My heroine, Jane Jacobs, wrote (and I paraphrase) that excessive problems in cities are not problems of progress itself but evidence of a stagnation of ideas to solve them. I’m thinking about that smart arse comment that people roll out when you’re late: “You’re not ‘stuck in traffic’, you ARE traffic.”

We all know what the problems in our cities are. Housing, traffic, crime, access to good healthcare, education, (lack of) beauty, (not enough) green space. We read about them every day. It’s all too easy either to shrug and mumble something about modern life, or to complain that it’s a result of austerity, bad government policy, the global economy, immigration, Brexit, the EU or social media. All things that could be explained away as progress, or at least an unintended function of it.

But isn’t it really a result of a lack of good enough ideas? Or, more likely, a lack of interest on the part of those in control to look for, understand and experiment with good ideas? When did we get so worried about the consequences of failure? Probably when the instantly global verdict of social media made it so much more visible and consequential.

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