Stewart Brand
"The Future of Cities As If the Past Mattered"
Wednesday, February 16, 2005, 11:30 AM
Stewart Brand is a favorite lecturer at Illahee, given that his talk in 2001 inspired the entire 2005 "How Cities Learn" lecture theme.
LECTURE SUMMARY
Stewart Brand began his talk with a bang. The audience was assaulted with a deafening roar as they watched the demolition of a massive coliseum, complete with 120 decibels of sound. The “ancient structure” was Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia, completed in 1971 and demolished 33 years later in 2004. Brand’s comment: "This is what cities do."
Later, he displayed two aerial photos of downtown Boston, one from 1869 and one from 1980. Every building had been replaced in the 111-year interval, save one.
The point was not that cities are destructive or ephemeral, but that they are creatively destructive, that they are organic learning entities. It’s no coincidence that the words city and civilization share the same Latin root. For Brand, city = civilization.
In his book The Clock of the Long Now (1999) Brand sketches a diagram that lays out the “pace” of different phenomena. From slow to fast, it runs something like: nature, culture, governance, infrastructure, commerce, and fashion. When we force one of these to operate “out-of-scale” we run into problems (e.g. the Soviet Union forcing commerce to run in the slower governance-time, and old-style timber extraction forcing nature to run in the faster commerce-time).
A recent example: Town after town was decimated by recent earthquakes in the Middle East and the December 26th Tsunami in Southeast Asia. Except for the Mosques. Why? The cultural/religious time frame of Mosques is long, like that of earthquakes. They’re built to last. Modern buildings in these areas are a result of fast-time commerce invading slower-time governance: officials were cajoled or bribed to ignore building codes and allow shoddy construction. The result? Mosques standing out like islands in a sea of rubble.
Brand drew the following contrasts between slow- and fast-paced phenomena:
Slow vs. Fast
Remember vs. Learn
Dispose vs. Propose
Integrate shock vs. Absorb shock
Continuity vs. Discontinuity
Constraint vs. Exuberance
Has power vs. Gets attention
What might be the attributes of “slow design?”
1) Longevity 2) Maintainability 3) Transparency
4) Evolvability 5) Scalability
Slow design attributes appear in unexpected places. For example, Levittown, and modern manufactured housing in general. Toyota now makes homes as well as trucks. If you’ve seen what a blowtorch and a paint-job can do to a mass-produced truck depending on whether you’re in Lima or Liberia, why can’t manufactured homes take on their own local identity as well? In fact this has happened in Levittown – a community much loved by its residents. Contrast this with “custom” homes in gated communities, where you can’t change the curtain color or hang clothes out to dry without a covenant exemption.
So, cities are learning organisms, they change. Yet, not always according to plan. And even the most massed-produced habitat can gain its own sense of place if it has some “slow design” attributes.
Some slow design principles:
1) Serve the long-term 2) Reward patience 3) Ally with the competition 4) Take no sides 5) Leverage the long term
Of course Brand didn’t stop there. He can’t make a presentation with out breaking a few windows, like suggesting to architects that they teach their clients how to design their own houses, rendering their work obsolete. (Kind of like asking your ophthalmologist to show you how to use that Lasik equipment, so you can do your own eye surgery.)
Or like Brand showing a pair of Navy SEAL boots to fifty Nike shoe designers and saying “Now this is great design. Too bad you don’t have anything like this. I’d buy it if you did.” (In turn, Nike gave Stewart several pair of 100% non-toxic, recycled shoes... The Navy SEAL boots probably don’t do that.)
Other windows broken in Brand’s public presentation:
Nuclear power may be our energy savior, and let’s not close off our nuke storage options by dumping it all down a hole in Yucca Mountain; after all, we may want to use it again!
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have gotten a bum rap, and could be used to combat an under-appreciated scourge: invasive species.
Never mind the population explosion. The rush of people moving to cities has drastically decreased our birth rate, and we’re facing a population decline that may lead to a worldwide recession in fifty years.
What about those shantytowns popping up all over the world in mega-cities? Not such bad places to live after all. People love 'em!
Naturally a few people in the audience disagreed with Brand. His response seemed to be, “Go ahead and try to talk me out of it.” One thing he is adamant about is that if you don’t seek out and consider highly divergent points of view and possible futures, you’ll be in for some unpleasant surprises.
He cited 9-11 as an example, calling it an avoidable surprise for which there was plenty of warning, just no openness to considering the possibility. Brand believes that dogmatic ideology essentially guarantees unpleasant surprises, and contends that our current leadership is setting us up for several nasty shocks over the next few years.
BIOGRAPHY
STEWART BRAND is a true visionary thinker of long-term proportion. Founder of Whole Earth Magazine, co-founder of the Global Business Network and The Long Now Foundation, Brand is a leader in considering our present impact on the future.
In 1984, Brand founded ‘The WELL’ (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) a computer teleconference based in the San Francisco Bay Area. It now has 10,000 active users, including the Global Business Network Membership, and is considered a bellwether of the genre. From 1987 to 1989 Brand ran a series of private conferences on “Learning in Complex Systems,” sponsored by strategic planners at Royal Dutch/Shell, AT&T, and Volvo.
Since 1989, Brand has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary center studying the sciences of complexity. He received the Golden Gadfly Lifetime Achievement Award from the Media Alliance, San Francisco in the same year.
Brand is the author of many pioneering books including The Clock Of The Long Now (1999), How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (1994), and The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987). The term ‘personal computer’ first appeared in his essay “Two Cybernetic Frontiers” (1974) on Gregory Bateson and cutting-edge computer science. Stewart Brand understands like few others how humans shape our world through business and technology.
The Clock book begins:
"Time and responsibility." What a prime subject for vapid truisms and gaseous generalities adding up to the world's most boring sermon. To spare us both, let me tie this discussion to a specific device, some specific responsibility mechanisms, and specific problems and cases. The main problem might be stated, "How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare?" How do we make the taking of long-term responsibility inevitable?
The device is a Clock, very big and very slow. For the purposes of this book it is strictly notional, a Clock of the mind, an instrument for thinking about time in a different way. As it happens, such a Clock is in fact being built. The builders are finding that the very idea of the Clock---why to build it, how to build it---forces their thinking in interesting directions; among other things, toward long-term responsibility. Since it works for them, please consider yourself one of the Clock's builders. It won't take long to catch up. Here's how the project summary read in late 1998, complete with preamble:
Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase.
Of this book Michael Shrage wrote in Wired magazine:
"A stunning exploration of the design of design. How Buildings Learn will irrevocably alter your sense of place, space, and the artifacts that shape them."
In the London Times Stephen Bayley called it "A hymn to entropy, a witty, heterodox book dedicated to kicking the stuffing out the proposition that architecture is permanent and that buildings cannot adapt."
