Translator: lisa thompson Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So, I’ve been hearing,
and I’m sure all of you have been hearing,
the word smart city.
Now, do we become passive bystanders and just let anything be called smart,
or as equal inhabitants of this planet,
should we have a point of view, a central, organizing principle
which tells us when do we allow something to be called smart?
So, this is something that has been bothering me,
so I decided to do what came very easy to me –
was to go ask.
So, I’ve been asking for the last four years, many people:
“Sir, what do you mean by a smart city?”
And believe me, I have come across many, many very senior people,
so I must have got hundreds of responses
and brilliant responses –
very brilliant responses.
However, with all those responses,
I had a feeling that something is missing,
something is not putting it together.
So, the kind of imaginations that I was hearing:
“What is a smart city?”
“A smart city is primarily world-class technology.”
“Globally better than the best.”
“World-class water systems.”
“World-class mobility.”
I, in all humility, was completely impressed.
Especially the talk on technology,
it seems to overwhelm the entire imagination of the city.
But even then, something was missing.
Quite honestly, if I may say,
it felt like just because if we take –
if we create an orchestra, we get the best musician from India,
best musician from Africa, best musician from America,
and in the absence of a unifying score or a conductor,
we say sing, or play, we risk a cacophony.
Individually, brilliant; but together, it will still be a cacophony.
A cacophony of brilliance.
Contradictory.
But I felt that way.
Is it just me, or do you also secretly feel the same way?
That, what is the integrating principle?
How does it all come together?
I didn’t get an answer.
So I asked a more fundamental question;
it was a follow-up question.
So I said, “Okay. What is smart?
When do we call something which is non-living –
maybe it’s a product, it’s a process or a system –
when do we call it smart?”
And again, I got hundreds and hundreds of brilliant replies.
Very insightful.
And it revealed to me what people feel is smart.
And there were distinct patterns and repetitive expressions,
so clearly what I kept hearing
was that when something adapts and evolves,
when it self-heals, when it self-corrects,
it has the ability to sense and respond,
it has the ability to grow.
So, all these expressions start making sense to me.
That, okay, when something which is non-living
starts displaying these attributes,
you can safely say, “Hey, this is smart now.”
Now, for this, I found, there was general agreement.
That people felt, yeah.
But then the follow-up question:
But isn’t all this an attribute of life? Living systems?
Well, yes.
No objection.
This is part of life.
Now, if all of these are part of life or living systems,
can we safely then say
that when a product, process, or an ecosystem
attains the attribute of life, it is called smart?
We can say that, okay, it has to be a positive attribute,
but broadly, when it displays,
it is our aspiration to endorse a non-living product, process,
or a system like a city –
with the attribute of life,
then it becomes smart?
Well, to that, to my pleasure and relief,
most people said,
“Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t seem unreasonable.
That’s broadly correct.”
So, can we also then say that since city –
city is not a physical entity in isolation;
it’s the combined expression
of the participants and parts which reside in a city;
it’s part of the larger ecosystem –
so can we also say that the same unifying or the underlying ordering logic –
or if I may use the earlier expression, “the custodian of harmony” –
which regulates all of life, would also apply to a city?
So, to this, also, I have generally received a consensus that yeah –
people feel it’s a bit fuzzy, but yeah, broadly, it’s right.
You can say that.
So …
So, once I got this, to me, this was my arrival into coherence –
that knot in my head, that “What is smart?” got resolved.
And I want to share this moment with you
primarily because I want to invite you and join you and join me
in what I felt is what we should all be saying.
So, in context to a smart city –
for that matter, a smart product, smart process –
I would say it’s not just human-centered;
it’s not just economy-centered;
and it’s not just technology-centered.
Because these are the popular imaginations.
It’s Life-centered.
And Life with a capital L.
Capital L means all life, not just human life.
Because all of you – you know, you’re science students –
life is interdependent, interconnected.
You cannot think about it in isolation.
So, can we all agree that a smart product is Life-centered?
That’s smart.
So that settles the big question,
which I think needs to be settled.
We cannot just allow any product, any city to be called smart
just because you have some bells and whistles of technology,
you have bells and whistles of some kind of economics.
What is the central – what is the common purpose?
This is the common purpose, isn’t it?
So that’s settled.
But having settled that,
I think our industrial and economic minds say, well, that’s fine.
How do you go about consulting life?
It’s easy to say Life-centered,
but if people want to mimic from life,
how do we go about learning from life?
So, this is where the new emerging science and discipline of biomimicry helps.
Now, biomimicry:
bio in Greek means life,
and mimicry means emulation.
That means learning from life.
The structured science and discipline of biomimicry allows us, gives us a way –
a way we look at the deep patterns and strategies
which nature has used to solve problems which also confront us.
And we use the problems and the solutions that we find in nature
to come up with more sustainable solutions for humans.
So, now, let us see in context to a city:
Can we learn something from nature?
But before we go there,
let’s have a good hard and cold look
at the way we go about making our cities today.
So, have you all heard about the master plan?
Master plan or city development, that’s the way we build our city.
For those of you who do not know,
I’ll share with you what a master plan or a city development plan is.
And I’ve had the occasion to sit in a committee
where we were supposed to appoint, or at least shortlist,
some master plan proposals.
In a master plan,
a few people are appointed and tasked …
to imagine the outcome,
the final outcome of a city.
It is to be pre-imagined, predetermined,
and based on that predetermination,
they are supposed to come up with bylaws and rules and regulations …
so that life can evolve to fit into that master plan.
Now, please …
can you predict if you’re going to sneeze in the next five minutes?
And it’s such a complex system.
And we are tasking a few people to imagine the outcome.
How smart is that?
How smart is that?
So …
a master plan, actually, what is it trying to do?
It is trying to tell life that this is the way you live and work
so that you can adapt and evolve to fit into the plan.
If we remember, a master plan –
if a tiger were to come into the room,
we will not remember anything else, right?
We will remember that master plan is just our imagination.
It’s something which we invented.
It’s a tool; it’s a servant to allow humanity to get somewhere.
So, when our servant becomes our master and we don’t even realize that …
it’s not very smart.
So, the first thing is
we have to question the processes which have become our masters.
So, my submission is:
Let’s not call it the master plan.
The master plan, because of the word,
seems to have become our master in a literal sense.
We should be having a servant plan,
you know, which serves life.
Now, let’s see even how do we go about procuring this master plan?
So, the primary way we go about putting together the parts of the city
seems to be procurement.
We take out tenders, contracts, is that correct?
It’s a winner-takes-all system.
What does a winner-takes-all system do?
It excludes a lot of people and includes a few,
and only they participate in a process which we all know is ongoing,
and what and where it will be required is not known.
Now, it is limited too.
How smart is that?
Shouldn’t we be able to say that, you know, this doesn’t seem right?
All the problems that we face of unhealthy practices –
I think this graphic tells you something.
Do you see yourself somewhere?
These are emergent behaviors of a bad system.
This is not necessarily what people want to do.
I have met scientists – some great people.
They say because of the system, we have to play the role of a lobbyist.
We have to.
So, can’t we see that the system is not working?
And it’s not rocket science.
We can fix the system.
So, these are the systems
which we are using to put together the parts of the city.
Now, can’t we imagine a system which would,
instead of taking winner-takes-all,
create an ecosystem which leverages, enables collective intelligence,
enables collective learning,
but at the same time,
it is able to procure work or services as and when required
from the most suitable person or agency
such that the local context and local information is best-suited?
We are intelligent people.
These are the problems we should be working on.
We shouldn’t let these systems become our masters.
They are servants.
And sometimes we forget.
So we are all concentrating on procuring parts.
It will not work.
We have to see:
How will these parts work together?
Now, if these two processes –
we can say, “Okay, we need to fix this process,”
and then we say, “Can we look at nature?”
Now, that’s the smart question.
That’s the smart question.
So let’s look what nature does.
Now, in nature, if you see – the closest thing would be a forest.
A forest is like an ecosystem.
It also has many autonomous –
thousands and millions of species,
which are at the same time independent yet integrated.
Imagine!
So much complexity, and yet it thrives.
So how does, in nature, a forest get built?
A forest is not predetermined or preimagined, by the way.
It emerges.
It emerges from the interactions,
the relationships of its various parts and participants.
Now, that’s the kind of living planning process that we could learn from nature.
That instead of being a rank, can the planning process be continuous,
like a breath, like our blood flow,
which is able to work on real-time feedback
and let a city emerge
within the context of operating conditions
and some fitness functions, which the planet has,
so we can define the fitness functions?
But clearly there are ways.
Only we have to look towards nature;
it’s already been solved.
Does nature have the same problem of managing competition?
Of doing some kind of procurement?
Clearly.
Nature has all these problems, but how is nature solving?
Let’s look at the forest.
Do you know: What you see on the ground in the forest are trees?
They appear to be all competing with each other for sunlight.
That’s the popular imagination.
That’s true.
But within the ground, underground,
there is a large network, which is called the mycelium network,
which links the roots of trees and plants together,
creating a huge network of collaboration and cooperation.
It is the interaction, relationships, and constant feedback
which allows the entire system to become resilient.
So, here is an example where we could look.
Can we learn from nature
to come up with procurement processes which are not so exclusionary?
And I think this idea of procurement
is a central design error in our economic system.
That creates fear, right?
We don’t want fear.
And can we create this kind of system?
So, Janine Benyus, who’s the founder of biomimicry movement,
she said there’s a central, unifying concept in nature.
It is called life creates conditions conducive to life.
That means the fitness functions will only allow those strategies to move forward
which allow and contribute to things
that contribute to creating conditions for life.
So, this is what we can learn from nature.
And I think these are the smart questions we should be looking at.
So, a smart city is possible.
Now, the good thing is that if you see the logo –
the butterfly is actually the logo
which the Indian government has chosen for the Smart City.
That’s the actual logo.
And I was really happy
because I think clearly it’s an admission of the hidden message.
A caterpillar cannot become a butterfly until it changes its ways.
And our fossil-fuel-based economy,
stuck in the current master plan and procurement process,
would need to undergo a phase change,
and surely we can become a butterfly.
Instead of me, it’s the butterfly.
It’s the hidden message, which I understood now.
So …
but then, is that the only thing, though?
See, after all, a city is the sum total of many, many things that are happening.
It includes our economy, our politics,
the way we organize our society, the way we do manufacturing,
so in an emerging ecosystem, we actually have to do everything in parallel.
So things like a nature-inspired circular economy,
a nature-inspired additive manufacturing,
nature-inspired green chemistry,
all these have to be done together because, you know, it’s inter-trough.
Even if you want to make coffee, you are limited by what’s available.
And we are saying we’ll build a smart city.
Out of what?
Out of what is available, right?
The kind of processes, materials, political system, economic system –
or will it just get built?
I think we need to look at nature.
A smart city cannot be procured and assembled by procuring parts;
however, it will emerge if we allow the ecosystem to become smart,
if we work on the many, many interrelationships,
the many, many interactions, and the many, many feedback loops.
A smart city or many smart cities will emerge in due time.
So, what I’d like to end by saying that –
the one thing which I would invite you and submit –
that as citizens,
there should be one non-negotiable criteria now we should settle at:
That we no longer will allow any product, process, or system to be called smart
until it meets the criteria that it creates conditions conducive to Life.
Life with a capital L. All life.
Thank you.
(Applause)
So, I’ve been hearing,
and I’m sure all of you have been hearing,
the word smart city.
Now, do we become passive bystanders and just let anything be called smart,
or as equal inhabitants of this planet,
should we have a point of view, a central, organizing principle
which tells us when do we allow something to be called smart?
So, this is something that has been bothering me,
so I decided to do what came very easy to me –
was to go ask.
So, I’ve been asking for the last four years, many people:
“Sir, what do you mean by a smart city?”
And believe me, I have come across many, many very senior people,
so I must have got hundreds of responses
and brilliant responses –
very brilliant responses.
However, with all those responses,
I had a feeling that something is missing,
something is not putting it together.
So, the kind of imaginations that I was hearing:
“What is a smart city?”
“A smart city is primarily world-class technology.”
“Globally better than the best.”
“World-class water systems.”
“World-class mobility.”
I, in all humility, was completely impressed.
Especially the talk on technology,
it seems to overwhelm the entire imagination of the city.
But even then, something was missing.
Quite honestly, if I may say,
it felt like just because if we take –
if we create an orchestra, we get the best musician from India,
best musician from Africa, best musician from America,
and in the absence of a unifying score or a conductor,
we say sing, or play, we risk a cacophony.
Individually, brilliant; but together, it will still be a cacophony.
A cacophony of brilliance.
Contradictory.
But I felt that way.
Is it just me, or do you also secretly feel the same way?
That, what is the integrating principle?
How does it all come together?
I didn’t get an answer.
So I asked a more fundamental question;
it was a follow-up question.
So I said, “Okay. What is smart?
When do we call something which is non-living –
maybe it’s a product, it’s a process or a system –
when do we call it smart?”
And again, I got hundreds and hundreds of brilliant replies.
Very insightful.
And it revealed to me what people feel is smart.
And there were distinct patterns and repetitive expressions,
so clearly what I kept hearing
was that when something adapts and evolves,
when it self-heals, when it self-corrects,
it has the ability to sense and respond,
it has the ability to grow.
So, all these expressions start making sense to me.
That, okay, when something which is non-living
starts displaying these attributes,
you can safely say, “Hey, this is smart now.”
Now, for this, I found, there was general agreement.
That people felt, yeah.
But then the follow-up question:
But isn’t all this an attribute of life? Living systems?
Well, yes.
No objection.
This is part of life.
Now, if all of these are part of life or living systems,
can we safely then say
that when a product, process, or an ecosystem
attains the attribute of life, it is called smart?
We can say that, okay, it has to be a positive attribute,
but broadly, when it displays,
it is our aspiration to endorse a non-living product, process,
or a system like a city –
with the attribute of life,
then it becomes smart?
Well, to that, to my pleasure and relief,
most people said,
“Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t seem unreasonable.
That’s broadly correct.”
So, can we also then say that since city –
city is not a physical entity in isolation;
it’s the combined expression
of the participants and parts which reside in a city;
it’s part of the larger ecosystem –
so can we also say that the same unifying or the underlying ordering logic –
or if I may use the earlier expression, “the custodian of harmony” –
which regulates all of life, would also apply to a city?
So, to this, also, I have generally received a consensus that yeah –
people feel it’s a bit fuzzy, but yeah, broadly, it’s right.
You can say that.
So …
So, once I got this, to me, this was my arrival into coherence –
that knot in my head, that “What is smart?” got resolved.
And I want to share this moment with you
primarily because I want to invite you and join you and join me
in what I felt is what we should all be saying.
So, in context to a smart city –
for that matter, a smart product, smart process –
I would say it’s not just human-centered;
it’s not just economy-centered;
and it’s not just technology-centered.
Because these are the popular imaginations.
It’s Life-centered.
And Life with a capital L.
Capital L means all life, not just human life.
Because all of you – you know, you’re science students –
life is interdependent, interconnected.
You cannot think about it in isolation.
So, can we all agree that a smart product is Life-centered?
That’s smart.
So that settles the big question,
which I think needs to be settled.
We cannot just allow any product, any city to be called smart
just because you have some bells and whistles of technology,
you have bells and whistles of some kind of economics.
What is the central – what is the common purpose?
This is the common purpose, isn’t it?
So that’s settled.
But having settled that,
I think our industrial and economic minds say, well, that’s fine.
How do you go about consulting life?
It’s easy to say Life-centered,
but if people want to mimic from life,
how do we go about learning from life?
So, this is where the new emerging science and discipline of biomimicry helps.
Now, biomimicry:
bio in Greek means life,
and mimicry means emulation.
That means learning from life.
The structured science and discipline of biomimicry allows us, gives us a way –
a way we look at the deep patterns and strategies
which nature has used to solve problems which also confront us.
And we use the problems and the solutions that we find in nature
to come up with more sustainable solutions for humans.
So, now, let us see in context to a city:
Can we learn something from nature?
But before we go there,
let’s have a good hard and cold look
at the way we go about making our cities today.
So, have you all heard about the master plan?
Master plan or city development, that’s the way we build our city.
For those of you who do not know,
I’ll share with you what a master plan or a city development plan is.
And I’ve had the occasion to sit in a committee
where we were supposed to appoint, or at least shortlist,
some master plan proposals.
In a master plan,
a few people are appointed and tasked …
to imagine the outcome,
the final outcome of a city.
It is to be pre-imagined, predetermined,
and based on that predetermination,
they are supposed to come up with bylaws and rules and regulations …
so that life can evolve to fit into that master plan.
Now, please …
can you predict if you’re going to sneeze in the next five minutes?
And it’s such a complex system.
And we are tasking a few people to imagine the outcome.
How smart is that?
How smart is that?
So …
a master plan, actually, what is it trying to do?
It is trying to tell life that this is the way you live and work
so that you can adapt and evolve to fit into the plan.
If we remember, a master plan –
if a tiger were to come into the room,
we will not remember anything else, right?
We will remember that master plan is just our imagination.
It’s something which we invented.
It’s a tool; it’s a servant to allow humanity to get somewhere.
So, when our servant becomes our master and we don’t even realize that …
it’s not very smart.
So, the first thing is
we have to question the processes which have become our masters.
So, my submission is:
Let’s not call it the master plan.
The master plan, because of the word,
seems to have become our master in a literal sense.
We should be having a servant plan,
you know, which serves life.
Now, let’s see even how do we go about procuring this master plan?
So, the primary way we go about putting together the parts of the city
seems to be procurement.
We take out tenders, contracts, is that correct?
It’s a winner-takes-all system.
What does a winner-takes-all system do?
It excludes a lot of people and includes a few,
and only they participate in a process which we all know is ongoing,
and what and where it will be required is not known.
Now, it is limited too.
How smart is that?
Shouldn’t we be able to say that, you know, this doesn’t seem right?
All the problems that we face of unhealthy practices –
I think this graphic tells you something.
Do you see yourself somewhere?
These are emergent behaviors of a bad system.
This is not necessarily what people want to do.
I have met scientists – some great people.
They say because of the system, we have to play the role of a lobbyist.
We have to.
So, can’t we see that the system is not working?
And it’s not rocket science.
We can fix the system.
So, these are the systems
which we are using to put together the parts of the city.
Now, can’t we imagine a system which would,
instead of taking winner-takes-all,
create an ecosystem which leverages, enables collective intelligence,
enables collective learning,
but at the same time,
it is able to procure work or services as and when required
from the most suitable person or agency
such that the local context and local information is best-suited?
We are intelligent people.
These are the problems we should be working on.
We shouldn’t let these systems become our masters.
They are servants.
And sometimes we forget.
So we are all concentrating on procuring parts.
It will not work.
We have to see:
How will these parts work together?
Now, if these two processes –
we can say, “Okay, we need to fix this process,”
and then we say, “Can we look at nature?”
Now, that’s the smart question.
That’s the smart question.
So let’s look what nature does.
Now, in nature, if you see – the closest thing would be a forest.
A forest is like an ecosystem.
It also has many autonomous –
thousands and millions of species,
which are at the same time independent yet integrated.
Imagine!
So much complexity, and yet it thrives.
So how does, in nature, a forest get built?
A forest is not predetermined or preimagined, by the way.
It emerges.
It emerges from the interactions,
the relationships of its various parts and participants.
Now, that’s the kind of living planning process that we could learn from nature.
That instead of being a rank, can the planning process be continuous,
like a breath, like our blood flow,
which is able to work on real-time feedback
and let a city emerge
within the context of operating conditions
and some fitness functions, which the planet has,
so we can define the fitness functions?
But clearly there are ways.
Only we have to look towards nature;
it’s already been solved.
Does nature have the same problem of managing competition?
Of doing some kind of procurement?
Clearly.
Nature has all these problems, but how is nature solving?
Let’s look at the forest.
Do you know: What you see on the ground in the forest are trees?
They appear to be all competing with each other for sunlight.
That’s the popular imagination.
That’s true.
But within the ground, underground,
there is a large network, which is called the mycelium network,
which links the roots of trees and plants together,
creating a huge network of collaboration and cooperation.
It is the interaction, relationships, and constant feedback
which allows the entire system to become resilient.
So, here is an example where we could look.
Can we learn from nature
to come up with procurement processes which are not so exclusionary?
And I think this idea of procurement
is a central design error in our economic system.
That creates fear, right?
We don’t want fear.
And can we create this kind of system?
So, Janine Benyus, who’s the founder of biomimicry movement,
she said there’s a central, unifying concept in nature.
It is called life creates conditions conducive to life.
That means the fitness functions will only allow those strategies to move forward
which allow and contribute to things
that contribute to creating conditions for life.
So, this is what we can learn from nature.
And I think these are the smart questions we should be looking at.
So, a smart city is possible.
Now, the good thing is that if you see the logo –
the butterfly is actually the logo
which the Indian government has chosen for the Smart City.
That’s the actual logo.
And I was really happy
because I think clearly it’s an admission of the hidden message.
A caterpillar cannot become a butterfly until it changes its ways.
And our fossil-fuel-based economy,
stuck in the current master plan and procurement process,
would need to undergo a phase change,
and surely we can become a butterfly.
Instead of me, it’s the butterfly.
It’s the hidden message, which I understood now.
So …
but then, is that the only thing, though?
See, after all, a city is the sum total of many, many things that are happening.
It includes our economy, our politics,
the way we organize our society, the way we do manufacturing,
so in an emerging ecosystem, we actually have to do everything in parallel.
So things like a nature-inspired circular economy,
a nature-inspired additive manufacturing,
nature-inspired green chemistry,
all these have to be done together because, you know, it’s inter-trough.
Even if you want to make coffee, you are limited by what’s available.
And we are saying we’ll build a smart city.
Out of what?
Out of what is available, right?
The kind of processes, materials, political system, economic system –
or will it just get built?
I think we need to look at nature.
A smart city cannot be procured and assembled by procuring parts;
however, it will emerge if we allow the ecosystem to become smart,
if we work on the many, many interrelationships,
the many, many interactions, and the many, many feedback loops.
A smart city or many smart cities will emerge in due time.
So, what I’d like to end by saying that –
the one thing which I would invite you and submit –
that as citizens,
there should be one non-negotiable criteria now we should settle at:
That we no longer will allow any product, process, or system to be called smart
until it meets the criteria that it creates conditions conducive to Life.
Life with a capital L. All life.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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