Transforming Cities
A design quest for resilience.
Preface by Marzia Aricò
This month’s guest column is by an incredibly talented service designer who specialises in urban development. Alexandra Coutsoucos is on a quest to design resilient living. Cities, with their social and environmental ecosystems, are her object of design.
I have asked her to write an honest blog, sharing her worries, intuitions, and what she sees happening in this field. Her piece is fascinating. It is a must if you work in architecture, city planning, estate development, or urban development. For anyone else, it is an opportunity for reflection on our behaviours and ways to conceptualise our relationship with our environment and ways of living.
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It’s Because of Pluto
Whoever you are, whatever your role in society is, by now, you should’ve noticed an odd combination of unprecedented, disruptive events: extreme weather, global pandemics, political and social turmoil. At this point, I’m assuming you too are aware we’re amid a global polycrisis and that our social, environmental, economic, political and technical paradigms are being shaken. Maybe it’s because Pluto, the planet of destruction, transformation and renewal, is entering a new 15-year cycle in Aquarius, the arena of originality and freedom from conventional thinking. Maybe it’s because we are finally dealing with the consequences of our spoiled living, our galore, almost-century-long exploitation of human and natural resources, which led to a collective hysteria of believing in eternal growth. Fact is that wherever you are from, life as we know it is about to change forever, if it hasn’t yet. With nearly 8 billion people living on this planet and closing in environmental tipping points, it should be clear we can’t keep going on our business as usual. Radical transformations are of order, and we can choose to drive it or be hit by it.
Cities as Resilient Hosts for Social and Environmental Wellbeing
My name is Alexandra Coutsoucos. I’m a strategic and service designer and in case it didn’t transpire by the premises, I’m a tad eco-anxious. This means I spend lots of time worrying about how climate change will make urban infrastructures collapse, kill all the wild animals, make us suffer incredibly hot summers and weird icy winters, and make our lives altogether less colourful and more miserable. It means I constantly feel heavily responsible for my life choices: what I eat, what I buy, what I do in my free time, and how impactful my job choices can be. Driven by the need to ‘do something about it’, next to my fickle, recurring experiments with vegetarianism, activism and buying boycotts, I also started reflecting on how I could contribute professionally to driving positive change. Being mostly inspired by my surroundings and passionate people close to me - mostly architects -, I started developing a fascination with urban systems. I spent the past few years working and specialising in urban regeneration projects across the globe, approaching them through a human lens. What does it mean? It means that as they are, cities are not sustainable environments and don’t enable sustainable behaviours either. On the contrary, they account for 70% of global CO2 emissions. Accounting for 55% of the global population and rising, they need to be reprogrammed, and for a regenerative transformation to be truly rooted and successful, the participation and involvement of local actors are paramount.
Inevitable to ask then: how can cities become resilient hosts for social and environmental well-being?
Being rich in diversity of resources and opportunities for exchange, cities can be great catalysts for the transformations they need. As open-air laboratories where to experiment with transformative interventions, pockets of future and grassroots movements can be identified or ignited, nurtured and scaled when synergically supported by public policies, tools and industry. All the elements for a purposeful transformation are there. How to coordinate actors, resources and efforts?
Designing Cities as Service-Systems
Perhaps due to my professional bias, I like to see cities as (inefficient) networks of services: complex, dynamic systems of actors that move and operate with and within a built environment. Think about all the service systems that shape cities and how we live in it: transportation, food, energy, sewage, and waste systems. While technology does play a great role in providing solutions that are (or try to be) considerate of new needs, if we’re looking to move towards more sustainable ways of living, these innovations also need to be contextualised in everyday life. They need to be complemented and facilitated with behavioural change at an individual and community level. Take, for instance, solar panels, whose energy production depends on sunlight. Considering the fluctuation of energy produced, their locally distributed infrastructure, functionality, and maintenance, they require certain know-how and an adaptation to the use of electricity on the day-to-day. Mainstream distribution of technologies or innovations like that can surely happen through legislation, policy, and infrastructure innovation (top-down). Still, it also has to happen through something more subtle that entails people's willingness to own such a change.
Thankfully, we are witnessing more and more in social groups (creative communities), new forms of organisations and experimentation to front new urban challenges. Whether facilitated by service systems, participated processes or at all spontaneous, new ways of living and producing that are in line with resilient, distributed systems logics are emerging. Examples are groups of people that share the economic and environmental burden of services like mobility or white goods that organise forms of mutual help to share care labour. Also, expressions of local productive activities such as markets or fablabs can be platforms of direct trade between local producers and consumers while linked to wider global networks of skills and values. These examples are expressions of social innovation that serve as solutions to social and environmental challenges while revitalising shared resources.
These examples also imply an adaptation of the built environment to host new uses: consider common spaces in apartment buildings for shared services or how shared mobility is (not) integrated on streets. So the built environment needs to be adaptive and flexible to host new, dynamic programming, as a result of transformative experiments driven by a collective of locally grounded, globally sourced expertise. Complementarily, a bit like software to hardware, new facilitated forms of governance and service systems should enable a quicker adaptation to emerging challenges in cities. During Covid-19, for example, at the peak of the housing crisis that left many struggling to find a place to stay, the business centre of Rotterdam was left a ghost town for almost a whole year. I always thought it was such a wasted opportunity.
It’s evident then how the built environment, service systems and social innovation need to work in synergy, as well as industry, public sector, and citizens to create new paradigms in cities for resilient living. In my view, this synergy requires a design approach in the broadest sense. While there is obviously no one method or tool that will precisely do just that, we can certainly borrow practices that proved useful in creating connections from a variety of fields. For instance, systems thinking is fundamental in analysing, mapping, and illustrating the interconnectedness of both tangible and intangible elements that form an urban setting, aiding the identification of leverages for change.
Case Study: Human Cities/ SMOTIES
I'm currently involved in a European-funded project focused on revitalising 10 small and remote areas across Europe. We've extensively researched and mapped the local social, spatial, and economic networks, as well as the needs and aspirations of the community and public institutions. This comprehensive understanding of the local ecosystem has enabled us to identify subdued yet valuable aspects vital for the social, cultural, and touristic vibrancy of these places. Through a collaborative process with locals and with consideration for the town's unique characteristics, we've proposed a series of light interventions in public spaces to enhance and innovate their usage, leveraging the rich local heritage.
Transformations like this require true transdisciplinarity, meaning we need to learn to speak different languages and most importantly, to learn to listen diligently to as many. Creating the space to create a shared language through participatory practices, co-design, and co-creative activities becomes paramount. They are necessary to work horizontally across disciplines as well as vertically through power structures. As creative, democratic arenas, such spaces can help ground understanding of each other’s needs, values, and aspirations and help find common ground or dissonance in future visions while creating opportunities for the emergence of new problems-solution links. With participatory practices (community engagement, placemaking, co-creation, whatever nuance you want to give it) the transformative process becomes as important as its outcomes, and as such, it also needs design.
A Revolution of Care
In simple terms, we need to learn to get along (following principles of inclusivity), we need to learn to nurture the ecosystem that feeds us (regeneration), and we need cities and their inhabitants to develop adaptation mechanisms to the ever-changing conditions dictated by upcoming crises (resilience). This is a transformative process that extends beyond technology, impacting social paradigms and serving as a catalyst for changes in productive, consumption, and economic models. These are the infamous ‘wicked’ challenges: open, complex, dynamic and networked, multi-layered bundles of problems that don’t have a unique solution and can’t be solved with linear logic but need a systemic, participatory approach. The good news is there are already plenty of solutions to these issues sprinkled around the world. The bad news is that we’re creatures of habit, and systemic changes take time and coordinated effort.
Looking at the effects of this polycrisis can be overwhelming. As ruptures, crises disrupt orders and inevitably create chaos. But while it is an overwhelmingly scary occurrence, it’s a great opportunity too. We’re in the ‘it’s getting worse’ part before it gets better. But let’s beware, a purely eco-modernist perspective– believing technology will save us and that the best is yet to come– sets us up for disappointment. The transformations we’re anticipating serve to patiently subvert and heal deeply unhealthy systems that put our natural resources - and us, as a consequence - in a very fragile position. This is a revolution of care. So don’t move fast and break things. Pay attention and clean up after your mess. Reflect, together and alone, fix things, maintain them, listen, get out of your comfort zone, and experiment. This is the time to set new norms.
While I hope I didn’t dry you out, I also hope that some of the things I wrote resonated with you. Want to follow up with me? Do get in touch. I love talking about this stuff.
Credits
Huge credits go to POLIMI Desis Lab which coordinates and develops "Human Cities/ SMOTIES - Creative works in small and remote places", a four-year international design research project co-funded by Creative Europe. The context of this research and the wonderful collaboration with the research team (Davide Fassi, Annalinda De Rosa, Marco Finardi to name a few!) greatly contributed to the reflections behind this blog.
References
Manzini, E. (2018). Politiche del quotidiano: progetti di vita che cambiano il mondo. Edizioni di comunità.
Meroni, A., & Selloni, D. (2022). Service design for urban commons. Springer Nature.
Bresciani, S., Tjahja, C., Komatsu, T., & Rizzo, F. (2023). Social innovation for climate neutrality in cities: actionable pathways for policymakers.
Clive Hamilton (2017) Defiant Earth, the Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene Polity Press, Cambridge
Manzini, E. (2013). Resilient systems and cosmopolitan localism—The emerging scenario of the small, local, open and connected space. Economy of Sufficiency, 70, 70-81.
De Rosa, A., Auricchio, V., & Finardi, M. (2023). Relational design practices in design for social innovation: a place-centred approach. In Proceedings of IASDR 2023: Life-changing Design (pp. 1-28). Design Research Society.
De Rosa, A., & Sasso, G. (2022). Spatial design+ service design: Framing a transdisciplinary perspective. PROCEEDINGS OF DRS, 1-17.
Vink, J., & Koskela-Huotari, K. (2022). Building reflexivity using service design methods. Journal of Service Research, 25(3), 371-389.
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