Disney's EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow)

The Guardian newspaper has a section they run on the evolving smart cities phenomenon. Normally it is informative. Not today.

Smart Cities Forty Years From Now written by Michael Durham couldn't be more wrong about the future of cities. Here's why. Durham takes the Disney World "EPCOT" approach to futurism, and we all know how that ended. Is Walt still in that cryogenic chamber waiting for ressurection? Or was that an urban myth? It doesn't matter. Both the man and the idea are gone. Neither will be coming back.

In 40 years' time cities will not just be smart, they will be so brainy it hurts. We will all be working mostly from home using super-fast data terminals that relay both information and entertainment, while electric cars will transport us to shops where we will pay for goods and services with a wave of our mobile phone.

The introductory paragraph gets it about right, but we'd argue 2020 rather than 2052. Michael, where have you been?!? With the exception of ubiquitous electric cars we are just about there now. Right?

After that intro things go sideways for the simple reason that Durham's future city demands people will have changed just about every behavioural pattern they've come to cherish over millennia of practice, privacy uppermost among them. Another thing; people living to 150? Forget it. It is not going to happen for the simple reason the world can't sustain 7 billion people living an average of 55 years let alone 150. The poor people of the world would not stand for the fraction of 1%ers who could actually reach Kurzweil's "singularity." There'd be a bloodbath.

That's not to mention the millions of children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, great, great grandchildren waiting for their inheritance and a crack at the family cottage. Their rapaciousness would make the unhappy 99%ers look like schoolchildren. Can you imagine?

Why don't we ratchet back the

The European Debt Crisis, from Mint.com

In North America we've been hearing a lot over the last months about how the European Union is crumbling under the weight of its long-term debt, an obligation driven in part by commitments to environmental and social programs. But is there more to the story than the headlines suggest? We think so. It seems that the US and Canadian press (not to mention the Economist) prefers a world where there are no social programs and where the people who inhabit cities are there only to consume more oil and gas. Sustainability? Humbug. Forget about a "Life worth living," people just want to survive.

Don't get us wrong. MESH Cities believes in open, free markets. We have seen the power ideas and capital have to change the world for the better. That's why we are enthusiastic about the evolution towards efficient, intelligent cities. We believe that well-considered urban environments are where people will come together to innovate solutions to the world's big problems. But it will happen only if public and private realms work together. There is a place for good governance, a place where planning goes beyond the next quarterly report.

Which leads us to tell you about a small publication we came across called, "European Energy Innovation." For a region of the world supposedly crumbling under the weight of financial mismanagement, the EU seems to be involved in a lot of innovative projects that just might save the world. EEI explains some of them. The general theme connecting EEI's stories is that the economy works best when people live in sustainable, enjoyable communities. This shouldn't surprise anyone.

One of our favourites is titled, "Ambitious Danes show will to be world no 1 with new energy plan." And they mean it. Under the mission statement and call to action, ‘Join the future. Think Denmark,’ the Danes are transforming their economy from the ground up. Dirty energy use is down. New industries are growing. They even

21st C cities want quilt solutions, not puzzle solutions. Let us explain.

There is a schism in our world. It determines how cities are built. On one side of this rough social divide are the people we'll call the quantitatives. They are the ones who are quick to understand the rules of a given system and take advantage of them. They are adept at solving puzzles. The pieces of the problem may be jumbled but the underlying order is waiting to be revealed using the right algorithm.

On the other side are the qualitatives. They are the people who acknowledge the rules and live by them if need be. But they will also question how the rules came to be and think beyond them to the possibility of other ways of ordering. These are the quilt makers. There are infinite ways to assemble different sizes and colours of cloth. They will solve the problem of infinite choice through approaches that are design based.

When it comes to MESH Cities what approach works best? We'd say the quilt-makers' approach. Here's why.

The quantitatives have done their work. They built the civil engineered cities of the 20th century. They hard wired the electrical grid. They built highways and the cars that converted oil into energy and CO2 to run on them. They invested in the idea of science-based systems offering the solutions for all the world's problems. For a while they were right. 

But like the human skeleton that can only support a body that scales so large before its underlying structure fails, these engineering systems have pushed beyond their inherent limitations. Think of the nuclear power industry as an example. For a while it seemed the answer for nearly free energy. A run of disasters across nations illustrate the industry's limits.  It turns out we do not have the systems available to manage risk on the scale presented by radioactive fuels. People make mistakes. Pipes break. Tsunamis happen. Civilizations fail. The result is thousands of years of toxins with

MESH Cities are places where change happens at the speed of light. Seriously.

With billions of bits of information now influencing the physical reality of our cities, the one constant is change. And it happens fast.

Want proof? Stock markets, for example, were once fairly stable places (albeit with a lot of people shouting and throwing paper around). They were part of the urban fabric of any reasonably sized city. Their design was on par with that of banks. Solid. Permanent. Secure. They evoked the idea that "Important work was going on inside these granite walls."   We could trust them. Ah, the 20th C. It was easy to add form to function back then.

Flash Crash, 2010

Today, however, not so much. The "Flash Crash" of 2010 put an end to that illusion of permanence. In seconds investors lost billions. Stop losses were useless. We still don't know what actually happened. It had something to do with the massive, instantaneous transactions that skim fractions of a cent off every trade. The super computers that sit right next door to stock exchanges so the speed of light doesn't slow them down too much—hiccuped.

People lost their life's savings. In seven seconds.

Welcome to the modern, information city. 21st C cities are process cities. They have to be designed to accommodate functions bracketing quantum mechanics on one end and getting water to your grandmother's petunias on the other. Who the hell has the nuanced command of design to manage encapsulating that range? Truth is . . .  no one.

There are, however, design firms who understand that they are designing for a calculus of moments they can't fully predict but they can try to reasonably accommodate. 

One such firm is Brown and Storey Architects. 

James Brown and Kim Storey are colleagues and our respect for them makes us less than objective reporters. Still, their corpus of work speaks for itself. If someone asked us who we'd get to stage manage the design of a MESH City, they'd be

In case you ever doubted that the earth is a small sphere with an even smaller envelope of air all hurtling through space, watch this new video from NASA.