Imagine the future

“Put your future in good hands - your own.”
- Mark Victor Hansen, an American inspirational and motivational speaker, trainer, and author.

Imagine the future: a City State of Sri Lanka, not the current scenario of our cities; but with four to six mega cities with a population of around five million in each, with integrated open spaces in between.

When intelligence and character would be the hallmark of men and women alike; when all the saving truths and all the healing graces adore the traits of men; when half formed, half digested, and half-correct ideas are dead and gone, along with their perpetrators; we will design a future of our dreams.

In that Sri Lanka, seven out of ten citizens will be an urban dweller. Driverless cars will zip around under sky-scraping vertical gardens in hyper-connected, energy efficient “smart cities.” Yet, what the cities of the future look like depends largely on decisions we make today.

Cities are dynamical environments capable of promoting great change very quickly. The universal attraction of cities today is a sign that this is becoming possible to everyone, especially in developing nations.

Complex

However, as to the situation of cities today, I quote Luis M. A. Bettencourt, professor of complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute.

“In the short term, however, urbanisation and development are creating many of their familiar unintended consequences on a massive scale, including the growth of urban poverty, the severe inadequacy of older political structures, insecurity and massive pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, with potentially devastating consequences for climate change.

Solutions to these problems are best found at the source - in cities.

The greatest obstacle to successful urbanisation is our present lack of the understanding of cities. As a consequence, much urban policy is often inadequate, short-sighted, and unsustainable.”

At present, in addition to what Prof Bettencourt says; the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

Today we are trapped in endless traffic jams while pollution overwhelms remaining green spaces and infrastructure crumbles. Cities, like cats, may reveal themselves at night; but for millions of people, being lonesome together is the final outcome of city life. Today’s city has turned into a city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare.

It is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

Tradition

A city is the place where whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up.

In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, without tradition, utterly matter-of-fact, without religion, clever, unfruitful and unfaithful, deeply contemptuous of the country counterpart and especially that highest form of country counterpart, the country gentleman.

Every city has a sex and an age, which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa.

London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, has not changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman. Colombo, eventhough in parts is turning out to be beautiful, still needs to grow into its full potential for beauty.

At present, its crowded tenements, peopled by a struggling and restless population, differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth.

In some parts, its concretions of concrete, and even those of lime and clay that spring up, is nothing but mildewed forwardness that grew out of a desecrated landscape, out of the kneaded fields about our capital.

The romantic notion of future cities is that they will be smart, well-connected with zero-emission vehicles, powered by renewable resources and self-sustaining; and have buildings equipped with green technologies while still providing all the fun, excitement and ample economic opportunities for all residents.

Shape

It is then that the imagined future will take shape. To do that, we must move from cocky ignorance and begin to educate our children. By education, I mean one where children are taught how to think; and not what to think.

It is then that education becomes a powerful weapon, which one can use to change the world. To achieve this, we must stop teaching our children an amalgam of current prejudices and choices of one particular culture.

Our children are, in fact, being moulded and patterned to fit the narrow and particular needs of this moribund society. They are, taught by people who accommodate themselves to a regime of thought, laid down by our imperialistic predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system.

Those of the children who are more robust and individual than others should be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating themselves - educating their own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are in the process of being: indoctrinated.

Instead, let our children live as if they were to die tomorrow; but learn as if they will live forever; and remember that, educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.

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