Cities, Mobility & Complexity in a Post-Pandemic World - Eric Miller

all right let's get started hello everyone I'm jel professor of City C Transportation nmit this is the MIT Mobility Forum organized by the MIT mob initiative today I'm really glad to have Professor Eric Miller join us presenting his research on cities mobility and complexity in the post pandemic World in 1958 uh Professor Colin Clark write an article on the journal to planning review titled transport the maker and Breakers of cities it's interesting to see that that's 70 years ago he recognized both the major contribution the transportation can do to the city but also of Many Many of this nective potential impact upon cities right so the role of Transportation in shaping city has been the central theme of many of our city planners tration Engineers right I see there's no better person than Professor F Miller to really give a talk about both the historical view on this but also what's the mod discussion in this respect Professor ER Miller is a pioneer of the agent based micro simulation model system in large Urban context he developed this integrated transportation and land use models that permiss the analysis of the two-way interaction between transportation system and urban form in particular he developed the GTA model is an advanced Regional travel demand modeling system you used by many municipalities in the greater Toronto area GTA to forecast travel demand is based on the state of art agent based micro simulation model of activity and travel as well as a integrated land use and transportation model system for the GTA Professor Miller directs the University of Toronto transation Research Institute he chaired the US Transportation research board commit committee on travel behavior and values he also chaired the International Association for travel Behavior research he received the Wilbur Smith distinguished educator award from The Institute of Transportation engineers and the inaugural winner of University of British Columbia marus national design for living award uh by the way at that time I was professor at UBC I really enjoyed the the the speech Professor Miller give at this inaugural session there and I also received the life Lifetime Achievement Award from the ibr so before I pass the for to to Eric I just want to warm up the the audience a little bit by having two post to understand people's counter ship uh this is the first question I just launched uh to get a sense of the trouble behavior of our own audience here all right 120 people already participated I'll give five more second Miss okay I will end the poll and share the result uh hopefully you can see that about 32% zero cars 36 one car 25 two cars seven three cars and there is people have more than four cars or more right that's the first one yeah uh the second one let me get is on public transit let's get this relaunch is about how how often you use public transit right see all right 160 people participated let me close the poll now and then share the result uh 40% people are very frequent users three days a week more than 25 one or two 40 4% one day a months and 20% not much right uh hopefully Eric this give you some background that this audience travel Behavior to look at car and trans as the two major drivers here right so just lastly let me reinforce the norm this forum which is every audience contributed one I did yeah please do type into the chat uh either a question for Prof Miller or a comment to the the presentation right without further Ado let me pass the for on to Professor Miller Eric it's yours well thank thank you very much jino and thank you uh so much for um invite you personally and and the mobility for inviting me here today it's it's it's a real honor especially as a MIT alumnus to be able to have a chance to talk today and talk about something that uh I've been uh thinking about for a long time so I'm I'm going to uh try to share my screen here um hopefully everybody can everybody can see my screen um so uh the agenda for today uh I I want to start by talking about cities as complex system and you know jino you mentioned the paper from 1958 well James Jacobs in 1960 in the famous death and life of Great American cities said cities were problems in organized complexity and I think lots of people have been trying to parse that and think about what that means uh ever ever since and about a decade later uh Ritter and Weber talked about cities as being a a um um a wicked problem and I think that's that's true today and I I I'm not going to solve that Wicked problem today but we're going to try to to wrestle with it a bit uh so having introduced a bit of notion about complexity I do want to talk about cities and transport starting with you know very briefly um you know a historical view by moving very quickly to to the present day by talking about how that history is with us today um and I'm going to try to tie that to to a concept of in in complexity in the notion of attractors um but then I want I do want to uh we've been disrupting um our cities our transportation networks for some time uh even before Co and then of course we have we have to understand how how is the status quo being shaken up by both technology and other events like the pandemic and I will conclude with some implications I think for change in future issues of of future sustainability so uh I I I think with this audience probably I I I'm preaching to the converted I think we all if if we are working in the urban sphere the transportation sphere I think we understand that cities are systems of systems and uh what we mean by that is that there are many systems we're most probably most of the people on the call today are Transportation people of some sort but there are many many Technical Systems physical systems information energy um and so on but the city is also an economic engine it's an economic system it's a social system it's a political system um and these and and and so it is this complex interplay the makes cities so fascinating but also what makes them Wicked problems and difficult to deal with um today obviously I'm going to be focusing on transportation and information and how that U how these interplay within within this this this complex system but I think we also have to recognize the city exists within a biological world as well as a physical world and and the interconnections uh with those those those larger systems we we ignore it our Peril um so so really on this notion of cities as being a complex system I think it's important to highlight that specifically or particularly they are massive social networks and indeed one could argue and certain PE researchers like Jeffrey West and L Bon Court have argued that you know essentially this we build cities to build create a social network we build cities so that we can interact again economically socially culturally politically um and there is an emerging uh science of cities led by people like Lu and and Jeffrey West but Mike baddy and many others um who are trying to explore if you know the science of cities you know are are there fundamental principles uh that underly way the way cities work almost regardless of form or location and so forth and and in particular some some you know there's been a lot of really interesting work over the last 15 plus years looking at what's known as the scaling of cities that that uh that As Cities grow large be because of social networks and because the the interactions grow you know exponentially geometrically um larger cities are more productive they're they're wealthier they're also have more crime and more disease and so they have more of anything so you know economists talk about um Gomer glomeration effects the glomeration effects uh of coming together and interacting uh really fundamentally I think has to do with his notion social networks the more of us there are together the more we interact the more creative we are and so on so forth so I think that's that's extremely important and I guess another way of talking about this in terms of the in terms of also complexity is um as with any system really cities are massive feedback loops and it's these it's these particularly positive reinforcing feedbacks within our economy and with each other and our technology that that grows wealth and grows information and so forth and so we have to understand at the end of the day we have to understand those feedback loops because ultimately the structure of the city or any system has to do with how are the parts interacting how is information flowing how does an action here uh create an action someplace else so uh moving directly to to uh Transportation um very you know Transportation has been fundamental to the growth of cities cities could not exist without you know a transportation system and so uh over in the long run um you know the the how we build the transportation system and what the technology and capabilities of that system are uh influences very directly our Urban form and how the city functions so so uh the the structure of cities has and how those cities have function have always been driven directly by Transportation so there's a very strong connection between how we build a city and and um and and uh how uh you know Transportation literally gives us this spatial definition that makes Land accessible and hence makes it useful and and and so uh uh you know the relationship between urban activity and Transport Systems is what you know what I would fundamentally call Transportation 101 the picture in the lower left corner as of Professor M Marvin Manheim one of my professors of MIT I for me he's the father of Transportation Systems analysis in many respects um and and but many others of course have contributed to this um that uh that the basic point of this and to a certain extent the basic point of my talk is we can't look at the transportation system in isolation we have to look at it as a mediating technology within the urban system if we want to understand uh how we should be designing Transportation Systems how systems are used um and and and and how they perform we have to understand them within the context of the large City the larger City on the other hand its form its function the location choices of developers and and firms and households are fundamentally again influenced by the accessibility uh the capabilities of the transportation system is evolved so um you know I often tell my students that once the land use is set everything else is quote unquote just traffic engineering you can flip that around and say I think uh you know Urban Design is also traffic engineering uh that that how we build the city and how we build the transportation Network they chickens and eggs they have we have to consider them together um so if having made those preliminary comments and saying transportation technology has always affected how we build cities if we look back through history to the pre-industrial cities going back to the dawn of cities I mean cities have been you know 5,000 years ago or 5,000 BC uh cities were starting to emerge in the Middle East and other places so you know cities are Lewis Mumford called them the containers of civilization our our civilization our economy is fundamentally tied to cities even though through much of History most people didn't live in cities the cities have always dominated culture and so forth but in any event the pre-industrial city for for Millennia uh were small dense and extremely compact a couple couple exceptions around the world but but generally cities were small U uh you know from a transportation and because largely because Transportation uh the transportation available we walked we had a horse cart an AUX uh to haul us around um transportation was very inefficient very very expensive uh very difficult um and it was a person-based you you know basically I you know you owned a horse or you owned an ox cart you walked um and and so we kind of self-supplied other than you know somebody built some streets we kind of self-supplied the transport that were used every day and it was very costly very inefficient and as a result cities were very small so I like to talk about uh you know different people divide things up slightly differently and so forth but I think we agree that there was a there was truly a revolution in transportation starting uh you know in the 19th century when uh with the industrial re Revolution and the uh invention of steam engines the first instance and and and uh availability of of Steel rails and so forth but then electrification um we indu we mechanized transportation and we were able to create mass transit public transit um on a scale never seen before and that translated directly into cities growing in size magnitude uh as as never before and so so the emergence of mega cities cities of a million or more London Paris etc etc um was directly enabled by the transportation technology that uh was now available to us I mean the Industrial Revolution was also driving the need for larger populations to gather together to trade a labor force but Transportation uh the mechanized Transportation public transit you know enabled this to happen and help help shape growth and so we see cities expanding the first suburbs really were occurred during this time they were Railway based uh and so the city actually not only grew but actually deified a little bit but but uh the densities at that time were still much higher than what we're used used to thinking about today um and so that you know that Revolution started in the 19th century and hard on its heels not that much longer L that much later in the early 20th century we obviously uh had a second revolution which was driven by the automobile and uh you know notably you know the the first model T Ford Model T that ran off the assembly line I think marked the start of the automobile era when the automobile became a practical reality for vast numbers of people and and we I think we're all familiar with you know the cities we have today have largely been built based on the automobile I mean these Trends did start at least in the United States and a few other places before World War II uh but there Great Depression and and then World War II kind of interrupted that but you know post World War II we're we're all familiar with the expansion of the cities and again not just in North America but around the world that has been largely driven by by uh access access the automobile um and this again returned us to more of a personal based transportation system um in in that uh you know the appeal of the automobile I've put free in quotes because nothing comes free as we know there's downsides um but it freed people from you know having to you know the fixed Service public transit they could go from A to B whenever they wanted it also on the land use side in a sense freed land use to to spread out St uh in a way that uh it was no longer constrained to be beside along the transit line um uh or the transit station um so that's Transportation but I I I just want to step back just a little bit to the first thought about system of systems is that uh another incredibly important technology and system we have is information Tech information Communications technology and just as Transportation has has changed has evolved dramatically over the over the centuries and decades so so has telecommunication starting with perhaps the Telegraph and the telephone and then radio and and so on and there's always been a very complex complimentary and competitive um interaction between Communications and travel um obviously we can substitute um Communications for travel you know none of us traveled to attend this lecture today we're using communication to gather together so communicate information Technologies provide another form of accessibility um and so this this this trend has been going on I mean historically I think it's been it's been fairly clear the more we can communicate with each other the more we travel particularly let's say internationally and so forth um but uh but there's OB obviously a a um a competition a substitution effect going on on and certainly we've all experienced over the last few years with the pandemic uh you know the explosion of of on online um platform such as we're using right now in order to interact uh you know people have been talking about you know you know this this sort of Technology since the 60s but it's really only been the last few years partially certainly driven I would think largely by the pandemic that that we are at the point now where we have information the information technology which is really substituting or competing with transportation for interaction and we'll come back to that okay so getting back to um sort of the systems theory kind of theme that's underlying this um in in in comp in systems theory in comp particularly complex System Theory it's well recognize that every system uh whether it's just a that first little diagram in the upper left is just a bowl just a marble in a bowl about as simple a system as you can get um the lower one is is a weather pattern won't try to explain it um that uh but every system has one or more attractors to which the system will tend to converge if left undisturbed so if you throw a ball into a bowl it'll roll around all sorts of different ways but it's going to end up at the bottom of the bowl eventually if left undisturbed that's the attractor in that very little s system the lower one there's there's a couple of attractors which are this is driving weather patterns and um and and there's obviously much more complex system but there is an underlying no matter how complex the system is there's an underlying structure to it which ultimately again really has to do with the feedback loops and how different parts are interacting with each other and so the number and location of attractors is is largely dominated by its it's its system structure mainly feedback loops and once an attractor is established it can be very difficult to break free from we very often have to rewire the system change the feedback loops just tweaking a parameter will not fundamentally typically change what the attractor looks like so what does that have to do with transportation in this talk um I would argue that every every city in the world has one or more attractors in it that because we built we've built a system it's a massive feedback loop it has an attractor it has a a type of performance a type of behavior that is kind of wired into the City and I would argue that both the pre-industrial and the transit or industrial cities the attractor was one of centralization and concentration of activities and travel flows whole idea of central places and monocentric cities uh the emergence of radial Transit networks to feed high density U very very dominant Central places um evolution of intensive and Ma mixed use of land along street car lines and so forth walkability has is is maintained even with is very essential to the to the transit system and trip lanks because TR travel is still you know somewhat restricted spatially and so forth triplink minimization tends to characterize let's say the 19th century city um the second attractor is obviously the automobile city that has emerged over the last 100 years very different in spatial terms uh low density dispersed population uh extensive and often single use of land land is not use intensively near as much a very different you know Street grid network of that facilitates many to many flows instead of many to one flows into that Central Area the whole you know in the 1980s there was a famous book by guo called Edge cities about talking about the emergence of this new Suburban uh structure and of course very high car dependency uh and typically very limited walkability but we're building have built things in a way that's very difficult to walk and in and arguably the the uh driving force is mobility maximization um in many aspects so um you know it's both of these attractors exist I would argue in essentially all cities um you know the first attractor hasn't gone away we still have transit systems in many cities not all uh we still have maybe a a strong central business district um uh we have some walkable neighborhoods but then we have a lot of car oriented lower density suburbs and so on so forth and so and so I view most most Urban regions are two cities at least um you know the the old city the the attractor one city that still has some density and Transit orientation and City 2 which is which is the auto oriented City and these two attractors these two Urban forms and and Associated Transportation Systems constantly interact they support each other to a certain extent but they're also competing with one and I think if we look around the world um I possibly we could categorize cities as which attract is dominant and which one is more is is is more um you know secondary so certainly in the North American context uh you know the auto tractor is is usually dominant but even there you know in the in some of the older cities the New Yorks the Boston Chicagos of the world there's still a very strong fractor one at work um uh if we then look at Asian cities for example um uh or even European cities tractor one is still may be very strong in many cases although there is still clearly you know a Suburban car culture that exists at the same time um you know and both of these work in the sense and I think they're both supporting cities of social networks but uh but often very different ways and I'm just looking at the time and I realize I'm I'm I'm taking way too long so I'm G try to skip through the next few slides very quickly um clearly we've been do we've been having a lot of disruption um and was happening technologically you know this thing of Technology before before Co then Co really messed things up in many ways so we could list a whole bunch of different kinds of uh disruptions that have been at play in parallel and interacting with each other many of them are sort of outside Transportation maybe even outside City design per se um they are challenging status quo you know climate change is a huge challenge to us increasingly we are more concerned than we used to be uh and just the sheer urbanization Trend that's going on is is a hug huge pressure on all of us um and then of course Co came along and it massively disrupted everything in particular given this notion that the Ci's The Social Network the only way before vaccines arrived that we could fight coid was break the social networks we stayed home we didn't go to stores we didn't you know we we broke the whole reason you know we broke the city so that we could try to fight the disease and now we're we're trying to you're trying to build it back um so then with the question of Technology uh you know what is having said technologies always shape cities what's the role of of of new technologies uh and all the you know the artificial intelligence and everything else that's that's surrounding us these days um you know and there's a huge amount of discussion and action in terms of you know trying to exploit Urban informatics um you know some people think it's a Brave New World some people think it's going to make things worse uh but but you know technology is going to have make a huge play in cities and the question is uh how do we take advantage of technology and certainly technology has you know we have new Mobility Serv Services we have the Ubers of the world um we have um uh so we have lots of Technologies and services we're all familiar with something I think maybe at least in the crowd I hang out with we we don't pay as much attention to but you know technology for a long time has been changing the way you know we've been gradually improving our real-time control of systems to get much better uh operational efficiency I mean that's going to continue and and it's it's you know I think it's it's a real Trend um again maybe something we don't always talk about as much is is all the ways information Technologies changing travel Behavior I mean we obviously know you know uh you know apps uh you know Google ways whatever telling you how to you know how to best you know what's the best rout so root root guidance apps but even things like activity location choice you know uh when I go to a city the first thing I do is you know look up Trip Advisor and find out where the restaurants are um you know and and I so I think I think travel behavior is being Modified by the access to the information real- time access to information in ways that I suspect we we haven't we haven't really been uh following um as as much as we should um so the question is with all this technology running around is it go is it going to change it is it going to change fundamentally shift the attractors yes technolog is going to have an impact um it's changing things all the time but will it actually create a third a different attractor or fundamentally shift between the two and and we can argue this back and forth but I I would actually argue that many of the things we're talking about root guidance apps uh new Mobility Services Real-Time Traffic Control I think these are all they're making the system more efficient maybe increasing consumer surplus in some ways but I think they're reinforcing the by and large the road car uh attractor it's making the system more efficient more attractive um and and and so even though it's it's it is changing our daily lives I'm not sure it's it's revolutionary in terms of getting us to something that's fundamentally different uh in ways that maybe we need um and so and so you know and I think having said that I think that the interplay of technology and Transportation uh is uh in terms of the working from home phenomena the hybrid workplace place again the fact that none none of us had to travel to Boston to to hold this seminar um you know I think I think information technology is playing a much bigger role in terms of the demand for travel and the role of Transportation uh that is just playing is going to play out for some time um and we have to we have to understand better how that's going um and and the same thing is playing out of course on the urban Goods movement side in terms of you know you don't have to go to the store anymore the store comes to you and so again how's that that information technology fundamentally changing you know travel relationships in terms of goods and services um EVS um uh you know will decarbonize but again I I don't think they're going to change the attractor and autonomous vehicles who knows um so uh but I do s harking back to what I've just been saying about working from home I think uh the information platforms we have but also the data we have just the massive amounts of data we have and AI techniques and so on um are are changing our travel Behavior changing they're also changing our ability as researchers for example or planners to see the city and to understand the city and hopefully maybe control it so I do think technology if we use it for good shall we say uh is is going to have an impact um so again and I'm sorry I'm rushing through this um but uh um you know I guess I'm arguing as opposed to the first two revolutions which were just completely technology-driven and you know sort of Technology acceptance I think most of the technology that we're talking about with some of the information uh Technologies aside um aren't really going to change things they may make it more efficient but they're not really revolutionary I mean and but that's not good enough because uh our cities our cities are continuing to face massive growth they have big Equity problems they have big sustainability problems the business as usual the current in particular the attractor 2 is not a sustainable is is just not sustainable into the future so you know how do we shift the attractor and so I would argue we have to start much more seriously shifting it from the land use side we have to think about how we build the city again as soon as you build that low density suburban suburban residential area you're hardwiring autod dependency in so I think you know we've talked about the transportation land use interaction for a long long time I've been talking about it forever um it's a really hard problem but I think we have to and we're not going to change things overnight but I think we really have to start taking Urban Design as traffic engineering shall we say much more seriously and I think we have to be leading if we're going to be breaking the feedbacks or creating you know more sustainable feedback loops and behaviors I think we have to take that whole Urban Design thing much more seriously and I do think data and information technology will will help us as to say we can understand the city and how it functions in much better ways can we make use of that to actually design cities better um and and and you know again I've been talking about this for a long time and everybody sort of Pats me on the head and says yes but you know you know we've built the cities this way it's not going to change overnight and we're not we can't possibly revolutionize cities but I I I think cities are continuing to grow so we need to take advantage of the growth to grow better and then we have to look for infill opportun ities things the city is a very Dynamic place it's changing all the time um and so so I think we have to be agents of change to be looking for every you know in as many ways as possible and as many places as possible as the city's evolving changing growing whatever that we're changing it thoughtfully in a Direction that's moving us more towards sustainability and not so ginoa I know I've run a little long but uh that's thank you so much yeah thank you yeah before I add my my uh question I see the professor Joe ferera from MIT is also here he's also been working on this land use Transportation inter section quite a bit Joe do you want to add a few remarks Joe was here right say hi to Joe while we're waiting for him if he's there Joe if you're hello good hey there good to see you I kept clicking on mute and it wouldn't work I think uh the gods had an idea about what to do um thanks for an interesting talk that summarized a lot of sort of what's happened with our thinking about land use and transportation I I totally agree that we we need to pay attention to this in a way that recognizes that the Urban Design and urban planning problems that we have looking forward aren't quite what the same as the ones that motivated the initial effort to look at land use and transportation interactions uh dating back to to the 60s and and 70s and I guess just make a few comments on those that uh I think Eric's done a lot of good work in this uh Direction but a lot more needs to get done there's been a long history of the models but so much of them are focused on sort of autof flow uh and um Autos have indeed greatly expanded access to 2D space compared to Transit before that so understanding how that uh affects land use and where people choose to live and work uh is important but um when these models uh that tried to understand the relationship between land use and transportation sort of grew up the policy questions were really big building a big new highway or building a railroad that took five or 10 years or in the big dig here even more than that before they came to fruition so the question of what you model and how you model is different and let me just suggest a few ideas about how we need to think a little differently about what to invest in regarding understanding land use and transportation interactions uh going forward because the world's a little different now you can have a coid that changes work from home you can have micromobility that uh uh brings E Scooters in and then takes them away I saw that happened in Singapore within a year uh and and bike sharing so there are ways in which through technology and information technology and sort of physical technology you can quickly change the way in which people get around um so we need to be a little bit more flexible in modeling what choices people make why do they go where they go and uh and how you can get there and the models aren't anywhere near that Nimble you look at them and most of the ones that have been applied to a large metro area are proprietary because either the data is private or a lot of the submodels are private and I think we need to begin to get around that they they tend still to be driven by predicting Auto they don't deal with multimodal very well uh they usually don't uh even include parking they can include Road usage charges but at least but it's still sort of autofocused and I think I look one of my colleagues here Andre s is trying to do pedestrian flow in sort of Main Streets commercial centers within a metro area and understand what motivates people to go to a place and to Traverse it in particular ways as a function of land use and it's sort of so hard to get the data to be able to do that um and that's understandable because we've had a standardization of the four-step model for understanding travel demand and work and home location and uh Network flow uh since the 70s and a lot of the transportation departments and the funding has sort of standardized the way in which that the data that's needed to do that modeling gets collected and used and when it comes to tying it into land use tying it into behavioral changes we're still largely using the travel demand models that were developed in the 70s u e and they don't handle multimodal very well so I think that needs some work and in particular I just say one thing there's a lot of effort on building digital twins but they focus on the built environment and understanding where the buildings are and what they'll look like and they're quite need in understanding exactly who is going to be on that street who's going to come there how heterogeneous is the population that goes to this commercial center versus another commercial center they're weak on that side and there aren't public Micro Data sets that adjust the synthetic population as of dayx so as a result because we don't have shared synthetic population at the level of detail of people in buildings that we need just just a snapshot um then we have a hard time comparing different models uh and comparing different cities there's nothing like there is for say Netflix choose the next movie where you have a a data set and uh um people can compare different methods to figure out exactly what's the best algorithm for figuring out what movie you're going to choose next we we need a little bit more of that in this area and I think it's important because in order to get where we want to go as Eric's talking about that's a sort of more sustainable environment in terms of uh greenhouse gas and uh the sort of sprawl that that comes with too much autod dependence uh then we're going to need to do things that are politically difficult with parking costs Road usage charges and uh own versus share vehicles uh recognize that in the city with this High concentration you're going to have a different model than you are in the suburbs where you don't have the density to make shared use instead of vehicle ownership work so so that suggests there's going to be lots of multimodal travel within Metro areas we really need a a serious effort to try and get models that can be improved by comparing one another and doing them with common data sets in order for us to build a better argument of which of these strategies or the 50-minute city or ET are actually viable and I think part of the difficulty now is that most of those have some good arguments you can see the reasoning as to how they might work but when you say okay put it all together and create some model of who's going to go where at Metro scale uh that's uh still a long shot and the only versions that are out there aren't sufficiently testable by the people other than those who made them to be trusted so I would agree with Eric in terms of what we need to focus on and understanding the direction in which our big Metro areas are going to go in keeping with all these demands for what we have to do to be more sustainable over the next few decades and I think there are a few things that at least viewed from Academia we can do to be able to sharpen our arguments in a way that takes into account the changing p patterns of uh how people get around uh What uh how they use the new technologies and the choices that policy can make regarding everything from Road usage charges and parking to the way in which we deal with uh uh vehicle ownership and multimodal travel in order to paint some picture that's a little bit more believable about how we can get from where we are to where we want to go right thank you Joe Erica do you want to have some quick uh response to this only as always I agree with everything Joe says and um I'll just I'll just mention that Sunday I'm off to UT Austin where there's going to be about 30 40 of us gathering together to talk about next Generation activity based modeling because we all recognize our current models aren't adequate to the task and that they've been challenged by so many things where that leads I don't know uh but but yeah I think in the interest of time I mean Joe and I could talk all day about this stuff yeah thank you Erica yeah so a few question from me and I'll give it to John for the audience question the first one is i' like to to comment a little bit on the international perspective right even though the two technology cars and po dragons they're mostly generic right I mean the cars in I mean America Canada was China they just cars right but the but in terms of what the role they played what type of City they really shaped it very vastly across the different region and different culture from this right so why so what's the other fundamental factor that influence this well yeah no and I agree and I I mentioned yeah so I think uh uh you know I think the differences are you know historical and cultural to a certain extent uh in terms of when the cities developed uh but also you know I mean I think also some conscious efforts by people you know that what sort of city do you want so you know I think if you you know I haven't tried to do this but if we sort of talk about these two attractors you could almost create some sort of you know Spectrum but you need a a few metrics but you could probably put different cities along the Spectrum and you you know and again I think you would see that you know most of the the uh C certainly you know Singapore and Hong Kong and Shanghai and Beijing uh and so forth uh well Beijing has a lot of cars but they would they would be ATT tractor one cities I mean there's still very Transit huge amount of Transit uh you know some walkability uh very dead mixed use uh with then an overlay of you know some our modern suburbs you know at the Other Extreme will be the you know the phoenixes and the Houstons and uh of the uh of the in the US where you know you don't have much of a downtown you don't have much of a Transit um and it's very Auto oriented I think interestingly just in that context I think Canadian cities sit very much between and then European cities again I think are you know much more ATT tractor one um even though there's again there's still suburbs and cars out there so so I think there you know if we look around the world it it is almost as to say cultural and historical you know I'm from Toronto I think Canadian cities actually sit somewhere in between US cities and European cities in terms of splitting the difference a little bit between the two attractors a bit uh a bit more um so yeah so I I think uh you know and I think there's a lot to be learn I mean it you know we you know certainly in torado and I'm sure it's the same in the US we say well let's learn from Asia let's learn from Europe and people say oh well no those are Europeans those are Asians you know what you know we're different we can't but I think there's an awful lot we could learn from each other in terms of what actually works you know and and what doesn't work and I don't think we actually ask that question often enough about again about particularly you know the combination of land use and transportation looking at holistically everybody to Paris but why don't we build Paris in you know Sous City yeah thanks the second question is more on the urban Information Technology right we've been applying this quite a bit academics industry there there were time there's a lot of discussion on the smart cities right there's a lot of kind momentum through time people excited including the the example actually in Toronto of the Toronto Waterfront from sidewalk lab in in Japan we have these Ving cities in China there many of these smart City discussion in India the whole smart Nation movement in the end of the day do do you see they actually made a difference or where where they successful where they failed what's your thought about this no I agree yeah it was it was uh it was a thing right um so I think that kind of ties into a little bit what I was saying like things like uh Traffic Control Systems um so I don't think there's anything wrong with making the city smarter and if we can move traffic more efficiently using AI um and and and data you know that's good but that's not going to fundamentally I guess what I'm trying to say is that's GNA not fundamentally change uh the city structure and the long run it may allow it may give you a little more capacity for growth but it's not going to change things fundamentally so and I think that's the thing we see in all of this it's maybe it maybe where it's working uh it is you know making your Wastewater management a little more efficient to a little more energy efficient this sort of thing but it's not fundamentally changing the city you know I think it was a Tech play by the cisos and the ibms of the world to a certain extent whether they made money on it I'm not sure but yeah I don't think they fundamentally changed the city um that's not the way to change the city I think right we have 12 minutes we'll give it to John for the audience question answer okay super thanks Jena so Eric we we really did have a super um active chat lots and lots of commentary so good stuff for you to read afterwards um but just to build a little bit on jino's first question there's a lot of talk about so you know what really what should what's the model that we want to achieve and I guess if as you pointed out that depends for which population for whom but is there a kind of single or a couple of cities that you could point to in different places around the world that you say this is where we want to go yeah I again I don't think there's one model I mean on my like first slide or so I had Kevin Lynch and MIT professor and he wrote a book on good good Urban form and I think he was trying to answer that question what's what's what's a good city and how would we know it when we get there and I think at the end of the book he sort of concluded well he almost failed because there's it's too complicated um I had a grad student when we're first building ilot and he said so yeah so if we could optimize a city how would we know when we get there you know how would we know when we got the good city um but it so it's got to vary you know so I think uh uh you know so the solution in in in China or India is not the same solution as in Europe or North America even though they share C I think it's criteria you know you I think you have to asking the question what how Equitable as a city how how what's its carbon footprint uh how much land is it consuming you know you know sort of an ecological uh approach to things what's its footprint um does it you know how how efficient is it functioning and there's different ways of answering that question um I mean I think in kind of shall we say the North American European context you know I I'm a big fan of you know a number of European cities you know Munich uh Amsterdam you know Munich is a big city fairly similar to Toronto much more much better Transit much more efficient people still have their you know they have their BMW that they use to get out on the weekend but you know it's it's a very different uh uh combination you know and it's not you know they don't have super high-rise buildings necessarily you know when we talk about density everybody thinks it has to be 70 story Towers it doesn't so I think there is much that let's say Us in North America can learn from particularly Europe because that is probably culturally closest to us indeed okay fair enough so very early on John Morgan asked I think quite an interesting question because it's about the built environment so he asked you know in the mid 20th century we retrofitted existing cities to accommodate cars today many of us are trying to retrofit car-based cities and suburbs to Center pedestrians and Transit so what are the similarities and differences between those those two efforts to reorganize cities yeah well I think yeah I sometimes say it took us about 100 years to build the autoc Centric City it may take us a hundred years to unbuild it um I I think one difference is a lot of I mean a lot of that retrofit was actually Green Field growth it was really expansion Subs right so that's easy I mean it's easy to take the farmer field and plop a bunch of houses down we now are much more in a retrofitting it's infill um and and there's people in place uh who maybe like their suburban houses so I I I I I do think it has to be um some you know the strategy the Strategic goal is more walkability more Transit uh more complete communities the tactics I think however have to be uh very local very targeted U you know old suburban malls for example are prime candidates for you know repurpose they're actually pretty cheap to repurpose um you know almost Street by Street Community by Community look for places where you could change the zoning you know a simple thing like maybe changing zoning so you could actually have a neighborhood gr you know Corner Store Milk Store uh which most suburbs you can't I I live in a traditional walkable neighborhood in Toronto where you know there's a coffee shop on the corner and there's a grocery you know there's a little little corner store uh it's mixed use by Design and you know most of our sub BBS are are single use by by you know by Fiat so I think I think we have to uh think about how you gradually uh and look for opportunities and and then it grows I mean if you can have you know you build a bit of you have an opportunity here so you do something and then maybe it's even a few kilometers away you have something and but gradually these things will grow together so it's uh um you know cities are organic um and we don't do it overnight but let's you know we start wherever you can and um I think that's the only way yeah yeah no I think that's a that's a very good point it was pretty easy to put up the strip mall when it was just bare land but it's it's it's a little bit tougher to sort of undo that that Urban fabric um let me just skip forward a little bit there interesting question and comment from Elon elar where he says look I actually somewhat disagree and here's what he's saying he's saying okay cities are complex systems right and all complex systems suffer from the law of unintended consequences and he started asking you know are there examples where urban planners might have executed a policy or some sort of you know some sort of program that they expected would have result a and in fact in the end it had result B any comments or thoughts about this law of unintended consequences yeah okay well Elon is my former student so and he's he's he always asks a tough question so uh hon thanks I will I agree completely and in fact you know when I'm talking about these things you know I I I am worried because you know planners really haven't had much success over over the last couple centuries you know people want to build utopian communities and you know uh I think it's very hard to uh plan and how things turn out the way you want and there will always be unintended consequences so um I mean I think think that's why again maybe more incremental approaches uh so we can fail once in a while will be helpful um but uh I I I I guess I just feel you know again I think the status quo the business as usual just is not will not continue to work and so we do have to try to change the trend curve somehow will we make mistakes yes um I mean I think I think one of the big challenges is how do we bring the people along I mean a lot of opposition to a lot of things are people do not see how it will be better they they they they think change will make things worse so it is risk I mean I mean if we're going to change things there's always risk but there's also huge risk of the status quo um and I think as human beings we always overestimate the risk of change and underestimate the risk of status quo and that's you know and so what I'm trying to talk about is well how do we shift that how do how do how do we uh reduce risk and find better paths into the future but and again I you know I came back you know previous question about you know I think it's about criteria it's about goals you know different mechanism will get there and and I don't think it'd be you know stalinist top down you know uh you know imposing structures on things that that doesn't work okay maybe a two-part question around the concept of the 15minute city which I as you rightly pointed out this is not a particularly novel concept people have been thinking about this for for many years but if the concept is that you want people to more or less uh live in communities where they have simple access to the things they need education for their children basic health care groceries and so forth and you want to sort of minimize that um the first part of the question is what about the concept of work so some people have said wait hold on do we really want people to work where they live do you have an opinion about in terms of the concept of the social fabric of cities that you articulated in the beginning of your talk where it's about these kind of spontaneous and dynamic interactions do you have a sense of of that like do we do we want people to actually work close to where they live in this traditional preco notion of you know working and commuting I would say no I I mean you know people have been talking about self-containment of communities it's going back to the 60s I mean it's it's not possible to achieve uh and I don't think it's I don't think it's desirable and I think this is one of the things that you know the you 15 minute Community misses and you know you know I'll stick my head out bicycle lobbyists and so forth the city is a big place and you want people to be interact be able to interact from one side of the city to the other uh and so we do need we do need mass transit to do that we do need cars and highways still to do this I think uh yeah that Synergy of the city requires all sorts of interactions you will never get a hermetically sealed neighborhood where everybody lives and works well we could go back to you know Medieval Times where you're in the village right uh do we really want that that was not a productive model um we don't want that I mean again as I live in a really nice traditional neighborhood it is the closest thing Toronto as to a 15 minute it's not 15 minute 20 30 minute Community uh but we're out of it all the time you know I mean and you're out and about and you want so so and I think walkable communities neotraditional communities it's you know I think the people have been thoughtful but recognize well yes there's lots of things we'll be able to do I can you could go to the neighborhood Pub in the evening one night but then you go downtown to the nice restaurant the next night and and and you may work from home one day but then you still have an office you know so I think the the fabric of the city has to be maintained much more over wider distances and so you know I think you know these complete communities whatever we call it help but um uh and and they're as much about quality of life as they are about sustainability I think um I mean we did and Sorry probably running along here but uh a long time ago we did an econometric study where we actually tried to look at you know micro neighborhood design impacts on greenhouse gas basically automobile usage versus macro things about where is this community versus employment and all that sort of thing and we were able to show that you know the neighborhood design made a difference but the macro factors of sort of how you organize the city where are the jobs where are the people how do they connect one another is far more important from something like uh vehicle kilometers travel and greenhouse gases uh so both are important but not you know the notion that we solve everything by turning everything into a 15-minute Community even if that was possible is is is you know just not going to happen so I will just say Robert SEO who joined this uh Forum about two years ago I think had a a Sim very similar uh perspective um I think we're out of time I'll turn it back to you jino that's right than thank you sorry to cut this such a warm conversation discussion there uh both in this hour conversation but also in chat there so many interesting discussion that ER will collect compile them share with you so please everyone join me thank Professor ER Miller for the presentation conversation well thank and thank you very much again thank you thank you so much for uh for for having me this is hope it's been interesting I've had fun

2023-11-13 15:48

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