viewing the past year - post holiday newsletter

18 January. Written over the Pacific enroute from Tokyo to DC

Dear Family and Friends,

This was a year of travels and the beginning of transitions. If I am to keep to my self- imposed 1 page length, I can do little more than recount events, with few reflections. As some may recall, I stepped down officially as Director, Center for Teaching Excellence and began a one-year sabbatical in July 2009. In early January, I loaded up books, electronic equipment and other necessaries for a 7-month stay in Singapore as of Visiting Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. The environment was welcoming. The Lee Kuan Yew School, located adjacent to Singapore’s Botanical Gardens occupies buildings on the site of what was once “Raffles College,” where the late Mrs. Lee Kuan Yew, Choo Kwa, ranked first in her class and “Minister Mentor” Lee ranked second as secondary school students. I moved into a spacious two-bedroom 10th floor apartment in National University of Singapore subsidized housing. Each day, I could view Singapore awakening from my balcony.

My principal projects were completing a paper drawing lessons from Singapore’s post independence history that would be relevant to global sustainability issues, deepening my knowledge of Singapore’s political economy and promoting the use of System Dynamics computer modeling as a planning tool to Singapore government officials. I pursued these while my wife, her horses and our cats were coping with mountains of snow in the worst winter Washington DC had encountered in years. My Singapore sojourn offered the advantage of easy, inexpensive access to Sri Lanka, where the project to translate Paradise Poisoned: Learning about Conflict, Development and Terrorism into 16 pamphlet sized booklets (8 in Sinhala, 8 in Tamil) continued to progress. The second two were “launched” in January 2011, just a day or so ago. The summer concluded with presentation of a paper at the Annual System Dynamics Society Meeting in Seoul entitled “The Relevance of Urban Dynamics to Singapore’s Development: Lessons for Moving Beyond the Crisis.” This was co-authored with Lee Kuan Yew School graduate student colleague new friend, Elizabeth Ong Ling Lee.

Full time teaching was the fall semester’s principal agenda, including an undergraduate class “International Development” that was my first attempt and a graduate class “Quantitative Research Methods” that I can taught many times, but not for 10 years. Both classes were relatively large – 25 in the graduate class; 33 in the undergraduate. I had forgotten how long correcting papers can take, especially if one provides fairly extensive comments. Fortunately my students were both bright – and patient – which made things easier.

For Christmas, I drove to Kentucky to spend three days with our four grandchildren, my son, and other family members. Once retirement transition is settled, I intend to spend more time “grand parenting,” Its fun. Wife E… continues to live an intense and interesting life dividing full days and evenings between teaching, riding, caring for her horses and spending time with friends. She won the prize for “most helpful member” at the Old Dominion Endurance Riding Association’s annual banquet. Daughter H…. divides full days between her landscaping, restaurant serving and a new practice – mosaic murals, including an awesomely large and beautiful production in Tarpon Springs Florida. With friends, she has purchased property in Panama that she hopes to develop as a resort. Son J…’s broodmare nurturing business in Kentucky appears to be doing well; he continues to pursue a vocation he loves in some of the most beautiful country in the US. Son B…’s work as President of Shaklee International appears to be thriving. I attended events in Johor Bahru and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and was impressed with his charismatic platform presence before what appeared enthusiastic cadres of salesperson-representatives… That’s all the news one page will allow – my love and best wishes to all in the New Year. Dormgrandpop.

Good bye to Singapore - for now, but with challenging future prospects

.My two weeks’ in Singapore passed all too quickly, but confirmed my belief, based on previous experience, that a preliminary reconnaissance trip, when contemplating an extended stay, is essential. The stay was intense, which is what one wants when arriving as uninvited guest, with no previous institutional relationship. Though I had visited Singapore as a tourist, I had little knowledge of the local terrain and no previous contact with the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public affairs, apart from a letter of inquiry and a cordial response from the Dean.

System Dynamics modeling, the computer simulation theory/methodology I have studied and written about from time to time, made the difference. This fall, the Lee Kwan Yew School initiated, for the first time, a course in System Dynamics as an option in the Master of Public Policy curriculum. It is being co-taught by the dynamic, high-energy Director of the School’s Institute of Water policy, who had studied the methodology as part of his graduate studies. His co-instructor is an equally energetic young faculty member whom I had met at the System Dynamics Society meetings in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Thus, on very first working day in Singapore, I was scheduled for a sixty minutes-plus lecture, following a lengthy get-acquainted meeting with the two instructors to discuss course related matters and and research-related opportunities that could be be informed by System Dynamics. This was particularly exciting for me, because it rekindled a long dormant interest in water policy issues, reminding me about the importance of water resources as an element of the development process. On the morning of my second day, I had moved into a temporary office, adjacent to that of the IWP Director. Soon, I was meeting students potential future colleagues, getting a sense of the School’s research agenda and making plans.

The most important outcome is a possible research initiative inspired by the IWP Director’s concept of the “Living City” as a future scenario for addressing urban development challenges and opportunities in Asia. Urbanization is widely viewed as a Yin-Yang dynamic. While urban growth, and especially growth of megacities, is seen as problematic, it is also in cities that the economic future of Asia will inevitably be shaped. Cities must, inevitably, be the engines of economic growth, creativity, innovation and revitalization if the human race is to survive and prosper sustainably on planet earth. The challenge is to define a vision that makes this possibility real and then to implement development trajectories that can attain it.

According to the IWP Director, a living city comprises dynamically interlinked subsystems: shelter, competitiveness, infrastructure, transport and information. Effective governance plays a particularly important role. But more important than the elements themselves is how they are interlinked and function. In his view, a living city resembles a thriving, healthy organism. It is beautiful, livable, sustainable and resilient. It interacts with its environment symbiotically. It offers a hopeful, empowering, attainable option for the survival of the human species on the planet earth. But is this vision attainable? If it is attainable, what development trajectories could move growing cities in the 500,000-population range toward the vision of a living city? How can today’s megacities, presently grappling with major problems of unsustainability and overshoot move in that direction?

If things work out as looks promising, there will be an exciting opportunity begin a project that seeks answers to such questions when I return to Singapore in January.