What is a MESH City? We argue that MESH Cities are the next generation of the so-called smart city. Let's start with defining what that is. 

Scientific American produced this short video to explain smart energy grids and why they are important to an urban dweller's quality of life.

The World Economic Forum also has a video on the smart grid and its benefits. This video is not quite as user friendly as the Scientific American version.

In fact, it strikes someone from our generation as a bit like those "Reddy Kilowatt" ads from the last century, mashed together with a Europunk voice over.

Still, the WEF video offers some insights into the hows and whys of smart grid. 

Beirut skyline, 2009

Like many in the Americas my understanding of Beirut came from news headlines that often shocked with the horrors of war. The last forty years have not been kind to the city. There were internecine wars, border clashes, and aerial bombings. The president was assassinated in a macabre bombing that destroyed a block of waterfront boulevard killing dozens. 

Yet the city—one of the world's oldest—survived it all.

But not unscathed. Far from it. Here is a photo I took of a building on the infamous "Green Line" during a 2009 visit. When the city was split between Christian and Muslim fighters this city road, a no man's land, became a paradoxical green oasis in an otherwise denuded city.

Beirut is an urban centre without city planning as North American cities understand it. Traffic is chaotic. Even in peace green spaces remain rare if not functionally non-existent. The city's air is thick with dust and exhaust fumes. I saw one cyclist there in 2009. Over one week.

Beirut is a city on the edge of sustainability. That may be its salvation as well as its curse. The people here want more. And the city is changing. New construction is everywhere. One architect is offering a smart city plan that may just accelerate that change. Wassim Melki has a vision.

"We want to cover the top of nearly every building in the city with trees," said Melki.

"We're just talking about planting small to medium-sized trees in relatively large pots and securing them to the roofs," he added.

At first look this plan does not fall into the normal categories of "smart cities." The solution is not wired. The cost is modest. The engineering simple. The impact of the idea is, however, very smart. That's why it is included in MESH Cities. We have noticed that cities that have faced ecological crisis and survived can teach other cities a lot. That's where information technologies come in. They help codify and distribute that information.

Melki's scheme

Ville Vivante traces the movement of mobile phones in the city of Geneva, Switzerland.

"The Human Connectome Project aims to provide an unparalleled compilation of neural data, an interface to graphically navigate this data and the opportunity to achieve never before realized conclusions about the living human brain."

Cities are the most complex, artificial machines ever conceived of and built. What is remarkable about that truth is that cities are not "designed" in their entirety, but often evolve over time to embody functions and representations their founders could never have imagined. In this way they share many characteristics of organic systems produced by evolutionary processes.

The two images above give a hint of the metaphorical relationships we as urban strategists might make between cities and brains. Like early brain researcher Alexander Luria, people who speculated about the connection between cities and evolutionary emergence had to look to analogs to substantiate their research.

For example, when Luria began his studies of the human brain no one knew what parts of the brain managed what parts of the body. Famously, he had to look at soldiers with brain injuries to gain insights into brain function mapping. Of course, today magnetic resonance scanners from Siemens allow researchers to see in real time what is going on within the brain when we move a body part or imagine an object. Brain function mapping is now an exact science (For more on the topic follow the link above to the Human Connectome Project).

These new technologies have given researchers game-changing information about the brain as an emergent system. And we can draw parallels between that evolutionary organism and the 21st C. city.

The newly discovered mathematical relationships between cities and the human brain will change how we understand the city. 

Comparison of City Highway System and Neocortex Exponents for Quantities as a Function of Surface Area,

New York World's Fair, 1939

If you are anything like the people at MESH CIties you spend far too much time thinking about the future of cities. And like us many of the urban forms you've probably dreamed up make better film set backdrops than they do practical places to live. Why is it that designers tend to produce either utopic or dystopic (or just plain bad) visions of future cities?

Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982—He also did the dystopic Apple 1984 commercial)

The answer is simple; cities are so complex that they are beyond the ability of one person, or any purpose-built team, to understand let alone design. Ask Jane Jacobs or Le Corbusier. The only option we are left with as designers is to make charicatures of what might be. The results are mostly wrong.

Until now.

MESH Cities wants to be one of the first sources to tell the architecture and urban design industry the good news. Efficient, livable cities of the future can be designed today. Here is the bad news for those professionals. Everyone alive on the planet today possesses the inate ability to do the same. It is in their DNA.

Let us explain how this works.

First, as urban theorists who believe emergent systems hold the key to solving the big problems facing humankind, we probably have a different view of what design is than most practitioners. In many ways that is because we made a point of following the Fulleresque idea that educated generalists not specialists are better positioned to respond to the increasing systemic changes driving modern economies and social systems. 

One of those systemic changes is the increased migration of the human population from farms to cities. Never before have more than 50% of all the people alive lived in urban environments. That massive migration is generating remarkable insights into the universal truths underpinning emergent systems. This, surprisingly, includes profound relationships between cities and the human brain.

Read Part Two

Colleague Don Griffiths sent this Intel infographic along for our information. You probably already guessed it, but a lot happens in an Internet minute.