A New Age of Exploration

The following piece is the first half of a seven page investment thesis entitled Social Capital: The Next 100 Years. Submitted as part of an open call by Social Capital, it looks to address issues surrounding:

• climate change & decarbonisation,
• increasing environmental volatility,
• additive manufacturing,
• building urban and psycho-spatial resilience.

The subsequent parts of the full piece are published on Medium.

Social Capital: The Next 100 Years

In the Age of Exploration, the brightest minds from across Europe were sent to traverse the known world, to set forth upon the new expeditionary epoch of the 15th century. The allure of lands uncharted and unimagined topographies were now within man’s strengthening grasp. Slowly and surely, scientific advancements in cartography, navigation, shipbuilding and engineering allowed us to decode the misty lands and phantom projections. 500 years later, we ponder upon the speculative landscapes that captured the minds of the great pioneers, where the mythical stories would inhabit a world of troubled uncertainty.

The world was being revealed to its curious tenants. The maps were being drawn and the topographies realised.

The world that faces us today is very different. Unlike the cartographers of centuries ago, we have mapped and charted every detail of the world. Yet, the map we hold is more in flux than it ever has been. Climate change shifts natural topographies and moulds the urban fabric that we depend upon — we have gone from the discoverers of uncharted lands to its incumbent caretakers. The most vulnerable of these sit on coastal regions at the precipice of environmental volatility. The uncertainty and mythos of a hidden world has been replaced by the unavoidable certainty of the known one. Whilst man of 500 years ago was subject to shifting mythologies and speculations upon the landscapes around us, we are not. All of the scientific tools and sensory technologies available to us reveal an unavoidable reality.

Our movement into the 2100 will be our very own Age of Exploration. Not one of uncharted lands or hidden grounds but an exploration of evolving urbanity and the elevation of billions into a new civic and infrastructural paradigm. It is about rediscovering the city, rather than revealing it.

I: Urban Resilience

Urban Resilience should be the core tenet and driving mantra for a societal approach for the next fifty to one hundred years of our civilisation. This is the ability for local municipalities, towns, cities, countries (both those that exist currently and those that will exist) to weather the storms of exogenous shocks that are as a result of climate change. Funding and developing systems that make cities more resilient will thus allow us to focus on actively mitigating, reversing and remedying the issues of climate change and promote a more investor-friendly environment to combat it. The latter is contingent on the stability that is fostered and implemented by the former.

Resilience applies at many levels — however its strategic end goal as an ideology is to both re-build our current infrastructural and social ecosystems and build our lost ecosystems with strength against exogenous shocks as a part of its core DNA.

Transcribing a new urban reality that is focused upon the most existential crisis in human history, as a confluence of technological, socio-political and scientific endeavours will inevitably result in a more active and pluralistic form of national participation. Inventiveness is stimulated and borne as a response of stability and promise against the phase-shifts and realignments of the landscapes around us. Urban and infrastructural resilience bleeds into the sociological composition, improving community-led resilience and engagement. Therefore the following proposal suggests that the strategy for the next five to ten decades needs to be on cultivating a technological, urban, scientific and psychological resilience that permeates both the cities we have created and the cities we will create.

Urban Resilience is not a prescription or a checklist, it cannot be defined or monopolised by one product or one company and it is not a philosophy that serves at the hegemony of either a nation state or a private entity. Social Capital should consider the role of urban resilience as an essential and urgent developmental and financial framework and process to build entities that can safeguard our cities, both discovered and undiscovered.

II: The Definition Problem & The Role of Private Capital Allocators

A great portion of the problem in the failure to address core issues regarding infrastructural resilience inherently derives from ambiguity and confusion over the responsibility of the state:

• When you ask someone to define the term ‘resilience’ in relation to the climate crisis, how many variances would pop up?

So we should ask the question,

• What is the core methodology that should underpin the investment strategies of a holding company dedicated to addressing the climate climate crisis?

This can be quantified by asking the question,

• How do we manifest the philosophy of urban resilience in reality?

If we look at what global and urban trends are coming to a crossroads with the climate crisis, these are accelerating in rapidly developing cities, such as Mumbai, Sao Paulo and Manila. These are densely populated, have the highest per capita rates of urbanisation and growth and usually have a governmental system that is struggling to maintain and organise a metropolitan-scale investment strategy. In these major metropolitan areas, there is a clear mismatch in collective vision vs. the effective allocation of capital. Many of these developing nations have pursued strategies of rising decentralisation of government responsibility, devolving authority to local municipalities. This means that the task of mobilising essential capital to finance core infrastructural investments is de-prioritised, incredibly inconsistent and delivered with mixed signals.

In a similar way that cities used advances made in GIS technology for waste management and automated billing systems for clerical administration to streamline their systems, technologies and companies built with the core focus of urban resilience will allow for cities to better manage the problems brought about through rapid development and population growth. They will be better equipped and more stable, thus in a better position to mobilise further capital and become investment friendly.

Infrastructural systems that are at the mercy of sudden floods, hurricanes, heat waves and air pollution will naturally be underserved to address the core issues that would have caused them, thus the cycle of volatility continues. Lobbying of governments to overhaul their social and legislative policy should be considered as an essential remedy to the ineptness of the state response in some areas. However, the core of urban resilience can be achieved through technology implemented into the grain of the urban composition — it does not require massive government led overhauls or demolitions of key infrastructure.

For international bodies, the priority should be on developing regulatory frameworks that can make our cities more resilient in the long term, whether it be through urban development or sustainability policies. They are essential bodies in establishing key targets and frameworks that can then be utilised by the private capital allocators.

III: The City Resilience Index (CRI)

“Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”

United Nations Sustainable Development Goal Number 11

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals act as a call to action for all nation states and there is much to learn from the criteria they set forth. The development of City Resilience Index (CRI) was through a collaboration between professional services firm Arup and The Rockefeller Foundation, in a manner through which we could mitigate the ambiguity behind a word like ‘resilience’ and aim for both quantitative and method-based qualitative targets that fight the climate crisis.

The index is a tool that facilitates a more complex understanding of the resilience capability of a city. The CRI allows for an engagement between policy makers, key stakeholders, private capital allocators and community organisers. This will therefore lead to a better articulation of urban resilience that will facilitate and inform improved investment behaviours.

How does this proposal apply to the potential methodology of Social Capital?

The core idea of urban resilience cannot be purely manifested in one product or a company: it is an essential framework to approach investment — a methodology that will underpin key decisions on how to mitigate and guard against the climate crisis. An effective holding company should use the City Resilience Index or any equivalent framework as a tool to evaluate investment decisions on whether the net output is an increase or decrease in the resilience capacity of a building, a town, a city, a country. The City Resilience Index is the qualitative manifestation of urban resilience, and the subsequent holding company is the means to implement the decisive change. There are key subdivisions of a resilient city that the CRI describes and these should be reflected in the companies and technologies that Social Capital looks to develop and grow.

“Cities are living laboratories forced to confront challenges of increasing complexity…A city’s resilience depends on its physical assets as well as its policies, social capital and institutions”

Dr Nancy Kete, former M.D., The Rockefeller Foundation

IV: Moving Forward: Manifesting Effective Change

In his seminal text, Critique of Everyday Life, sociologist Henri Lefebrve denoted that an inclusive and humane socio-spatial environment reflexively results in a similarly humane sociological composition amongst the populous. He wrote about a plea for the peoples ‘right to the city’ where the homogenising behaviour of spatial and urban planning needed to be rewritten for the benefit of the general populace who inhabit it. The rewriting of cities happens, whether by incremental attenuation or by paradigm shifts. Not only will it happen, but it has happened. The revolutionary pushes of 19th century urban planner Baron Haussman overhauled Paris as a city — this in turn, increased the standard of living massively, improving living and working conditions for the entire city.

Using the concepts of urban resilience as a necessary North Star to drive our investment and using the criteria set forth by essential resilience indexes like the CRI, the concern is now the companies and products that can be built that can manifest effective change into our world. The three paradigms below will follow this ideal of rewriting the urban fabric. These will form the baseline for how we approach all forms of climate change protection, mitigation and remediation for the next century.

In the following pages, the proposal will detail a number of key areas of investments, whether they are physical products or services, both conventional and radical, presentable as immediate or last resort options — however they will all converge upon key elements of the City Resilience Index in the primary goal of making our habitable world less vulnerable to exogenous shocks.

This piece was the first half of a seven page investment thesis entitled Social Capital: The Next 100 Years, submitted as part of an open call by Social Capital. The rest of the thesis can be found on my Medium profile.