NETWORKS, SYSTEMS AND

FUTURESJOHN URRY

CEMORE LANCASTER UNIVERSITYCOSMOBILITIES CONFERENCE, COPENHAGEN, NOVEMBER 2014

John F Kennedy once said: ‘Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future’ (June 25,

1963).

ENERGY IS THE FUTURE

Futures are on most contemporary agendas. States, corporations, universities, NGOs and individuals believe they cannot miss the future. Since contemporary societies are characterised by change, innovation and transformation, new ways of examining the future have to be undertaken. BUT

Schumacher: ‘There is no substitute for energy. The whole edifice of modern society is built upon it….it is not “just another commodity” but the precondition of all commodities, a basic factor equal with air, water, and earth’

McNeill notes that: ‘We have deployed more energy since 1900 than all of human history before 1900’

Stern: climate change is ‘the world’s greatest ever market failure’ – and ‘peak oil’ is the world’s second greatest market failure

GLOBAL CARBON EMISSIONS 1800-2010

C20TH ‘LOCK IN’ TO OIL-BASED SYSTEMS

Oil provides over 95% of transportation energy in the modern world – so making possible networks of collegues, family and friendship – hence the miles

Also fuels the world’s ships that transport most oil, components, commodities and food from afar

Is an element of most manufactured goods (95%)

Is crucial to at least 95% of food production for a rapidly rising world population through irrigation, transport, pesticides, fertilisers

Provides back-up power and lighting

LOCKED INTO OIL

MOBILITY-SYSTEMS AND SCALE

THEORIES

• systems are dynamic, processual and unpredictable, open rather than closed, with energy and matter flowing in and out. Complexity involves studying the consequences of interactions between the elements of each system. Systems are characterised by a lack of proportionality or ‘non-linearity’. The ‘normal’ state is not one of balance; there are positive feedbacks which take systems away from equilibrium points. New kinds of order may emerge (cf Gore’s The Future)

• ‘socio-technical systems transitions’. This ‘multi-level perspective’ interrogates innovation through focusing upon niches, socio-technical regimes and socio-technical landscapes whose interactions are crucial. This perspective examines how to move beyond lock-ins by developing niches that may turn into new regimes (cf Geels)

• ‘social practices’ situate everyday practices, the specific elements of these practices – materialities, meanings and competencies – as well as the interconnectedness between them at the centre of developing low-carbon transitions. It is necessary to transform or replace these very social practices and thereby to reduce energy ‘demand’ through different habits (cf Shove)

HIGH CARBON ‘NETWORKED’ SOCIAL PRACTICES

• Overseas holidays• Driving to the shops• Showering daily• The school run• Drinking foreign beers/wines• Second homes• Climate control rather than clothing control• Driving through well lit streets• Dining out rather than in the home/collective canteens• Global friendships • Working on projects with a global team

SYSTEMS

Systems significant in the contemporary world are simultaneously economic, physical, technological, political and social – sociotechnical

There is increased linking of system components through software, cybernetic architecture and networking

Systems once established can get ‘locked in’ over decades in relationship to each other. Systems are clustered: David Nye: a ‘high-energy regime touched every aspect of daily life. It promised a future of miracle fabrics, inexpensive food, larger suburban houses, faster travel, cheaper fuels, climate control, and limitless growth. Even the music of the emerging counterculture was plugged in’

NETWORKS OF ELEMENTS

• So while certain systems are stabilised for long periods through various ‘lock-ins’, small causes can prompt or tip the emergence of a new ‘path’. Movement from one state to another may be rapid• Complexity economist Arthur: innovation typically involves a

new combination of existing elements of machinery, text, technology, materials and organization (2009). Innovation stems from combining elements over lengthy periods that are assembled through networking often across the world as a new sociotechnical system. • Innovation processes are thus not like the linear notions

often deployed by policy makers. Innovation is more combinatory, non-linear, systemic, networked and unpredictable.

‘SOCIAL’ CHARACTER OF INNOVATION

• First, there are social ties between multiple ‘innovators’ and we need to examine in what ways there are clear innovation networks specific to or especially enhanced within particular ‘cities’.

• Second, innovations only come to move beyond the ‘niche’ phase if they are successfully inserted within social practices as people’s lives may be re-organised around the particular innovation or set of innovations.

• Third, such innovations will involve ‘synchronising’ otherwise disparate elements located at varied positions within what we term the ‘international division of innovative labour’. It is necessary to examine links and connections between these spatially separated innovators and hence facilitate ‘synchronisation’.

GOVERNANCE

• the level and forms of necessary public expenditure partly because many transformations require infrastructural change;

• the role that ‘cities’ should play so as to orchestrate resources and facilitate synchronisation;

• how to deal with the ways in which many new infrastructures are national/ international and hence bypass cities;

• developing systems of calculation such that interventions with regard to new mobility initiatives can be assessed alongside each other;

• how these systems of calculation should concern the collective interests of a ‘city’ and not just those of individuals;

• the ways in which the shift from public to private funding means that companies will often use notions of ‘commercial confidentiality’ to hide the costing/pricing calculations that lie behind decisions

LENGTH OF SYSTEM CHANGE

US National Intelligence Council: ‘an energy transition, for example, is inevitable...An energy transition from one type of fuel (fossil fuels) to another (alternative) is an event that historically has only happened once a century at most with momentous consequences’.

Buckminster Fuller ‘You never change anything by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete’.

Innovations at least presuppose the combining of isolated islands of an archipelago into a different system. According to Brian Arthur this takes three to four decades . There may well not be enough time before different climate, economic, social and political consequences unfold (see The Nature of Technology)

FUTURES

Is there a reversal from oil-based system and habits at least in the rich North? If so what systems might be coming into being? How would we know what is a system change and what is a blip – as now with ‘peak travel’?

Central to many future scenarios are new technologies BUT technologies do not develop for endogenous reasons NOR do they simply transform the economic and social landscape in their own image - many unexpected and perverse consequences

Technologies are always embedded in economic, social and political life and depend upon business and sociological models for development. Especially consumer-related systems depend upon the new being fun and fashionable

Mobile communications shows how systems and habits can change extremely rapidly but often not through a simple substitution.

TWENTY FIRST CENTURY FUTURES

• Various systems have, over the C20th, irreversibly taken the world into uncharted territory

• Positive feedbacks loops implicated in climate change intersect with peak oil, peak water, peak food and 2-3 billion population growth

• Catastrophist writers argue that there is limited time before systems collapse

• Various possible futures• Utopias, extrapolations, scenarios• Wicked problems

‘WICKED PROBLEMS’

• complex interdependencies which mean that the effort to solve one problem reveals or creates other problems• solutions depend on how the problem is framed and

vice-versa• different stakeholders have radically different frames

for understanding the problem• the constraints that the problem is subject to and the

resources needed to solve it change over time• the problem is never definitively solved but returns

albeit in different forms

VIRGIN GALACTIC TOURISM

LOW CARBON WORLDS

• ‘well being’ beyond GDP• lower measurable income and supply of consumer goods and services• less inequality• reengineering success as local• post-suburban• re-localizing ‘friendships’ and ‘families’• different kind of networking• the seasons would determine which and when foodstuffs were

consumed• most goods and services would be simpler and produced nearby

STATUS • Status attributions would have to be re-localised. This depends upon

new kinds of “friendship”, on choosing to know mostly those who live close by and can be walked to and being unperturbed by a lack of long distance travel and connections.

• Indeed it will be unfashionable to live and bring up children in anything apart from such “compact cities” (like suburban living became fashionable in the middle years of the twentieth century).

• Long distance travel would be uncommon and disapproved of with lives being organised around “neighbourhood”.

• There would have to be extensive building of such new local “communes” to facilitate such localism. Planners, politicians, and citizens would collaborate in the urban redesign with neighbourhoods and with mobility systems focused upon local access and high level facilities.

CRACKS IN CAR SYSTEM

car restraining measures such as parking restrictions and tariffs, traffic calming schemes, pedestrianised centres, bus lanes, bicycles and road pricing

some weakening in the commitment of policy makers to the auto-mobility regime

policy makers, transport planners, and the car industry more aware of environmental limits

the growth of car mobility seems to be coming to a halt in some countries

younger generation prefers smartphones to cars

NEW ACTOR-NETWORKS AND THE FUTURE

Brian Arthur: ‘A revolution does not arrive until we reorganize our activities…around its technologies, and until those technologies adapt themselves to us. For this to happen, the new domain must gather adherents and prestige. It must find purposes and uses…This time is likely to be decades, not years. And during this time the old technology lives on’, driving out the new