Cities Endure the Ages

Two months ago, I sat before this LED screen for half an hour. It is a key exhibit of the Museum of the City of New York, using numbers to record the growth of the city — you can see light spots representing population and wealth multiplying, gathering and spreading. It took over 100 years for the city to grow from a small harbor town in the 1600s-1800s to a global metropolis in the 1900s. At that time I was thinking, for a man, 100 years could be his lifetime, but for a city, a time of wonders and miracles. The history of New York has proven that a city shares prosperity with its people. It is an extension of the life of those now living, but also a community of common destiny for future generations.

According to the famous political scholar Benjamin Barber, cities are the most ancient and long-lasting organization, as proven by the fact that Rome and Istanbul are much older than Italy and Turkey. Cities are our homes, unlike nations and countries, both abstract concepts. In cities we grow old and die, work and play, fall in love and build families. He says, "Cities endure the ages."

Cities are where we receive lifelong education and a carrier of our individual and collective value. Upon receiving an invitation from TAL to make a speech on "capabilities required for the future society," "coexist with cities" popped up in my mind.

In the future, urbanization will have more overlap with the evolution of civilizations, which requires us to enhance our capacity to coexist with cities.

My childhood dream was to visit every corner of China and the rest of the world when I grew up. Lucky for me, I seized many opportunities to help realize my dream, and have visited five continents and lived and worked in many cities. My feeling for and pondering on cities gradually deepened. Next I’d like to share my experience of learning, working and living overseas, as well as my views on how to coexist with cities and what specific capabilities or actions are required.

Self-learning

I studied in a future-focused college renowned as the most pioneering one in the world. In four years, students study and live in seven cities around the world. They attend classes using an advanced online system, instead of in a physical campus. The curriculum has also been redefined and redesigned accordingly. Deans visit and talk with students regularly. And student activities are more about working with the local governments, active organizations or persons on various projects.

So how was my studying going?

Indeed, as an international student, sometimes I had too many pre-class reading assignments to spare the time of hanging out with my friends. Though the high-tech platform we used to attend classes was really awesome, I would feel nervous when facing intensive courses or heated discussions. Sometimes I would do my homework against the clock.

But I prefer to talk about my living in the cities. If you ask about Berlin, I can share with you the opening hours of the local libraries, the annual tickets on the Museum Island, the half-year performance calendar of the Berlin Philharmonic, and the plays performed by the Berlin State Ballet. I can show you the market where you can buy fresh salmon and strawberries on Saturday morning, or where fashion boutiques are clustered. I can also tell you the richest community, the busiest street, the block with the highest crime rate, and even the district most populated with immigrants in Berlin. I want to tell you everything about Berlin that I’ve read from books, seen with my own eyes, and heard from the local people.

When cities became my learning resources, I spent every minute learning knowledge and skills, and more importantly, sharpening my wisdom and sense of aesthetics. It will be much easier to acquire knowledge and technology in the future, which enables us to broaden our scope of learning. This month, in a cover story titled The Future of learning, The Economist discussed an important change brought by educational technology to the future of learning — more personalized and liberated individual learning.

I believe that in the future, learning will be pursued permanently, not for a limited time only, and people will get more involved in the operation of cities.

Self-learning is the first step to coexist with cities. I’m not talking about big concepts here, but personal learning capacity. We should keep learning to enhance our understanding of life and cities.

Far-transferring

I joined a UAV company during my study in San Francisco. I had to rush around in the Bay Area, attending classes in the morning, working for the company in the afternoon, and returning to the downtown to complete my homework and handle my work emails.

Before my first day in the company, for better communication with the CEO in a teleconference, I prepared and sent my work plan in advance, including an over-10,000-word document and PPT presentations, to explain my solution in parts, particularly relevant priority issues and team structure, as well as what I should do to help solve these issues. To complete the work plan, I launched an industrial research, had one-on-one conversation with my colleagues, and collected various data such as crowd-funding records and sales. I also talked with customers online, read many reports on competing products, and even acquired the information about competitors. To me these work were fundamental and should be done in advance. I would pour my heart and soul into anything I found interesting.

After I started my career, I realized that I was mostly benefited by the Silicon Valley. I visited many outstanding companies and entrepreneurs, attended several courses to improve myself, and met many friends in industry meetings. What I learned from solving problems and making strategies in the Silicon Valley is that, I was imprinted with the unique features and vitality of this place, making me not only embrace and inherit its culture and mechanisms, but also feel energized and cheerful.

I believe that in the future, there will be comprehensive exchange of energy between students and cities. The education we once received will constitute our careers, life experiences, and contributions to the world. I also believe that in the future, taking a leave of absence or a gap year will be no longer necessary for college students, because students and cities can help each other to meet their needs and achieve themselves simply in class hours.

The second step to coexist with cities is far-transferring, a pet phrase of our Dean and Professor Stephen Kosslyn. This means the capacity to think and practice across multiple dimensions and to transfer your learning between different and even abstract contexts. And cities are an important approach to the transfer of learning.

Co-evolving

According to my plan, when speaking about evolving, I would talk about how I gradually deepened my connection with cities, including the places I once visited and my hometown Beijing, and how my horizons and dreams were influenced by cities. I would also tell you that my new book Step by Step will be published this October, in which I will share my bonding with cities.

But I remembered some of my friends.

Two of my friends who went to the same middle school as me studied computer science and biomedicine at college. But they chose to teach village children in Datong, Shanxi Province how to use pinhole cameras. With a "huge fortune" of 2,000 yuan from the college to support their education programme, they each carried four large bags and headed for their destination. Shen Danxi, a low-profile friend of mine, has been promoting public benefits and social innovation for years, and currently runs the Sany Foundation. Recently, she founded a social innovation platform 3ESPACE, which is now incubating over 10 public service projects. Liu Hong, Secretary-General of PEER, co-founded PEER during his study for a bachelor’s degree at Harvard University, and later received his master’s degree at the same university. He has been working as a full-time public service promoter devoted to providing high-quality education opportunities for young people in China’s underdeveloped regions. Qin Yuefei, co-founder of Serve for China, shares purely stories of villagers and pictures of his beautiful village on WeChat. We can see from him the very beauty of dreams.

The theme of today’s conference is "universal gravitation", an attractive force that exists between any two objects in the universe. There is also mutual attraction between people and cities. Many young people have moved to cities that attract them with resources, cultures, inspirations, opportunities, and challenges.

I always encourage myself with the actions of my friends. Every person who has received the best education in cities should give something back to society. You will become more inclusive, not more advanced, as you are sharing with more people the benefits of cities.

I believe that in the future, people and cities need to benefit from each other, and more importantly, to focus on sharing and co-development. The boundary of cities will be blurred by their inclusiveness. These will become the core principles of future-oriented education.

Co-evolving is the third step to coexist with cities.

This picture shows the last place I visited in the Museum of the City of New York. It is called Future City Lab. These pictures are quite funny (laugh). Can you find out where I am? Visitors design future buildings and streets and are placed among them in a short video, as if they were living in the future. How I wish I could borrow from that guy in the video his awesome bike! (laugh) I love that color (laugh). This interactive function made me ponder on the relationship between people and the future, and between cities and education. In the future, we should build the capacity to learn by ourselves, and to improve and evolve. This is in line with the six capabilities advocated by TAL, each as a building block for a better future society.

When I returned to Beijing two month ago, my love for the city grew deeper. I came to realize that, we all coexist with cities, no matter who we are, where we are, or what we are doing.

To enhance the capability of coexisting with cities, we should truly consider cities as future labs where we can learn, develop and evolve.

Thank you!