Am home for a couple of days, and spotted that some of the TED talks have started going up. Here, as a sort of Transition Culture Summer Homework, is Paul Romer’s talk on ‘Charter Cities’ which I was so critical about in my write up. It offers a fascinating taste of unbridled human hubris, of an economist with no sense of economic or resource constraints, no sense of living within our means or of peak anything, no sense that perhaps unbridled neo-liberal free trade economics have been anything other than to the dazzling wellbeing of everyone.  Have a look.  Be fascinated to hear your thoughts on it.  My two highlights are his raising the question as to why no-one else has thought of building cities in deserts, and the bit near the end where he says …“there is no roadblock, there is no impediment, other than a failure of imagination that will keep us from delivering on a truly global win win solution”.   See what you think.

The result is stunning computer generated images of Mannahatta (as the native peoples called it) before it was developed and populated. That work in itself, as a tool for understanding one’s bioregion, is the most thorough, poetic, compelling and fascinating such study I have ever seen (his book is incredible, the only book I return home from TED with, and which I will review after the summer break). But what they have then gone on to do, which is fascinating to Transition folks, is to then roll forward, to imagine what New York might look like if it has gone some considerable way towards reintegrating some of the ecology that was there before, reintroducing some of the rivers, the trees and so on, as part of a Transitioned, more resilient city.  Brilliant.

Next was Constanza Ceruti, a ‘high altitude archaeologist’, who studies archeaological sites on the tops of mountains around the world, finding evidence of those peoples who saw them as sacred places.  One of the telling parts was when she spoke of one place where for centuries the people had a ritual where once a year they would go up the mountain to the glacier, chip lumps of ice which they would bring back to their homes as a blessing.  Now, with the shrinking of the glacier, they have to bring home plastic bottles of water instead.

Next was Carolyn Steel, author of the excellent ‘Hungry Cities’.  Her talk was one of the highlights for me, and in the context of Paul Romer the previous day asking why people hadn’t built new cities in the desert, here was a powerful articulation of why not.  Because the starting point of any city has always been ‘how will it feed itself?’  We take it for granted when we live in a city that there will always be enough food for everyone, but when you think about it, it is amazing that that happens at all.  It has led to a system of agriculture that has profoundly changed the world.  She traced the symbiotic evolution of cities and agriculture back 10,000 years to the Fertile Crescent, where temples were, in effect, ‘spiritualised centralised food distribution systems’.  The Roman Empire followed, an empire built, as much as anything, to source food for Rome.  She described the growth of the Empire as “one long ancient shopping spree’, sourcing food from great distances.

London in the 17th century was built around its food supplies, fish and grain markets by the river, still found in street names.  It would not have been possible to live in a city and not be aware of where your food came from.  This has now become much more invisible, thanks initially to rail and then to suburbia and our present day distribution systems.  She looked back through a series of food thinkers, and at the idea of ‘Utopia’, which means simultaneously “good place”  and “no place”… it is an idealised thing that cannot actually exist in reality.  She has coined a new phrase, ‘sitopia’, or ‘food place’, to articulate the need to use food as a conceptual design tool, that in designing anything, we always think of food first.  We can use, she concluded, food as a powerful tool in order to shape our cities for the better.

Bjarke Ingels is a young Danish architect who has won many awards for his work.  An engaging and entertaining speaker, he talked about his work.  This started out OK… he is clearly a talented designer, with good thinking around sustainability, but as the talk wore on, he ventured more and more into the kind of architectural megalomania that architects are often drawn to, creating huge ‘statement’ buildings just because they can.  His first buildings were fine, the idea of creating large buildings like mountains so as to maximise the south facing spaces.  Then it all got a bit carried away, some ghastly thing he designed in China, and then a project in Azerbajan where 7 huge buildings were to be built, each in the shape of one of the country’s largest mountains.  No thoughts of the resource impacts of such a project, and a scale of project that really belonged to the upside of the Age of Cheap Oil, not the downside.  Great speaker though.

Magnus Larsson is another architect, with an initially interesting idea that got rather carried away with itself, although in his defense, he did put forward his talk as an idea, as the early stages of a concept.  His starting point is desertification. Deserts are moving southwards (in Africa) at 1 metre per day.  Trees can slow it down, but often they just get cut down for firewood.  His solution is to ‘make the dunes inhabitable’, creating a green desert from within.  All you need to do, he said, is solidify the sand.  How?  By using some microorganism that one finds in marshes, one can turn sand into sandstone.  It is a far cheaper way than using cement to do the same thing.  His idea is to turn the dunes into ‘linear cities’, one long continuous line of dune houses across Africa, which would hold back the sands, while also creating shelter.  Conceptually interesting, but I’m sure you could spend this morning coming up with a list of the many reasons why it wouldn’t work in practice (here’s a few to start with: water, food, energy, cost, loneliness, boredom….)

The second session of the afternoon was called ‘Enquire Within’.  First up, Dan Pink, who applied observations from science to how to run a business.  He showed something called ‘the Candle Problem’ a simple initiative test.  When people were presented with it, some were given a cash incentive to solve it, and others were just asked to do it.  Logic would tell us that the cash incentive inproved performance, but it didn’t.  The opposite was the case.  However, he said, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.  He looked at various models for how people can be encouraged to give their best at work which include creating time for them to be creative outside of what they already do.  He offered the example of wikipedia, as an example of something done using peoples’ passion and enthusiasm, as opposed to Microsoft’s Encarta, which worked in a more traditional way, and was left in the dust by Wikipedia.

Next was my personal highlight of the whole 2 days I was there.  It was so brilliant that I could not do it justice, and you will have to wait for the film of it.  Conductor Itay Talgam (left) talked about inspiration and leadership, using the work of famous conductors to illustrate his points.  It was stunning stuff, but as I say, you will have to wait for the film!

Then Daniel Birnbaum, the curator of the Venice Biennale.  His talk was about the role of a curator, but I have to say it didn’t do much for me, given that I think that much modern art has become so removed from reality, like some the architecture presented during TED, that it has attained levels of abstraction that make it rather irrelevant.  Interesting footage though of a house built as a typical US suburban home being brought up the river to Venice as a centrepiece of the exhibition, sinking in the harbour.

Last speaker was Brother Paulus Terwitte, a Cappuchin monk, who talked about what he saw as the important things in life and the power of silence.  Felt like a slightly condescending and patronising conclusion to the event, whereas most other speakers had clearly honed their talks and put a lot of work into them, that Brother Paulus just gave his usual thing, which was disappointing.  Anyway, then Tom O’Reilly, one of the organisers, gave a very funny recap of the conference, accompanied by hilarious powerpoint, taking off many of the previous speakers.  Final thing was an improvised musical piece from Imogen Heap.  Beautiful.  A great way to conclude.

The TED staff take to the stage for some well-earned applause

So, altogether, an extraordinary event.  I think that TED is a bit like a really good record shop.  As a teenager, I virtually grew up in Revolver Records in Bristol, one of the great independent record shops.  The people who worked there were such music obsessives, that usually when you went to the counter clutching whatever record you wanted, they would say “you don’t want to buy that rubbish, listen to THIS”, and then proceed to play you something extraordinary.  They were usually right, and you usually went home with their record instead.  In the same way, the speakers at TED create an eclectic list which, on first inspection, reveals no-one familiar at all.  However, the skill with which they are picked, and the diversity of what they bring, and the professionalism of the whole event, is extraordinary.  They are clearly quite an extraordinary organisation, with a great power to communicate powerful ideas.  I wish I had been able to make the whole thing.  If you haven’t already done so, check out Ted.com for more information.

What an extraordinary day.  I missed days one and two of TED, which, if they were anywhere near as good as today, was a big loss.  A day of fascinating speakers, even the ones I disgreed with were interesting…  Set in the Oxford Playhouse, the day was well presented, well hosted, and had a great buzz. It divided into 4 sections.  I’ll just give a few thoughts on some of the presenters.  Over at the TED blog is a detailed write up of each speaker and some good photos, far more detail than I am going to manage!  So the first session was called ‘Radical Development’.

First speaker Paul Romer was, to my ears at least, dangerously deluded.  The solution to the world’s problems, he argued, was the building of new ‘Charter Cities’, in effect free-trade zones.  Guantanamo Bay, he argued, should be turned into a free-trade zone run by Canada, and we could build new cities in the deserts of Africa which could house the growing world population and be a driver to the world economy.  No talk of resource constraints, resource depletion, the possibility that free trade hasn’t been an unbridled success everywhere, no mention of food growing, no mention of lots of reasons why building new cities in the desert is really not a very good idea and that there are very obvious reasons why it hasn’t been done before.

Mark Koska talked about his invention, a new kind of syringe that could not be reused, thereby meaning that in the developing world millions of people would not get hepititus or AIDS from dirty needles.  Great idea.  Then Michael Pritchard, who has invented the LifeSaver bottle, which you can use to filter even raw sewage and it will turn it into sterile water.  To demonstrate he filled a tank with river water, sewage and other horrible stuff, stirred it up, filtered it through his invention and drank it.  An amazing thing, and the role it can play in disaster areas and in the developing world is huge.  Fantastic.  I want one.

William Kamkwamba is a young man from Africa whose parents couldn’t afford to send him to school, and so he taught himself physics by reading books, and then built wind turbines for his village using scrap materials.  Fabulous.  Really inspiring.  Then it was me.  Seemed to go OK to me, I just about remembered everything I wanted to say.  Tim Brown, a designer, then talked about the need to lift design from thinking about individual products to big thinking, taking Brunel as an example.

The second session was called In the Shadows, and as the name suggests, it went into some of the darker issues of our times.  First up was Taryn Simon, is a photographer who specialises in taking pictures of the things we never see, the inside of long term nuclear waste facilities, CIA headquarters and disease laboratories.  Beautiful but chilling. Then Misha Glenny, the former BBC correspondent, talked about organised crime, and how 15% of global GDP is now generated by organised crime, as he set out in his book McMafia.  Very sobering.  There was also a guy whose name I didn’t catch who is a photographer who photographs the landscapes created by oil extraction.  He was the second person (as well as me) who talked about peak oil, very passionately, accompanied by his striking images. 

Loretta Napoleoni talked about terrorism, and its role in the world.  The session finished with Emmanuel Jal, an extraordinary young man.  He told the story of his youth in Sudan, seeing his village burnt down, some of his family killed, and by 8, he was a boy soldier.  His life was hellish (he refers to himself as a ‘war child’), until a few years later he was smuggled out of Sudan by an aid worker.  He now travels the world as a hip hop artist, raising money for building a school in his village.  He ended his part with a rap song about Emma McCune, the aid worker who rescued him, which moved many to tears. 

First session after lunch was called Revealing Energy.  First up was Ross Lovegrove, a designer who talked about how his work is inspired by forms from nature and biomimicry.  He was followed by music, the Radio Science Orchestra, and then Nick Veasey.  I was immediately drawn to him due to the fact he was wearing a New Order t-shirt, and his talk was very interesting too.  He is an x-ray artist, taking amazing photos of ordinary things using xrays.  Very striking. 

Steve Cowley is a researcher into nuclear fusion.  His talk was about the potential of fusion as an energy source.  There are about 40 years worth of oil and gas he told the audience, but over 30,000 years worth of lithium for fusion, which can be found in seawater.  Lots of people say that nuclear fusion is 30 years away, he told the audience, but in fact at his laboratory they have already managed to create a fusion reaction.  So when might we actually see it come on stream?  Well, ah, 30 years.  Although he is clearly excited about it, for me it is so far away as to be almost irrelevant given the rapid onset of other energy depletions. 

Eric Giller was the one that a lot of the geeks in the audience were excited about and had been buzzing about in the breaks.  He has developed a form of wireless electricity, which means that electricity can be sent through the air rather than needing cables.  Devices could recharge themselves withut being plugged in, we’d not trip over leads any more, and save loads of copper in cables.  The demonstration went fine, for people who find that kind of thing exciting.  He didn’t do it over great distances, just a couple of feet, but it seemed to work.

Bertrand Piccard is a French balloonist who has gone on to develop a solar powered plane, and intends to fly round the world in it non-stop.  He told the audience that his aim is not to create planes that can carry 200 people commercially, but rather it is a symbol that renewables can do anything.  It is about what can be achieved when we believe in the impossible, and when we thrown uncertainties overboard.  Very impressive, and also realistic about the potential of what he can achieve.

The last session was called Worldview Rethink.  First speaker, Parag Khanna, gave an absorbing account of how borders are changing, and the geopolitics of the world affect us all. Geoff Mulgan gave a great talk about capitalism and how, following the economic collapse we are only just starting to see the beginning of, we will need to prioritise and put other thing up there as important.  When the government bailed out the banks, he said, they were bailing out the past, not the future.  Why should we now boost consumption, rather than think about what we consume, he asked.  He called for a different kind of economy, one based on care and relationships, mentioning Transition as one of the things we need more of.  The only way to progress, he said, is by doing experiments.

Rory Bremner was fantastic, a much needed bout of hilarity, great impressions and funny reflections on the conference.  The day ended with Karen Armstrong, a religious scholar, talking about the Charter for Compassion that will be unveiled in November.  A fascinating project, and her talk about the power of compassion was very touching.  And that was that.  Ah but no, there was more.  What was termed the ‘Bonus Session’ at another venue round the corner.

After some odd but intriguing music made by ‘Felix’s Machines’, TV comedy producer James Balog talked about the things we can’t see, which was a humourous chat.

Then there was one of the highlights of the whole thing, Manuel Lima, of the Extreme Ice Survey.  He is a nature photographer who specialises in ice.  His organisation has set up time lapse photography on glaciers and on the ice sheets, and he showed speeded up sequences of huge ice fields collapsing.  Amazingly presented, agonising to watch, something everyone should see (check out their website).  The day ended with Nigeran novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who discussed the power of stories and how people often only want to tell, and hear, one story about Africa, whereas there are many more than the usual ones about hunger and war.  It was a beautiful speech, a testimony to the power of writing.

By then, I actually had a cracking headache!  So I had something to eat and headed off into the night.  What a day though.  Quite astonishing.  From the madly deluded and the frankly pointless to the life saving and the world changing.  I laid my head down to sleep with the Manuel Lima’s images of melting ice shelves in my mind.  Boy do we have a big task on our hands.