{"id":2622,"date":"2020-02-27T10:48:29","date_gmt":"2020-02-27T09:48:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/?p=2622"},"modified":"2020-07-31T13:05:20","modified_gmt":"2020-07-31T11:05:20","slug":"cities-as-social-ecologies-by-thomas-madreiter-isabella-mader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/cities-as-social-ecologies-by-thomas-madreiter-isabella-mader\/","title":{"rendered":"Cities As Social Ecologies <\/br>by Thomas Madreiter & Isabella Mader"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The cities of the future we imagined in the\n1970ies were about flying cars and beautiful skyscrapers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where are we now? At micromobility with e-scooters? Where did it all begin? If the Renaissance began in Florence, Smart City began in Silicon Valley. While we know San Francisco as an ideal place to test the latest Smart City tech gadgets their City Government took an interesting decision recently: you now have to demonstrate which public value your technology will bring to the city. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drucker Forum 2019<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>
\n

This article is one in the \u201cshape the debate\u201d series relating to the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme \u201cThe Power of Ecosystems\u201d taking place on November 21 & 22, 2019 in Vienna, Austria.\n
#GPDF19 #ecosystems<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

What value does your tech bring to the\ncity<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cecile Maisonneuve, President of the think\ntank Fabrique de la Cit\u00e9, kicked off the Session on “Cities as Social\nEcologies” at the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum with this revealing\ndevelopment of urban policy. She goes on to explain: Cities are wonderful\nlaboratories, but citizens are not guinea pigs. It seems we are currently\nliving at a turning point in the way we are considering the future of cities.\nWe seem to be coming back to the right questions. What is the purpose? What is\nthe vision? Future cities have to overcome three main and intertwined problems,\nshe argues: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Climate Change:
\nAs worldwide two thirds of people are living in cities, urban policies will\nplay a major role in this challenge. The discussion with the audience was quite\ncontroversial. Too drastic measures will lead to failure due to public\nresistance. Policies need to be ambitious and balanced at the same time, which\nis not a trivial task to pursue. Thomas Madreiter adds to the discussion that\nproviding alternatives that work well contribute best to wider adoption of\nthose alternatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Affordable housing:
Social and economic accessibility remains crucial to successful urban and economic development. The City of Vienna manages to tackle the issue of affordable housing in a way that no other metropoly has been able to. The social crisis upcoming around the world \u2013 illustrated by France\u2018s yellow jacket movement – is about the fact that cities increasingly exclude people who built them, says Cecile Maisonneuve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Mobility
\nMobility in a city is not about technology, e-scooters or public transport.\nMobility is about people, about how you fulfill your program of activities\nevery day: working, movies, shopping, taking the kids to school \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cecile Maisonneuve proposes a new urban\nsocial contract. The classical social contract in cities was about taxation: paying\ntaxes bought you services and representatives. The future model can be that we\ngive data. What do we get in return? Mobility, social security, affordable\nhousing, innovation \u2026?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cities as a contributor to climate\nchange<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Madreiter, Vienna\u2018s Director of Planning, sees the contribution of cities as critical in the context of climate change. Vienna initiated climate budgeting in June 2019 to address this as one of many initiatives. Another policy cornerstone in Vienna is affordable housing: Vienna started 100 years ago with its social housing program to tackle social inclusion and social peace. The so-called Red Vienna housing program is still one of the decisive factors that secure Vienna\u2019s position as one of the world\u2019s most livable cities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Urban planning\u2019s daily business is to deal\nwith conflicting goals. Understanding the city as a social ecosystem in a modern\nway means urban policy must find compromises. In other words, the city has\nconflicting interests and that can\u2019t be avoided. Thomas Madreiter concludes\nthat embracing conflict and finding solutions in a collaborative process is\npart of the solution. No single technical solution can solve this problem.\nSolutions will need to involve people and city policies will be about\nconversations and finding solutions to mediate interests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Public policy breakthrough in London<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martin Ferguson, Director of Policy & Research at SOCITM, contributed examples from the UK, citing Charles Booth, a social ecologist, who mapped poverty in London which resulted in a breakthrough in terms of public policy. Breakthroughs in this sense eliminated the blind spot that poverty existed in London. This enabled reformers to influence government to introduce a variety of social reforms that enabled the city to progress. Today the UK looks back on an extraordinary period of austerity in terms of public expenditure. The idea of centralist top-down hierarchical silo-based thinking has stifled innovation in the communities and brought about an inability to do anything to improve the human condition. This is why cities would need to focus on a local level and would need to leave the debate on a national level aside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deficits, according to Martin Ferguson, are\nless about budgets and more about visible shortcomings in other fields like poor\nair quality, unemployment, homelessness and other social problems typically\nmigrating from the countryside to the cities. Manchester City Council and other\nmunicipalities like Barking & Dagenham demonstrated a new way forward based\non a collaborative approach solving citizens\u2018 needs. Barking & Dagenham\ndeveloped a data driven Social Progress Index to look at the causation of problems\nsurrounding poverty and well-being in particular.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The crucial success of urban public policy seems to be whether the real problems that people are facing are being solved and communities are being included in the process. The development of city policy should focus on how to bring humanity back into managing cities. A shift from the Taylorist centrist view to a point that Charles Handy made as a conclusion of this conference two years ago: shifting to a more organic, social, evolving approach to improve the human condition, orchestrating the interactions \u2013 and going beyond harvesting just the low hanging fruit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is one in the Drucker Forum \u201cshape the debate\u201d<\/strong> series relating to the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum<\/a>, under the theme \u201cThe Power of Ecosystems\u201d, taking place on November 21-22, 2019 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF19 #ecosystems<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

#GPDFrapporteur
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The cities of the future we imagined in the 1970ies were about flying cars and beautiful skyscrapers. Where are we now? At micromobility with e-scooters? Where did it all begin? If the Renaissance began in Florence, Smart City began in Silicon Valley. While we know San Francisco as an ideal place to test the latest Smart City tech gadgets their City Government took an interesting decision recently: you now have to demonstrate which public value your technology will bring to the city. What value does your tech bring to the city Cecile Maisonneuve, President of the think tank Fabrique de la Cit\u00e9, kicked off the Session on \u201cCities as Social Ecologies\u201d at the 11th Global [\u2026]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2624,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":""},"categories":[272,237],"tags":[270,238,137,274],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2622"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2622"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2815,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2622\/revisions\/2815"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}