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Genuinely sad to read of the death of Sir Peter Hall, the urban planner responsible for dreaming up a number of mega-projects that have shaped London, among them the M25, Crossrail and the Thames Gateway. He also came up with the notion of a new London airport in the Thames estuary, subsequently supported by Boris Johnson, which (despite the considerable wildlife impact) I support – because the aircraft noise in must of western London (including Barnes, where we live) is already insupportable, and likely to become worse.

I didn’t know Hall well, but my town planning M. Phil. at UCL (where he taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture, which was the School of Environmental Studies when I was there, 1972-74) and subsequent work in areas like environmental impact assessment brought me into contact with him on a number of occasions, most memorably on the margins of a TCPA event. He was always charming and stimulating, though I confess I didn’t always love his ideas.

The Financial Times obituary flagged above recalls that Hall once promoted a Detroit-style network of motorways for London, with elevated walkways to take pedestrians out of harm’s way. When I left UCL, I joined TEST, run by architect-planner John Roberts – and much of our early work was for clients like the Department of the Environment, focusing on ways to improve the pedestrian’s environment. Elevated walkways were anathema to us.

Still, such towering figures are allowed their glitches.

And there are other aspects of his life story that I found endearing, as I read about them. The Times obituary, for example, which is hidden behind Murdoch’s paywall, notes that Hall recently tripped and cut his head while in Liverpool. After waiting for two hours in an A&E unit at the local hospital, he gave up and returned to deliver his speech with a plaster “haphazardly” covering the wound.

When I was hit by a car driven by a Mongolian woman (her second day out on British roads, and I was in a cycle lane at the time) while biking through Olympia in 2006, I was ambulances to hospital, but had to stand around (I couldn’t sit with another set of cracked ribs) for nearly two hours. Like Hall, I eventually gave up, and with a palmful of painkillers offered by a slightly panicked nurse as I left, cycled home, shrieking every time I hit a bump.

It almost had me feeling that Hall’s segregation of cars and other traffic was the way to go, though in the end we are going to have to tame and civilise motorised traffic in cities in ways which I suspect would be inconceivable to today’s motorists and urban planners.

As I walked by Barnes Pond en route home this evening, I saw something I had never seen before: a heron, usually thought to be a non-swimming bird, swimming. And in its beak, a small fish. I interrogated Google when I got back and came across a photograph showing exactly what I saw today.

Friends and colleagues, I need your help. If you aren’t already wearing them, please find and put on your future-tinted glasses.

20 years on from the launch of the triple bottom line, long symbolised by the trinoculars shown below, I am head-banging again—working on the early stages of the next phase of the Volans Breakthrough Capitalism program, with core funding now secured from the Generation Foundation.

The word breakthrough may trip off the tongue, but it begs the question: Breakthrough to what? For us, the Breakthrough Challenge involves capitalist societies embarking on an accelerating market transition to a future powerfully shaped by a new scientific worldview—the Lovelock Paradigm.

Anyone who wants a quick dip into the world of paradigm shifts, would be well advised to at least skim this blog by David Weinberger.

Our emerging scientific paradigm was sparked by the work of James Lovelock, particularly his invention of the electron capture detector, his work for NASA on the detection of life on Mars, and the evolution of his Gaia Hypothesis and Theory. It encourages us to view the Earth as a single, integrated system, to a degree self-regulating—but surprisingly vulnerable to actions that adversely impact critical elements of the system.

Like earlier paradigm shifts (to the Copernican view of cosmology, for example, or the Darwinian view of biology), the new paradigm—evolving since the late 1950s—is already transforming markets, business, finance, government and politics.

My assumption in all of this is that, as Thomas Kuhn argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions way back in 1961, paradigm shifts take place on generational timescales. They proceed one death at a time. Time has to remove both those who were deeply infected by the previous paradigm, and all the memes that went with it, and many of those they infected in their teaching careers.

As a result, I have always assumed (I read Kuhn’s book when I was 13 or 14) that a true paradigm shift would take 70-80 years to effect. If that is the case here, and Lovelock’s invention of the crucial piece of technology, the electron capture detector, happened in 1957, then we are talking about a timescale out to the late 2020s or 2030s. In the next phase of our Breakthrough work we are reining ourselves in a little, focusing on what we are dubbing the Breakthrough Decade, from 2015 to 2025.

Among other things, I see the Lovelock Paradigm assuming that:

1. We are moving into the Anthropocene era, where our economies, technologies and lifestyles have impacts on a geological scale
2. Everything on Earth is connected, with complex and difficult-to-predict feedback loops
3. Humankind has already exceeded some planetary boundaries at 7 billion people—and is predicted reach 9-10 billion later in the century
4. New technologies and transparency processes are making these loops, connections and boundary conditions increasingly visible
5. Global governance mechanisms struggle to cope, but by the 2050s activities that damage the self-regulatory mechanisms of the planet’s atmosphere, oceans, land surfaces and biosphere must be brought back under control
6. A core strand in future politics and business will be the reconciliation of environmental, social and governance (ESG) priorities
7. New types of capitalism and market mechanism will be central
8. Demand for policies, technologies, products, services and investment that protect and regenerate natural systems will grow exponentially
9. New types of market research and intelligence will be needed to track the value and wealth created
10. Core disciplines of business, including accounting and economics, must undergo unprecedented change to adapt to the new paradigm.

 

These 10 elements of the emerging paradigm are those that occurred to me as I thought all of this through, but I would be fascinated to hear what items you would add to the list – and which you would take away, and why. Answers to me, please, at john [at] volans [dot] com.

Now Americans can see how hot their cities will potentially be by 2100, thanks to global warming. Watch as as Phoenix becomes Kuwait City and Washington, D.C. moves to southern Texas. We need something similar for Europe.

Hadn’t come across Climate Central before, but their work seems impressive.

Hornet kills and dismembers a bee

Grass-scape

Taken by Elaine

Six-spotted burnet moth

A sculptural growth

A delightful walk in Richmond Park early this afternoon, in bright sun, with particularly vibrant insect life. Passing by a large clump of ragwort, which I hadn’t realised was so toxic to horses (I looked it up when I got back), we stopped to watch the bees and other insects enjoying the blossoms.

I saw a large hornet, quartering the ragwort, inspecting bees and other potential victims. Then it pounced on one and, in short order bore it down to the ground, killing it and stripping off its wings. Soon predator and prey were aloft and away.

I remember allowing a very large hornet to sit on my arm in Turkey a few years back, off the Lycian coast. Somehow I don’t feel threatened by them, but I’m glad I’m not a bee.

Many dragonflies and damselflies about, several mating. And the grasses now have that wonderful reddish hue, which is a glory to see ruffled in the breeze.

As we walked west towards the Richmond Gate, a passing dog put up a beautifully coloured sparrowhawk. Its owner asked whether we thought it was a kestrel and I said I thought not: it was only when I looked it up later that I realised what we had seen.

Have been trying out my new Leica D-Lux 6 in various conditions – and so far very happy with the results. But I suspect I need to spend a lot more time with the manual to get the best results.