It took me the longest time to read my dad’s PhD dissertation. When I finally did, I’m glad that I waited so long. There’s a perfect symmetry in taking it in now that I’m the same age he was when he wrote it.
***
My dad personifies the proverbial jack of all trades. In the dawn of history, he majored in the fittingly cross-disciplinary field of Cultural geography, studying the relationships between humans and the spatial environments they inhabit.
Around the time I was born he did a brief stint as an urban planner. I think it was probably his one brush with regular employment. To paraphrase Bob Dylan: He was so much older then, he’d be younger than that ever-after.
Having cut ties with predictability, he got involved in a project that must have appeared as complete madness to his contemporaries. That project consisted of breathing new life into an old abandoned factory. It was a monstrosity of a thing; more like a small town than anything else. Its 19th century brick facades concealed thousands of square meters worth of empty space.
My dad and his partner in crime—a dreamy architect who became as dear as an uncle to me—set about converting this sprawling edifice. Astonishingly, they did it all with their own hands, using material they’d scavenged from local scrap yards.
Some of my sunniest childhood memories are from that place. My dad and his friend sitting at a desk in the middle of a vast empty room, feverishly talking about their shared obsession.
An obsession which would bear fruit; the place soon buzzed with creativity. I remember photography studios next to advertising agencies, sharing kitchen with ceramists, painters and musicians. The vibe was the coolest I’ve ever experienced, both then and since.
As this vast project neared its completion, my dad went looking for new challenges. He found one that was orders of magnitude grander, in the abandoned shipyard district of Sweden’s second-largest city.
The area was impossibly big and utterly desolate. It had met the same destiny as pretty much all western naval yards and maritime industrial zones in the early 80’s. In just a few years, thousands of jobs were lost, leaving an immense dead space, smack in the middle of the city.
Repurposing this sprawling ghost town, seemed just the ticket for my dad.
I spent a couple of summers there as a lowly construction worker, tearing out the insides of enormous old buildings. That’s as far as my firsthand experience went however, since I finished highschool and left home around this time.
Over the ensuing years, all that reached me were vague rumblings from beyond the horizon. It was enough to know the world kept my dad busy, but not sufficient to grasp the enormity of his new endeavour.
***
Urban renewal is probably just about the hairiest challenge imaginable, especially if you’re taking on a whole integral part of a major metropolitan area.
In fact, even calling it “urban renewal” is a euphemism. It gives the impression of a disciplined process when in reality it’s more like constant mud wrestling with politicians, architects, city bureaucrats and a whole host of other stakeholders. My dad used to talk about it as “riding the tiger“, an expression he had lent from his British friends.
Given that the Brits had practically invented the modern ship yard, they were ahead of the curve when it came to dismantling and repurposing it. So my dad went there regularly, to seek inspiration and companionship.
I never met with the folks over there, but I heard many stories and have a feeling that they became like a second professional family to him. These were people who reinvented the waterfronts of cities like London and Liverpool. They’re the ones who spoke of their trade as riding the tiger, connoting a sense of excitement, unpredictability, and ultimately even danger. You better not fall off this sucker once you’ve got it running…
It was probably thanks to the Brits that my dad got the crazy idea of extracting the hard-won wisdom of a long career as bare-knuckle entrepreneur, into a dissertation.
Fusing real world experience with academic “knowledge production” is simply a lot more mainstream in the Anglo-Saxon world. Paragons within the field, such as John Dewey and Donald Schön, set a tone that reverberates to this day. Their work gave rise to methodologies like action research and reflective practice, approaches that would be my dad’s lodestars as he donned the academic straight-jacket.
The result of which became Urban Processes and Global Competition. Enabling factors for mutual urban and economic development at Norra Älvstranden in Göteborg.
It’s the kind of long and serious-sounding title academic texts are expected to have. Had it been up to me, I’d have called it Building the Good City, perhaps followed by a catchy subtitle like Transplanting the Heart of Gothenburg and Living to Tell the Tale.
The concept of the “Good City” is the central theme not only of my father’s dissertation, but also in his life long undertaking as an entrepreneur. The Good City is what happens when ‘a logistical frame’* is conducive to solving the “two-body problem”.
*Measured as the area within which it’s possible to ‘meet 15 minutes from now’. In the US that means 15 minutes by car, whereas in Europe it means 15 minutes by foot.
The term two-body problem originates in classical mechanics, then took on a different meaning in general relativity, and was eventually adopted to describe a dilemma where spouses who are both well educated and highly specialised professionals have problems finding appropriate jobs at the same location.
There are broadly two ways to tackle this conundrum. You either compromise—which typically means women interrupting their careers to support their husbands—or you can try to create the Good City.
The Good City is distinguished by its concentration of high-skill job opportunities and it’s typically found where there is a notable density of universities, corporate R&D facilities, and emerging startups.
Silicon Valley obviously comes to mind, and many academics have scrutinised it in pursuit of cracking its code. Management guru Michael Porter attempts to do so with his “cluster theory”, while urban studies theorist Richard Florida got famous for his notion of a ‘creative class‘.
What both have in common is a descriptive approach. What my dad tried to do was different; he tried to capture how to create the Good City.
Normally in academia, unless you’re in medicine or engineering, you’re not expected to do that. You’re not supposed to suggest solutions. Prescription is a dirty word.
This makes sense given that most academic researchers are brief visitors in what the rest of us think of as ‘reality’. The risk of getting it wrong is already high enough just describing what they see, so staying away from prescription is really a way of playing it safe.
My dad was never one to play it safe, but I suspect that even if he had wanted, he wouldn’t have been able to stick with a descriptive approach. It would have defeated the whole point of the project in the first place.
I also think it’s what makes the dissertation surprisingly readable. It has something which is sorely missing in most academic texts: a story-line. Really it’s the memoir of a life-long entrepreneur, masquerading as a thesis.
What great about it is also, nominally, its weakness: it vividly conveys what worked and what didn’t in an endeavour that will never be exactly repeatable anywhere else in the world. These types of processes are simply too complex and chaotic to duplicate, a lesson learnt by countless failed initiatives to create clones of Silicon Valley.
The devil, as they say, is in the details.
Having said that, I think there is one pattern my father did manage to extract, and it’s an important one.
It has to do with the very ontology of urban planning.
Dealing with ontologies means you’re zooming out to an abstraction level where it becomes possible to question the very meaning of words we take for granted. Words like “planning”, in this case.
The fundamental paradigm underlying urban planning used to go like this: The state guarantees infrastructure such as access to electricity, clean water, and public transport. Then, commercial players take it from there.
This was a slow process but worked fairly well for a long time. It even worked—albeit in a serendipitous way—in the case of Silicon Valley, which got its initial impetus from investments made by state players (manifested both in the guise of the military-industrial complex and Stanford University).
It doesn’t work so well anymore, however. While concrete aspects of a city can still be planned, you can’t really plan for a creative cluster to happen. You can’t plan the Good City.
This is a matter of great concern, since the global economy has come to revolve around innovative clusters. Where whole nations used to compete against each other, it’s now discrete urban regions that are coming to the fore as the primary units of economic power and influence.
So how do you build the Good City?
First of all, you get rid of any legacy notion of urban planning. It’s not just that the old way of doing things has become too slow, but also that it was hierarchical whereas what’s really needed is a networked approach.
That means putting people center stage. It means the challenge has turned into how to have good conversations about the qualities you want the built environment to be infused with. And it means having such conversations both continuously and in parallell with the actual building process.
***
When reading my dad’s dissertation (which is now nicely filled with underlinings and scribbles in margin), I’m struck with two things.
First of all, I think of how my father was synaesthetic as a kid. If you’ve never heard of synaesthesia, it’s a fascinating condition where input from different sensory pathways bleeds into each other and synthesises, so that colours might be heard, sounds seen, and shapes tasted.
I can’t help thinking how this must have helped as he navigated the constantly colliding worlds involved in urban renewal, learning to swim elegantly in the resulting cross-currents.
The other thing I think of, is how ahead of its time Dad’s approach was, and also the extent to which his experiences dove-tails with mine. The toolbox he developed in the ’70s and ’80s is eerily reminiscent of the mind-shift that happened decades later in my world of software-based entrepreneurship.
There, too, it was discovered that the old way of doing things no longer fit the bill. There, too, the complexity had grown unmanageable and the only valid response was to become more “agile”, which is really just another way of saying that there’s no way around the mud-wrestling.
It’s funny how I had to figure that out for myself, when all this time I could have just asked my father. But then again, that’s probably also why I had to wait twenty years before I felt I was ready to read his dissertation.