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Once
you start talking about the Traditional City, you get a lot of people who say
"but I don't want to live in your Traditional City!"
Of course they don't. This is normal. There's a simple reason -- most
people want to do what everyone else is doing. This is especially true
when it comes to people's houses, where people don't get that many chances to
mess up (or they think they don't). "Tried and true" works for
them.
Although Traditional Cities are quite common worldwide, unfortunately, the
imaginary/intellectual space has not kept up. We have lost much of our
ability to think about Traditional Cities, which has been accompanied by the
disappearance of the ability to create them. People can work with them when
they are left over by past generations, but creating a new one where it did
not previously exist is rare. The best efforts of even the best "New
Urbanists" -- even those of Europe and Asia, who really should know
better -- are pretty lame compared with the historical examples. That is why
I say it is so important to be able to imagine the Traditional City, and also
to understand the basics of how to make one (Really Narrow Streets).
The fact of the matter is -- despite humans' five-thousand year history of
building Traditional Cities -- we are visionaries.
The percentage of visionaries in the human population is rather small. You
could say the percentages work out something like this:
0.5% Visionaries
4.5% Innovators
15% Early Adopters
50% Mainstream Followers
30% Fuddy Duddies
Visionaries: They enjoy the process of exploring new lands, solving
problems, taking giant leaps of creativity, and often imagine that they are
working toward the general good. Visionaries are typically bad
businesspeople. If they were motivated primarily by profit, they would follow
the easiest, tried-and-true method of creating a profit. Maybe open a
McDonald's franchise. Or build condos and stripmalls in Phoenix. The reason I
keep talking about imagining the Traditional City is because that's
what Visionaries do. That's my audience. It is also the necessary first
step.
Innovators: The Innovators take the material of the Visionaries and
evolve it, improve it, and commercialize it. The innovators are often
excellent businesspeople. They are constantly searching for a new Vision that
they can commercialize. (It's very hard to start a business in a long-established
industry. Are you going to compete with Sherwin-Williams in the paint
business? With Thyssen-Krupp in the steel business?) The innovators took the
idea of a "home computer" and added features, improved the memory,
created more software, and drove down the price. Often, the Innovators take
something far beyond what the Visionaries even thought possible -- typically
in incremental steps, not the clean-sheet-of-paper leaps of the Visionaries.
Did the inventors of the hard drive imagine that you could eventually buy a
1TB model for $98?
Early Adopters: The Visionaries and Innovators are creative types.
They are creators or sellers of new products. If the thing under
consideration is not a commercial product, but perhaps an idea like
"sustainability" for example, the Innovators are busy innovating --
changing, tweaking, adding, improving. The Early Adopters are generally not
creative. They participate in the new "movement" generated by the
Visionaries and Innovators. In the case of electronic goods, they are
shoppers and users, not designers, engineers and marketers. In the case of
"sustainability," the Early Adopters might follow the thinking of
the Innovators closely, and Adopt it whenever there is a new consensus, but
they will not contribute to the evolutionary process itself. Early Adopters
are excited about participating in the new evolutionary activity. Innovators
would be bored with a role of being a passive end user. They want to tweak
and create.
Mainstream Followers: Mainstream Followers have one overriding
principle -- do what everyone else is doing, and don't do anything original.
They assume that if everyone else is doing it, then there must be a good
reason, or at least, they don't want to find out the consequences of not
doing what everyone else is doing. What that reason might be, or the
consequences, they typically have no idea. The whole point is: if you follow
the Mainstream, you don't have to think about such things. Mainstream
Followers' biggest fear is being laughed at. They adopt the new thing when
the Early Adopters start laughing at them.
Fuddy Duddies: Fuddy Duddies don't really care what the Mainstream is
doing. Usually, they just want to do what they've always done. Their old CRT
television and rotary phone still work just fine. Sometimes, this is genuine
wisdom. They've seen enough cycles of "the next new thing" to know
that not everything is as good as everyone thinks it is. Besides, if you wait
a while, you can get the next next new thing. Probably cheaper too. If you
already know that you like fly fishing, then why play World of Warcraft? It
would just cut into your fly fishing time. Eventually, they will adopt a few
selected things if it has had the bugs worked out and genuinely improves
their lifestyle. They are practical and look to end results. They don't do
things because it's the "next new thing!" or because "everyone
else is doing it." Obviously, they don't mind getting laughed at.
If you're wondering why your friends don't understand your enthusiasm for
Traditional Cities, it is because they are not Visionaries. We are still at
the Visionary stage, especially in the U.S. The Innovators are thinking
"this is all airy-fairy nonsense." The Innovators want Proof of
Concept. Eventually, some Visionaries will go and create some new Traditional
Cities, or at least a few neighborhoods within existing cities. I hope they
don't screw it up. Why do you think I insist on Really Narrow Streets so
often? After a few failures -- which I suspect will be caused by not making
the streets narrow enough, and introducing excessive amounts of non-space
like Green Space and parking lots -- they might have some success.
At this point, the Innovators will get interested. The Innovators will start
to bring in some serious money, and increase the scale. We would start to see
some competition among different City Design concepts. Who can make the best
city? In other words, the Innovators will start to innovate.
Eventually, we want to create a class of Early Adopters. Maybe 5-10% of the
U.S. population living in Traditional City type neighborhoods. The Early
Adopters will start to laugh at the lamebrains still languishing in Suburban
Hell. That's when things will really start to move. Eventually, municipal
governments -- bureaucrats are always the ultimate Mainstream Followers --
will make it impossible to build anything but a Traditional City.
You can see these different thought processes when you talk to people. Most
people are not creators, they are shoppers. They adopt others' creations -- the
work of the Visionaries and Innovators. Often, when I say: "look, Venice
is so wonderful, we could live like this," people assume that I
mean that they should actually live in Venice. They say things like:
"It's full of tourists all the time, and I don't speak Italian." I
don't mean that at all -- I mean that you could live like this in South
Carolina, and not just identically like Venice, but your own special 21st
Century South Carolina version of the Traditional City. But most people (95%
in our breakdown) can only deal with existing things. They can order from a
menu, but they can't cook. Since Venice exists, and Houston exists, they
assume that the only options are Venice and Houston. Literally Venice and
Houston.
The same process applies to historical examples. When I show some lovely
piece of architecture and city design from the 18th century, is that people
assume that you mean that they should live exactly like France in
1745. I say: "Look at this nice building and the Really Narrow Street.
We could also make our buildings nice and our streets narrow. It's so
easy." But the response is: "But they had tuberculosis and very
high taxes, and bad plumbing." Was I talking about tuberculosis? Okay,
if you insist, let's have a Really Narrow Street with no tuberculosis.
Happy now? It's a repetition of the same pattern. Most people can only deal
with things that already exist. They aren't creators, taking a bit from here
and a bit from there, and a bit of their own inspiration to create something
new and better.
After a little while, you only want to talk to other Visionaries.
Most people who think they are Visionaries are really Innovators. For
example, you talk to the technology people who get all excited because they
think they can put a video screen on a soda can. You mean, we can make video
screens smaller and cheaper, just like Innovators have been doing for the
last sixty years? Wow, that's so creative! Like watching TV from a soda can
is really going to improve civilization in some meaningful way. Like we don't
get enough TV already. Or the biotech people, who will talk your ear off
about the new wave of miracle drugs. Look: we did miracle drugs in the 1960s.
Those drugs -- the first antibiotics -- were truly miraculous. The last two
decades of drugs have mostly created miraculous profits with very little real
benefit. Even negative benefit. A real Visionary would say: we are already
drugged to death. That is just more of the same-old same-old (i.e. typical
Innovator thinking). What we really need is a change in lifestyle, diet etc.
so we don't develop the maladies (diabetes, heart disease, obesity, etc.
etc.) that we are now taking drugs for, with little effect. What we really
need is not more drugs but less drugs. Some people think the
solution to cars is ... electric cars! If they are a little more
sophisticated, they will understand the problem with electric cars, and say:
no no no, the solution is bicycles! They are really thinking (without
realizing it) about Suburban Hell + bicycles, or perhaps the 19th Century
Hypertrophic City + bicycles. In other words, cities that are poorly
designed, so you need some sort of personal transportation device. This is
really Innovator thinking. Cars are a problem, so we need to improve the
system with electric cars/bikes/etc. The Visionary says: the system
is the problem, so we need a new system. Once you fix the system, you
don't need cars or bikes. Not as many, anyway.
Nathan
Lewis
Nathan Lewis
was formerly the chief international economist of a leading economic
forecasting firm. He now works in asset management. Lewis has written for the
Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal Asia, the Japan Times, Pravda, and
other publications. He has appeared on financial television in the United
States, Japan, and the Middle East. About the Book: Gold: The Once and Future
Money (Wiley, 2007, ISBN: 978-0-470-04766-8, $27.95) is available at
bookstores nationwide, from all major online booksellers, and direct from the
publisher at www.wileyfinance.com or 800-225-5945. In Canada, call
800-567-4797.
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