Transdisciplinary Design

Saint Francis vs San Francisco: Will Technology Save Our [Cities’] Souls?

Posted on December 18, 2013 | posted by:

The thirteenth century Catholic preacher, Francis of Assisi, may have never been more popular. His namesake, Pope Francis, is leading a charm offensive that has breathed new life into a bruised Vatican. After decades of larger-than-life, theological heads, the Church has a straight-talking, no-frills Pope who appears to be in touch with the reality beyond the Vatican City’s pomp.

Francis’ most substantive contribution, however, is his critique of ‘trickle-down’ economics in his first annual papal address. He laments growing economic inequality as injustice, and as substantive evidence of the failure of neo-liberal capitalism. He’s not the first one though – economists have been critiquing the intuitive-sounding ‘trickle-down’ effect for a while, especially, when in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008, large bailouts of financial institutions by the American government did not appear to trickle down. Inequality has consistently worsened, and according to a Berkeley economist, 95% of income gains since 2009 went to the top 1%,[i] a damning failure of trickle-down that even President Obama admitted to.[ii] More interestingly, he attributed the failure to “globalization and technology [that] have robotized ‘entire occupations.’”

Is technology a culprit in worsening inequality?

If the litany of complaints against the changing landscape of San Francisco (ironically, another namesake of Francis) are anything to go by, technology may have some role to play in this. The city is a nursery of tech start-ups, and increasingly home to the largest concentration of technology companies in the world that are collectively are altering the way people across the world live, work, play and interact. They’re defining the contours of the cloud-centric, crowd-sourced post-industrial era that would be populated by small, service-based, digital firms like themselves. San Francisco, therefore, ought to be the best glimpse into that future city. Unfortunately, that glimpse is not very heartening.

The influx of technology companies moving in is increasingly turning the city into “a one-dimensional town for the 1 percent,”[iii] especially as technology successfully courts the financial markets. Case in point: Twitter. When the microblogging site went public, 1,600 of the company’s rank-and-file employees turned millionaires overnight.[iv] The increasing inequality is evident in the rapidly vaporizing small businesses that cannot compete with sky-rocketing rents paid by tech firms,[v] and the gleaming fleet of private buses that tech workers use for their “bubbled commute … to social media campuses to the south.”[vi] The space for interaction between ‘techies’ and the rest of the population is rapidly vanishing, and the city is feared to be turning into a monoculture: “a city without its nurses, its teachers, its artists, its waiters, its bus drivers, its cops, its musicians and writers and grandmothers as residents is … as sterile as a forest of a single commercial tree species.”[vii]

For someone who has never been to San Francisco, that sounds like an entire New York that looks, feels and acts like Williamsburg. Or the Financial District. Scary, either way. Shudder.

It’s not just San Francisco. Some of the highly-publicized greenfield ‘smart cities’ of the last decade haven’t been doing particularly well either. The no-emmission, low-carbon, all-renewable, cleantech cluster Masdar City in the UAE is still a prohibitively expensive showcase and an open-ended experiment, far removed from its initial goal of being a living, feasible city of 50,000 residents by 2015.[viii] Likewise, South Korea’s purpose-built, Cisco-backed Songdo International Business District is struggling for occupants despite its gleaming towers, walkability, connectivity and a sprawling not-so-original-sounding Central Park.[ix]

What’s going wrong in all these places? While each of these experiments has its unique flaws, there is one thing common in all of them: a top-down approach to urban design that has little regard for chaos, and the emergent behavior that it produces. Simply put, we may be over designing the cities of the future. The world is littered with top-down, over-designed urban experiments: from Mughal emperor Akbar’s meticulously designed capital Fatehpur Sikri, or City of Victory, which served as the seat of the empire for barely 15 years before being abandoned completely,[x] to a large number of Chinese ‘ghost towns.’ The problem is not planning per se, (a large number of thriving cities around the world were planned) but planning to the point where the chaos is designed out of the city. In other words, designing sterile monocultures, like San Francisco.

Cities thrive because they are messy. They provide for mobility when they have inequality. But it’s a precarious balance. Too much inequality and you have a security crisis; too homogenous, and you have a monoculture. The challenge for urban and transdisciplinary designers, therefore, is to find that balance, and cultivate it. Interestingly, the Pope seems to have a good grasp of this. In his words:

“Cities create a sort of permanent ambivalence because, while they offer their residents countless possibilities, they also present many people with any number of obstacles to the full development of their lives. This contrast causes painful suffering… [and while] the Gospel … is the best remedy for the ills of our cities, … we have to realize that a uniform and rigid program of evangelization is not suited to this complex reality.”[xi]

You know a centuries-old institution is getting it right when it abandons top-down approaches, and factors in for chaos and emergence.