By David Crossley
Dealing with other people is always a challenge, so it’s surprising people flow together to form giant cities where dealing with other people is almost constant.
We do it because in cities there is spectacular exchange – of goods, of ideas, of skills, of beliefs, of love – and in these places we create innovation and wealth.
We talk a lot, and that seems to be the engine of innovation. The talk can be frustrating because from our point of view it’s often uninformed, or trivial, or boring, or even just wrong. Sometimes we think we’re not allowed to talk enough, and we tend to resent that.
Talk in the private sector is generally different from talk in the public sector. The private sector seems to be more hierarchical in flow of information than the public sector, which is more fractal, chaotic. In the private sector, the general trend of information and direction is downward from a relative few, whereas in the public sector the ideal is that the trend is upward, from many people.
These dynamics are obviously different, so the cooperation of the sectors is troublesome. We tend to worry a lot about this difficulty, regardless of which sector we spend most of our time in, or how far from the middle we are. So we’re always groping together, trying for a rhythm. When we find it, we create ideas and solutions.
Many people, maybe everybody, would like to hit the rhythm a little more often, and sustain it a little longer. When we don’t find it, then we do the other thing: we fail together.
In the full-friction world of metropolitan politics, the rhythm is hard to achieve. The force of all ideologies and worldviews comes to bear on squeezing agreement out of enough powerful individuals to set something in motion, or to slow something down. The powerful individuals are not always thrilled with all this talk, and resist it, which frustrates the petitioners and closes down choices and ideas.
Situations where some people aren’t interested in hearing diverse ideas tend to kill innovation. There may be a get-things-done scenario being played out, no time for foolishness! Or a confident and commanding individual who moderates the discussion, with varying interest in hearing others’ ideas because the individual is bursting at the seams with them, or worse, terrified of them.
In our dreams, the highest goal for this city of people is that somehow, miraculously, we find the enormously complex way to express our common vision, produce economic success, give everybody a fair shake, and not allow anybody to suffer needlessly. We become inventive creators, a city of giants.
This gathering-of-people-for-exchange idea about cities is pretty well established. Metropolitan regions produce about 85 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. If one of the goals – maybe the only goal - is innovation, then it would appear we should take care to be open and productive in our exchange.
Agreement tends to produce action, but ideas precede action, and ideas are more likely to come from disagreement and diversity. There are meetings where solutions are reached, and other meetings where nothing happens or things get worse.
The word we use for those meetings with rhythm and invention is dialogue. Where some kind of exclusion is practiced, dialogue is diminished.
There are value systems at play here that have varying appreciation of inclusion. We all harbor them, those aversions to individuals or groups we’d really rather not hear from.
To build a great city, one where people all over the world would be happy to live, requires a far bigger establishment of community and dialogue than many people want to grapple with. Still, the creation of tomorrow’s city is happening in every exchange, every round of discussion. The quality of our lives is dependent on the quality of our dialogue.