perception of growth as meaning success, an investment for your children.
What are the alternatives and how to we get to something that is more about leading happier, more fulfilled, healthier lives, something about development rather than growth?

International vs. local

One of the problems is that we are part of a global system, but there are things that a city controls and can change. The more business that is done locally or regionally, the more that power and funds move away from big corporations to something more transparent and locally based, where the organisations have a direct interest in the populations that they serve.

If the current systems seem too embedded and talk of developing alternative frames and narratives too difficult to achieve then don’t talk, just do things differently. The idea of ‘everyday making’ is that individuals just start behaving differently day-to-day, it has a cumulative effect and the end product is change. It’s an idea in academic literatures but it can be seen in real life too. Examples include buying food from local suppliers, ethically sourced clothing, and saving in green investment funds. In Bristol, the Bristol Pound is a manifestation of this idea – that by having a local currency people can gradually make more conscious consumption decisions. The new ‘Real Economy’ network has been developed through the Bristol Pound in an attempt to challenge the dominance of big business supermarkets. In the Real Economy, buying groups source food from local producers to start to create a food system that is fairer to all.

Talking about economics

Another issue is that many people feel disempowered when there is talk of economics, they feel that they don’t know enough, that somehow only the experts understand and can manage the system. It’s not really a conversation for the pub or at the school gates and that plays into the hands of the vested interests. The dominant free market right have captured the narrative with the idea that only growth can support ‘hard working families’.
There is such a dominance of growth as being the necessary outcome that it’s easy to portray everyone outside as excluded or naïve. In this narrative, growth translates as success and anything else is irresponsible.

Is it really a free market?

Could a true free market take account of climate change and value natural capital and social capital? These issues are not even really in the (mainstream) discussion yet whilst government subsidies support some industries and don’t let them die or change when they should. For example, banking; or the petroleum industry, which perhaps should be dying because of its costs – even before taking into account the environmental cost. Subsidies skew these markets.

There’s also a simplistic perception that everybody who is in the private sector (or at least the big business, multi-national part of it) must be bad but there are many entrepreneurs who act ethically and responsibly, who want to create good (local) businesses that employ people on fair wages and give back to their communities.

Part of the problem is that we’re all part of a very complex, interdependent system. This interdependency allows risk to be shared. For example if a city loses core industries, employment and income, shared resources from central government are there to help out. These interdependencies are highly complex which is why cities and businesses are not allowed to fail – for now at least, we’re all tied together in a global monetary system.

Politics, power and change

Our current political system draws some of its power from big business, paying taxes and providing employment, but also with the power to lobby to maintain the status quo. The powers in the system not only prevent things from dying but prevent change too and, although of course we need employment and tax receipts, there needs to be a mechanism whereby changes can happen more quickly. At a personal level, change is uncomfortable, so people vote for what is familiar, even if they don’t really like it, because it feels safer. It was suggested that the neo-liberal movement has succeeded in making all of us resistant to change. It’s scary, change takes us into the unknown and that feels risky, especially when we’re feeling vulnerable.

The constant growth narrative feels to some like a form of oppression. Individuals feel disempowered and that no-one else feels like they do, that they are all alone in being the good guy, all alone in arguing against the current system and narrative. There are many groups and conversations reflecting this view but they are fragmented and weak against the established power structures. Can a city bring its dissenting voices together into a more powerful collective? What is within its power to change?

…Wordle of what we talked about during the debate.

New approaches

This conversation started feeling a bit gloomy, that all the wrong people have the power, that we’re all alone in trying to make changes, that anyway we’re a bit powerless in such a globalised system and that the two big reasons for needing growth seemed unarguable.

A few good examples from around the world got us thinking about what could be done at the scale of Bristol. The examples from elsewhere included Ecuador which has legislation for the rights for nature, Sweden is experimenting with six-hour working days and Bhutan has a measure for gross national happiness. What could be the different ways of measuring economic welfare in the city – and which are not trying to put a monetary value on non-monetary issues such as quality of life or care for the natural environment?

The shift from growth to development or other forms of prosperity could involve a major change in how we see the economy and what we want from it. Rather than seeing growth as the end in itself, the economy should be seen as a means to achieve different development goals such as better public services, improved housing, increased inclusion, reduced inequality and greater levels of sustainability.  This would take a cultural and structural shift – overcoming the vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

What about Bristol?

There are already many parts of Bristol that are taking on big business and creating their own alternative economies with flourishing local enterprises and community-led prosperity coming out of them. The people of Bedminster are fighting against supermarkets and pawn shops, Knowle West are looking at pop up manufacturing and 3D printing, Lawrence Weston and Southmead have great momentum and visions for the future. Neighbourhood partnerships are working really well in some of the areas that need them most, and there are great social enterprises in many areas. BUT, there is still the dark side and, unlike some parts of the North, people across the city don’t feel like they’re all in it together, more like ‘us and them’. As we have observed before in these debates, there is significant racial tension and inequality in the city, high levels of child poverty and differences in life expectancy of 10 years between different areas – and, even more shocking, a 20 year difference in healthy years lived.

With these problems in the city it feels really important that we make efforts to work together better, to learn from the good examples and to join up this conversation outside the university and across the city. The big organisations in the city, such as the health sector, universities, council and businesses, have an important civic role in contributing to the wellbeing of the city. They have the resources and potential in their workforces, customers and supply chains to create new partnerships and city-wide change.

A new economic future?

When we talk about the allocation of limited resources there is no shared theory of value and no broader plan against which to share resources. So, for example in the health service, the budgets are boundaried and it’s easier to measure success of spending on cardiac surgery than it is to allocate resources to preventing heart disease with less predictable results somewhere in the future (that short-termism again). People across organisations collaborate in multi-agency partnerships but much of the actual resource allocation comes back to core service delivery. We need to understand where the power lies that can unlock these behaviours and allow longer term decisions to be made.

Again in this debate we talked about reducing inequality and creating a fairer system. The aim of the Bristol Pound was to support a green and fair economy – more equality and a more sustainable way of using resources. There is a wider role for business in contributing to life in the city, to have a positive impact. Local businesses and social enterprises are more connected with their communities and larger organisations have a civic role.

In the future we need to think more about what the economy is for – how to help pay for public services and improve housing, increased inclusion and greater levels of sustainability. We need to understand how to measure the real cost of environmental damage and that growth in itself is not the aim.

And sometimes we just need to do it, to make changes locally, to work together and to act on our beliefs in a way that supports the new economic system that we want to see.

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This blog is written by Caroline Bird, Future Cities and Communities Knowledge Exchange Manager at the Cabot Institute.
Caroline Bird
 
Other blogs in this series

Blog 1: Delivering the ‘Future City’: does Bristol have the governance capacities it needs?
Blog 2: Delivering the ‘Future City’: collaborating with or colluding in austerity?
Blog 3: Delivering the ‘Future City’: engaging or persuading?

Delivering the ‘Future City’: engaging or persuading?

Posted on by janet.crompton

In Bristol’s European Green Capital year, the University of Bristol and its Cabot Institute have been working with the Bristol Green Capital Partnership and its members to convene a series of four conversations between Bristol academics and city ‘thinkers’ from across public, private and civil society exploring how Bristol delivers the ‘future city’ –  what capacities it needs to be resilient, sustainable and successful and how it can start to develop these in times of changing governance and tightened finances. The conversations will be reflected in a series of four blogs (the third below) and then brought together as a policy report for the Festival of the Future City in November.  You can read the other blogs from this series at the bottom of this post.

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In this third conversation we considered how the range of civil society in the city is or could be effectively engaged in the future of the city. Our earlier debates (on governance and austerity) have suggested that a limited range of the spectrum of thought in the city is really engaged in shaping the future so how can engagement be widened in a way that brings people in because they want to be involved. But first, are we asking the right question in seeking new forms of engagement when maybe we don’t sufficiently value what is already happening? After all, isn’t everyone engaged in some way? What would be different in Bristol if the contribution of every individual, group and community was celebrated, connected and valued? If they felt they had both a stake and a role and were already part of delivering a better future? Would there be different questions asked, or different projects, processes and policies designed for the future?

Utopia and dystopia

A strand of discussion that captured the collective imagination was the idea of utopias – not as an impossible goal but rather as a method to help us move beyond the immediate issues of what we know now. Particularly in the current economic and environmental crises, the use of visions of utopia as a method for imagining a better world and alternative futures is a great tool – although we can also imagine the opposite, the dystopian vision of social disruption in an overcrowded, overheated world fighting for limited resources.

Dystopia. Image taken from PlayBuzz.
We have set an important, ambitious target for combatting climate change: that by 2050 we must have an 80% reduction in our carbon emissions; and we’ve been talking about the profound inequality in the city and the lack of social mobility for years – neither of these will change with incremental efforts. The Utopian approach allows us to imagine beyond what we know now, to think further ahead. Continuing to work in 5 year cycles is only tweaking when what is needed is system change – we can wait for the ruptures or be bold in addressing the big problems. We know that the city will be very different in the future, that the potential is there for dystopia if we don’t act.

‘We need to start thinking about how we best plan for the type of world we want, because if we just carry on the way the current narrative is playing out, it feels more like dystopia than utopia’. 

Could we try to imagine out of that dystopia what the possibilities are? To use a great phrase from Seamus Heaney, we need to ‘make space for the marvellous as well as the murderous’, the utopian vision coming out of crisis. But of course there are tension between what we think will happen and an imagined ideal future and we need to work with the first to get the second – and work out what will make the difference in what we end up with.

Utopias are liberating: an imagined goal to work to
Visions are constraining: just limiting variations of now 

Spaces of encounter and trust

Living in cities allows us to collaborate and survive better. But cities also allow anonymity (for better and worse) and non-participation, creating boundaries between different communities and the segregation that many perceive, generationally and culturally and within and across communities. How could the infrastructure be changed to allow the creation and connection of neutral spaces in order to facilitate interaction? Could a city be designed to actively help people to get to know each other? A city designed to break down barriers between differences, and that values and perceives diversity in all its guises to be a ‘fantastically wonderful, magical, absolutely life-enhancing, collaborative opportunity’.

We do know how to do some of this this, but it’s not happening and more needs to be done if a city’s infrastructure, services and technologies are to make positive contributions to building trust across communities, cultures and generational groups. Infrastructure could then be an enabler of bringing people together, creating spaces for encounter and reasons for interaction and discovery, celebrating and sharing stories and creating connections.

In overcoming intergenerational barriers, there are great examples from around Europe: ante-natal care in old peoples’ homes in Switzerland or co-housing students and older people in Amsterdam. The class and ethnicity barriers seem to be harder to crack – children in schools work together but increasing segregation occurs after age 16, so understanding why and what could be done to build trust and communication between communities is needed.

Trust came up strongly in the conversation, the need to build networks of trust to start to erode boundaries, having conversations to build lasting relationships, finding and using ways for neighbours to know each other. Across Bristol, neighbourly gatherings are building local encounter – like street parties and Playing Out.

Playing Out grew out of discussions amongst friends and neighbours with
young children, living in a built-up, residential area of south Bristol.
Image taken from Playing Out.

Looking further ahead, should we start with envisioning how would we all want to be with each other and treat each other in 50 years’ time in order to have society that works? Can this help to create a Utopian image of human relationships and forms of engagement to work towards?

Who are ‘we’ and are we right?

There’s a danger with all these good intentions that what we really think is that all that needs to happen is everyone else should think like ‘us’. Is there therefore a risk that engagement is really more about persuasion? There are many forms of engagement and many people are engaged in different ways. It is important that we celebrate and value different contributions so that everyone feels like they have a role. For example, surely someone supporting a kid’s after-school basketball club in Southmead is engaged – they’re helping young people to learn leadership and team working skills. They’re encouraging low-carbon, high-community activity (rather than playing sedentary electronic games or engaging in other more antisocial behaviour). They are actively and directly community building and, although they might not use these words, they’re engaged in Future Cities too.

Are certain types of engagement the only valid ones? What about the new political engagement that the Scottish referendum brought about for example, through harnessing new places and by engaging young people more successfully. Riots are also a form of engagement, bringing people together and making something happen – in Bristol, the St Pauls Riots of 1982 resulted in change – this type of engagement is more profound than elections but it’s also messy and disruptive. Mob engagement, civil disobedience, communities collaborating to be exclusive, these are all forms of engagement… are we then talking about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ engagement?

So perhaps everyone can coalesce around the common human aim of having a better future for us and ones we love with human (and environmental) flourishing at the core of everything, tackling issues of equity and justice and not forgetting the climate imperative that might force us to act more decisively together.

Politics, democracy and big institutions

We talked in previous debates about who has the power. Here we also discussed democracy and the democratic mandate of the big organisations that have power in the city. The city council of course has a democratic mandate through its elected councillors and mayor but other major ‘anchor’ organisations do not. These still have the ability to shape and influence policy – organisations such as the universities, health services, travel providers and big businesses in the city.

However, even where there is a democratic potential, not everyone exercises their rights to participate in democracy. For example in the last mayoral election, around 12% voted in parts of south Bristol, compared to over 55% in the more affluent northern areas, leading to a huge democratic deficit which demonstrates that current forms of engagement in the running of the city are not working. There is something about the current idea of politics which is not engaging so, as we’ve reflected above, new engagements which address building trust, inclusion and the embracing of diversity are necessary.

The large institutions in the city do have power but they are seen as impenetrable, unaccountable and not good at democracy and yet they have the resources to do much good where the city council is constrained by its bureaucratic processes and lack of resources. Grassroots activities should also have a role in the formal democratic processes, allowing power to be diffused and giving more communities agency, influence and a voice.

People involved in Green Capital have been described as the ‘emerald city’ and they are just a small group within the overall population of over 400,000. But how many ‘degrees of separation’ are there to reach the whole city? How can we, as a future city, build on the levels of engagement and ambition for resilience and sustainability started in this Green Capital year, working through all the networks and across the separations?

In conclusion

In this third session we talked about engagement through the ideas of Utopia (and dystopia), spaces to facilitate encounter, and the necessary building of trust. We questioned what is meant by ‘engagement’ – whether we’re missing valuable contributions by holding onto a narrow definition and that what ‘we’ might really mean is more akin to persuasion. Some forms of engagement are messy and disruptive but sometimes ruptures are needed to force the radical change that isn’t happening through the routine tweaking of the familiar. The exercise of imagining the future opens up a conversation about what to do tomorrow in seeking a better future for us all, making ‘space for the marvellous as well as the murderous’. It should be less ‘we engaging them’ and more ‘us all co-creating’ a thriving city for now and in the future.

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This blog is written by Caroline Bird, Future Cities and Communities Knowledge Exchange Manager at the Cabot Institute.
Caroline Bird
 
Other blogs in this series

Blog 1: Delivering the ‘Future City’: does Bristol have the governance capacities it needs?
Blog 2: Delivering the ‘Future City’: collaborating with or colluding in austerity?

Complex cities in an uncertain world

Posted on by janet.crompton

The Festival of Ideas have invited partners and participants in the Festival of the Future City to contribute articles on areas of work they are engaged in of relevance to the upcoming events. Rich Pancost, Director of the Cabot Institute, blogs below.

Photo by David Iliff. License CC-BY-SA 3.0

Half of the planet lives in cities. By the middle of this century, that number will rise to nearly 75%, nearly 7 billion people. The decisions we make today will dictate whether those future cities are fit for purpose, whether they are just, sustainable, vibrant, resilient and pleasant. But those decisions must navigate an increasingly perilous web of urban complexity and global uncertainty.

The Nobel Prize winning physicist Niels Bohr famously said,

‘Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future,’ 

a quote that recognises and subverts the very nature of the scientific endeavour. Scientists aspire to understand something well enough that we can predict what will happen under certain conditions in the future, whether it be a chemical reaction or nuclear fission – or administering a drug or raising interest rates. In fact, prediction is the basis for all decision makers, not just doctors and engineers but mayors, CEOs, teachers and you. Whether it is predicting when you will run out of bread or predicting whether a residential parking scheme will bring about a net positive change to a congested city, we all make decisions based on what we think is about to happen or will happen if we take an action. In a simple world, we barely need to think about these things because the pattern has been reproduced numerous times or the solution will clearly address the challenge.

But we do not live in a simple world. We live in a complex world – an astonishingly complex world in which the landscape is changing faster than our ability to map it.

People are complex: our emotions, motivations, desires and fears make us notoriously (and wonderfully) difficult to understand and predict. Society is complex: our communities, whether they be geographical, historical, ethnic or religious, interact in marvellously messy ways. And most of all, our cities are complex. Beautifully, fantastically, unpredictably, frustratingly and vibrantly complex. Cities represent tens or hundreds or even thousands of years of ad hoc expansion, destruction and redevelopment; the accumulation of technological and infrastructural strata, from ancient paths, to great roads, to modern electrical grids, to smart city digital networks; and vast demographic changes including an aging population, migration, globalisation and a frightening increase in social inequality.

That is just the complexity within a city, but cities are not isolated from the rest of the world. They are nodes within a vast and increasingly complex global supply chain on which we depend for everything from our food and electricity to our culture and entertainment.

And adding yet additional layers of complexity are our global environmental and societal challenges. We are warming the planet and depleting it of vital resources. Those would be challenging enough given the complex interdependencies that now define 21st century society. Unfortunately, global warming could change our planet in ways that are unique in human history and possibly geological history. We have not experienced and our models cannot fully constrain this uncertain world. Forecasts for rainfall patterns, extreme weather events or food production are fraught with uncertainty – and by extension, so are forecasts for political insecurity and financial markets.

How does the complexity intersect and overlap, how do these systems merge, either dampening or enhancing their collective impacts? How will climate change and food insecurity, for example, exacerbate inequality? We do have tools for navigating these complex systems – ranging from cognitive shortcuts in decision making to community histories to sophisticated models. However, those are almost all based on experience, and experience loses value when the ground rules are changed. Our vast experiment with the Earth’s climate and ecosystem – making our world not just complex but complex and uncertain – makes it harder for scientists to predict the future, decision makers to plan and individuals to act with creative and empowering agency.

Of course, complexity need not be bad. Complexity and change can bring about positive challenges, shaking us out of complacency and inspiring creativity. Perhaps even more inspiring, complexity could be harnessed as a tool for connection rather than isolation. Although our interdependence makes us particularly vulnerable to conflict or instability on the far side of the planet, it also makes us all invested in one another’s lives. This also applies to the urban scale as exemplified by Bristol is Open, in which an additional layer of complexity – a publicly shared digital infrastructure managed by a smart city operating system – could generate new platforms for social cohesion. It could be a new set of cross-city linkages, a digital commons, or a shared lab for city-scale experimentation in which all of us are the scientists.

Ensuring how our complex cities thrive in an uncertain world is a rather exciting challenge that will likely require a range of solutions. During the Festival of the Future City we will explore both what it means to be a citizen in a complex city, how we navigate that complexity both on a personal and societal scale, and the new technologies that create both new challenges and new opportunities. In some cases, we should avoid unnecessary uncertainty, such as potentially devastating climate change. In others, we should harness the social and economic opportunities it presents. But in all cases, we ourselves must change. A more complex world requires a more resilient citizen or community, one that is empowered to learn, to improvise and to create.

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This blog is by Prof Rich Pancost, Director of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol.

Prof Rich Pancost

This blog has been reproduced with kind permission from the Bristol Festival of Ideas blog.

Delivering the ‘Future City’: collaborating with or colluding in austerity?

Posted on by janet.crompton

In Bristol’s European Green Capital year, the University of Bristol and its Cabot Institute have been working with the Bristol Green Capital Partnership and its members to convene a series of four conversations between Bristol academics and city ‘thinkers’ from across public, private and civil society exploring how Bristol delivers the ‘future city’ –  what capacities it needs to be resilient, sustainable and successful and how it can start to develop these in times of changing governance and tightened finances. The conversations will be reflected in a series of four blogs (the second below) and then brought together as a policy report for the Festival of the Future City in November.  You can read other blogs from this series at the bottom of this blog.

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The University of Bristol and the Green Capital Partnership have convened a series of conversations between Bristol academics and city ‘thinkers’ to discuss Bristol’s capacities as a future city. The second of our conversations discussed ‘austerity and service delivery’, building on the ideas emerging from the first workshop which was on governance. ‘Austerity’ impacts on the public sector and the city in many ways and it impacts unevenly on different places, sectors and social groups. It can also be used as a (short term) excuse for sidelining environmental obligations – resulting in even greater problems further into the future. It was interesting to see, in the Netherlands recently, civil society taking their government to court to demand stronger carbon cutting targets despite tight finances. The court ordered the government to cut emissions by 25% within five years rather than the planned 14-17% in order to protect citizens from climate change. What could a city like Bristol do to lead the way in challenging government?

Below are some of the ideas and thoughts emerging from our big conversation on austerity.

Words that came out of our conversation on austerity.

Our debate questioned how much of what we are seeing in austerity is really about political values and choosing not to spend money that is there or to spend it in a particular way. In the current political climate, arguably the poorest feel the effects disproportionately, exacerbating inequalities that already exist. So is austerity necessary? If we’ve been living beyond our means then something needs to change, but maybe it’s something fundamental about the system rather than under-resourcing a flawed system and hoping to manage. It was suggested that we need to ‘hospice out the old system and birth in a new one’, questioning the assumptions that underpin the apparent need for austerity and creating different narratives and cultural norms.

Whatever we think about the austerity agenda, there is a need to survive and be resilient in the face of it and to find ways of looking after the poorest communities so that they don’t suffer even more.  Solutions are starting to emerge at a local level but, as one participant said, “we can’t forget the underpinning politics; we can’t let these solutions be escape clauses for the politics that are creating bad situations”. So alternative solutions should be pursued in a way that recognises that they can be empowering, whilst also acknowledging that they are less ideal alternatives to a non-austerity agenda.

Public sector

In the public sector, many would argue that much of the scope for efficiency gains has already been used up. The further cuts that seem likely will impact not only on the ways in which the public sector provides public services but also on whether it provides some services at all.  It is under enormous pressure to maintain services despite increasingly constrained resources and staff are feeling the strain. What is the opportunity to do things differently? In some places, the ideas of ‘entrepreneurial municipalism’ and ‘municipal entrepreneurialism’ are gaining traction. How can the council be more entrepreneurial, and how can the entrepreneurs in the city be enabled to provide municipal wellbeing (services to support the wellbeing of citizens in the city) in different forms? Or how do these come together – the public sector being more entrepreneurial, the private and civic sectors being more municipal?

Bristol City Council was criticized in some areas for taking a monolithic and closed approach and for not sharing and using the expertise that exists in the city to everyone’s benefit. It was suggested that a collaborative, open and co-produced approach might have more and wider support. By contrast, in other areas as we observed in our last debate, it has maintained a hands-off approach which has allowed external innovation to flourish.

Taken from parliament.uk

The impacts of recent changes to the benefits system (such as capping benefits, restricting who can access them and delaying payment) were described as devastating, especially on families and young people. New ways of distributing benefits and other services which rely on digital access also impacts on those who need them most. A particular problem is in housing where private rents are rising and the caps on social rents will result in substantial deficits and a reduced ability to build more stock just at a time when, with new rights to buy, there needs to be more investment from both local authorities and housing associations.

Beneficial ‘collaboration’ with austerity

How do we collaborate in or co-opt the austerity agenda without colluding in it? In other words, how can we make the best of something that will happen without saying that we accept the need for it? Austerity might force new ways of doing things and if we grasp the challenge we might actually discover something new and better in the process by questioning some of the old systems and assumptions about how and by whom services are provided. In this way, a new and better system might be created in spite of the government, rather than because of it.

Communities and organisations across the country are seeking to solve the problems caused by austerity and there are many examples where a really exciting idea develops in a particular place and time. We need to both learn quickly enough to enable those successes to carry on, but also to identify why they happen and how they can be transplanted, nurtured and scaled up and out into other areas, creating something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts. Potentially this is “playing to a Conservative agenda around self-reliance”, but if we change the language to make it more about community empowerment and reconfiguring to bring all the assets that we’ve got in the city together in new ways, it feels much more positive. This is important not just for people who are desperate now but in order to construct a new vision and build capacity for future resilience:

“So much is not exclusive between surviving the space we’re in and articulating a new narrative and a new way of thinking and working.”

Power, short termism and rethinking

But first, there is a need to better understand the current direction of travel and powers held by different players in the city in order to gain clarity over what will happen if we just continue on the present path.  What social and environmental services will be lost and with what results? Once those implications are clear, a new vision can take form, one that reflects what is needed for the long term and not just to solve immediate problems, a vision that says ‘what do we do about this in a more proactive way?’  Some of the cuts made now will be false economies, a short term approach leaving bigger problems to solve in the long term. It was suggested that the impacts of the Thatcher government in ‘decimating’ the North of England took perhaps 30 years to regenerate and create a new future for those communities.

This agenda could be an opportunity to rethink ‘prosperity’ and to challenge the GDP growth paradigm to bring long term planetary and social justice benefits. We can see in so many ways that the current economic system isn’t working, so what are the opportunities for change? In the past, ambitions to get people to consume less have failed where people have resisted any infringing on their personal freedoms but, in the interests of their own communities and if, as one participant contributed, it is framed as a way of avoiding ‘stuffocation’ to lead more fulfilled lives, could it be better received?

Who has the power in the city or neighbourhood to make changes, who can authorize something being done differently? At a local level, are there low hanging fruit that could be grasped to start making smaller changes leading to bigger new systems in the long term? Is this the ‘big disruption’ that we need to force beneficial change to a more sustainable future?

Mechanisms

What are the mechanisms available to make changes? For example how can we raise financing locally? At the moment, we have little control or revenue raising powers locally because of the centralised way that budgets are controlled. But there are opportunities such as the Social Value Act which could be used to benefit local communities through the supply chain. Or are there ways to harness the resources of the businesses in the city to deliver social benefit? It is in their interest to invest in a more equal, cohesive city where their employees will want to live and where they can do business.

There could also be a role for the major institutions in the city too – for example the NHS through the Bristol Royal Infirmary and Southmead complexes account for about 10% of all travel in the city through staff, patients and visitors. It also has a civic function in addressing the ‘wellness’ of its patients and citizens more widely – developing links with communities to address chronic health problems – but can we / should we seek to change the rules on health spending to address causes before they become illnesses and if so, how do we account for the lag that will result whilst historical ill health works its way through the system? What is within local powers and what should be if we want to take a longer term view?

One of the car parks at Southmead Hospital (6763761). Image taken from
Gazetteseries.co.uk

Devolution is also an opportunity – can the power to raise finance for particular things be devolved? Could we manage NHS spending locally, allowing a more holistic view to be taken? Or does devolution just mean that the same decisions will be taken at a more local level? Although Bristol’s politics is left-leaning, the surrounding areas are blue and more likely to reflect the politics and values of central government.

Another way, within the city, is for all employers to commit to the living wage or to have a city that was “proud to have a maximum wage”, with voluntary contributions to a city-wide fund.

Where to now?

Our austerity debate talked about ‘solidarity’ across the city and collaborating or co-opting rather than colluding in an austerity agenda to get the least worst outcome. The phrase ‘being ahead of the curve’ came up but it needs to be the right curve or we need to ‘create a different curve’ or new system. Communities are developing resilience through new partnerships and new ways of doing things, sharing their experiences and learning, to start to develop a new narrative and a more equitable, sustainable and resilient locally owned system. These new partnerships are reframing the debates; for example to tackle transport issues through reducing obesity, tackling air pollution and changing the way people think about moving around the city. Universities have a role too in supporting the sharing of learning and new systems, finding good examples from elsewhere and producing collaborative research into what works and why.

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This blog is written by Caroline Bird, Future Cities and Communities Knowledge Exchange Manager at the Cabot Institute.
Caroline Bird
 
Other blogs in this series

Blog 1: Delivering the ‘Future City’: does Bristol have the governance capacities it needs?

 

Delivering the ‘Future City’: does Bristol have the governance capacities it needs?

Posted on by janet.crompton

In Bristol’s European Green Capital year, the University of Bristol and its Cabot Institute have been working with the Bristol Green Capital Partnership and its members to convene a series of four conversations between Bristol academics and city ‘thinkers’ from across public, private and civil society exploring how Bristol delivers the ‘future city’ –  what capacities it needs to be resilient, sustainable and successful and how it can start to develop these in times of changing governance and tightened finances. The conversations will be reflected in a series of four blogs (the first below) and then brought together as a policy report for the Festival of the Future City in November. You can read other blogs from this series at the bottom of this blog. 

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In Bristol’s European Green Capital year, the University of Bristol and its Cabot Institute have been exploring new ways of engaging more widely with the city and the range of organisations that make up city life and, in particular, with the Green Capital Partnership and its members. One of these forms of engagement has been to convene a series of conversations between Bristol academics and city ‘thinkers’ from across public, private and civil society, to try to move the discussion about Bristol’s future beyond what we already know to what it really means to be a future sustainable city and what capacities Bristol needs for the future – and how it can start to develop these in times of changing governance and tightened finances.

Our first debate took the theme of ‘Devolution and new forms of governance’ on a beautiful sunny Bristol evening when an invited group of some 30 city people came together for the first of 4 conversations on the (sustainable) future of Bristol – its capacity, opportunities, needs and blockages. What follows are some of the big issues identified and the start of what we can do to address them.

We acknowledged that Bristol is, on the whole, a successful city, with a thriving economy, judged to be one of the best places to live, culturally vibrant and with a reputation for doing things differently – including being the only UK city to vote for a directly elected mayor in 2012. Bristol’s leadership is more visible locally, nationally and internationally now, it is a member of the UK ‘Core Cities Group’, and business finds it easier to work with – although not all parts of the city value these changes. Bristol also has another darker side, with high levels of child poverty, lower school achievement and a lack of investment in infrastructure.

Working together

First and perhaps inevitably, the conversation was about Bristol and its neighbouring local authority areas – the ‘Counties that used to be Avon’ (or CUBA for short). There is resistance from the other unitary areas to (re-) forming something akin to Avon with Bristol’s perceived dominance – a ‘mutual loathing and distrust’ between the authorities is surely something to be addressed. The authorities involved could choose not to ‘indulge in the loathing behaviour’ but re-approach one another in a spirit of mutual collaboration and partnership – which we are now starting to see as they consider the potential of the government’s offer for devolution to metro areas.

For Bristol in particular, the current authority boundaries are a real problem with ‘stupid red lines’ cutting across the urban area, particularly to the north and east, dividing parts of the city out into other local authority’s control and creating arguments about the positioning and ownership of services. The various local government boundary changes have, over time, seen an evolution to the current four unitaries with boundaries that are historical but make little sense in 2015. We have an overall population of about a million, with people travelling to work, shop and play across the boundaries and now there is an opportunity and a need for more effective working together, that, in one participant’s words, it ‘makes total sense to be one entity’ with more devolved powers and budgets (as the Manchester metro-region is doing) which will allow longer term fiscal planning. At the moment, layers of bureaucracy get in the way of getting things done. If Bristol is the ‘capital’, it needs to show that it is working for the whole region, that it can be supportive and empowering of all the urban and rural parts. The question now is how to create mechanisms that facilitate enduring collaboration in a locally relevant way and which can withstand the buffeting of national policy changes

Moral purpose and the ‘dark side’

So, how do we set up these enduring partnerships? We think it starts with finding a common moral purpose, something that everyone thinks we should be doing to help the city (and region) work better. This could be something to do with addressing the ‘dark side’ of the city and the inequalities that persist – for example there is a 10 year life expectancy gap between the richer and poorer parts of the city and that’s not ok. There’s 25% child poverty, a lack of real representation of different communities in the power and governance of the city and a segregation between and within communities (especially generationally) so that only certain voices are heard. So it’s not a very equal or well represented city, in fact less so than at the time of the St Paul’s Riots in the 1980s and this causes tensions. We need to set up governance structures locally that can address inequalities – because it’s not happening nationally – and we’re concerned with issues of social and environmental justice not just because it’s right but also because reducing inequalities will actually improve everyone’s lives.
Police facing rioters in City Road, St Pauls. Source: Wikipedia.

Finding out what stops action and who has the power

In developing new forms of governance, the city first needs to acknowledge where the current power and blockages are. We see that there are lots of visionary people coming up with amazing ideas which then don’t make it into reality – why is that? Who blocks innovation and why? Is it mostly to do with the short term nature of government policy and funding or is there something more fundamental going on that we could work to address and allow brave ideas to flourish better and at a bigger scale? We talked about the central initiatives that have come and gone over the years and acknowledge that we need to draw on and learn from history, taking the best from the local council and encouraging risk taking in order to flourish.

The low electoral turnouts show that people don’t currently connect well with their elected representatives and that more could be done to open those lines of communication and trust and improve the democratic process – meanwhile, so much interesting stuff is going on that isn’t done by the council at all but by other people.

Innovation in spite of rules

Bristol is an innovative city and lots of the best things have happened in spite of the rules, when communities and citizens have taken the initiative and made things happen. There has always been grassroots activity in the city, taking place without waiting for permission, and the council has allowed this – there’s no big municipalism compared with some cities in the north, so the city hasn’t crowded out initiative, but rather it has ceded power and allowed initiatives to emerge. The question then is whether formalising devolution within the city might kill the thing we’re trying to grow – how do we govern so that things happen because of policy rather than despite it? And how do we provide an environment where good ideas grow beyond the ‘bubbles of innovation’ that have flourished in this permissive environment? Now that the council is expected to let go of more areas of control because it has little budget, we are actually ahead of the curve and doing it – people in the city have the experience of making things happen in interesting ways.

A visible and much publicized example of local action is in the Stokes Croft area but it’s not the only place. The Stokes Croft ‘anti-Tesco riots’ showed that people will get up and protest against what they don’t want but, in another part of the city, a Tesco Metro would be a welcome source of decent food. So we have to acknowledge that locally relevant approaches are needed and that means community led responses – as we are now seeing in Redcliffe, Barton Hill, Southmead, Lawrence Weston and other places around the city. But not all communities currently have the capacity to take the lead, so helping to develop ‘collective action’ at different levels is key. Neighbourhood partnerships are at best a partial success, working best where there are active communities, but the potential to engage and use the resources of local business to support communities is untapped.

What next?

The people participating in these debates do not represent the spectrum of thought within Bristol but if we can start to untangle how the city is managed now and for the future then further conversation might involve different people from across the city. We might be a ‘leftie liberal’ group as one participant suggested but we’ve got lots of connections across the city which can be drawn on to take responsibility for doing something, whilst also recognizing that we can’t change everything all at once!

One idea was that we should start with an issue or sector of concern such as transport or housing and explore it at all the different levels, working together to see how a new governance model would play out in reality. For example, take transport, this impacts on everyone’s quality of life and has a disproportionately high impact on the poorest people and their ability to move around the city and hence has a direct impact on equalities.

So, where does all this get us? We’ve talked about the relationship between communities and the city, the relationship between the city and its neighbouring councils and the relationship between that collective and central government – all of which need to be negotiated in the terms of possible devolutionary structures. We’ve recognized the flourishing of community innovation that will stand us in good stead as we move into a new city-region future whilst also needing to understand the powers and blockages that enhance or impede risk taking.

There are three more debates and through them we aim to develop and strengthen the relationship between the university and civil society in the city so that we can collaborate in the long term for the benefit of the city. It is also about a real concern for our city, taking advantage of the year’s Green Capital status to look at how Bristol (and other cities) can develop into the future – drawing on the knowledge and expertise galvanized in 2015 and trying to create a legacy that will live long after this year of activity and debate.

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This blog is written by Caroline Bird, Future Cities and Communities Knowledge Exchange Manager at the Cabot Institute.
Caroline Bird
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