The clearest dynamic we have to deal with
as people thinking about the future of the city,
is the polarization of the public conversation.
You know, the lack of collective idea
of what the city is for.
And we think that the streets,
that kind of gigantic untapped resource
of open space in cities really,
is a place where we can really work
to transform something that's been reserved for motorcars,
into something that's an amenity
for the whole population.
Hopefully, in a way that can be scalable
to the whole country and beyond.
As countries wonder how to meet
their carbon neutral promises,
many have also begun to question the future of our cities.
A popular model is the 15-minute city.
It's a vision of a decentralized urban area
where your daily needs are within a quarter hour walk
or bike from your home.
It promises to cut greenhouse emissions
and boost livability.
But while Paris works on neighborhoods
with a 15-minute radius,
and Barcelona explores a similar idea
dividing areas into nine block chunks,
Sweden is taking the hyperlocal concept one step further.
The one minute city idea, of course,
uses a buzzy sounding phrase to talk about
the even more local than the hyperlocal scale.
You know, the street exactly outside your front door,
or outside the door of a cafe or a business,
and how that can be transformed
to make additional amenity space, to make public spaces
that didn't exist before.
This is the Street Moves project,
and it allows communities to become architects
of their own streets layouts.
It's led by two national government agencies,
ArkDes, the national center for architecture and design,
And Vinnova, the Swedish government's
national innovation agency.
I think there's a sort of implicit critique in the project
that questions residents and citizens role
in planning processes.
We have now these very large scale formal planning processes
in most Western countries that make it very hard
for individual citizens to influence
the outcome of urban change.
But we know that citizens have really, really
strong opinions especially about
their immediate environment.
So that method of involving citizens
with their hyperlocal, extremely expert knowledge
on their environment, but getting that out of their heads
and putting out on the table for designers
but also for agencies, national agencies and municipalities,
we think there's something really, really valuable in that.
Unlike the 15-minute city concept,
the Street Moves model isn't about offering every feature
of a city at a hyperlocal level.
Instead, it turns patches of pavement
outside our front doors
into critical connecting spaces for communities.
Through workshops and consultations,
residents can control how much street space is used
for parking and how much is used for anything else
they can think of.
It's already been rolled out experimentally
at four sites in Stockholm,
with three more cities about to join up.
The prototypes were designed by Lundberg design,
an industrial design firm here in Stockholm.
And the prototype that exists
is a kind of deployable system
which runs on three simple tracks,
which can easily be laid down on the streets.
And then sort of cassettes or sections of timber
are laid on top of them.
And those sections, they fit together
and create a kind of boardwalk which can be leveled
with the pavement, of course.
And different kinds of elements can be integrated into them.
Be it seating, opportunities for planting,
cycle storage, electric, scooter storage,
and later, many, many other things.
When you make something in three dimensions
by a designer who's skilled at making something beautiful,
intriguing, different in a material in this case
that's not often seen on the streets in timber,
it becomes a talking point.
Sweden has committed its cities
to becoming carbon neutral by 2045,
making a project like Street Moves,
that de-emphasizes car use,
more of a feasible prospect.
But that's not all that Street Moves wants to address.
Of course, the transformation
that needs to come to our cities
because of the need to decrease our carbon use,
is the most urgent driver for all of the transformations
that are coming, especially in Swedish cities.
But we use that cover sometimes,
and we use that huge undeniable momentum
to also have other conversations.
And I think it's no accident and no coincidence
that alongside the ecological driven transformation
that's coming, there's also a socially driven one.
Be it Black Lives Matters, be it Me Too,
be it large scale citizen led movements
that are bringing new dynamics to the public conversation.
That creates new demands for the city.
And I think everybody's starting to realize,
you know, the ecological transformation that needs to come,
is just as much a cultural project as it is technical.
Street Moves ultimate goal is ambitious.
To rethink and makeover every street in Sweden
over the next decade.
But while this kind of grand transformation
might appear to only work for a country like Sweden,
Long and the Street Moves team are confident
the concept can cross borders.
I think the future of scaling up
this kind of project internationally,
will be about using the talent in those individual spaces
for what they're good at.
In Sweden, we have great skill in industrial design
so that kind of modularity, the materials, and so on,
really, really good at that.
In another country, it might be a completely
other set of skills.
You know, it might be that the designers
take more of a lead on the public conversation
than they might do here in Sweden.
In the end, what I believe in,
is that the extraordinary talent
that is around the world in design and architecture,
can play a massively bigger role than it already does
in that public conversation, in generating new ideas
for how we use our city public spaces.