Monday, August 31, 2020

Back to the future



by Gregory Saville

Today I spoke to some colleagues in Europe about teaching a virtual course in SafeGrowth to students at a Swedish Technical University. It was remarkable in a number of ways. First, although cultural differences between countries make it difficult to apply anything from one place to another, I was amazed at the many similarities between different people in different cultures. It seems we are not all that different. 

But it was another dimension to our conversation that struck me as surreal.

We were using Zoom, speaking in real-time, watching each other’s expressions thousands of miles, and many times zones apart. We showed different images on our computer files and used shared digital calendars to plan the workshop. I had never before met one of those colleagues and yet here we were, quite comfortable getting to share ideas and stories.

We dialed into our call as easy as changing chairs in a coffee shop. There was no difficulty or stress in setting up the meeting (aside from me fumbling with the wrong dial-in code). There was no fear of sharing with someone I had never before met in person.

Such is the reality of daily living in, not only a pandemic, but in the second decade of the 21st Century. 

You may think that is all so, well, ho-hum. But it is actually quite remarkable! 

FLASHBACK TO 1961

It's a hot and muggy summer afternoon in 1961 and journalist Jane Jacobs is banging away on her Underwood typewriter in New York’s Greenwich Village. Her ideas will later turn into one of the most famous urban reform books of her generation “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”. Consider the reality of her world at that time, only one lifetime ago.

A typewriter of 1961 - photo Creative Commons

Overseas commercial jet travel was less than a decade old and a rare event for average citizens. Propeller airplanes were commonly used for overseas travel. Passenger ships were popular for commercial passage to and from Europe (I travelled to Britain on one as a kid 6 years later). Television was a novelty and broadcast in black-and-white. TV signals arrived via cumbersome TV “rabbit ears”. 

Suffice to say the internet and computers did not exist for private citizens. Laptop computers would not be invented for decades to come. For entertainment and amusement, kids would go outside and play. Just imagine! Music was unrecognizable compared to what airs today – the Beatles appearance in the U.S. was still 3 years away. 

In many neighborhoods, ice trucks transported huge ice blocks for home freezer boxes. Widely distributed electronic refrigerators were just being manufactured. Milk arrived at the front door of many homes in the form of a milkman placing milk bottles on your doorstep. Newspapers were delivered by the paperboy to each doorstep and the main source for immediate news was radio. 

During hot and muggy days of a New York summer, apartments like those of Jacobs became sweltering ovens, even with fans and open windows. Air conditioning units were far too large for common use – the rotary compressor was invented only four years earlier. 


The Greenwich Village apartment building where Jacobs lived in 1961

Crime flourished in many neighborhood pockets and, in the decades that followed, many American cities, in particular, would experience an unimaginable explosion of urban crime. The justice system of 1961 was, frankly, utterly unprepared for the crime storm on the horizon. 

FLASH-AHEAD

Now fast forward 60 years from today to 2080! 

What new technologies will shape daily lives? How will we travel and how will we communicate? Will this pandemic, or the next, force us into permanent social distances and some futuristic face covering? Will personal intimacy be relegated to staged meet-ups and software date matching? We have worked with the Swedish Helsingborg City 2022 Smart City initiative and they ask these very questions about our cities of tomorrow.

How will we communicate in 2080?

What will our streets and neighborhoods look like? Will we get climate change under control or will the number and intensity of weather catastrophes erase coastal cities and trigger mass migrations like never before in history? Or will renewable technologies create electric vehicles and flying drones to transport us in highways in the sky? Certainly, those technologies are already in our grasp. Will artificial technologies transform our cities into Smart Cities in which we need no longer worry about car crashes, traffic jams, or traffic? Will cars exist?

The technologies we take for granted today would be fantastical to the Jane Jacobs of 1961. As she pounded away at her typewriter in a humid and stuffy hot New York afternoon, today’s world would be as alien as a Martian from the 1950s science fiction film, War of the Worlds

If we are to believe Einstein (I place my bets on Albert), then time travel is quite impossible. So, there is no way to know what will unfold by 2080. Some of you reading these words will be alive to see those times and I wonder what you will see. 

Today, as I chatted with friends far away, with technologies unimaginable long ago, it occurred that the ideas we develop, the actions we take, and the virtual courses we teach, represent an important drop in the proverbial pond of time. Jacobs wrote well. We learn from her words even today. For the sake of our progeny, may we offer the same kind of wisdom for their future!


4 comments:

  1. I've been reading about assisted neural connections. We already routinely monitor bodily functions in 2020. By 2080 I suspect there will be no external hardware or numbers to phone into and confuse the participants. ATM the breakdown comes with infections, low efficiency power sources for radio frequency telemetry and breakage of internally implanted devices. They will no doubt overcome all of those difficulties.

    I have no doubt that we will all be walking around with internal communication devices particular not to an assigned number, but to a biological signature. Now, if only we could fix that time lag for the 6 to 44 minute delay while we catch up with our family living off planet! Good article - however, the question remains, will enhanced communication make our living spaces safer or more vulnerable. Now that's a topic for our next generation of PhD students.

    I can't wait to see what happens next with bio implants and communications.

    Gerard Cleveland Perth Australia.

    ReplyDelete
  2. How true! While on another Zoom, I teased a recent SafeGrowth class in Calgary that I keep reading books about Mars habitation, and if they didn't get the idea right about improving troubled neighborhoods in future cities that I would be leaving Earth (a prospect I suspect a few of them relished). But looking at all the rapid technical advances I see with SpaceX, Elon Musk, and those types, Mars travel may actually occur within our lifetimes! Scientific and technical advances are such an integral part of the arc of history. We live in interesting times.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great article! We will certainly be kept our toes as we try to navigate our way through this constant and fast-paced change. Keeping a hold on, and being mindful of, the roots that we know can anchor us is a good place to start.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks, Anna. I think your word "navigate" is the right one - it requires a compass of intelligence and reason to keep our heading true. It reminds us that looking forward 60 years in the second decade of the 21st Century demands the same of us as it did for Jacobs in the 60s.

    ReplyDelete

Please add comments to SafeGrowth. I will post everyone except posts with abusive, off-topic, or offensive language; any discriminatory, racist, sexist or homophopic slurs; thread spamming; or ad hominem attacks.

If your comment does not appear in a day due to blogspot problems send it to safegrowth.office@gmail.com and we'll post direct.