I want all of you to think about this question:
is your city designed for you and our planet,
or are you and our planet designed for your city?
For the first time in history,
the majority of the world’s population no longer lives in the rural areas,
but in cities.
People have been flocking to these places,
and today, we’re about 4 billion urban dwellers in the world.
I think that this is a very disturbing trend
because not only are we abandoning the rural areas
that once supported our cities,
but we’re in fact, right now, constructing the destruction of our world,
and I will tell you why.
This is one of the most famous cities in the world.
This is Los Angeles, the “city of angels.”
It’s a city that is modern.
It’s a city that most people want to go to.
It’s a city that is functionalistic.
The funcionalistic city is the city where every building has its own function.
It’s the city where we live in one place, go to school in another place,
go to work in a third place, and buy what we need in a fourth place.
It’s a city that’s divided in its different functions,
and so are our lives.
An example:
have you ever thought about how many hours, days, or perhaps years
you’ve spent commuting in your life?
Well, I have.
I did a rough estimate of how many days I spent commuting
to my elementary school in Stockholm,
and during those nine years,
I spent 135 days transporting myself.
That’s one example of what this kind of city does to us people,
but what does it do to our planet?
This.
This is what we are doing to our planet.
We’re about to kill Mother Earth
by the way we’re constructing our cities.
Here in Europe,
75% of the population already live in cities,
but despite that,
the construction sector counts for 50% of all the extraction of raw materials
and it generates 30% of all waste in Europe.
And because we also have to use our buildings in our cities
and live our lives a certain way,
this has resulted in that cities consume 75% of the world’s energy
and emit 80% of the greenhouse gases.
Cities are fundamentally resource-consuming entities,
and that’s why I think this trend is so disturbing.
I mean, just imagine what will happen by the year 2050
when the world’s urban population is expected to grow by 60%,
to 6.4 billion urban dwellers.
If we keep designing and building as if the planet had unlimited resources,
we will construct the destruction of our world.
As an urban planner and sustainability expert,
I can’t allow that to happen,
and to succeed, I have to make all of you sustainability experts.
So, listen close to it, people:
the most sustainable building, and car for that matter,
is the one that never has to be built, period.
You know this, and I know it.
So, why are we building?
We build because it is profitable.
We build because it is not profitable
to save all the millions of communities around the world
by meeting people’s problems and needs where they live.
It is profitable not to do anything
and see these people being forced to move to cities.
The more people, the more we can build.
It’s a systemic failure,
and, unfortunately, this TEDx won’t stop people from moving to cities,
but there is a way to stop cities from being used unsustainably
and expanded unsustainably.
What I want to present to you today are two new measurements
for how to rethink our cities,
that are both economically, socially and ecologically beneficial for everyone,
a way to use the buildings that we already have resource-effectively.
I call these two measurements time and space vacancies.
A couple of questions to get you thinking.
Are we occupying buildings all the time and using all of their spaces?
No.
Are we managing our walls, roofs and lawns the best way?
No.
Are we using office buildings, schools and malls resource-effectively?
No.
How about all the infrastructure that is dedicated to cars?
I will need another [TEDx] talk just for that.
No, people.
We have huge time and space vacancies everywhere in our cities.
What we have to do is to rethink how and when we use
all the different parts of our cities,
instead of stubbornly using them for only a couple of hours each day.
I mean, think about it.
By using time and space vacancies,
we can create, socially, more integrated cities
by using buildings in more ways than one.
Economically, we can split the costs of our buildings
by sharing them with others.
And ecologically, we can stop building more than we actually need.
Look at Cuba, for example.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba had a sudden oil shortage,
which crippled its oil-dependent agriculture.
Because of the problems that followed,
Cuba and its capital Havana had to rapidly adapt.
So, Havana used the land within the city
and started expanding its urban farming.
Today, Havana, a city of more than 2 million people,
produces almost all of the fresh vegetables it needs.
It became self-sufficient by using space vacancies.
Another example is Flogsta.
Flogsta is a residential area here in Uppsala,
where about 2,000 students live, including myself,
and like most residential areas, Flogsta is quite dead.
So, I decided to do something about it.
I saw that, in almost all of these buildings,
there are big facilities on the bottom floor that are scarcely used.
So, I contacted one of the owners of one of these facilities
to see if there was a possibility to rent their place second-hand.
Today, I’m renting their place a couple of hours each week
to give my neighbors something to do where they live,
where we live.
In our community center,
we show documentaries, we play board games,
and we eat after our art exhibitions.
You name it.
I saw time vacancy as a resource,
and by using that resource, I made Flogsta a bit more alive.
So yes, people,
time and space vacancies are resources in our cities,
resources that we have to learn to use,
because we can’t afford to “try” to build away our self-inflicted problems
by doing the same thing over and over again.
Doing so, we will unnecessarily build more than we actually need,
and deplete our world.
And here is where I need your help.
As an urban planner, I know who the real experts are.
It’s not me, it’s you.
You guys use and live in your cities every day.
You are the experts.
You see these time and space vacancies,
and I bet some of you already have brilliant ideas of what is possible.
So, dear urban planners and sustainability experts,
let’s stop living in dead and divided cities,
and instead, make them come alive, and without the need of Pokémon GO.
Let’s stop being dependent on cars,
and instead, make our cities people-friendly.
Let’s stop ignoring our walls, roofs and lawns,
and make our cities self-sufficient, instead of resource-consuming.
Let’s stop this madness of constructing the destruction of our world,
and instead, learn to use what we already have.
Dear urban planners and sustainability experts,
look twice when you walk through your city, and ask yourselves:
is you city made for you and our planet,
or are you and our planet designed for your city?
Thank you.
(Applause)
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