Leaving Mumbai

After 4 years on the project and a year as Director I’ve packed my bags and said goodbye, for now, to my fabulous friends, colleagues and community at the Museum of Solutions (MuSo), Mumbai. Thank you! I am overwhelmed by your kindness and generosity and I’ve learned more from you than you’ll ever know!

It was a privilege to help nurture this new museum and its library (LiSo, the Library of Solutions) from concept to reality; to help build and lead the founding team; and to welcome tens of thousands of visitors to our new state-of-the-art building — “a world-class space to champion the art of finding solutions,” as a reviewer at Condé Nast Traveler recently put it — unique in Mumbai and India, if not the world.

Four years ago Tanvi Jindal, MuSo’s founder, asked if I would help her think about a new “museum of solutions” she was envisioning for the site of an old industrial building in the middle of Mumbai.

How could we create a new kind of museum in one of the world’s largest and most challenging cities to catalyze action for the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, foster new approaches to education, and help young people make meaningful change in the world together?

…And could we also make it fun?

Though Mumbai and India were new to me, this question of museums, play, and civic impact was not. Through years of work with the Smithsonian Institution, the U.N., and other cultural and civil-society conveners around the world I’ve been part of a decades-long movement to *flip the script* on traditional museum practice and help people use their own cultural institutions as platforms for the public good.

And this moment demands nothing less.

With a population of 22 million, Mumbai is indicative of the world’s 40+ megacities (cities with over 10 million inhabitants). Along with megacities like Shanghai, Jakarta, Paris, and L.A., Mumbai is home to daunting social and environmental problems — as well as astonishing creativity and drive. But the problems and the vitality often seem to live in different worlds.

Mumbai is India’s financial capital but over half of its residents live in slums. It is India’s innovation and creative hub (Bollywood! The city of dreams!) but many of its neighborhoods will be underwater by midcentury, drowned by rising seas due to climate change. Education is highly valued, but it is predominantly structured around rote memorization and test achievement, not the world as we see it today.

Young people are often caught in the middle of this dynamic, squeezed between a daily fight for survival, antiquated educational and social systems, and their own profound abilities to see and create a future filled with beautiful change.

Furthermore, young people — all people — have a fundamental human right to be involved in the decisions that will affect their futures, but too few conveners will help them find their way.

If we can learn to solve problems in places like Mumbai we stand a good chance of surviving and thriving in the 21st century. Museums like MuSo can be a kind of civic infrastructure in this regard. By being bold, inclusive, and action-oriented — rooted in reality but also participatory and fun — we can bring people together to build social capital and elevate everyone’s ability to imagine and build a future that is joyous, sustainable, and just.

What’s next for me? I don’t know — I’m still catching up on sleep and processing what I’ve learned! But with any luck, I’ll keep working in this direction: young people and their grownups in vital civic spaces, enthralled by the chance to play and explore together — making life better one small solution at a time.

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This text is a slightly expanded version of this post on LinkedIn.

Why companies die but cities do not

Despite their apparent bumbling inefficiencies, cities are places of action and agents of change relative to companies, which by and large usually project an image of stasis unless they are young.

Companies typically operate as highly constrained top-down organizations that strive to increase efficiency of production and minimize operational costs so as to maximize profits. In contrast, cities embody the triumph of innovation over the hegemony of economies of scale. […]

Cities…operate in a much more distributed fashion, with power spread across multiple organizational structures from mayors and councils to businesses and citizen action groups. No single group has absolute control. As such, they exude an almost laissez-faire, freewheeling ambience relative to companies, taking advantage of the innovative benefits of social interactions whether good, bad, or ugly.

Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Part 5. Why Companies Die, But Cities Don't, page 406 (with some light editing and re-ordering of paragraphs)

Slow to change, hard to kill

…Perhaps the most salient feature [of cities] is how relatively slowly fundamental change actually occurs.

Cities that were overperforming in the 1960s, such as Bridgeport and San Jose, tend to remain rich and innovative today, whereas cities that were underperforming in the 1960s, such as Brownsville, are still near the bottom of the rankings.

Roughly speaking, all cities rise and fall together, or to put it bluntly: if a city was doing well in 1960 it’s likely to be doing well now, and if it was crappy then, it's likely to be crappy still.

Once a city has gained an advantage, or disadvantage, relative to its scaling expectation, this tends to be preserved over decades. In this sense, either for good or for bad, cities are remarkably robust and resilient—they are hard to change and almost impossible to kill. Think of, Detroit and New Orleans, and more drastically of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, all of which have to varying degrees survived what were perceived as major threats to their very existence. All are actually doing fine and will be around for a very long time.

It takes decades for significant change to be realized. This has serious implications for urban policy and leadership because the timescale of political processes by which decisions about a city’s future are made is at best just a few years, and for most politicians two years is infinity. Nowadays, their success depends on rapid returns and instant gratification in order to conform to political pressures and the demands of the electoral process. Very few mayors can afford to think in a time frame of twenty to fifty years and put their major efforts toward promoting strategies that will leave a truly long-term legacy of significant achievement.

Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Part 9. The Structure Of Wealth, Innovation, Crime, And Resilience: The Individuality And Ranking Of Cities, page 354

Cities are time accelerator machines

…So it's hardly news that the pace of life has been accelerating, but what is surprising is that it has a universal character that can be quantified and verified by analyzing data. Furthermore, it can be understood scientifically using the mathematics of social networks by relating it to the positive feedback mechanisms that enhance creativity and innovation, and which are the source of the many benefits and costs of social interaction and urbanization.

In this sense cities are time accelerator machines. The contraction of socioeconomic time is one of the most remarkable and far-reaching features of modern existence.

Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies by Geoffrey West, 2017. Page 328.

Hudson Yards

“Up in the sky, Hudson Yards’ observation deck may also become an attraction — a triangular platform, 1,100 feet high, theatrically cantilevered from the top of 30 [Hudson Yards], with bleachers that provide an even loftier view. It opens next year.

I got a preview the other day. It’s one of the most amazing vistas over the city. I gazed north toward Harlem, gaped at the Empire State Building, and took in Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.

New York is awesome, I thought.

Then it occurred to me.

From that deck, you can’t see Hudson Yards.”
Hudson Yards Is Manhattan’s Biggest, Newest, Slickest Gated Community. Is This the Neighborhood New York Deserves? by Michael Kimmelman, Architecture critic, The New York Times, 14 March 2019

What sort of place?

Screen grab of https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/14/arts/design/hudson-yards-nyc.html

Screen grab of https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/14/arts/design/hudson-yards-nyc.html

“A new place is emerging.
The question is, what sort of place?
And this is the immediate problem with Hudson Yards.”

It is, at heart, a supersized suburban-style office park, with a shopping mall and a quasi-gated condo community targeted at the 0.1 percent.

A relic of dated 2000s thinking, nearly devoid of urban design, it declines to blend into the city grid. […]

[T]he whole site lacks any semblance of human scale…as if the peak ambitions of city life were consuming luxury goods and enjoying a smooth, seductive, mindless materialism.

It gives physical form to a crisis of city leadership, asleep at the wheel through two administrations, and to a pernicious theory of civic welfare that presumes private development is New York’s primary goal, the truest measure of urban vitality and health, with money the city’s only real currency.

Hudson Yards Is Manhattan’s Biggest, Newest, Slickest Gated Community. Is This the Neighborhood New York Deserves? by Michael Kimmelman, Architecture critic, The New York Times, 14 March 2019

"They are the only experts"

Expertise is unfashionable right now, partly because our society is not very good at understanding who is expert at what, so we give too much power to some people and not enough power to others. […]

Sadly, we don’t see residents as experts. This is a critical and corrosive mistake. Of course, they certainly are not experts in how to reduce greenhouse gases, or pave roads, or pick bike routes. They should not be picking beams for a bridge.

But citizens of a city do know how the built environment makes them feel, and how they would like to feel.

They are experts in how increasing taxes will stress them out. They are experts in hidden secrets of their streets and alleys. They are experts in the amenities they want for themselves and their family. They are the only experts. Their expertise should be respected.”

From Most Public Engagement Is Worse Than Worthless by sustainability consultant Ruben Anderson, August 6, 2018

The experience

christo1.png

[Christo, sitting down with three workers to discuss his proposal to wrap the iconic Pont Neuf with fabric.]

Worker: “Paintings are witnesses of the evolution of a certain era. But here there will be nothing left in the end…”

Christo: “But wait. Each era has its own means. We now have electronics. There is a camera filming us now. Imagine if under Louis XIV there were cameras. That would be extraordinary. The 20th century has developed new means of memory, and all this is a question of historical memory.”

Worker: “It gives me a feeling of uselessness because it’s temporary." 

Christo: "Because it’s going to disappear after 2 weeks? But in the end, the experience, you can never take that away.”

From the documentary Christo in Paris, 1990

"There is the blueprint"

“Someone puts his eye to a crack in a fence, he sees cranes pulling up other cranes, scaffoldings that embrace other scaffoldings, beams that prop up other beams. ‘What meaning does your construction have?’ he asks. ‘What is the aim of a city under construction unless it is a city? Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint?’

‘We will show it to you as soon as the working day is over; we cannot interrupt our work now,’ they answer.

Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. ‘There is the blueprint,’ they say.”
— The city of Thekla, From Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.