Future-TENSE

Two things are on my mind right now: Alvin Toffler's Future Shock & an interview with an eminent city planner. 

Toffler talks about the need to perceive the future and be ready for it. He rightly talks about our education being backword looking in a world that is headed towards the future. He also talks of innovations happening in the world, and how they have affected the society. The planner whom I interviewed also talked about the need to see the future & build cities for the same.

I believe that the future can be predicted only by understanding the past. Rote learning is not the point, but understanding & dissecting events of the past can provide us with crucial insights into the future. Hence, I started with a list of inventions / discoveries that have changed the course of human society today morning. This is the rough list (incomplete):

Mechanization:

Division of labour factory (Ford) - part mechanized factory - automated factory (CNC systems)

Manual labour - supervision of machines - creation of supervisory machines & networks (Computers)

Communication:

Telegraph - telephone - internet (written communication - spoken communication - communication & illustration)

Telegraph - radio - cellular phone networks (recorded communication - one way live communication - interactive two / multi way communication) - satellite networks (non-importance of physical location)

Painting - Symbolics - writing - coding (binary)

Transportation:

Personal transport (cars) - public transport (planes, trains) - personalized public transport (rent-a-car, chartered jets)

Biology:

Darwin's theory of evolution - Discovery of DNA - cloning (human controlled evolution)

Organ Transplants - test tube babies - cloning

Philosophy:

Marx & Lenin - Ayn Rand & Ford - Chomsky 

(this sequence may be highly erratic as it is based on the limits / extents of my reading)

Construction & Habitat:

Structural grids - non-grid structures - self-evolving structures

Centenary structures - decadal structures - transient / temporary structures

Skyscrapers / ghettos - urbanization - urban + sub-urban

land cities - water cities - space colonies

The above is a mapping of the developments till now. Then, I proceeded to shortlist technologies that will affect the future: - 

Mechanization: shape memorizing materials (AI) & nanoscale robots (AI+scale / energy reduction)

Communication: telepathy (meaning mind to mind conversation here)

Transport: teleportation

Biology: artificial culture of body parts, regrowth / healing controllers in brain

Philosophy: True democracy (like the IDEA ad we see, ultimate participation / control) or personalized democracy (choice of one's own set of rules from a given set)

Construction & Habitat: non-cities

That is where i stopped. The word non-cities hit me & the pattern in my own set of choices for the future hit me. If we are able to achieve teleportation, the need to live together / nearby would cease to exist. Infrastructure would change dramatically. If teleportation becomes possible, we could teleport our needs to our home & send back the wastes to a recycling facility. We would not need ANY PHYSICAL CONNECTIONS!!!!

As planners how far into the future are we looking? 10 - 20 - 50 years? Most of our urban projects take about 20 years to accomplish. But within that time, the original calculations have gone wrong. & yet that is just a short-sighted example. At the macro level, the government is investing some hundred thousand crores of rupees in developing india wide highway / railway network, urban transport systems, airports, etc. All of these will take atleast 10-15 years to materialize. 

Imagine if, within that timeframe, say Tata is able to create a Nanoplane: a personal aircraft that runs 20 kms a litre (with partly air powered, partly solar powered) engine & that can also take off from rooftops. Imagine the lack of manpower in Air traffic control that would face us! & we are preventing aerospace use for SECURITY REASONS. One has to only imagine if aerospace is exploited for public use (not limited to chartered / public flights), one can form a 3 dimensional network of highways in the air without any substantial investment! The only large scale investment would be in form of ATC manpower! Any person desirous of using a car provides for the garage himself. The same will apply for landing facilities & maybe area / building wise ATC personnel. Even this would make our investments in highways & railways a joke! Because super-efficient engines are not too far away! (skeptics may use google to enlighten themselves) & I am still talking on a present scenario basis.

Now, imagine if teleportation is established in next 50 years! (Cellphones were established in 20 years. Teleportation of electricity within 1metre is possibly as of today) The immense investments that we made in next 20 years would be obsolete in just 30 more years! Not to say what a waste of land would be found, when physical transit would die off! 

In my earlier post I mentioned that we provide about 20-25% of our urban spaces to streets & connecting infrastructure. All that space in cities & the space between cities would be now utilized for better purposes! & I have still not reached the climax!!!

What cities???? Once everything is teleported, why should i live next door to my office, or to anyone for that matter? I can reach anywhere i want in a matter of seconds via teleportation! Ditto for material needs!!! If we are using communication to talk to people in space on a live basis, why is it so hard to imagine we can even go there in future on a live basis??? That, is the ultimate death of urbanization! People are capable of building spaces better than cities to congregate. Our stadia, our theatres, our plazas could be in more exotic locations; and yet just a jiffy or few jiffies away! (hey, in case you forgot congestion, your current call drop rate could bring you back to earth!!!)

So, as planners: provided with the responsibility of developing human environments for the future, are we even thinking of the future? or are we just reflecting on the present & trying to mend things, rather than evolving with them??? While I completely agreed with the talk of the planner i interviewed, I am unable to understand why, inspite of having studied so much history, we are still not into the business of future anticipation (not prediction) based on current pace of growth (be it technological, political, philosophical,etc etc) If we are unable to provide visions into the future as planners, and guide public opinion towards the same, I believe we fail somewhere as professionals.

PS: I'm just an amateur thinker & a blog is definitely a product of the BETA world. Hence, it contains a collection of my random & almost live stream of thoughts. More importantly, I may have (with my limitations of exposure / understanding) got the chronology of past developments & connected future perceptions wrong. But, I DEFINITELY HAVE NOT got the point wrong. We ARE too SHORTSIGHTED to see what's going to hit us in the next few decades. If a much-publicized (thanks to Star Trek) technological research is beyond our vision of the future, how can we claim to be the directors of future growth patterns? We don't even try to understand what these patterns will be based on!!! One has to only imagine the combined effect of many such technologies, and lament the futility of our so-called PLANNING.

For humans or machines?

In a country where caste is a basis for assigning quotas, I wish to present a caste / life war that is, as yet, unaddressed. I do not support the caste system, but since we are still living with it, I would like to bring to everyone's attention, a new quota system that needs to be in place.

I am a landscape planner by profession. We work on many road sytems / urban streets / public transit systems. I have been enlightened by the company of many leading professionals in India, and my friends who have been living the cause of urban spaces.

We are allocating increasing amounts of space to cars & road systems, while the amount allocated to pedestrian activities is on the decrease. We like to take out our vehicles for distances that we would have happily walked a few years ago. In the foosteps of the USA, we are becoming an automobile society.

Some statistics are so shocking, that it is insane to think how ignorant we are. A city is usually designed based on a masterplan. The plan allocates about 25-40% space for public activities from the total land pool (depending on the political / social preferences). 20% of the total land pool (minimum) is used to road systems & access! That is almost 50-80% of the public spaces!

If we have a road with a width of about 40 meters, we allocate a measly 4 metres width to pedestrians (both sides of the road included!) Talk about human rights! We are not allowed to walk. We are promoting policies that are pro-car & anti-pedestrian. Every driver believes it is his / her birthright to be able to have unhindered access to roads, where crossing pedestrians are unnecessary & should be done away with!

Recently, Ahmedabad Corporation did a one-of-its-kind experiment by closing down a part of its largest shopping district for one sunday. The place: C G Road, is a prime commercial area with heavy traffic & congestion during peak hours & weekends. When the road was closed for pedestrian activities, people started walking all over the road! The entire 24-30 meters of road width was available for pedestrian use. One could see people walking freely in groups (& not in a single line), children racing about or skating, older persons sitting & chatting with ease & so much more! All this without the noise & hindrance of vehicles. Whats more, all shops recorded 2-3 times more footfalls that day! This is because people had already left their vehicles and were walking by leisurely, finding more time for window shopping and hence stepping in more often!

The corporation had been sane enough to club this occasion with performances by schools, NGOs, traffic sense presentations, etc. The whole space became one vibrant public space. It was that day i realized that if a small 250 metres long stretch of road could hold hundreds of people with ease, who were enjoying themselves, imagine how much space we actually waste, by handing it over to the vehicles!

This brings me to an important question: are the vehicles for us, or we for the vehicles? Why should we allocate increasing space for those monsters, when we can easily do away with them, endeavor to create better public transport in the same manner as we endeavor to build better roads / flyovers. How wonderful it would be if we can leave our parking & traffic worries, enjoying the trip as well as destination!

Landscapes for the other half

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article for Kerb magazine's topic "Is landscape architecture dead?" While it wasn't selected for publication, i wanted to share the article with you.

Please find it at:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/9706185/Landscapes-for-the-Other-Half

I couldnt find a way of putting it here. I'll be glad if you can read it on Scribd.