We need to “accelerate city transitions” - and Dark Matter Labs have a slew of options. But 3 degrees of warming is a punishing context…
We appreciate and value the material that comes from Dark Matter Labs, on the way that cities can transition from their old toxic, planet-wrecking, technologically-determined models, towards more sustainabile and equitable ways (its director, Indy Johar, has been a long-standing contributor here).
But sometimes it’s important to chunk and parse their discourse, as well as their references, so that there can be entry points to it for more than the city planners and steering classes which seem to be their immediate audience.
This recent overview of their path ahead, and their recent and forthcoming body of work, Accelerating City Transitions, is a great candidate for this approach. We’ll go through the piece, stumbling across notable items, and either rephrasing or highlighting.
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Firstly, it’s worth noting the global-warming science framework DML is operating within - an assumption that cities will be living in a world where we’ll be enduring 3 degrees of rise in global temperatures. They take this from a paper highlighted in CarbonPost, which suggests that the “equilibrium climate sensitivity” (ECS) – a measure of how much the world can be expected to warm for a doubling of CO2 above pre-industrial levels - is currently estimated to be between 2.6C and 4.1C, by 2060. An ECS of 3.0C is thus on the conservative end of estimates.
There’s quite a lot of expertise readily available on what happens to cities when three degrees of warming happens. In Mark Lynas’s 2020 book Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency, he anticipates that even if sea-level rise is limited to half a metre by 2100, this “inundates land currently inhabited by 50 million people”. If it goes higher, then more - and in any case, we’ll have cities rebuilding further and further inland, or “trapped behind enormous barricades holding back the angry ocean”.
According to David Wallace-Wells in The Uninhabitable Earth, at 50 meters, 97% of Florida disappears, as does San Francisco and Sacramento, New York and Seattle, London and Dublin, Stockholm and St. Petersburg, Dubai and Mumbai… In any case, 600 million people - the majority in cities - live within 30 feet of sea level today.
And if the seas don’t get ya, then the heat will… According to Lynas, over half of South Asia’s populations - hundreds of millions living in dozens of major cities - may experience “dangerous heatwave conditions never before seen in today climate” (and that at 2.25C of warming). Whereas cities in Africa could easily, at 3.0C, experience dangerous conditions for 145 days per year, by the 2090s.
So a three-degrees assumption, at least from this tour of the climate science, threatens the very existence of many cities situated at the sea shore or around river basins. Worth reading through the rest of DML’s proposals with this in mind.
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After a list of their projects, DML identify their method:
we’ve cultivated a deeper understanding of the critical role of ‘dark matter’ — the invisible structures and infrastructures that shape our systems, from regulation and procurement to contracting and financing mechanisms — must play in driving transitions in cities.
Anchored by this dark matter, a city is a “system of systems”, and DML want to pick out four ways to intervene in this dense thicket:
regulation - they want “sandboxes” in which to test out whether old regulations are adequate
technology - the question is, does its speed of change take communities with them, or leave them behind?
participation - “Seeing deeper civic participation as inherent in regulatory or technological innovation is integral to the future of cities: the promise of new technology and agile regulation moving us to a more sustainable future rings false unless people and communities can truly be part of collaboratively understanding why it is necessary, what opportunities it could hold for them, and how different design principles can drive towards very different outcomes.” A question arises: is it allowed for these communities to “collaboratively understand” what ISN’T necessary? And to what degree is there a danger of participation becoming facipulation?
finance - fascinating to see articulated here the idea of a wave of “transition capital” about to hit city administrations, as a consequence of various national commitments of a “green new deal” nature. The challenge, summarises DML, is that “we need to re-code capital so it privileges the shared public value of transition investment”.
That is, we don’t just want “transition capital” to boost the value of privately owned land, by virtue of public investments in infrastructure and liveability (so we’re surprised not to see an exploration of land value tax here, which compels rentiers to use their land productively). Nor to miss out on these funds improving health and wellbeing indicators. Yet the variety of development, commissioning and fiscal powers that cities have across national jurisdictions is so wildly different. Not much recognition of that here.
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We were struck by this passage:
We are explicitly working on what it means in practice to deal with urban systems by both reaching down into neighbourhoods, and up into sprawling economic and ecological geographies and supply chains. We recognise the need to mobilise national and regional authorities as much as municipal governments if we are to truly rewrite the DNA of cities and their dynamic flows beyond the traditional city boundaries.
The position occupied by DML in this “reaching” image could be captured as “meso” - as opposed to the “micro” of neighbourhoods and the “macro” of city, regional and national governments. We also wonder, however, about the “reach-up” of neighbourhoods to establish their own, powerful structures of deliberation, knowledge, association and even self-provision - what we’ve been exploring and mapping as CANs of various forms (see here).
We find a real overlap with what the commoning and peer-to-peer movements have been advocating for many years in this space. We share an emphasis on an extreme sensitivity to already-existing initiatives and agency in any area - amplification as much as enablement is the key.
DML do link into this area of practice:
In the near and now, we aspire for ‘cities-as-commons’ — places where participatory governance of civic assets shape our communities, public spaces and local economy.
New institutional tools, such as multiple-level climate contracts and civic endowments for shared infrastructure and innovation investment, are building blocks for this.
We see cities as carbon positive urban environments — not just because of decarbonised homes and transport, but also with vast urban nature capable of turning concrete jungles into their very own carbon sinks.
We aspire for ‘caring cities’ — places that privilege and properly invest in wellbeing and empathy, but also shared learning and active participation in deep democracy.
We see cities as circular and collaborative, where food and (re)construction are part of digitally integrated local value chains, capable of building community wealth and local resilience…
[These will be underpinned] by next generation logistics systems and agile regulation that include real-time environmental performance as key metric.
Again, just to note: “new institutional tools” are often applied to populations after they have been designed by smart elites. We would at least point not just to our CANs as alternative communal power-structures, but also to a conceptualisation that looks at “constitutes” as much as “institutions” - with the capacity to dwell on the nature of the rulebook/methodology at hand. “Nothing about us without us”, as they say.
And to be fair, DML go on to proclaim an attractive vision for the city:
Urban futures like these would mean:
people having more power over their places
a deeper relationship with nature despite their urban setting,
a sharpened consciousness of the materiality of their city
greater security and capacity to focus on the pursuit of equitable human flourishing
the ability to benefit from the value generated by collective endeavours
while preserving and nourishing our shared ecosystems.
It is a vision in which cities finally deliver on their promise to each and every one of us.
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The paper has a dazzling raft of proposals whereby investment decisions in cities are directed according to a strategic vision of transition, which we don’t have space or time to cover here. They are intended to address current failures in the governance of cities that DML are, clearly, acutely aware of:
Even though 2020 showed in brutal tangibility what ‘interconnected and cascading risk’ can mean for cities, urban governments and the national equivalents that support them systematically fail to properly account for risk and liability.
In too many cities we see ambitious urban strategies for decarbonisation sat in juxtaposition with stable consumption of high embodied carbon materials (such as concrete).
In too many cities we see aspirations for eliminating poverty alongside extractive development models, reliant on housing and land asset bubbles.
In too many cities we see ambitions for once-in-a-lifetime deep energy retrofitting investments that are unconnected to other needs and opportunities in neighbourhoods, like reimaging streets, creating digitally enabled local supply chains, building community wealth.
In too many cities we see a growing awareness of mental health risk being undercut by an ongoing inability to make long investments into social infrastructure that overcome loneliness and strengthen individual and collective resilience.
But we are also struck, returning to the 3 degrees of warming context at the start, by their admission that cities are both the problem and the solution to any attempt to mitigate global warming effects. As much “smokestack” as “ark”:
Cities are where many of the most complex challenges we face combine into webs of cascading risks and legacy lock-ins. It’s widely acknowledged that cities are a net-contributor to climate breakdown, covering less than two percent of the earth’s surface, but consuming 78% of the world’s energy, producing more than 60% of all carbon emissions and reinforcing the habits, lifestyles and extractive economies most associated with the causes of the climate crisis.
And the past year has been a particularly stark reminder that this takes place in the context of chronic and deepening ‘multiple horizon’ emergencies, of growing disparities in wealth and power, and the double edged sword of runaway technological capabilities.
While the scale and entanglement of the problems are enormous, so is the possibility for impact. If we succeed in transitioning cities to a more sustainable and democratic future, the aggregated value of improving the lives of the vast urban populations cities serve is clear.
But cities are also particularly powerful hubs of knowledge and collaborative innovation capacity, driven by their innate diversity, their assertive plurality of institutional and non-institutional actors, and their capacity to attract capital.
This, together with the soon to be made available ‘once-in-a-generation’ investments, if leveraged well, can shift them from engines of unsustainable growth to catalysts of healthy, green, caring transitions.
Overall, it’s an encouraging, bustling prospectus - and we certainly hope that its blizzard of novel abstractions overwhelms and inspires otherwise convention-bound city, regional and national administrators.
But we are haunted by the very “three-degree” constraint that the Dark Matter Labs writers give their endeavours at the beginning. Some of the consequences of which threaten to put the very buildings, manufactories, public squares, parks and homes that are the elements of their vision, under metres of water. We wonder whether Archigram maybe conceived of “transition cities” more appropriately…
