CityAge and Global City Builders Head to Toronto and NYC
In this installment of our guest writers series, Miro Cernetig and Marc Andrew share the journey of CityAge. The American Architectural Foundation is pleased to partner with CityAge and invites you to join us in either Toronto (May 16–17, 2013) or New York City (June 18–19) to be a part of this important work.
CityAge was born 14 months ago when the City of Vancouver took a leap of faith and decided to let us help them run an international conference. We called it the Vancouver Cities Summit. After just ten weeks of planning, over 500 people from 40 cities gathered from around the world to talk about a new idea we called “the business of city building.” We called our effort CityAge—and we’ve been on quite a journey ever since.
CityAge summits have been held in Vancouver, Toronto, and Kansas City, and new editions will be held in Ottawa, Toronto, New York City, Washington, D.C., Waterloo, Ont., and Vancouver in the next seven months. More are in the works. Thousands of people have now attended CityAge events. We often ask ourselves why it’s catching on. While we don’t have all of the answers to that, we do have a few. Primarily, we think it’s because of an emerging realization that we are living at a unique moment: the world is seeing the greatest migration of people to cities in human history. According to the World Bank, 3.5 billion people live in cities today. By 2050, 2.5 billion more will join them. It means three out of four people will live in an urban setting, a mega-trend that is reshaping our economy, our environment, and how we live. It means the importance, and the power, of cities is on the rise. In a sense, we’re seeing the re-emergence of the city state of old.
Our cities are the crucibles of the future. How we build—and rebuild—them is one of the greatest challenges of this century. How we design and run our cities—how they use resources, whether they allow people to live well, improve their lots in life, and connect to each other and the world— just may be one of the most important factors in shaping our future. CityAge exists, and is growing, because we’ve tapped into this urban zeitgeist.
People intuitively understand the power of our cities, and they want to use them to shape a better future. They also know this era of city building is a major opportunity and will yield billions of dollars in investment and economic development. These are among the factors that have driven thousands of mayors, engineers, architects, CEOs, community activists, designers, doctors, academics, and ordinary citizens to become part of CityAge. A generation ago, federal and state governments seemed to be the agents that did the big things. Building countries, building continental highway and rail networks…even putting men on the moon. But today cities and civic leaders are proving their ability to make things happen, surprisingly fast.
Consider Kansas City. At a time when many Americans worry about falling behind other nations, the mayors of both Kansas Cities (yes, there are two) forged a partnership with Google to pipe in hyper-fast Internet to citizens, spurring innovation and making the city a hub of entrepreneurship. In Memphis, citizens have taken an old Sears distribution warehouse and are turning it into a whole new community, complete with universities and retail and health institutions. In our hometown of Vancouver, the mayor has set a goal of being the greenest city in the world and is introducing dozens of policies to make that happen. In Tokyo, the city set up the world’s first city-led carbon trading program. In Manchester, an abandoned warehouse was turned into cheap office space for startups, and now they need to build another. In Quezon City, the mayor is working on a plan to remake the city, eliminate slums, and build resilient infrastructure to improve the future of the Philippines.
The list goes on and on. Edward Glaeser has rightly called the city, “our greatest invention.” At CityAge, we also believe that cities—and the billions of people who live in them—will be our century’s greatest catalysts for positive change and innovation.
Featured image courtesy of David Skankbone (left) and Benson Kua (right).
