We Should ‘Be Like Water’

The most vibrant cities in the world came about as a result of being close to water both for economic and ecological reasons water has always been central

I’ve lived in a megacity (Lagos), a global powerhouse (London) and a midwestern hub (Chicago) and while all these cities have been amazingly different, water and proximity to water has been central.

We experience cities through water. Do we have water to drink? Is there enough rain to keep our farms fruitful? Do we expect storms or flooding? But because water is so central, it’s literally life, we do not pay enough attention to it.

I now live in Austin Texas (a suburb of Austin now since we moved out of the town itself). And I use town because having lived in some of the cities I mentioned above, the centrality of water I would suggest is what makes a city. It is the engine that runs through the main cities in the world: Amsterdam, Singapore (which is actually the only city-state that I know of), Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo.

Mumbai was quite literally built and expanded because of the Arabian Sea. Mumbai was an archipelago of seven islands situated along the Arabian Sea. 

The system thinking idea that underlies this is that when designing systems (cities in this case) we should go with the flow of human tendencies, the centralized water system breaks the flow of human tendencies and we will end up back with decentralized water systems because that is the natural tendency of humans. 

The point here is that, even as we build new artificial cities, we doom ourselves to failure because we are going against natural human tendencies. We should build our cities close to water bodies and treat those bodies with respect. We should be like water.