Urbanized Page #5

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We had car dealerships,

clothing stores, bars, lounges,

theaters, restaurants.

Everything you could imagine.

You didn't have

to leave the neighborhood.

You just had everything here.

And people just picked

up and moved away.

And now, we got a bunch of vacant lots

in our neighborhood.

In 2008, I came outside

and saw a bunch of garbage

on the curbs and in the lots.

That's something I never saw

in the neighborhood

and I wanted to do something

about it.

Being out here cleaning up, we were

able to talk to neighbors,

people were coming up to see

what we were doing.

And we found out that

some people were choosing food

over medicine or medicine over food.

So we started a community

garden project.

It kind of turned into

healthy food choices,

cheap food, because we were

giving it away for free.

We got hot peppers,

two beds of okra,

in the back corner's two beds

of mustard and turnip greens.

We have 31 raised beds for vegetables.

And across the street,

there's two vacant lots

where we did an orchard

and across the street from that

is our community center.

And down the street we have two

more community gardens.

The guy that just walked past.

His brother is 22 or 23 years old now.

The first time he saw me picking

carrots out of the garden.

- He said, "Are those carrots?"

- "Yeah."

"I didn't know carrots came out

of the ground!"

I was like, "Where you think they

came from?" - "Out of the bag!"

You're kidding me?

You didn't watch Bugs Bunny?

We don't own the lots.

The city owns them.

But other than letting us do it,

that's really the only thing

the city's done.

It's our blood sweat and tears

that've done it.

I definitely don't expect everyone

to do what I do, but...

I'm trying to say this nicely;

you need to get off your butt and

take care your own.

If you take care of your own,

everything else will fall into place.

There's a lot of parts of the city

where stuff like this is happening.

There are a lot of community

gardens going on.

Maybe not on this big of scale,

but all of us want to do

something like this.

I would almost use the term

"self-organized urbanism"

to describe what's going on there.

In the sense that there is

a kind of possibility,

a sort of DIY aesthetic that does

in fact exist in the city

that is allowing for a lot

of individual initiatives to happen.

And you see that in the urban

agricultural movement

not only with community gardens,

but also with these large-scale

commercial gardens.

There are all sorts of different

retrofitting practices,

not only on an urban scale

but also on an architectural

micro-scale happening in the city.

If we think creatively,

if we think as entrepreneurs,

there is no reason

why in 15, 25, 35 years

we shouldn't be looking

at a very different Detroit.

But we have to change our mental state.

We should be innovating

on how to crack the code

on low carbon and climate change.

And we should be doing that in places

like Southeast Michigan,

given the legacy of production,

and innovation,

and science, and engineering.

That's what we should be doing.

Because at the end of the day,

cities are competing for people,

they're competing for investment.

And so how they develop,

whether they're livable,

whether they're sustainable,

whether they're economically

focused,

whether they're easy places

to do business in,

will affect their prosperity now

and over time.

Today's Beijing, when I go through it,

I see a city I don't recognize.

It's a new Beijing,

but I'm not sure if I like it.

When I was growing up,

my family,

we would take a walk,

after dinner,

summertime, typically.

And then we'd meet people,

friends and relatives, and then

you stop and greet them.

That kind of a feeling of living in a

city is not here anymore.

It's gone.

In the past 30 years, cities were

conceived and designed

to be part of the economical

development, which is okay

but I think livability has really been

ignored until very recently.

So it's not convenient.

It's not comfortable.

Those mistakes,

they didn't have to happen,

even if you build a city fast.

The Chinese are basically struggling

with of course with the same issues,

struggling with traffic,

struggling with public space,

struggling with density,

struggling with how big

a city should be,

should it have history,

should it not have history.

So I think all the issues

are essentially the same.

Every major building

really demands

its own specific scenario

in terms of what you are trying

to achieve with it.

The first consideration

is how could you create place

in a collection of high rise towers.

Because towers basically consume place,

but very few towers manage to create

a larger then itself moment.

And that really explains its shape.

For me one of the more

interesting parts of it

is that it's a building

that doesn't have a single identity,

and that the slightest movement

in the city

actually changes

the building completely.

It has an almost unlimited amount

of different identities.

There is an incredible amount of wasted

effort in the industry.

A fair amount of it is

generated through

the procedure of competitions.

Which is really a complete drain

of intelligence.

I don't know any other profession

that would tolerate this.

At the same time you are important,

we invite your thinking,

but we also announce

that there is an 80% chance

that we will through away

your thinking

and make sure

that it is completely wasted.

I think that very few cities these

days are really designed.

And there's been very little rethinking

of what cities can be.

Particularly...

since we have entrusted in the

market economy so much power.

Since we're still right in the middle

of a very fast urbanization,

cities will be built fast,

but I hope,

I really hope that collectively

we can correct some of the mistakes

made in the past 30 years.

As China builds its cities,

as India builds its cities,

it can't just take the recipe

from 20th century America

and apply it to 21st century China

or 21 st century India.

That would be horrendous for them

and it would be horrendous

frankly for all of us.

Cities today consume 75%

of the world's energy

and therefore contribute

to 75% of CO2 emissions.

Added to that,

40 years from now FA of the world's

population will be living in cities

and they will consume

more and more energy.

So a small reduction of the

environmental footprint

and energy footprint of a city has a

massive impact on the planet.

We're interested in making people

more aware

of their patterns of behavior

so that potentially

they can change them.

In this project we were interested

in electricity usage.

We actually went for a very low-tech

method of recording electricity usage.

So rather than using smart sensors,

each day we got participants

on Tidy Street

to go down

to their electricity meter,

note down the reading

and then they went to our website

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