Sometimes reading a book feel like a personal history. That happened to me when reading Jeb Brugmann's Welcome to the Urban Revolution, where I could trace my history from being a student of human geography, city planning and political science and a lifelong interest in facilitating strategic change as an organizational consultant. In a comprehensive book he shows how large metropoles, where today more than half of the world population lives, define the dynamics of globalisation. Core of his message: cities are no longer islands in itself, but
have transformed the world to one big, but unstable metropolitan ecosystem. We can see the effect, when viewing satellite pictures of the earth by night: big, half a continent spanning conglomerates of light. We are used to see cities as concentrations of problems, but it is as interesting to view them as laboratories of solutions. Because solving problems of food security, climate, environment, mobility and diversity of peoples will have to be done there. Brugmann tells the stories of three examples, Bangalore, Barcelona and Toronto (but there are more, luckily!). Fascinating projects of urbanism that enable integration, social innovation and sustainability.
Crucial for success of these urban strategies is, according Brugmann, the combination of three competencies: a strategic alliance of political, economic and social interests, that work from a common vision of the future; an extensive laboraty of local practices to test new way of working (prototypes); and, last but not least, institutions that can foster and embody vision and practices.
One of my clients,
TransForum (a Dutch agricultural innovation body), started a big international project that fits into this strategy, the
Metropolitan Agricultural Innoversity (
www.metropolitanagriculture.com). In five metropoles, Detroit, Sao Paolo, Johannesburg, Chennai and Amsterdam, innovative project are started, that enable a sustainable food provision in these areas. They will be brought into connection with each other at a Summit in September 2010. The metropole is not seen as the problem, but at the contrary as the space where sustainable solutions can and have to be found, because of the closeness of knowledge, logistics, technological innovation and creativity.
The project is organized as a Change Lab, a practical implementation of the U-proces (Otto Scharmer), that we also use at Create2connect. The development of a strategy for metropolitan renewal is a learning yourney, you cannot design it. Or, as the former mayor of Toronto, David Crombie, tells in Brugmann's book: "The biggest struggle, like the one over Leslieville (a neighborhood very hard to transform, WK), learned me something about conflict solving. Conflict solving is not about searching for compromise. You have to find the new space. You have to look for where you want to go. And if you see the new space emerging, help others to see it too. And then make the journey together to this new space.
