Refactoring Our Communities and Cities
There is a little known term within the software developer world known as ‘refactoring’. This is not a term that you will hear in everyday life. In fact the term itself is only a couple of decades old and even its origins within the software community are unclear. However it has become a core term, and practice, within the computer engineering world and it is a practice that I believe can be applied toward another type of development: the creation of our communities.
Refactoring as a concept is fairly simple. Without changing the function of something, refactoring optimizes how it is working internally. The easiest way to think of this is like a math equation where you are solving a formula to find variable x. Through a series of processes you can ‘unscramble’ the formula into its simplest and most logical manifestation, without ever unbalancing the underlying ‘truth’ of the equation.
Refactoring is a kind of innovation that doesn’t necessarily get the same kind of attention as the creation of something ‘new’. Refactoring looks to find optimizations, shave off delays, iron out bugs, and to transform subtly from within. In many cases, refactoring may not even be noticed by the end users. When it happens on our electronics devices, we may notice things get faster, smaller, and more mobile.
This refactoring is happening all around you. Perhaps the streets in your community have been widened, the curbs enlarged, the street lights updated, or bus routes optimized. On the surface everything looks the same, but through the refinement and improvement of infrastructure we gradually make better. These changes may be small, but they can have profound effects when applied over time, in combination, and in a comprehensive fashion. Small changing begin to have big impacts when applied over a macro level.
Perhaps another good comparison of refactoring in action is the shuffling of genetic code which happens through reproduction. While the effects may not be visible on the service, each time this happens introduces the possibilities for miniscule genetic modifications to become advantageous over time, and within the right combination. Over time these internal optimizations (genotype) may impact the external (phenotype) appearance of the organism, and the refactored code finds itself best suited to work within and respond to the challenges of the natural environment.
As well as being a software designer I am also an architectural designer. So my thinking automatically takes me to wonder if it would be possible to apply this kind of process at the urban and architectural level. Are there certain structural decisions taken within the underlying ‘codes’ of our society which are having major influences on the performance of our cities? There are certainly codes which our cities adhere to with respect to their planning. Provincial building codes and municipal zoning are two obvious codes which dictate the design, placement, and use of various kinds of buildings. However these codes have been themselves built upon a deeper level of ‘legacy code’. This legacy code is deeper set of code which has been ‘blackboxed’.
Blackboxing is one other term that needs to be understood. When a piece of code is ‘blackboxed’ it means that it has been created, tested, and deemed to be highly functional. It also has specific inputs which are well documented, and creates reliable results. Feed in a number, it feeds out an answer in a predictable fashion. Once code gets blackboxed it typically gets placed in a ‘reference library’ to be called, shared between developers, and is rarely revisited.
Having blackbox code makes development cycle exponentially faster. Rather than recoding basic things, like how to make a monitor work, or a mouse move, or a button click, developers rely on this blackboxed code to rapidly get to the more interesting developer roles of creating new applications and interfaces. They are kind of like the Lego blocks which lets you build anything you want… as long as it works within the Lego block framework.
I believe that our cities have evolved within the same way. They have been built within a particular framework of codes which when applied produce a specific type of city. These codes are not just relating to regulating the built environment. Below that level there have been many various blackbox codes relating to commerce, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, and education which are determining the kind of cities we can build. However if we recognize that we are building our cities around these ‘blackboxed’ practices that cross a variety of different interests, then we can begin to take a second look within these closed and tacit systems. Refactoring the operations of these basic things will give us an opportunity to reexamine the basic assumptions which make up our cities and potentially find solutions which have the same end results but are highly optimized. From there we can explore what new forms may begin to develop over the long-term as we begin to refactor our environments from the inside out.
In 2007, to much applause and excitement, Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously announced the release of three new products. The first was a widescreen iPod, the second a revolutionary mobile phone, and the third was a breakthrough internet communication device. But, as he quickly demonstrated, these were no longer three devices. They were a singular device that was capable of being all three of these things at once. Introducing the iPhone. The release of the iPhone became the pivotal point for Apple to grow to become the largest corporation in the world through the creation of the IOS platform and the many spinoff services, including the App Store, which have generated not just billions of dollars for thousands of international companies but also a revolution in the way that we communicate, consume digital content, work, travel, access the internet, share images, learn, and so much more.
In order to make the mental leap, which now in 2016 seems so obvious, it was necessary for Apple to take a deep dive into the basic understanding of what three separate devices were doing. Broken down to their most basic factors, they were individually helping people to communicate. iPods helped communicate through one of the most profound methods: music. Music is essential to human identity, the building of community, the storage of shared cultural memory, and is an integral element of our species’ identity. Phones allow us to communicate to the here and now, to talk in an instant to people near and far. They open up opportunities for people to continue to maintain their personal connections while living anywhere on earth, and they open the gateways for better understanding within this ‘global village’. And internet communications are the gateway to knowledge sharing, the great library of the world, the news and learning centre of a rapidly evolving world. In essence they are all forms of communication, although nuanced and different.
Apple realized that to separate these three elements was no longer necessary. The evolution of the technology had allowed all of these necessary elements required for the function of each type of communication to occur within the same space. This shrinking of the physical form allowed the creation of a device that was compatible with our human form. It fit in our pockets. It strapped to our arms. It was light, strong, and most importantly it was mobile. It refactored the basic building blocks which were separating these three elements down to the very basic core of them all and rebuilt the device from the ground up.
Fast forward 9 years and we seen the explosion of communications that has happened. I could spend a lot of time charting the impact, but the odds are that if you are not reading this on a mobile device then you have one within arm’s reach of you. In fact we are now barely able to be separated from our devices. From the planning of our lives, to how we spend, to where we work, to where we shop and what we buy, the smartphone as it has evolved has become its own building block and framework to dictate much of how we spend our lives. And yet… Some things have not evolved to keep pace.
Back to our cities. If Apple was capable of reimagining the basis of global communication and commerce through a refactoring of communications, then why has this not had a deep physical impact on the planning and construction of our cities. Cities are themselves merely communications devices if you think about it. The origin of cities is based on a few key things: communications, security, and trade. It can be argued that person to person communication is the core element of cities. Modern cities are not formed for security like medieval cities (in fact quite the opposite). And the gritty and physical side of trade has been replaced by a money driven consumption cycle of which cities are the last stop of physical goods before they get exchanged for money which is now electronic and its own manner of communication.
So let’s consider then a city as a communications hub. Because cities still rely on ‘proxy communication’ (aka face-to-face interactions) then many things exist as a result of this basic assumption:
Proxy communication requires that people be physically able to meet
This requires intensification in order to be done efficiently without excessive physical travel
Intensification results in an imbalance between our consumption and our production abilities and spaces, meaning that we sacrifice growing farmlands in exchange for areas for socializing and communicating.
As a result, we require infrastructure to push the missing essential items (food, energy) from other places
This creates the need for rail, car, boat, and other means of transportation
This need spins off many other industries to create the cars, boats, trains, and trucks that will move the goods and people from the periphery inward to feed the demands of the city.
In turn, this infrastructure requires major activities relating to mining, forestry, oil refinery, energy creation through coal and nuclear, which can only be found through the exploitation of our natural world.
Limited natural resources result in research and education to find ever more optimal ways of manufacturing these goods to feed the cities and generate the highest rates of return.
Ultimately this requires international relations, war, trade, and politics to maintain a global balance as all peoples struggle with the same challenges to maintain their means of communication within our cities.
As you can see, proxy communication relies on a lot of factors to be successful. In fact, the greatest industries and economies of the world are solely focused on maintaining the critical element of proxy communications viability i.e. preserving the functioning of our cities. The vast majority of all of our consumption comes not from the people but the infrastructure required to move these items around the world and to sustain the cities that we have built which is the physical realization of our proxy communication.
So if we are able to refactor communications within our devices, then perhaps this is possible to refactor the communications assumptions that we have created within our cities. This is only possible however when we look at the basic building blocks and assumptions, the blackboxed codes and functions that we have used to assist us in rapidly building our society.
If people were psychic, and we were able to share our deepest thoughts, ideas, affections, and hopes effortlessly and selectively, then perhaps physical proxy communications would be irrelevant. If communication were only as simple as words, then we would never need to speak, since we could much more efficiently consume each other’s words without pause or the ‘ums’ and ‘likes’ and errors that dominate spoken language. But this is simply not the case. The ‘ums’ and ‘likes’ which exist in any language are something deeper, part of an intimate body language and expressive vocabulary that part of physical interaction. We use it to assert, or show deference, we use it to charm and humor. Body language is in fact a much stronger and more indicative form of communication that words, and we both rely and crave this form of communication. And as much as we try to pretend sometimes, we are not digital. We are humans, bodies who enjoy sensation, experience, touch, smell, sound, and most importantly the ever changing combination and reapplication of these varied senses.
This is indeed why cities persist. Despite the rapid depletion of our resources, we are highly (and perhaps dangerously) addicted to ourselves and our interactions. We love the interaction, the stimulation, and when it is taken away we struggle to find purpose. We become quite bored, anxious, and often struggle to adapt to the ‘slower pace of life’. As much as we like to go on vacation, there is part of us that craves the familiar interactions of daily life. People are meant to be around people as we will often agree.
That is why I am suggesting that we refactor, and not merely discard the basic elements, and imagine what could happen as a result of this exploration. In essence we can preserve the good elements, such as contact, communication, and our shared culture, and discard with some of the other things like commutes, congestion, over-consumption, and constant work.
Let’s explore how this can happen.
The three items I would like to consider are the home, the workplace, and the supermarket. Originally these three items were indeed the same thing. You lived, worked, and grew your food all within the same place. The extended family lived, grew, worked, and died within the same geographical area while maintaining themselves through a combination of self-reliant gardening and trade and barter related activities within the immediate geography. These days, the three activities are highly fractured. The automobile is both the product and driver of a cycle of separation between home and work. As our cities have expanded, work has centralized within downtown areas while life has been forced outward into the sprawl due to the economics of land ownership and the ways mortgages work. To optimize on land, the agricultural activities have been pushed even farther away, and an intense network of roads pushes good resources inward and hauls the trash out of sight.
A lot of other things have happened due to the fracturing. Firstly the work day has shifted dramatically when compared to historic (pre 1900s) patterns. Where work used to ebb and flow seasonally and in cycle with our day and environment, modern work is now constant. The work day, which used to be split into 2-3 different parts, with rest and recreation times in between, is now a continuous stretch of 8+ hours per day with an average 2 hours of commute time daily. Given the commute, it is logical to compress all work together to get it over with, but this causes other problems. The continuous work day is stressful to people, and we feed this stress with expensive foods which are often not the healthiest to stimulate ourselves. Stress causes us to also self-sooth with consuming excess of all of these things, which creates a spiral effect of unhealthy activities. And all of a sudden, the benefits of human proxy connection which forced us together in the first place begin to mount toward having negative effects on our overall existence. Human interaction becomes limited to our office and car environments which are both stressful, and our limited home time is typically constrained to dinner, television and then bed before beginning the cycle anew.
Refactoring our cities requires us to examine these items which we all take for granted as separate and, with a nod to Apple, reintegrate them into a single platform. The solution is not to shrink our homes (into condo towers), shrink our cars, shrink our workplaces or even reduce the amount or nature of our work, but instead to refactor them into a unified system where they are all able to coexist within one. Introducing the LifePod.
It is important to remember the LifePod is the combination of all three elements. There is no ‘home office’ because that would mean there is a major use ‘home’ which contains a minor use ‘office’. Within the LifePod scenario, this wouldn’t exist any more than the iPhone arguing it was a telephone with an MP3 player or vice versa (I listen to a lot more music from my smart phone than I ever make phone calls, and text and email more than anything so I would be hard pressed to call it a phone at all). Instead it has to be seen as a holistic and refactored singular environment.
The LifePod would also have to lose some of its labels. Living room, kitchen, and bedroom are coded ‘blackbox’ spaces which we add together and call a house. Instead we would have recreation which could very much be in a hammock, in a pool, in the garden, or in front of a fire as on a sofa. In our LifePod we need to work, but work is different for all of us. Typically these days work for many of us has something to do with computers and the LifePod should support this by creating opportunities for work life to overlap with relaxation life. So rather than the ‘office’ or ‘den’ we integrate the opportunity for bringing what an office would accomplish such as privacy, access to technology, and innovative ways to keep organized. The third element, the production of our own food, requires that the LifePod be well integrated into the natural environment. Spaces for growing food, starting plans, and harvesting and storing food also integrate within the landscape. The LifePod concept does not constrain itself to be a singular structure either. Although we are used to having our homes as monolithic elements, we have to check our assumptions. The LifePod home could in fact be many deconstructed elements which are integrated within the many activities within the landscape, rather that standing separately from them.
This deconstruction of the blackbox of the home creates a lot of exciting opportunities for recombination. For example the LifePod home should be adaptable to change to accept multi-generational living. It should be able to evolve and be customized and tailor to the financial realities of the residents and accept both expansion and also compression of spaces depending on shifting needs. The refactoring of the relationships between the various elements of living, working and growing may also split apart how we think of utility. Rather than a central heating furnace, we can leverage distributed solar which brings only as much energy as each home requires, is generated locally and consumed on demand. Already hot water tanks and furnaces are giving rapidly away to on-demand electrical instant hot water and radiant floor heating, both of which can be accomplished in a highly efficient manner.
Many other elements would exist within the LifePod. Green houses for growing, power generation from active and passive solar, workshops for making, 3D printers for repairing and many other items would co-exist within the same platform of where you live. Within a day at the LifePod, you have the ability to continue to work in a way that is efficient to your profession, live in a way that is comfortable, have a commute of zero minutes, and also consume the food that you’ve grown. Like the iPhone, you have less devices to demand your money, and are therefore able to do more through the refactoring of the various elements of your life.
The sphere of the LifePod now has some benefits. Redundant, blackbox, and unchallenged labels disappear into the functions that are logical, convenient, and also provide advantages. But just as the iPhone allowed you to buy and operate a single device which opened up new gateways and opportunities (such as the App Store), the LifePod opens you up to new platforms for sharing and communicating. The iPhone was made great by the App Store and many app developers throughout the world, and also created the platform for many developers around the world to launch new industries on their own. It is part of a cyclical relationship.
The LifePod contains a lot, but it doesn’t contain every facet of life just as your smartphone doesn’t replace every device in the household. The need for community, interaction, socializing, collaborating, sharing music and food, exercising, and many other activities is still a missing element within the LifePod. LifePod thrives as a concept in context to a larger infrastructure which allows for new businesses and opportunities to thrive. Therefore a second platform must accompany the LifePod which is itself an amalgamation of several independent blackbox elements: the community centre, the bakery, the daycare, the event hall, and the co-working centre. Introducing the CoPod.
This CoPod refactors many of the different daily elements of life into a singular destination. Presently the car is the tie-in element between all of these various elements, but they can undertake the same refactoring that we did above with the LifePod to alleviate this inefficient burden. CoPod is a business and collaboration platform that allows new kinds of businesses to thrive. Like the AppStore, it is a platform for innovation and growth, allowing entrepreneurs to find a highly accessible and sophisticated framework to launch their new activities. We are already beginning to see these pop up, in places like Innovation Centres, but these initiatives do not go far enough because they are still highly isolated conceptually and haven’t merged enough critical elements to be a game changer. A makerspace, daycare, cafe, innovative restaurant, and open theatre for music are all possible together within the CoPod, and you open up doors to whole new segments of people to gel together and define their own opportunities within this platform.
The CoPod platform is this kind of accessible framework and platform for entrepreneurship, socializing, community building, arts, and entertainment which is integrated together into a much more strongly realized destination. Like the LifePod, the CoPod does not necessarily need to be a singular building but instead could be part of a much larger, more engaging environment of activities, nature, recreation, and healthy activities to be filled by innovators and entrepreneurs, artists and engineers.
Most importantly the CoPod would be the opportunity to reintegrate many of the missing items that have been lost or are fading as a result of fractured society. Commite culture doesn’t leave time for traditional cultural practices. There is no sauna, no fire circle, no ceremony, and no multi-cultural centres remaining within our modern cities. If it doesn’t come with a coffee, there are very few social spaces left as well. The CoPod would create opportunities for these cultural practices of co-learning, immersion, and hybridization of cultural practices to continue to thrive and to be steeped in opportunities for countless remixing and regeneration. The electric powwow, the prayer circle, ‘crafternoons’, maker culture, live performance, folk and independent music and many other ‘fringe’ elements all create great value for their practitioners and all struggle to find spaces within the modern city. Commute society eliminates the opportunity for discovery since the car takes you from point A to B with minimal interaction in between. With the CoPod, each of these things will find easy access to the framework of a refactored community/economic/cultural environment and new opportunities for commerce and social enterprise will thrive within.
So what is the big difference thus far? If you look at the landline telephone vs. the smartphone, almost nothing has changed with respect to making calls. A phone call remains a phone call in all its low fidelity. But cutting the wire on the phone has changed the way we communicate. The refactored living model is much the same. Places to work, places to eat, places to sleep and all of the familiar items are still there, but now with a much stronger mobility and independence than ever before. The LifePod model is about freedom from the limitations of time, work, commute and consumption which are ever-present in our unfactored model. By streamlining and reintegrating the work and supermarket aspects of life, we are able to find a much more efficient, lower cost, more free way of living without removing any of the core activities that you do already. We have sacrificed nothing except removing the inefficient physical boundaries and reintegrated the core elements through the application of technology.
The big difference is the efficiencies and subsequent freedom of life that this refactoring finds for you. Without losing any of the effectiveness of our working, living, or consuming, we are able to do all of the above in a more efficient means. As a result, we will reduce our expenditures which will radically free up our time to socialize in meaningful ways that are not merely just standing in line at the food court. The LifePod model reduces our expenditures by half which logically frees up 50% of our work time within the year. With an average work year of 2000 hours, and an average commute life of 500 hours, you can effectively free up 1500 hours of life per year to spend on activities, restructure your day, work on entrepreneurship and innovation outside your daily profession, or take a train or fly to another city for real quality socializing and proxy communication.
Apple never said to take your iPhone to the beach and read a book, to use it to track your fitness, to explore the woods with it as your compass, to use it as your nightlight while camping but when the opportunity to do this present itself through greater freedom, clever entrepreneurs made it happen. Similarly when we eliminate the commute, the work hours, the unhealthy lifestyle, and the financial debt that results, we free ourselves to fill our lives with many more meaningful opportunities. It will be up to you to decide how to use the gift of your refactored life.
