According to the United Nations, by the year of 2050, 70% of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. So what will the city of the future look like? These are some of the questions that dominate our conception of “The City 2.0”: How will we transport ourselves? Where will we grow our food? How will we power our homes, our offices, our grids? What will happen to the natural world?
Today — October 13, 2012 — communities across the globe will be offering answers to these questions as part of TEDxCity2.0 Day, when nearly 70 TEDx events will be held in conjunction to dream about the city of the future. Events will be taking place from Antananarivo, Madagascar, to Daejeon, South Korea. In fact, so many events are happening today that the TEDx program is celebrating an exciting milestone — the 5,000th event since its launch in 2009.
To celebrate the City 2.0 and the spirit of urban inspiration, here are 6 great TEDxTalks about the future of cities.
Corporate Cronyism Harms America
“We didn’t build this business—somebody else did.”
So reads a sign outside a small roadside craft store in Utah. The message is clearly tongue-in-cheek. But if it hung next to the corporate offices of some of our nation’s big financial institutions or auto makers, there would be no irony in the message at all.
It shouldn’t surprise us that the role of American business is increasingly vilified or viewed with skepticism. In a Rasmussen poll conducted this year, 68% of voters said they “believe government and big business work together against the rest of us.”
Businesses have failed to make the case that government policy—not business greed—has caused many of our current problems. To understand the dreadful condition of our economy, look no further than mandates such as the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “affordable housing” quotas, directives such as the Community Reinvestment Act, and the Federal Reserve’s artificial, below-market interest-rate policy.
Trickle-down central banking
HOW is bond-buying by the Federal Reserve supposed to help the real economy? Last week, my colleague and I debated the potency of monetary stimulus when household balance sheets were constrained. Instead of arguing in a vacuum, perhaps it would be better to ask Ben Bernanke, the Fed’s chairman, how he thinks the Fed is assisting the recovery. Fortunately, a reporter from Reuters did just that at the press conference held in the afternoon after the announcement of QE3. Mr Bernanke’s response:
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?
The diamond invention—the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem—is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.
Troubled Juárez starts to breathe again
Today, after years of bloodshed, the mortuary is all but empty and the growing sense is that the war may be over.
Bars and restaurants once closed and boarded up because of extortion and fear are reopening. Families that fled to El Paso across the US border are returning, and teenagers, who not so long ago spent weekends indoors to avoid getting caught in a massacre, are rediscovering clubs and discos.
“People are starting to go out and spend money again,” says Cristina Cunningham, president of the national restaurant industry chamber. “The city is coming back to life.”
Notes from the Heartland
Physics suggests that pulling into a residential driveway at 50 miles per hour from a state highway is a bad idea. About one-eight of the Chevy makes it on to Magnolia. It soon joins the majority of the car hurtling towards the bottom of a ditch, propelled by the combined forces of spin, gravity and incompetence.
This is not ideal. I’m in a corpse of an automobile six feet below a gravel path. The engine sounds like a helicopter scything through a migratory flock of sparrows. Fox News confirms that Mitt Romney has begun speaking. Redemption was an adroit turn away.
Fortunately, this is Iowa. A pick-up truck pulls over next to the ditch. “Did you mean to do that?” asks the driver, throwing doubt on America’s trouble with sarcasm. I explain that I am collateral damage in Mr Romney’s war on punctuality. “That’s a lot of trouble to get yourself in for politics,” he says.
Uniqlo’s CEO on His Long, ‘Crazy’ Fight for the Future of Retail
But where other global fashion brands like Zara and H&M zig, Uniqlo zags. Where the other guys focus on winning at the old game of fashion, churning an array of styles through their stores ever more rapidly, Yanai is acting more like a tech executive, nurturing long development cycles in which clothes and advanced materials are carefully iterated. Uniqlo partners with high-tech suppliers like carbon-fiber-maker Toray and cuts 10-year deals with Chinese manufacturers. The model draws as much on Intel and Toyota as Gap.
This approach has made Uniqlo one of the world’s most successful retailers, gaining fast on rivals like Gap and H&M. It has also won the company admiration among apparel executives, who are as impressed by the company’s approach to business as style mavens are by Uniqlo’s collaboration with designers like Jil Sanders. If Uniqlo fulfills its big ambitions, it will have moved technology closer to the center of fashion and helped spread Silicon Valley’s management ethos into the global apparel trade.
The Lone Sailor: Burlington, VT
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The Lone Sailor.
The CIA Burglar Who Went Rogue
The six CIA officers were sweating. It was almost noon on a June day in the Middle Eastern capital, already in the 90s outside and even hotter inside the black sedan where the five men and one woman sat jammed in together. Sat and waited.
They had flown in two days earlier for this mission: to break into the embassy of a South Asian country, steal that country’s secret codes and get out without leaving a trace. During months of planning, they had been assured by the local CIA station that the building would be empty at this hour except for one person—a member of the embassy’s diplomatic staff working secretly for the agency.
But suddenly the driver’s hand-held radio crackled with a voice-encrypted warning: “Maintain position. Do not approach target.” It was the local CIA station, relaying a warning from the agency’s spy inside: a cleaning lady had arrived.
The Plight of Young, Black Men Is Worse Than You Think
The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any wealthy nation, with about 2.3 million people behind bars at any given moment. (That’s 730 out of 100,000, vs. just 154 for England and Wales.) There are more people in U.S. prisons than are in the country’s active-duty military. That much is well known. What’s less known is that people who are incarcerated are excluded from most surveys by U.S. statistical agencies. Since young, black men are disproportionately likely to be in jail or prison, the exclusion of penal institutions from the statistics makes the jobs situation of young, black men look better than it really is.
That’s the point of a new book, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, by Becky Pettit, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington. Pettit spoke on Thursday in a telephone press conference.