Endless City Release
Today marks the release of The Endless City by Urban Age and Phaidon Press. After years of work, Urban Age has compiled the work of 34 contributors across a range of professions and academia. Spearheaded by the London School of Economics and the Alfred Herrhausen Society, this group has pursued an investigation into the future of cities.
Book cover for The Endless City, compiled by Urban Age. Courtesy of Amazon.
Largely based on conferences in Johannesburg, Shanghai, Berlin, London, Mumbai, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and New York, this book debates the implications of one simple statistic - over half of the earth’s population is now living in urban areas.
Coupled with the books release, Deyan Sudjic wrote a piece for Guardian, titled Cities on the Edge of Chaos.
We have more big cities now than at any time in our history. In 1900, only 16 had a population of one million; now it’s more than 400. Not only are there more of them, they are larger than ever. In 1851, London had two million people. It was the largest city in the world by a long way, twice the size of Paris, its nearest rival.
This has political implications, as I have discussed in In Search of a Real Urban Policy and A Level Playing Field for Cities.
In America, the Republicans have concluded that there are no votes to be had in cities. And wealthy suburbanites refuse to pay the property taxes that will support the downtown areas they fear and despise. Yet whether we like it or not, at some point in 2008, the city will have finally swallowed the world. The number of people living in cities is about to overtake those left behind in the fields. It’s a statistic that seems to suggest some sort of fundamental species change, like the moment when mankind stopped being hunter gatherers and took up agriculture.
Beyond the intricacies of politics, however, this shift has major implications. Most of us are oblivious to this transition because most of the rapid population growth is happening in the developing world, where cities are faced with unprecedented population growth.
The nature of cities has already changed irrevocably and in The Endless City, there is plenty of evidence to show that they are changing us. In 1950, they were predominantly a Western phenomenon, with the developed world accounting for 60 per cent of the urban population. Now, 70 per cent of city dwellers are from the developing world… Lagos, the fastest growing of them all, is adding 58 people every hour; Mumbai is growing by 42 every hour.
This growth is creating problems for public safety, effective transportation systems, water management, and the rapid depletion of local resources.
Half of the 12 million people in Mumbai live in illegal shacks, 200,000 of them on the pavement. Every day, at least two people are killed falling off overcrowded suburban trains.
A problem we might be more familiar with, however, is the changing face of cities. We have seen maddening pace of record breaking towers and the absurdity that is the construction industry in Dubai.
Cities look different, too. Shanghai had just 121 buildings over eight storeys high in 1980. Twenty years later, it was 3,500, and just five years after that it was a staggering 10,000.
Despite these frightening statistics, it is still important to remember that cities are important. We must continue to make cities livable and manageable, rather than returning to the flight for the suburbs.
But for all their agonies, cities must also be counted as a positive force. They are an engine of growth, a machine for putting the rural poor onto the first rung of urban prosperity and freedom. Look at London, … It has grown, layer on layer, for 2,000 years, sustaining generation after generation of newcomers.
Most importantly, though, this book gives us a different way to conceptualize cities. It is important that the general public can relate to issues we are talking about, and understand the path to a solution…
A city is an a la carte menu. That is what makes it different from a village, which has little room for tolerance and difference. And a great city is one in which as many people as possible can make the widest of choices from its menu.
… and be aware of trickery and superficial answers.
Politicians love cranes; they need solutions within the time frames of elections and cranes deliver them. But there are only a limited number of problems that are susceptible to this kind of time scale. The result is a constant cycle of demolition and reconstruction that is seen as the substitute for thinking about how to address the deeper issues of the city.
Finally, it appears that successful cities must take a similar approach to software. Openness is the path to progress.
Successful cities are the ones that allow people to be what they want; unsuccessful ones try to force them to be what others want them to be. A city of freeways like Houston or Los Angeles forces people to be car drivers or else traps them in poverty. A successful city has a public transport system that is easy to use; an unsuccessful city tries to ban cars.
A successful city has room for more than the obvious ideas about city life, because, in the end, a city is about the unexpected, it’s about a life shared with strangers and open to new ideas. An unsuccessful city has closed its mind to the future.
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