So cities are shaped around our more immediate needs, so what? It’s arguable that the form of our cities has arisen from centuries of trial and error, and that the economic forces driving us towards that form are a direct result of what we want. And, lets be honest, the major forces involved in our lives -- from the grand urban plan to your day at work -- are a result of the money and resources that are available, the amount of people and business, the existing built environment around us, and our codified needs and expectations of each other.
These forces influence where we live, where we eat, where we decide to put our houses, how much we know our neighbors, and much more. These are the set of codified values that we must live with. The problems that we see today are the rift between the values we have and the obstacles that arise from them. Fortunately, the obstacles are clear: transportation and our dramatic increase in reliance on the automobile, industrialization and our love of two-dimensional, problem-solution attitudes, the cost of creation at all forms, especially on our built environment, and overpopulation, defining itself as the overwhelming bear on resources and space on a system we haven’t accounted for yet.
Most of the twentieth century we have devoted our resources to an automobile-based framework. We supply each thing we make with parking, we devote more than half of our city plan to them. Imagine, hypothetically, were we to make an alternate source of transportation -- one that fulfills our requirements of freedom, flexibility, speed, and comfort -- all of a sudden we improve health, safety, space, resources, and solve in a very direct way what is ailing us. Similarly, we have created a process of industrialization that has unleashed an incredible potential for human growth, but somehow is not effective in improving the major costs of our current cities. Imagine, hypothetically again, that we utilized this process of industry and mass-production to affect things like whole buildings, whole city blocks, and that we had the capability to assemble a neighborhood with pre-made parts with better quality and less resources and even less time. All of a sudden, now we have a system of construction that leads to inter-connectivity, made from pieces that all fit together and work together, can be easily changed and maintained because of its regularity, and provides for rapid expansion should the need arise.
If we can imagine in this way, we have already shot forward towards a better future. We can support more people, give them the access to amenities they need with more focus on commerce and society rather than survival. What you find while analyzing and imagining this future, is that what is holding us back, and anchoring our lives to our cars and construction processes merely our societal values. We have a vested interest in avoiding change.
We don’t want change because we see that it is hard to fix something at a larger scale without hurting the smaller scale. Bus transportation, for example, functions quite well at the scale of a district: it operates nearly always on time, it travels to a wide area, and transports people through the district and to the station where they can go farther, and it is relatively inexpensive as far as service-per-upkeep is concerned. At the scale of an individual, the buses are often too slow because they do not cater to one’s specific needs, they are inconvenient because they arrive infrequently, and are unable to travel great distances.
We are paralyzed by this inability to change for no reason. We have the means to address multiple scales at the same time, to move around the city and neighboring cities freely, without an automobile, to construct a sidewalk the same way we construct a tower, and most importantly the means to change and create as we feel necessary.
The only constraint we face is cost and time, both aspects of efficiency. If we become more efficient, we use the same amount of resources to achieve greater outcomes, overcome our challenge of change and consequently make a positive difference in our environment. Most logically, efficiency comes from repetition and flexibility, or having one thing that can be used for many. Prefabrication, streamlining, repetitive elements, mass-production are all examples of efficiency-driven concepts, however there is one concept that is often unheard of: bio-mimicry.
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