Complexity to inform issues of methodology, taxation and politics in a context of crisis

When I travel from my Scottish Borders village to any large urban region I – a city kid born and bred – become increasingly worried about what a world which will be 60%+ urban by the middle of this century actually means for the complex global socio-technical-ecological system. Currently I am in Vancouver to see my younger daughter who lives and works there and so have travelled by car to Tyneside, train to London, tube to Hounslow West Tube, walk to hotel, shuttle bus to Heathrow Terminal 2, plane to Vancouver, daughter’s car to her apartment. A lot of carbon to try to offset but what struck me was how horrible much of the urban world actually is, and all of this is the urban world in two high income countries. I found the walk from the Tube to the hotel in Hounslow where average house prices are pushing £500K particularly gruesome. It was the rush hour on a dark evening but the houses on the route looked shabby and run down. The whole area looked like an anti chamber of hell – OK main roads but even so. And this in a city region where production industries other than construction have disappeared and in effect the whole system lives on the off scourings of the essentially useless and damaging interwoven operations of finance and real estate capital.

I play at being a peasant whilst living of my pension income but there has to be a better way to live than this form of urban existence. Rather taken with th Dutch suburb where every dwelling has agricultural production associated with it but that is first world luxury option. I am a long way from digging lazy beds (lazy my foot) in a bog fertilized with seaweed if I can get it and my families dung to grow potatoes. Whilst I get good crops of first and second earlies the slugs got my main crop which is what matters for real food production. Very gloomy rant but this is what it feels like to pass from a very fertile agricultural area – the Berwickshire Merse – to the urban world – and a lot wrong in the Merse notably the Leit Water just 100 meters over my hedge which is sterilised by nitrogen run off from Oil Seed Rape etc.

Kitsilano looks like a bit shabbier version of South Yarra Melbourne. It is pleasant and close to the beach and the houses are quite large but not on big plots – hard to live off the garden here. Vancouver is a west coast city with a strong union history but now very much deindustrialized in employment base with a massive but highly mechanized port. It is lovely but even so.

So a flaneur impression but these are good for understanding. David Byrne