“What is the one thing you can do to make a city more sustainable? That’s easy. Stop asking the question: What is the one thing you can do to make a city more sustainable?” How we should really be tackling the debate and issue is by first recognizing that cities are hyper-complex and none exactly alike. Meaning, every single one will have different solutions and every single one will need different solutions as it changes over time. Although these complexities and diversities sound like a strain on our ability to combat the problems faced, Warren Karlenzig argues that the dynamics and inter-connections of urban areas are what give them their “strength against shocks and stresses”. They are our gift and our curse.

In this incisive speech entitled ‘Collective Intelligence: Cities as Global Sustainability Platform‘, presented at TEDxMission in San Francisco, Warren chooses 8 core categories to assess cities of today: built environment, economy, energy/climate, food, land use, mobility, water, waste. The more combined these core categories are when forming a solution, the more potent that solution will eventually be. Warren pays particular attention to web-based urban technologies that help us live in our cities more efficiently and look at our urban lives in completely new ways.

“Our collective intelligence is really only beggining to emerge… The cities that rise up with nature will succeed but they will also require new forms of citizen participation. Over the next few decades, we’ll be put to the ultimate test in terms of our creativity, our ingenuity and our economy. Cities offer the most resilient evolutionary path, which is an extremely high value-added proposition made eminently more possible with our collective intelligence.“