InTIME Transition Labs

The first big research project this past year in the Islands Centre for Net Zero has been codifying the corrective transdisciplinary processes in what we have called “Transition Labs”.?This is what I am presenting.

1. Cities exist because of the benefits of division of labour. When we have some critical mass of activity (government, port, trading, manufacturing, education…) that requires held knowledge, then the network around that activity is the thing we call the city. Let’s always remember that cities exist for the work being done. That work requires people. So homes for the people so they can get to the work, and the rest follows. Waters and food/waste flows infrastructures make the city either nice or nasty. Architecture and design of the spaces make the city either meh or lovely.
2. The way an industrial city with infrastructure works without?cars is accessible to us as we can simply visit 1911. We can take as given that the research is clear – the car city isn’t the optimal as far as nice or lovely – so even if EV’s could replace all ICE in time to stop CO2 accumulation below the failure limit – we would still have suboptimal city.?
3. We can visit 2121 and we see that the city is not car dominated. There is no reason it should not be optimal. We have the tools to find optimums.?
4. What happens now??What do we invent or develop or come to be able to do that leads to the transformation of the multi-suboptimal urban areas to cities that will be flourishing for centuries??How many people can we get together to answer that question??I would propose that it is a convergence of all of the knowledge about cities with an evolution in how the transdisciplinary work is accomplished. Let’s call that “Interdisciplinary Transition Innovation, Management and Engineering” (InTIME)?for a moment. Something happens now, InTIME. It results in profitable projects that achieve the transformation like putting together a complicated Lego. A lot of pieces, but all building the Optimal Urban Form with 600 year design life. Can we do that this year??Why not.?
5. The work is transformation work, where all stakeholders and the planners, engineers, designers, businesses, economists, policy… get to “go” on the transition projects. Let’s call this the Transition Lab process. Let’s focus research on that – bringing together all knowledge and tools – for rapid adaptation and optimal investments in 600 year designs….?

Let's develop a Transition Lab process that all cities want because they get the proposition that transformation is possible and what they are looking for. Every country needs at least one university research centre where they can have training for consultants, companies (like developers and real estate and investors and public health) and public officers?on the?process, and training for engineers on the tools. There is going to be rapid development of the tools once we start, so we need some big data and software companies (Like SAS) to take up building them. The new Transition Lab workbenches will probably have tie-ins to the existing data and modelling tools, especially GIS. But we need to start thinking of the capacity to do this as fundamental base, standardised, useable across the world. That is the only way to share learning and rapidly build the capability.?

Right now it seems like there is a lot of work in this direction – but way too much bespoke in-house effort to be able to achieve the transformations. We need to pull the field together. As an academic at a new centre dedicated to making the big pivot to climate and future safe technical enterprise and ways of living…. I could possibly get together with some other big thinkers and put out the call for a global summit on transformation InTIME. Just imagine if there was the kind of spend and effort on actually doing the changes as there was this year on one more COP meeting…. We could get this sucker done. Would the UN put up the funds??