Think City!

Two weeks ago I got invited by Think City, a subsidiary of Khazanah Nasional Berhad the Government of Malaysia Strategic Investment Fund and the World Futures Studies Federation to give a keynote speech on UNESCO Foresight Global Anticipatory Thinking project and help facilitate the city futures for city leaders futures course held in George Town, Penang, Malaysia.

Think City was created to spearhead community based urban regeneration in Penang and transform the state into an “engine of future growth” in line with the tenth Malaysia plan. Established in 2009, Think City has led innovative initiatives that resulted to the enhancement of Penang’s assets, tangible and intangible, to arrest urban decay and sustainable urban regeneration.

Around 35 city leaders and CEOs from various national government agencies of Malaysia, graduate students from Taiwan, Singapore-based research think tanks, architects, and directors of regional and national public service departments under the office of Prime Minister Razak attended the course. The State Minister of Penang and his staff also attended the three-day workshop.

At the panel, I met Anwar Fazal, the chairman of Think City and Anthony Capon, United Nations University director of the International Institute for Global Health. Sohail Inayatullah (notably one of the best in the futures world right now according to Singapore-based think tank Shaping Tomorrow Network), Cesar Villanueva of the WFSF, Dave Duncan of Think City, Jeanne Hoffman from Macquarie University and MeiMei Song of Tamkang University ran and co-facilitated the course.

The three-day workshop introduced futures thinking and strategic foresight and through collective intelligence participants explored, mapped, anticipated, simulated, questioned, gamed and co-created some plausible alternative and preferred city futures for Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Johor Bahru, Melaka, Taipei, Singapore, and Victorias City of Oriental Negros. Mayor Francis Palanca and his city planning development team attended the course (his intention was to learn something about foresight and to explore some strategies to integrate and deepen the context of Victorias’ planning and development agenda).  

At the breakout sessions, new and emerging plausible future cities emerged like the CompaCity for the Kuala Lumpur group—high end, low cost, greening and growing, wealthier and healthier KL residents and communities. Another one which was quite similar with the Penang group’s emerging city future scenario, the KL team envisioned a polycentric urban agglomeration or the merger of cities and other urban areas they called ‘urban conurbation’. The push here was to develop a new high speed rail link that connects the urban regions of the Straits of Malacca including Penang, KL, Putrajaya, Johor Bahru and Singapore. The vision was to increase the level of connectivity of people and ideas. The context was to change old concepts of traditional urban/city boundaries and create a larger urban system and new scale of planning across larger territorial boundaries.

Recently, the Prime Ministers of Malaysia and Singapore agreed to build a High Speed Rail between KL and Singapore to improve connectivity. City leaders envisioned this to occur ‘within’ Malaysia.  The end was to create better social outcomes, optimize growth, deepening economic integration and cross-promotional branding. The vision of urban conurbation was to connect 16 million people and enhance their capacity for compactness, productivity and innovation.   

The third city scenario that emerged at the workshop was the “Greenology” city futures for Taipei City.  Here, the concept was to embed information and 3D-4D technologies on urban landscape, planning and city transformation.  Instead of modernity, visuality and transmodernism and ‘greening’ now informs the life and experiences of Taiwanese residents and communities; that transactions, commerce and social transformation occurs in the virtual world while greens, slow time, culture, meditation and self-realization, the eco-city, the Gaian and spiritual city is real in the physical world.

While Singapore ranks third on Asian city competitiveness Index and that its global appeal appears to be the highest in Asia, Inayatullah shared that Singapore continues to explore ways of reimagining the Singapore city futures narrative and creating options for alternative city models.

Inayutallah presented some case studies on how emerging cities like Singapore and Penang are redefining city concepts and landscapes such as the city from the geographic and singular space to a multiple, desired and ethical space and having more forward looking politicians reimagining their roles as representatives of their constituents to that of brokering ideas and mediating disputed visions.

For Inayatullah cities of the future could emerge as full players in the global political landscape (the nation-state is losing its relative importance) and may, Singapore appears to be a leading indicator, pioneer the return of the City-State?

So what will the future of your city be like?  Smart? Gaian? Sprawl? Old World? A Global Brand? A failed city like Manila? Or Penang—greening and growing city of the future?