Unless buildings empty out in a business crisis, building managers will soon use digital sensors to track how people use spaces. By the time the high school class of 2012 pays off student loans, a property’s market price will reflect how craftily its managers size rooms and fit out passageways to match how people tend to use them.

We stand at the edge, someone very smart about buildings and their marketing told me confidentially yesterday, of a real-estate era. Landlords and investors who once worked off measures of size, material and function will increasingly also measure how buildings and parks make people feel- and make them behave.

Whether this puts us at the edge of a mineral-bath swimming pool or a cliff depends on how we understand privacy and how we understand metrics.The second is a lot easier to norm, so let’s bang it into place: now that sensors and Web surveys can tell us stories about how people tend to move through a space, we should use those stories to make places promote better health.Which means we should anonymize all the data like this we get, and let vendors like Facebook make incursions on our privacy.

Health anchors both a value proposition and a moral code. The riddle of how you measure activity within a place springs to life with no clear lineage in the history of private property. We’ve spent common brainpower adjudging how people should use a place, through zoning and floor plans. We’ve come up with rules for how owners should safeguard a place, with fire codes and air quality laws. But now that sensors can pick up where people tend to sit, fidget, gather, throw spitballs and nap, what do we track? For capitalist ends, we can either choose what people seem to like to do- and then sell cues toward that implied preference – or get arrogant and choose what people should do to live fuller lives.

Let’s get arrogant- we’re real estate professionals, after all- and see what makes people less likely to become obese or develop Type II diabetes. Let’s see what connects them more frequently to each other and to sunshine. Let’s leave to other economic actors (like publishers) the game of guesstimating what really maters to them based on their habits and then stuffing those habits down their throats.

Healthier people tend to keep their spaces clean. They negotiate in good faith. And odds are they survive floods, food shortages, new airborne diseases and other climate events more inventively and with less rioting.

This letter is open.

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And while more co-working space means more revenue and brand power for a few companies, nobody can discern what it means for productivity or for output across a city’s income ranges.

To see why, consider our workspace on the ostentation scale and ask what productivity it creates. Places charge rent based on how they feel, but they stay afloat based on how well they connect to the Net. We share an overhead fan, a window, a printer and a landline (this last is coveted). These work as requisites, while reliable broadband access draws our monthly checks and inviting design earns a premium price.

The same goes for the espresso bars sporing around Lower Manhattan and northern Brooklyn- and probably your city too. Each claims a niche- my coworking space is for writers, an espresso place in my neighborhood also sells men’s shirts and shampoo- but each lives and dies with the strength of its Wi-Fi.

Which means that the players in this “new” workspace are corporations like Cisco, Intel, Google and Apple. Cisco, subtly but doggedly, has even invested in designing and managing coworking spaces in the Netherlands and in New England. When the folks supplying the pipes start outfitting the containers, it’s hard to argue that independents gain power in pricing terms.

What these firms do with the extra clout, though, remains unwritten. Broadly, history suggests a path like the one Microsoft forged in the 1990s or like the one Starbucks whacked out a few years later. They can choke off choice, or they can stimulate demand for a new category. Microsoft starved Netscape and other rivals; Starbucks triggered a wave of independent coffee shops all over America.

The co-working spaces exist in the physical world, even if their profits flow to tech companies. And real estate is harder to monopolize than cyberspace. So it’s tempting to hope that a lot of idiosyncratic designers and retailers will stoke a lot of configurations of coworking space, some public and some for members, some with smithies and some with shampoo. But even so, everyone pays rent to the router and interface owner. Which brings us back to the mystery: how does the overall economy gain?

That’s a question for job developers, real estate entrepreneurs, watchdogs, advocates, educators and (sigh) creatives like me in co-working spaces to hash out. And one we’ll have to co-work out with limited access to information. At least we’ll have unlimited access to Wi-Fi.

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But a generation of history shows that international parties muffle or warp climate-control policy. And in the past year, cities from New York to Seattle and around the world have forged ways to address climate change’s impacts with capital projects that plant thirsty species in the ground or retrofit energy-hog buildings. New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, if he doesn’t run for president next year, may be preparing to spend his post-political years overseeing the coalition of cities his charities support.

Cities are Planet B, provided they can talk to each other and trade ideas briskly.

Why, then, are American cities facing budgetary dilemmas and losing federal support? The answer hauls in traditional party politics (which sent money to national parties who now perpetuate themselves) and traditional statecraft. Institutional weight rests with agents who speak for countries and parties. These parties, for climate-resilience purposes, are used to haggling. But to finely motivate behavior change and spread innovation requires a different set of skills.

Cities trade ideas through conferences, both hushed retreats and all-in affairs like the Architecture and Design Education Network’s gathering this past October. To bring these ideas to scale, cities need an international marketplace to match the talking shops. If Greensboro can sell an idea to Greenwich which can then take it apart and lease it out to cities in Africa or Central Europe, imagine the capital that could stir.

Now keep imagining that, as doings like the ones in Durban churn on and on, city delegates siphon good ideas into policies with capital to support them.

Now imagine that cities enforce climate action with a range of incentives and penalties it can coordinate through schools, civic institutions, leases, permits and taxes.

Seems like a new planet, right?

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The new tree pit, technically a “bioswale,” soaks up rainwater at a lower cost and with more reliability than a gutter. It creates what New York City parks chief Adrian Benepe calls “entry-level skilled jobs” in weeding, planting and maintenance. It has money to cover its costs from a multi-year city budget and it grows in tandem with broader efforts in Philadelphia and San Francisco that get additional fuel from new borrowing,

But let’s go back to talking about how there are no jobs and no ways to create them, how greenies are soft, and how the Oscar show will go. If we have time, let’s sniff about people calling BS on crony capitalism too- because we know that in the real world, there is no alternative.

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To understand why, think about why Michael Kimmelman’s well-executed columns on mixed-income housing and disaster relief spurred thousands of Tweets and rubbed-together palms among architects. Won’t architecture criticism naturally probe how architects address market failures and human crises?

The answer is: yes, but you’d rarely know it. Since the last century, publishers tendentiously group architecture writing with art. So we read and watch discussions of buildings as fixed objects that reflect one person’s inspiration. This makes dangerous leaps of logic, though, because everyone in the world uses architecture in a basic way that nobody uses art. Architecture is the process of making places, and its success or failure resides in the way people live when they share those places. This is damnably hard to evaluate, though, so critics expediently pick a point in time to evaluate how a building serves a social purpose.

The question that climate change inflames, though, asks which point in time. The beginning, which critics commonly choose, bears little promise of revealing how people will use or know the building in the future. Frank Gehry’s billowing IAC headquarters or Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern will express other moods and values when the rivers they face rise higher and when rain lashes their windows more fiercely.

What’s an architecture critic to do? Kimmelman’s move, which reminds casual followers and aesthetes about how architecture can address social questions, makes a gentle move toward more expansive thought. Once you internalize that design terms can tame social dilemmas, you can start thinking about how design interacts with the economy around it. And you can see pretty quickly that an architect, while she may start the day as an artist, spends the day as a negotiator.

Successful buildings like Via Verde, the project Kimmelman praised, reflect collaboration among designers, suppliers, engineers, advocates, and construction people. They balance physical strength with personal charm, open space with airtight engineering.

Likewise, climate-ready cities combine strong executive leadership with spirited give-and-take among landlords, financiers, activists, students, arty folks and seniors. They balance mom-and-pop shops with multinational employers (and the insurance agencies who love them), parks and nature with cultural heritage.

Thinking about architecture as a tool for social reform means thinking about inspiration as part of the daily toolkit. And as we confront climate change, that’s a valuable means of learning to think.

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With shirtsleeve temperatures and trenchfuls of rain, autumn in New York this year gets me thinking about autumn in New York in 2040. Architects and civil servants I admire are nudging landlords and regulators to prepare for that season, when storms will send river swells up the sides of buildings and floods will factor into families’ plans the way snow does now.

But these forecasts have yet to resonate widely in the marketplace. Evidence suggests people still would rather express their green bonafides by purchasing handcrafted cheese or driving a car that runs on electricity (which often runs on coal). I have learned from developer Jonathan Rose’s Garrison Institute that people reliably tune out messages of foreboding. Most every culture tells a flood legend, but the drift of the legend is always that the flood happened way back before we had to worry about anything.

People do respond, though, to images of beauty and messages of potential.

So if you look at the MoMA’s “Rising Currents” show from last year, wherein architectural teams imagined ways to reorient New York in future decades so that the swollen harbor becomes a center of transportation, you can start imagining a growth industry in teaching the skills that make the city more malleable.

Now you can start seeing eddies of growth along these lines. These skills can grow within children, who can study art and science with a skew toward urban bridges and levees and other systems. They can grow within college and graduate students, like the ones I advise in Pratt Institute’s Environmental Systems Management program. And they can grow within hard-to-employ people who can quickly master landscape restoration and enhancement — or, put another way, clearing bogs and planting trees.

Architectural appreciation can ripen into this kind of industry. On the recent OpenHouseNewYork weekend, a popular stop in a once-maritime Brooklyn neighborhood guided kids through the exercise of drawing what they saw from the sidewalk and then constructing a skyline or floor plan from the drawings. (Linda Miller, a resourceful publicist, put me and my family on the RSVP list for this event, but others like it go on throughout the year at the Kentler International Drawing Space.)

Locavore culture can feed this industry, as premium prices support growth among nonprofit commercial kitchens run by groups like Whedco in the Bronx.

And every level of schooling, from daycare to doctorates, can use the city as a text and classroom.

I’ve left links out because, as I say, I either work for or want to work for almost all the operations I’ve mentioned and I want readers to find them on their own. That’s a challenge in itself, because our information overload tends to blur worthwhile responses to climate change with greenwash.

And that can’t last. When you think all day about sea level rise and storm surges, you can start feeling like a fish out of water in 2011 New York City. Turn a corner and a convenience store is restocking petroleum-based-plastic-wrapped sugar smacks. Cross a street and a utility crew is using 20th Century tools to patch the subway. Blog triumphally about the inevitable turn toward an engagement with the landscape, and wonder how to turn your ideas into currency.

Well, I actually know the answer to that last conundrum — it’s to go out into the city and teach people how to change parts of it that don’t work. More on that in my next column.

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Joseph Schumpeter, law professor and dandy, posited around a hundred years ago that capitalism and democracy would feed each other forever so long as policy – mainly a lush source of money to borrow- encouraged kooky ideas. These ideas would feed a response of “creative destruction,” in which lots of cobblers suddenly faced empty cupboards because nobody wants any more horseshoes, then lots of cathode-ray assemblers stay home all day because everyone wants plasma TVs, and so forth. It’s an elegant thesis because it implies a value in venture capital that spreads across all zones in an economy. But.

What if part of the public no longer accepts the premise that people share resources and thus share the cost of those resources, another part of the public asks for and gets a bye on paying for all the perks it gets from everyone else- and then big changes in air and water expose the cost of the overall public’s failure to invest in fitness, freedom of movement, and scientific knowledge?

Well, then you get big shifts in power. Extremists bore into the two-party system on the right. Scattered protests on the left gather into a force that makes the hyper-rational mayor of New York City decide to stay on the sidelines. And dictatorships up their productivity, new technology and purchasing power while American employment flails. You can’t assume that destruction is creative if the cost of living with storm surges, weather disruption and filthy air will be dramatically higher in whatever new normal you happen to seek.

In that context, you might consider creative repair. You might find ways to train hard-to-employ people in mending bridges or creating carbon-capturing green space on contaminated sites. You might reward developers who give permanent jobs to neighbors, who help connect residents and workers to training and education and wellness, and who make their buildings conducive to human health.

The Tea Party’s mouthpieces would call all this incidental to their quest for free money…er, low taxes. The Occupy Wall Street movement would call it incremental. Nobody would call it a killer app that wipes out a prior arrangement. Venture capital can do well in landscape restoration, site cleanup and employment, I’m sure- as soon as somebody works out the metrics for capturing these activities’ value.

That somebody would have to be both creative and collegial, because there’s a lot of destruction to clear.

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Why did so many Americans want 99-cent songs, phones with no keyboards, and credit card receipts you sign with your finger? For a while I thought the answer entailed a desire to hide: climate change, corporate heedlessness and global instability made reality too scary. Then I thought maybe the Apple pull worked the other way round: a conglomerate tradition in the 1950s had foisted computers and screens on us, the screens were inescapable, and Apple took that fact as a starting point to make the screens fun. And personal.

Whatever mix of causes and effects he rode, though, Steve Jobs wedded Americans to screens. Paying for milk, voting and visiting the doctor now means spending more time looking at a screen than at an employee. Call that progress or dehumanization, you have to agree that it places more barriers between people than we used to expect.

So in tribute to Steve Jobs, let me suggest that connected Americans are readier than our forebears to find value in face to face contact. If we groove on iPhone apps, we can use them to look up the fruits and veggies that are ripest this week and buy them at farmer’s markets- from farmers who hand us dirty produce in exchange for cash or shares. If we design from iPhone photos, we can use them to muster volunteers to plant a proper mix of succulents and thirsty plants in a park- and if we enjoy the on-the-go iPad we can use it to work up a payroll and investment schedule for making that park viable.

Jobs’ famous quote urges people to avoid the zombie condition of “living someone else’s life.” Hear hear. But Jobs’ American fans are saying goodbye to him in a country where our healthcare costs, our corporate-loving tax code, and our odds of getting walloped away from our loved ones in a storm are all too huge and too confusing to escape.

Let’s pay homage to American invention by using the screens to invent a country where we can face each other and take our cues from what other people show us.

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I have no dispute with Starbucks, or with franchising, or with the idea of raising civic awareness through shopping. But I do worry that the Kiva model, or the Kickstarter model, makes it too easy to declare your allegiance to plucky small business and too hard to invest in ongoing learning or civic life. We hear droning from politicians that small businesses drive our national progress, yet economists and naturalists never endorse this view. Economies of scale, in which many people share a resource or a burden and crowd-guess their way to better management, drive growth. And our stagnant economy needs new kinds of jobs making soil tillable and water drinkable under widely new weather patterns.

Put another way: I’d rather see the Federal Highway Administration collect money at toll booths for bike repairs and playgrounds, or see the IRS introduce a checkbox for afterschool programs. I’d feel more assured of carbon-light economic growth if we voters got a clear message that small businessfolk can make profits by finding cleaner ways to bring about connection and progress within communities.

Nobody invented anything that could seed hundreds of jobs, to my knowledge, in a coffee shop. Coffee and graphics and words and ideas keep us reaching for ideas that breach our many social gaps. But Starbuckses are too diffuse and too distracted to be the garages for the next Mac. And so we need to be serious about how, and in what volume, we want to join together to invent new ways out of an economy that keeps us all sleepy and increasingly generic.

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Even if a nation of 50 states declines in power as its policy moves in jerky rhythm from state to federal law and back, the lives of people and places in that nation can on the main improve. Gopnik and Packer leave out the idea that resuscitating cities through better design and smarter industry can create prosperity. Now, the evidence that this does happen remains scarce, so the authors are reasonable to leave it out. But consider decline as an idea rather than as a diagnosis, and you can start investigating it from its source.

New York has failed to right its economic spine since the attacks: it overwhelmingly relies on Midas-sized wealth, much of it native to other countries. But New York has also opened thousands of square feet of new parkland- even Lower Manhattan, which mainly became an enclave of luxury housing, offers more than 10 new parks with ample new access to both rivers. Along the way, it has seen new design guidelines for streets and parks that require intensive weeding and maintenance.

This creates more than a tourist attraction: it scaffolds a range of unskilled and skilled jobs, and it feeds both labor and entrepreneurs to niches like urban farming and urban forestry. Public investment in good urban design stokes the private appetite for clean air and good produce. That in turn creates two generations’ worth of demand for better transportation, smarter refrigeration and sounder building design.

A small city or big city can learn to manage its natural resources with more intelligence, more specialization and more respect for science- which can stoke better schooling and finally make the “couch potato,” Packer’s analogy for American attitudes, uncool.

My friend Vishaan Chakrabarti, a former city official, has written an essay series yearning for “a country of cities.” I would argue for a nation of cities. Leaders in cities know the urgency of converting foreign wealth to local stability, and they are clear-eyed about the value of immigrants and decent healthcare. Their policies in that key obscure the question of whether America is sinking. Experiments are popping up so widely that even if America does go below the waterline, cities can start new democratic enterprises that assign value to clear thinking about health and work.

Gopnik rounds up recent books on the subject and concludes that the question’s path depends on where it starts. George Packer travels to Mt. Airy, NC and shows that America has lost too many jobs and too much cohesion to swagger about anything. Both are right, as far as they look. But both would do readers a service by asking whether cities that rework their laws to shrink pollution and increase land management are rising not only in influence but in responsibility for Americans’ future.

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