“This weekend, dear, shall we clean out the basement or go solar?” This scenario may soon be a real possibility, using a back-to-the-future approach called thermoelectric paint.

Despite their many benefits, solar photovoltaic panels are not a do-it-yourself delight. Installing them is complex and typically requires someone certified to do it. They’re expensive too, and with payback times of 10 years or more, they require a real commitment.

Now imagine a home energy system that, like solar PVs, harnessed the sun’s power – but was something you could easily do yourself. This is the promise of thermoelectricity.

Thermoelectric materials have a cold side and a warm side. The warm side releases charge, which flows to the cold side, at which point you have a separation of positive and negative charge and, hey presto, electricity!

In the 1950s, solar pioneer Maria Telkes used thermoelectric materials to generate a very modest flow of electricity. But the cost of the material and the inefficiency of the process made silicon solar panels considerably more cost effective. Solar thermoelectric landed in the technology junk heap, and remained there for decades.

Recently, researchers began investigating if thermoelectric materials might offer a way around a fundamental constraint on solar PV development. Because PVs can make use of only a relatively narrow range of the light spectrum, their efficiency is limited: the best commercial models currently available have a maximum of around 20%. Since thermoelectric materials have the potential to make use of a much broader range of the spectrum, they can potentially beat solar photovoltaics on price and performance – even with inferior efficiency.

Professor Charles Stafford, a theoretical physicist at the University of Arizona, recently published a paper arguing that thermoelectric paint could provide an affordable, consumer-friendly path to solar energy usage. “Our calculations show that quantum effects should lead to very large thermoelectric voltages in these materials. And if the materials are cheap enough, we don’t need to worry that much about efficiency”, he says. He has identified a type of polymer called polyphenyl ethers that might do the trick.

How far down the road toward commercialisation are we? Not very. “I’m a theoretical physicist”, Stafford points out. Still, while noting that “the devil is in the details”, he does not “foresee anything that will block it. With the right push, thermoelectric paint could be on the market five years from now.”

Which means we could all soon be up on the rooftops, rolling out solar.

This article originally appeared in Green Futures, the magazine of independent sustainability experts Forum for the Future. Image courtesy of TheGiantVermin on flickr

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When we think of getting from point A to point B, we normally think along the lines of efficiency. Google Maps gives us options, categorizing our choices by route length and estimated time of travel, but nowhere does it say which the most interesting route to take is. Public transport is by and large stuck in the same simplistic mindset of speed and efficiency.In a new e-book called Making Transit Fun! How to Entice Motorists from Their Cars (and onto Their Feet, a Bike, or Bus), urban designer Darrin Nordahl challenges public transport-planners (and takers) to level the playing field with car manufacturers and add joy to our daily commute.

Nordahl rightly notes, “The automobile industry and its associated infrastructure are heavily subsidized, while budgets are routinely cut for public transport. Why? Because people love cars. We love their style and we love what they represent, namely status American culture, and freedom. So, we lobby vigorously to preserve our status, our culture, and those perceived freedoms. Only when transit snares popular affection will people fight for it.”

Nordahl shares numerous playful public transport projects. What if bus stops looked like giant, delectable fruits? Could love seats on a bus add levity to an otherwise dull bus ride? What if instead of boring old bus stop seats we got swings instead? I would love to see any of these options (or more) implemented in and around my city. Just reading about them sets my transit-riding heart aflutter.

Nordahl doesn’t just stay in the realm of fanciful interventions like these. As his book subtitle indicates, he covers the whole range of transport by also focusing on cyclists and pedestrians. One of his most intriguing investigations is how to break the cycling quandary. He suggests that to increase the abysmal percentages of cycling in America (0.6 percent versus 37 percent in Copenhagen), perhaps we should look to the needs of the fairer sex for safety and practicality.

He suggested something I would love to see more of in the city – a dedicated cycleway with a physical barrier. He argues, having the security of an actual barrier allows all cyclists to really enjoy the experience of riding without worrying about zooming cars endangering them. Nordahl confidently dissects problem areas and suggests strategies that one could use to answer those problems.

In the last chapter, Nordahl answers the all-important money question. Can public transport actually afford to add in an element of fun? “Contrary to what our gut tells us, good design—the kind that provides utility and delight—can be affordable. The issue here is not about spending more, but spending smarter. Sure, designing for the human experience will indeed be an extra and likely expensive cost if it is an afterthought…but when we design our sidewalks, bike lanes and transportation circulators with the concern for human experience at the forefront joy is surprisingly cheap,” writes Nordahl. Convincingly, he cites a study from a Political Economy Research Institute that found at for every $1 million spent on pedestrian and bike projects, 14 jobs are created versus the seven jobs in road construction. In the long run, great transit costs less, affect our environment less and provide more jobs. That’s one big win for transit, if only they can seduce us to their side.

If you find yourself wondering what fun public transport could look like, Nordahl is a great place to spark some ideas. It’s a quick two-hour read full of well-researched examples and compelling arguments on the power of fun to affect our transportation experience.

Images courtesy of Mark Dodds, SWANclothing and Diego3336 on flickr 

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Sustainability as a movement is picking up pace globally. The ancestors of environmental consciousness have long-ruled the sector, holding ecological footprints at high value. Some cities have been recognized for quite some time for their sustainability efforts long before being ecological was a trend.

These days, however, cities are overcoming environmental challenges they’ve been faced with and are emerging as global leaders making positive environmental changes.

Songdo, South Korea is an example of development done right. A city literally built atop swampland just 40 miles from Seoul was a design plan by Kohn Pederson Fox, an international architecture firm. The concept, birthed with a blend of state-of-the-art innovation and sustainability in mind, includes South Korea’s tallest building.

Most impressive though is that Songdo happens to be the first LEED Neighborhood in South Korea, and all of its buildings either meet or exceed LEED standards. With 40-percent green space boasting a 100-acre Central Park rivaling that of New York, Songdo is more than just a big city filled to the brim with skyscrapers. It also happens to be a green mecca.

The city is an inspiration for architectural design teams worldwide, demonstrating that big-city development can, in fact, be quite environmentally friendly.

And from an opposite perspective, Medellin, Colombia shows us that any (yes, any) city can overcome its former challenges and become a global leader from a sustainability perspective. Once deemed the most violent city in the world, heavy with the pollution of drug cartels and filth, Medellin’s latest mayor, Fajardo Valderrama has shifted the city to a new glory.

Having won the 2012 Sustainable Transport Award alongside San Francisco by the Institute of Transportation and Development Policy, Medellin has demonstrated leadership and innovation in transit options. Installing a complex escalator system connecting Comuna 13, formerly Medellin’s poorest community, to its city center, all residents have access to city navigation.

Additionally, Medellin has implemented a bikeshare and rideshare program that allows residents the opportunity to partake in systems where 160 public bikes can be utilized for 30-minute increments.

And as for its rideshare program? “Medellin pioneered the use of cable cars as a transit alternative in low-income informal settlements in hilly areas, moving 3,000 passengers per hour per direction; a real breakthrough now being replicated in Caracas and Rio de Janeiro,” said EMBARQ Director Holger Dalkmann.

Both of these cities represent polar approaches to becoming more sustainable, and subsequently–global leaders and inspirations. Development doesn’t have to be environmentally detrimental, and even the most ecologically, and socially-torn cities can overcome their past and intact a plan for a bright green future.

Images courtesy of Michele Travierso and robertschrader on flickr

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It took me a while to get accustomed to a small city, but I ended up enjoying the life of a “little town”: being able to walk everywhere all the time, running into acquaintaces in the street, getting to know every nook and cranny of the colonial city, taking part in local traditions and the discussion of public issues.

Especially on the issue of public life, I always think back to Plato’s ideal polis with only 5,000 inhabitants. A city that size is way too small in our times, but that cap on population had a reason: it allowed for citizen participation, so that every citizen could have a measurable contribution to the polis (and yes, I do know that not everyone was allowed citizenship, and therefore direct participation, in Ancient Greek democracy…)

While I lived in Guanajuato, people protested passionately against a real estate development in a protected environmental zone. Passing out flyers and putting up posters was a great way to swing public opinion. People discussed the issue on the streets and they were passionate about protecting their city.

When I came back to Mexico City, I realized it’s hard to know where to start. A poster here does nothing, let alone a flyer. The city is so big; it consumes so much of our time and energy that participation in public life is reduced to a minimum. People can’t be passionate about cities they don’t even know that well because of their size.

How can we bring back that community, that participation from microcities to megacities? Social media has certainly allowed us to do this more efficiently, but we can’t just participate online; we have to reconnect with people in the real world.  How do we make people passionate about their megacities, so they are moved to participate?

Part of This Big City’s Megacities/Microcities series.

Image courtesy of Javier Hidalgo on flickr

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Easy enough, right?

But changing the living arrangements of tens of millions of Americans isn’t as easy as simply changing their tastes in geography. Sure, cities are getting more  desirable for young, creative Americans, but how many can afford to stay in the city when they start a family and need to move out of their closet-sized studio? And can you blame the couple that wants their own patch of green without having to wake up the sound of garbage trucks and revelers at 4 AM?

The suburbs resemble that escape hatch from the pressures of city life. It’s the easy way out. Walking 5 blocks to the dirty, either freezing or boiling subway to wait for a train and get to the crowded and overpriced grocery store, or hop in your car, drive five minutes, and not have to carry your groceries more than 60 collective feet. Yes, there are days when I long for the suburbs. And yes, I can hear the collective groan of my hardened urbanist friends now.

But the suburbs are far from perfection, breeding inefficiencies and inequalities of the economic, environmental and demographic form. They can’t be unbuilt though, so here’s a list of current problems and potential fixes for our neighbours in the sprawl:

1. Energy and Resource Use

Vertical living is relatively easy on the earth: hot water is typically communal, cutting out the need for individual tanks for every 3 or 4 people. Electricity distribution is concentrated as is potable water infrastructure and heating, and smaller abodes typically mean less intense energy use.  You’re also squeezing more people into less space allowing goods and services to be more efficiently parceled out.

Most of the efficiencies that can squeezed out of the suburbs are in transportation-related improvements, but there is still ground to be broken on immobile energy technology. Solar water heaters have been installed on top of 30 million households in China and the technology has gotten to the point where the panels operate even when the sun isn’t blazing. District heating, where temperatures for thousands of homes can be regulated by a single, centralized plant, has been embraced by countries in Europe and Asia and plants are increasingly turning away from fossil fuels in favor of alternative energy. The best part: neither technology is density dependent. You can have your yard and trimmed hedges and nosy neighbors and still heat your house and your showers without the inconvenient plume of carbon dioxide.

2. Environmental Degradation Due to Development

Suburban buildings harm the environment for a pretty simple reason: they’re new. Even if they’re built out of recycled pizza by a hemp clad all-vegan construction crew and go LEED triple platinum, new buildings still leave a foundation-sized footprint and, as the well worn theory goes, used always trumps new when it comes to the environment. Those negative impacts are magnified when firms decide to build in geographies that are, outside of millions of dollars in resource infrastructure, generally uninhabitable. Thousands of people were never meant to live in the Nevada of Arizona desert, so why are we building sprawling ranch houses with lush green lawns outside of Las Vegas and Tucson? Well, because we keep buying them.

Once again the secret to improving the environment is in the economy. When you buy a house in the ‘burbs, you are buying a final realization, a product of brick and mortar and sweat and engineering without having to pay for the externalities associated with the your home—the miles of pipe sucking water from an overworked aquifer, the stretch of concrete from your garage to a major onramp, etc. The non-inclusive (and often, non-monetized) costs are called externalities and there has been a decades’ long clamoring to capture these costs correctly in the form of excise taxes. The argument has generally been focused on drivers who have been paying a paltry $0.184 in gas taxes to the Federal government for two decades—even conservative economists say that it doesn’t even begin to capture the true cost of driving.

So what if we actually made developers and surburbanites pay the true cost of that immaculate green rectangle and spare bedroom? It sounds coldly practical but monetizing and penalizing for environmental degradation is among the only ways to actually influence development and consumer actions; if you want to move to the middle of the desert and expect a constant source of freshwater where there just isn’t any, then you (and the firm that built your home) should have to pay for more than just the infrastructure, you should have to pay what it actually costs the environment as a whole.

3. Transportation

If there’s one thing about living in suburban California I’ve learned it’s that driving is a necessity. The nearest grocery store is 1.5 miles away, my brother’s school is another 5, and the majority of jobs are between 10 and 50. There’s a bus system on main thoroughfares but, in what seems like a complete slap in the collective face of urban planning and/or simple logic, residences aren’t on any of the main thoroughfares. Transportation in the suburbs is not a structural problem, it’s a geographic one.

$4 per gallon gas isn’t enough to change driving habits significantly nor is it enough to spur ambitious and ubiquitous pursuit towards alternative methods of propulsion. The general consensus, though, is that oil production will peak and begin a relatively swift decline especially as the economies of India, China, and Brazil step up their demand for light sweet crude. Americans will eventually be looking down the barrel at $10 or $12 gasoline—more than enough to drive major automotive manufacturers towards something other than combustion engines.

We’ve seen what industry titans like Nissan and Chevrolet can do with relatively modest cuts of their R&D budgets, as well as what boutique companies like Tesla and, more recently, Fisker can cut from whole cloth in terms of all electric vehicles. Others have experimented with hydrogen-powered vehicles, but these are almost exclusively niche products.

Of course, there is the argument that the volume of emissions and waste that goes into making a new car negates the effect that any low-or-zero emission car will have over its lifetime. But that theory lacks foresight. If alternative energy vehicles begin to switch market positions with their petrol-powered counterparts then eventually you create a secondary market that is essentially zero-impact and, by proxy, allow communities that are auto-based become saturated with earth friendly cars.

That endgame is down the road, admittedly, but one wonders what auto manufacturers could do if they really put their collective backs into creating more than niche vehicles. Would two car garages be as menacing to the progressive urbanist if they housed a Leaf and a Volt?

We’ve gotten ourselves into a mess when it comes to suburban sprawl but it’s not the type of problem that can be solved through tearing down and building back up. The imprint of the suburbs will last for decades in the US, and people will continue to leave apartment blocks for ranch houses and colonials for reasons of cost and aesthetics and health while simultaneously degrading the environment and straining the country’s infrastructure. Inefficiencies abound but razing the ‘burbs isn’t the answer, as much as many of you want it to be! Changing the culture is a much cleaner alternative.

This Big City’s Megacities/Microcities series runs throughout May.

Images courtesy of ulybug and Stacy Lynn Baum on flickr

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It may be tiny, but it’s driving a big vision. This electric vehicle from MIT is the first commercial stage of a new urban transport system. It’s designed to give city dwellers the freedom of individual transport, without the stress of tailbacks and endless searches for parking spaces.

The car has been branded Hiriko – the Basque word for ‘urban’ – by the (Spanish) Basque investment group Denokinn, which has partnered MIT to take it to the road. Kicking off with a trial production of 20 cars and a pilot programme in Vitoria Gasteiz, near Bilbao, Denokinn plans to bring the car to cities around the world, targeting a vehicle price of €12,500 if sold to private individuals. Barcelona, Berlin and San Francisco have also signed up for trial runs.

The smartest element of the car itself is the wheels. Each one combines an integrated electric motor, steering, suspension and braking, so they don’t require a drivetrain or transmission. This means the cars can fold up to park, stacking three to a standard space. And, as all four wheels can turn, they can spin on their axis like ballerinas – much more elegant than the neatest three-point turns.

The whole car has a modular design that makes for easy upgrades, assembly and maintenance, according to Ryan Chin, a researcher at MIT. Smarter still is the mobile network which means these cars can communicate with each other and with smartphones – ideal for sharing schemes, along the lines of Paris’ Autolib [see 'Paris hosts the world’s first municipal EV hire scheme']. The range is 100km, plenty for short city hops.

But whatever the fate of the car, we’re likely to see more smart wheels on the road, integrated into other vehicles, such as light trucks. And the more applications, the cheaper they’ll be.

This Big City’s Megacities/Microcities series runs throughout May.

This article originally appeared in Green Futures, the magazine of independent sustainability experts Forum for the Future.

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You’re in the local supermarket buying a box of breakfast cereal. You pick up a box, and before dropping it in the trolley, give it a quick swipe with your smartphone. The near field communications (NFC) transceiver in your phone wirelessly reads the box’s radio frequency identity (RFID) chip. Up pops an app which cross-references the ID with an online database – and instantly relays the nutritional details of all those oats and nuts.

Intrigued, you open your other shopping app. This time, instead of calorie counts, a first-hand account of where the cereal comes from appears on the screen, with the option to listen to comments from the farm workers who grew it. Anecdotes of long hours and unpaid wages accompany some shots of the rainforest that was cleared to make way for the plantation. Zoom in and there’s a list of species whose habitats were destroyed in the process, along with real-time reports of water levels in the river used for irrigation and the historical depth of topsoil in neighbouring fields.

You put the box back on the shelf…

It might seem far-fetched, but this is how ethical shopping could work within the next couple of years. Product tagging with RFID  technology is fast becoming the norm, and the latest Android smartphones already come with NFC radios built in. The seemingly improbable part – an online database of production data matched to RFID codes and maintained not by communications specialists but by people on the ground – is about to be launched by a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, Mark Graham.

It’s called Wikichains.

“The goal of Wikichains is not to push any particular standpoint”, says Graham, “but rather to allow people to make more informed ethical choices.” For him, it’s “vitally important” that consumers can access information about the impact of their purchasing decisions. His ambition is to encourage a “new type of consumption based on knowledge [and] transparency” by attaching information to everyday objects – and that this transparency will drive better practice up the supply chain.

Good old activist zeal might get Wikichains off the ground, but what will make it possible is a relatively new approach to data. More rapidly than ever before, we can gather, disseminate and access data from almost anything, and turn it into something useful, such as a statistic, graph or Google Map. And more of us are asking how we can harness these new skills for sustainability.

The promise is great. If we can interpret and apply the information we have access to in an intelligent way, we could solve many issues – such as how to cut waste in our food supply chains, make it easy to move around our megacities, or turn our gas-guzzling homes into smart systems.

But for some, it’s more than mere problem-solving: it’s a form of art. Take David McCandless, Founder of Information is Beautiful: a book, online platform and – arguably – an aesthetic movement. His aim is to create data visualisations which reveal the “hidden connections, patterns and stories” in the world. Recent examples, including one which charts the decline of North Atlantic fish stocks from 1900-2000, and another showing the risk to major cities of sea level rise, are worth a thousand words about climate change…

For Hugh Knowles, Principal Sustainability Advisor for Forum of the Future, this issue of presentation is the question of the data age. Data by itself is overwhelming, he argues. But if your aim is to use the data to incite more sustainable patterns of behaviour, making it look pretty isn’t enough:

“Even the most beautiful visualisation has to be given cultural relevance if it’s going to encourage sustainable change”, says Knowles. “If you can make data meaningful within the community, through comparison or by giving it a social context, then you have a chance to create behaviour change on a long-term basis.”

To illustrate the point, Knowles turns to smart meters. Though it’s still early days to measure their impact precisely, evidence suggests that current domestic smart meters only have a temporary effect on energy consumption. After three to six months, the novelty of seeing real time usage figures wears off and householders revert back to their previous behaviour. It’s just numbers, which – taken out of context – are neither engaging nor significant.

A more effective strategy for engaging consumers in the long term, says Knowles, is that used by Opower in the US. Opower takes the data from smart meters and compares it (without naming names) to that of your neighbours, using graphics, bar charts and SMS alerts. Suddenly you’re no longer looking at numbers: you’re looking at well-presented information about the behaviour of your neighbours – and, crucially, how you match up. This added dimension – peer pressure – is a real motivator.

Derek Foster is trying to replicate this comparative approach at an institutional scale. A researcher at Lincoln University’s Social Computing Research Centre, Foster is part of the team working on Electro Magnates, investigating ways of encouraging staff and students in universities and other public buildings to meet goals for reducing consumption.

“A lot of energy reporting tools are really hard to comprehend”, Foster says – citing measures like the kilowatt-hour, which remain unfamiliar to many. Foster’s team of computer scientists, psychologists and sustainability experts wants to use a mix of games, dashboards and social networking sites to help people understand their impacts. But for Foster, the big challenge isn’t so much making the data relevant to people, as getting hold of it in the first place:

“You actually have to use a dial-up modem to dial into the meter, which is hideously slow, costly and unreliable. Then the software to read it is really expensive: you’re talking around a thousand pounds per licence per modem, plus some sort of corporate analytic software… and that’s tens of thousands of pounds, plus a yearly maintenance contract.”

The problem of access is widespread, and most theorists believe the solution lies in the ‘semantic web’. The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee to describe what some think will be the next major stage of the internet. In the semantic web, a common set of languages and readable formats will be used for all machine-to-machine communications.

If realised, the semantic web could look a lot like Pachube. Pronounced ‘Patch Bay’, this online service bridges the gap between collecting data and formatting it for general use. Anyone can plug a tool for collecting data (such as an environmental sensor) into Pachube, and its servers translate the output into a ‘language’ that open-source software, such as Google Maps, can use.

One project which uses Pachube to compare data from multiple sources is Japan’s Geigermap. Real-time radiation-level readings are fed into Pachube from over 200 sensors scattered across the country, and plotted on a common Google Map. Any individual or institution is free to connect their meters to the network, and they do. At the time of writing, several sensors near to Fukushima were showing radiation levels 100 times that of the average public space in Japan.

Other examples include six ‘weather tunnels’, which gather data about carbon dioxide and monoxide levels, humidity, light, noise and temperature – from Helsinki, London, New York, Berlin, Seoul and Arizona. Together they create a real-time air quality monitoring system that anyone can access.

It all goes to show that, once data is published and accessible, it becomes a catalyst for creativity. Rewired State, an organisation based in London, is dedicated to unleashing that force, finding new ways to use the information we have.

John Bevan is responsible for running ‘hack days’ on behalf of the organisation. At these, up to 100 developers get together on a voluntary basis, tapping into data streams to create application prototypes in as short a time as possible.

“There is an energy that comes from doing things quickly”, says Bevan, “It’s something you can work on for a day or two and forget about. It’s an intellectual exercise, a test of your skills, an opportunity to learn a new language.”

But the aim isn’t just to give geeks a fun day out. “Our motto is ‘Coding for a better country’”, Bevan explains.“[We use the] developers’ skills to make things better: save time, money, energy, reveal inefficiencies in supply chains and take cars off the streets.”

One application to come out of these hack days helps people with electric vehicles work out how far they can go and where they can juice up. EVPointFinder, by Michael Dales, draws on data generated by charging point companies to offer drivers information on the location of charge points and their status (available, in use, offline). They can even see where coverage between different areas overlaps enough to make a longer journey possible.

Another is PedalMania, which takes data about the status of bicycle sharing stations in London’s citywide cycle sharing scheme, and encourages users to ride bikes from full racks to empty ones. This way, fewer trucks have to be sent round in the evening to do the job.

The potential of such creative energy is vast. And all that’s required in way of fuel is… data.

Former journalist and internet entrepreneur Greg Hadfield is leading a campaign to turn his home town of Brighton and Hove into an “open-data city”. Based on the models of San Francisco, Washington, Edmonton and London, the Open Data Brighton and Hove group is pushing local authorities to open not just their books, but their servers too.

Open data in this sense, says Hadfield, is about creating cities that “think like the web”. Developers draw on technologies which “grew up in the global village” to create cohesive, networked and sustainable communities. Locals can access applications which draw on public data to tell them things like where the buses are, which farmers’ markets are open, what the air quality is like, and how much power this street or that municipal building is consuming.

“It’s about much more than transparency”, explains Hadfield. “It’s about co-production. We generate the data together; we clean it, curate it and add value to it. We all benefit from outcomes that are, quite literally, unimaginable.” No one really knows what the open data city will look like in the future.

“Open data is the straw to build the bricks: the mansions are yet to be designed”, Hadfield enthuses. And that, for him, is what’s really exciting: “The architect is as likely to be the teenager in a backroom in Barnsley, Brighton, Boston or Bangalore, as a person sitting in
bloated bureaucracy.”

Some worry that this new age of omniscience could alienate the less data-literate among us – or that we could find ourselves too rich in knowledge and too poor in understanding. Hadfield is dismissive: “Information overload is nothing compared with ignorance overload. We didn’t build libraries because people were literate; we built them to help people to become literate.”

This Big City’s Megacities/Microcities series runs throughout May. 

This article originally appeared in Green Futures, the magazine of independent sustainability experts Forum for the Future. Images courtesy of jonnimont and slaff on flickr.

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But walkability isn’t just about hilliness or proximity to shops, its a combination of many different factors.  Now Walkonomics.com has created walkability maps of San Francisco that compare the Hilliness of streets to several other factors including:

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I’ve written before about how much I enjoy living in a small home in a walkable neighbourhood. Apparently I am not the only one. Real estate trends, urban planning theorists, and architects in North America are coming to the realization that more and more young people – Generation Y –  and even their soon-to-be-empty nest parents, want a smaller home. And not just anywhere, they want it in a walkable community. And most of those Generation Yers don’t even want to own a car!

If you are a relatively young person who grew up in the 80s like me, you probably grew up in the suburbs on a street surrounded by big homes with big driveways and big backyards. Walking to school was a 20-30 minute walk past more big homes with the odd gas station, fast food joint and 7-11 along the way. Other than this walk to school, you spent most of your time in a car. Getting your license was the ultimate ticket to freedom.

If you are like me, you do not look back at this as the ideal lifestyle because – lets face it – no matter how sexy car companies make driving look, it is expensive, boring and stressful.

As an adult, I have no desire to return this lifestyle. Unless I become a farmer (which would be nice but horribly impractical), I do not want a big house surrounded by other big homes.

North American demographics, car buying trends and real estate market research are all converging to prove what the urban planning community has been touting for years: the home of the future is small and in a walkable community.

America’s National Association of Realtors’ 2011 Community Preference Survey found that 58 percent of respondents indicated a preference for “a neighborhood with a mix of houses and stores and other businesses within an easy walk.”

This makes sense considering demographic trends. According to a recent Atlantic Cities article, the two largest generations – the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) and Millennials (born 1981-2000) - are reducing the share of total households with children, traditionally the portion of the market most interested in suburban homes with sizeable lots for kids to play in and grownups to maintain. Neither the Millennials with their preference for urban lifestyles nor the empty-nesting Boomers fit that suburban home market to nearly the same degree as their parents did. According to a recent article by Patrick Doherty of the New America Foundation:

Boomers and millennials, the two largest demographic groups in the country, are converging in a time-of-life moment where what they want is smaller homes on smaller lots in walkable, service-rich, transit-oriented communities. Boomers, who have just started turning 65, are empty-nesting and downsizing.  Millennials are in the process of getting married and having kids, and according to market surveys, 77 percent simply don’t ever want to go back to the ‘burbs. 

We need to build more dense, walkable communities, but what do homes in these communities look like?

Due to limited geography and developers preferences, Vancouver has spent the past 10 years focused entirely on building a walkable, liveable downtown filled with high rise condos. While this worked for downtown, not everyone in the rest of the city wants a one story home in the sky. Some people want a front door, an entrance to the outdoors, a small yard/outdoor space, two stories, not living under someone, etc.

If we build smaller homes, we can still have walkability without relying entirely on condos. There are many options. A recent article by Dan Parolek in Better! Cities & Towns: Missing middle housing: Responding to demand for urban living notes that we need a complete paradigm shift in the way that we design, locate, regulate, and develop homes. As a report by  Urban Land Institute states, “it’s a time to rethink and evolve, reinvent and renew.” Missing Middle housing types, such as duplexes, fourplexes, bungalow courts, mansion apartments, and live-work units, are a critical part of the solution.

Vancouver’s new laneway housing initiative is a step in the right direction, but there are several middle housing types that also need to be encouraged to allow more density, affordability and walkability in existing neighbourhoods. My only hope is that Vancouver City Hall, developers and particularly residents continue to embrace these more gentle forms of density in our neighbourhoods so that young families can continue to live in the city. High-rise condo living is not for every one, but few people want a big home any more. Not me. Not Generation Y. Not even our parents.

This Big City’s Megacities/Microcities series runs throughout May. 

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1. Converting a Victorian House into a Bright Green Home
2. Microcities: Five of the World’s ‘Smallest’ Cities
3. What Will a Typical 2050s Home be Like?

Innovation is critical to economic growth, progress, and the fate of the planet. Although innovation may seem to happen at random, planners and politicians could take advantage of patterns that emerge to encourage innovation and growth.

One emergent pattern, spanning centuries, is that the pace of innovation is perpetually accelerating, driven by a combinatorial explosion of possible recombinations of good ideas that accumulate over history. And that is why cities are the crucible of innovation.

Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute argues that cities are an autocatalytic attractor and an amplifier of innovation. On average, people are more innovative and productive when they live in a city because ideas can cross-pollinate more easily. Matt Ridley calls it “ideas having sex”. This positive network effect drives a positive feedback loop – attracting the best and the brightest to flock to the salon of the mind, the memeplex of modernity.

Why does this drive innovation and accelerating change? In The Nature of Technology, Brian Arthur argues that ’all technologies are combinations of technologies that already exist.’ In any academic field, today’s advances are built on a large edifice of history. This is the foundation of progress, something that was not so evident to the casual observer before the age of science. Science tuned the process parameters for innovation, and became the best method for a culture to learn.

The number of possible idea groupings grows exponentially as new ideas come into the mix (Reed’s Law). This explains the innovative power of urbanisation and networked globalisation. And it explains why interdisciplinary ideas are so powerfully disruptive; islands of cognitive isolation such as academic disciplines are vulnerable to disruptive memes, much like South America was to smallpox from Cortés and the Conquistadors.

So what evidence do we have of accelerating technological change? At Draper Fisher Jurvetson, we see it in the diversity and quality of the entrepreneurial ideas arriving each year across our global offices. Scientists do not slow their thinking during recessions.

For a good mental model of the pace of innovation, consider Moore’s Law in the abstract – the annual doubling of computer power or data storage. As Ray Kurzweil has plotted, exponential progress spans from 1890 to 2012, across countless innovations, technology substrates, and human dramas – with most contributors completely unaware that they were fitting a pattern.

Moore’s Law is a primary driver of disruptive innovation – such as the iPod usurping the Sony Walkman franchise. And now it drives not only IT and communications, but also genomics, medical imaging and the life sciences. As Moore’s Law crosses critical thresholds, what was formerly a lab science of trial and error experimentation becomes a simulation science – accelerating the pace of progress and creating opportunities for new entrants in new industries. As a result, the industries effected by the latest wave of tech’ entrepreneurs are more diverse, and an order of magnitude larger – including everything from automobiles and rockets to energy and chemicals.

Biology is in the midst of this transformation; we are actively reengineering the information systems of biology and creating synthetic microbes whose DNA was manufactured from bare computer code and an organic chemistry printer. But what should we build? So far, we largely copy large tracts of code from nature. But the question spans across all the complex systems that we might wish to build, from cities to designer microbes, to computer intelligence.

As these systems transcend human comprehension, will we continue to design them or will we evolve them? As we design for evolvability, the locus of learning shifts from the artifacts to the process that created them. There is no mathematical shortcut for the decomposition of a neural network or a genetic program, no way to ‘reverse evolve’ with the ease that we can reverse engineer the artifacts of purposeful design. (My Google Tech Talk goes into some detail on the dichotomy of design and evolution.)

And what about human social systems? The corporation is a complex system that seeks to perpetually innovate. Leadership in these complex organisations shifts from direction setting to a wisdom of crowds, where the locus of learning shifts from products to process.  The lessons learned so far are a bit counterintuitive to some alpha leaders: cognitive diversity is more important than ability; disagreement is more important than consensus; voting policies and team size are more important than the coherence or comprehensibility of the decisions; and tuning the parameters of communication (frequency and fanout) is more important than charisma.

The same could be said for urban planning. How will cities be built and iterated upon? Who will make those decisions and how? We are just starting to see the shimmering refractions of the hive mind of human culture, and now we want to redesign the hives themselves to optimise the emergent complexity within. Perhaps the best we can do is set up the grand co-evolutionary dance, and listen carefully for the sociobiology of supra-human sentience.

Image courtesy of Torcello Trio on flickr

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3. Innovation in the Pizza Box Industry