Cross-posted from Metronauts.ca:
Friday's Globe and Mail featured a prediction by Jeffrey Rubin, the CIBC World Markets economist, that damage from Hurricane Gustav and other intense storms this season could cause a sudden spike in gas prices to $1.75 a litre.
Every time there is a price spike, the media runs to the local gas station to cover the "pain at the pumps". But does that pain translate into a change in behaviour? How much of an impact do gas prices have on the commuting public in the GTA? Do increasing gas prices cause people to make different personal transportation decisions, or are households just absorbing the extra costs?
It appears that gas prices are affecting vehicle purchasing decisions (sorry GM), but are consumers switching from private vehicles to other modes of transportation? I would love to see the research on that. (Perhaps our friends at Metrolinx have some sources they can share? If readers know of recent research on this question, please leave a link in the comments.)
Surely demographic factors influence gas price sensitivity and the substitution of one mode of transportation for another. It makes sense that household incomes will affect price sensitivity, with the working poor being hit hardest. At the same time, many service workers need to use private vehicles to get to or perform their work (i.e. not the GO train Bay Street crowd) and have few alternatives. This creates a political problem that will bring calls for action.
But I also believe that there is a relationship to a another familiar demographic trend with political and policy implications: Boomer parents versus their Gen Y children.
Older upper middle-class car owners who live in the bedroom communities surrounding the City of Toronto and other major urban centres in the 905 will not be terribly affected by increasing gas prices - at least not enough to effect a historic shift to more sustainable modes of transportation. In addition to enjoying relative affluence, my guess is that this group have deep-seated cultural habits and experience systemic barriers that make switching costs relatively high.
Meanwhile young, newly urban professionals, creatives and knowledge workers who are repopulating our city centres (like Metronauts writer Adam Schwabe) are moving en masse to enjoy the vibrancy of city life, reduce their carbon footprint and increase the quality of their lives by spending less time in the daily commute. Generation Y workers, the Echo, the Millennials - or whatever you want to call them - are changing the workplace, the urban fabric and the nature of the transportation problem. This is more than a stage of life question - research points to a values-driven shift towards more sustainable choices by young people for environmental and financial reasons:
Workers under the age of 25 in the Toronto region use public transit 30.8 per cent of the time, while a further 9.5 per cent walk and 1.5 per cent use a bike.
That's a considerably higher reliance on environmentally friendly means of getting to work than the average commuter in the Toronto region, who commutes by public transit 22.2 per cent of the time, by foot 4.8 per cent of the time and 1.0 per cent by bike.
Which of these two groups receives the lions share of attention in the media and the political conversation that surrounds the work of Metrolinx planners and the development of its Regional Transportation Plan? I don't think anyone should be surprised to see plans and investments that reflect the needs of the suburban Boomer commuter class, but what of Gen-Y and the New Urbanists?
Ultimately, and historically in this region, the allocation of scarce funding is a question of politics, not planning. So here's the political question:
Should governments dull the pain of those making energy-intensive choices about where they live and work and how they choose to travel, or should governments reward those that make more sustainable choices with the required supporting infrastructure, planning policies and design of dense mixed-use city centres?
I believe that the Gen-Y shift to urban life is a generational opportunity to shift behaviour and a leverage point for systemic change, if our planners and politicians can find a way support and embrace it. But can planners and politicians hear their voices?
Image by Will Gotshall-Maxon
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Cross-posted from Metronauts.ca.
The economic conditions that supported the tremendous growth of North American suburbs during the last half of the 20th century - cheap energy and the modern industrial production system - appear to be undergoing a sharp reversal. What do these signals of the future mean for the suburbs and the demands that will be placed on politicians asked to respond to these changes?
You don't have to be a peak oil theorist to recognize - as James Smith, CEO of Shell UK has - that "the era of easy oil is over". The reality that we are not going to ever return to an age of cheap oil is just starting to sink into the consciousness of the marketplace, electorate and policy-makers. Scenarios of a serious supply crunch and $200 a barrel oil are no longer on the fringe.
The Freakonomics blog at NY Times recently held a quorum inviting a small group of smart and opinionated experts to imagine the future of American suburbia in 40 years time. The responses vary from James Kunstler's "the suburbs have three destinies, none of them exclusive: as materials salvage, as slums, and as ruins" to the more hopeful "Suburbia will be flexible, it will be smarter, and it will be hybrid" of John Archer.
What about in the Toronto region?
In the Toronto area context Toronto Star writers Christopher Hume and Phinjo Gombu have been considering these same issues in the GTA: Downtown density will prevail over slums of suburbia, A planning headache, 50 years in the making;Reinventing Suburbia.
One of the primary issues facing the suburban electorate and their politicians are the very real economic hardships that expensive oil will bring to the suburbs.
The cost of living is increasing with the cost of transportation. Ontario's industrial economy is being hit hard. The investments necessary to reconfigure how we plan and build and how we move around the sprawling megalopolis are staggering. The required shifts in 50 year-old cultural mindsets and behaviours may be even more difficult to make. The very instruments being suggested to help pay for some of this - road-pricing, congestion charges and other carrots and sticks - are political hot potatoes unpopular to those being asked to pay the price or change their behaviour. There are economic winners and losers, and where the money flows, politics is sure to follow.
Can our politics cope with what is being asked of it? Can we move beyond the us vs. them dynamic across municipal boundaries to a greater sense of shared destiny and community across a vast city-region? Can our institutions adapt? Can we solve the wicked problems that will surface during a period of rapid change and uncertainty? Will our suburbs become slums and ruins or smarter and hybrid?
These are questions that we're looking to our community of readers to help answer. What are the political fault-lines of suburbia's adaptation, re-imagination and renewal?
As my own work enters a new and exciting phase, I find myself considering three intersecting and co-evolving forces: the Obama Moment, the New Great Transformation and the Social Web. I see signals in these forces of a new resilience just when we most need it.
The convergence of these forces in the context of tremendous global economic, environmental and political uncertainty signals an opportunity for renewal by change-makers, social innovators and social entrepreneurs for the benefit of us all. The complexity of the world requires better solutions, and we know from the open innovation literature that the ideas we need today do not live within a single organization.
Is this a truly transformative moment at a critical point in human history? Is a new social, economic, environmental and cultural resilience possible, or will status quo forces reassert themselves?
Full essay after the jump...
The New Great Transformation
Paul Hawken's book Blessed Unrest and his talks paint a picture of an emergent immune response to global environmental and social injustice in the form of a global and decentralized social movement unlike anything that has come before. When you have some time to reflect, I recommend the video of the full Long Now talk.
Hawken describes an emerging movement of NGOs around the world concerned with values of economic, environmental and social justice - projecting a set of global cultural creative values throughout the world.He describes this as a movement unlike any other in history. It is new, because it is not driven by a single charismatic leader with a unifying ideology. This movement is not devoid of ideology, of course, but it is primarily pragmatic and solutions-oriented about propagating memes, while being driven by a unifying set of values rather than an integrated ideological system.
Up to now every ism became a schism. This movement is born atomized.
This movement is also not trying to aggregate power onto itself, but rather it seeks to disperse pathological concentrations of power that are harmful to the sustainability of human and other life on earth. It is less about gaining power than it is about permeating our institutions with ideas and memes, trying them out to see what works, letting them go if they don't.
Hawken claims that we are observing the end of isms. Moving from a world of privilege to a world of community. In his view, Neo-conservatism, religious and economic fundamentalism are vestigial reactions to the threat to traditional concentrations of power that is posed by this movement.
The Social Web
The emergence of a self-organizing global civil society movement that Hawken describes is enabled and accelerated by social web tools. Those who are building these tools, learning about how they are eliciting new kinds of human behaviour, and developing practices to connect those tools with the challenges and opportunities of contemporary global life are engaged in building the architecture for Hawken's Great Transformation.
Whether in social movements, government or corporate life, the technologies and behaviours of the Social Web are already having a huge impact. This is only beginning, and these impacts will become more and more visible in the years to come, as Generation Y grows into itself and assumes its place in our organizations and our politics.
The Obama Moment
We may see a truly transformational leader take the world stage in January 2009.
Barack Obama's recent speech on race in America, A More Perfect Union, is the closest thing I have witnessed to transformational leadership in action. This is a new style of leadership, one born out of a deep understanding of complexity of the post-modern world, steeped in grassroots community organization, recalling the best oratory from history and realized through the enabling networks, technologies and participatory practices of the Social Web. Just one of the reactions:
What I heard today, though, was not a political speech in the sense we have gotten used to in this country. I heard instead a speech that, as much as it was about Obama and Wright, was also about us. Our politics does not quite know how to handle such a thing; campaigns are meant to tell people what they can expect to receive, not to ask them to understand, forgive, and reach out. [The Plank]
A politician promoting self-help and social change. This is new. It is not the nanny-state, nor is it laissez-faire neo-liberalism. Hillary Clinton says "I will do this for you", Barack Obama says "we can do this, but only together". Absolutely progressive, but pragmatist and post-ideological. Somebody who does not shy away from complexity, his 37 minute speech receiving 3 million views on YouTube in a few days thereby bypassing the 15 second sound-bite horror show that is cable news. Obama is a politician who uses the Social Web not only to communicate but, as Sean Howard argues, to gain insight and enable our participation:
Even if Obama fails to achieve his goal of becoming President of the United States, I predict he will have a deeper and more powerful understanding of the American people than anyone in the history of politics. He will have engaged at a level yet to be fully grasped or understood. [CrapHammer]
The importance of Obama isn't so much his policies, the man himself or even his potential to transform US and international politics. His importance is that he is the FIRST of his kind - a political leader that understands and is able to intelligently tap the forces of Hawken's "New Great Transformation" using the tools of the Social Web - in order to bring participation back into democracy. This is my great hope: that others will learn and will follow.
My Work - Government 2.0?
These converging forces and my own recent work is giving me greater focus about the direction for my consulting work and greater clarity around my social mission. What is it that I do, and why am I doing it? I am wrestling with some key questions:
What is the relationship between the world of control (corporations, government, governance, policy, politics) and this emerging decentralized global social movement?
What is the interface between hierarchies and heterarchies? How do we break the boundaries between them and create a fusion of these categories for mutual benefit?
What is the relationship between global, networked movements and place? How do we reimagine the local in the face of a profoundly changed global context?
I suppose you could say that I work in the Government 2.0 space. I do spend a lot of time working on projects related to public policy and planning, but I'm reluctant to attach myself to 2.0-anything. The term "Web 2.0" didn't help us understand the Social Web with any particular insight, so I'm reluctant to hop on the Gov2.0 bandwagon. But I will try to give some definition to how these emerging trends impact the public sphere.
My reading of whatever "Government 2.0" is is not about "E-Government". It is not about info-age efficiency from automating government services using web tools, however useful and beneficial these applications of technology might be. E-Government is not transformational change, it is incremental change.
The E-Government discourse does not allow for insight about what public policy should be and how its goals can be achieved. Nor does it provide guidance about how the private and public spheres collaborate in new ways to produce those public benefits.
My focus on public engagement and open innovation models in Government and governance is in part about enabling a new conversation about how we develop policy and plans, how regular citizens can become part of a solution-making process and how we can reconsider and reconfigure the public sphere in order to get better solutions. It is about open innovation applied to developing public policy solutions - inside or outside government.
And yes, this is an emerging field of practice, with much that is not yet well understood. So I look for collaborators and clients who are interested in doing innovative work in this emerging space; groups of passionate individuals interested in playing midwife to something new that is actually pretty old: nature reasserting itself as a form of social resilience to global change.
Digital Media is the hot sector du jour in Ontario, and for good reason. It is one of those rising sectors that are the great hope to support economic growth in an age of de-industrialization. In case you hadn't heard, there's a bit of a government-led gold rush going on.
At ICE08, we learned that Ontario's Ministry of Research & Innovation is investing $9 million in OCAD's' Digital Futures Initiative to expand training and research programs in digital media. Sara Diamond, President of OCAD, is a remarkable force of nature and under her leadership, OCAD is aggressively pursuing a reinvigorated research agenda and building partnerships with technology and content industry partners large and small.
We also learned that $10 million is being invested in a new Stratford campus for the University of Waterloo, bringing UW's acknowledged strength in technology together with Stratford's vibrant arts and culture community, focusing on digital media.
Both announcements came out of are in addition to the new Next Generation of Jobs Fund, a $1.15 billion initiative modelled after Ontario's Auto Investment Strategy, which put $500 million into strategic projects and leveraged private investment of $7 billion. The Next Generation of Jobs Fund focuses on three broad sectors: green/clean tech, bio/pharma/health and digital media/ICT. There are three program streams:
the Jobs and Investment Program (focused on projects with specific job targets, including attracting Foreign Direct Investment) and
the program of most interest to my community, the Strategic Opportunities Program, which is open to "creative industries such as digital media and information and communication technology" to fund public/private partnerships
What is a “Strategic Opportunity?”
An opportunity where:
A large scale global market opportunity exists, coupled with a unique strategy to deal with the competition, or a niche global market opportunity where Ontario has significant capacity and little competition and;
Ontario has a demonstrated competitive advantage such as strong private sector strengths including global market leadership, and globally competitive research strength.
Now, here's an innovation challenge for the Strategic Opportunities Program itself:
How do you identify and evaluate the best strategic opportunities?
The Ministry is holding a series of workshops and doing a SWOT analysis within each of the three focus areas. (sigh)
Don't get me wrong, I love a good SWOT analysis as much as the next strategy consultant. But have you seen a SWOT analysis yet that provides the needed insight or foresight implied by the goal of developing "next generation jobs", particularly in an environment of accelerating tech and cultural change?
In the auto industry, panning for job gold is pretty straightforward - you call up the Big 3, the major import manufacturers, the parts and auto technology makers and you've got a pretty manageable group to work with. Eventually BIGCO installs some equipment or builds a plant somewhere. Now look at a map of the 11,000 enterprises in the entertainment and creative industries in the Toronto CMA, including digital media and ICT, and you'll see the problem: 77% of this $9 billion industry are sole practitioners or micro-enterprises. That's a mighty big river to pan in!
In order for this strategy to be successful, strategic opportunities have to be found, validated by expertise and evaluated against investment criteria in order to be funded. Is there a community engagement strategy that could support this process? What role does strategic foresight, design thinking and collaborative innovation play in its execution? I'm interested in finding out. Leave a comment if you have some thoughts.
Friday's Globe and Mail featured a prediction by Jeffrey Rubin, the CIBC World Markets economist, that damage from Hurricane Gustav and other intense storms this season could cause a sudden spike in gas prices to $1.75 a litre.
Every time there is a price spike, the media runs to the local gas station to cover the "pain at the pumps". But does that pain translate into a change in behaviour? How much of an impact do gas prices have on the commuting public in the GTA? Do increasing gas prices cause people to make different personal transportation decisions, or are households just absorbing the extra costs?
It appears that gas prices are affecting vehicle purchasing decisions (sorry GM), but are consumers switching from private vehicles to other modes of transportation? I would love to see the research on that. (Perhaps our friends at Metrolinx have some sources they can share? If readers know of recent research on this question, please leave a link in the comments.)
Surely demographic factors influence gas price sensitivity and the substitution of one mode of transportation for another. It makes sense that household incomes will affect price sensitivity, with the working poor being hit hardest. At the same time, many service workers need to use private vehicles to get to or perform their work (i.e. not the GO train Bay Street crowd) and have few alternatives. This creates a political problem that will bring calls for action.
But I also believe that there is a relationship to a another familiar demographic trend with political and policy implications: Boomer parents versus their Gen Y children.
Older upper middle-class car owners who live in the bedroom communities surrounding the City of Toronto and other major urban centres in the 905 will not be terribly affected by increasing gas prices - at least not enough to effect a historic shift to more sustainable modes of transportation. In addition to enjoying relative affluence, my guess is that this group have deep-seated cultural habits and experience systemic barriers that make switching costs relatively high.
Meanwhile young, newly urban professionals, creatives and knowledge workers who are repopulating our city centres (like Metronauts writer Adam Schwabe) are moving en masse to enjoy the vibrancy of city life, reduce their carbon footprint and increase the quality of their lives by spending less time in the daily commute. Generation Y workers, the Echo, the Millennials - or whatever you want to call them - are changing the workplace, the urban fabric and the nature of the transportation problem. This is more than a stage of life question - research points to a values-driven shift towards more sustainable choices by young people for environmental and financial reasons:
As 