35 | 9 3 This issue of the AR focuses on the 16 cities that feature in the main display of the 10th International Architecture Exhibition at the Arsenale in Venice. Cities have been selected to ensure a degree of consistency in size – they are all above 3.5 million people – and geographical distribution across the globe. Above all, though, they have been chosen because each city is undergoing a period of significant change that has a direct impact on its urban form, city policy and future development. The following 32-page section provides an overview of each city, comprising a short personal account of everyday life and a complementary analysis of social and spatial attributes, developed by the team at the London School of Economics. Together they provide a unique perspective on global urban change. Imagine that we could see the entire earth from space at night-time. The enormous patches and cordons of light closely mirror the world maps of urban extents and the wider human footprints associated with them. If we think of the concentrations of consumption of electricity as representations of human settlements, then large-scale patterns of urban development begin to take shape before our eyes. From this we see that most of Europe is criss-crossed by urban development and that a dense band of urbanisation is consolidating at the core of this continent, stretching from southern England to northern Italy. In North America, vast parts of the United States, except perhaps its deserts, are covered by an almost geometric grid that also links sections of Canada and Mexico. These spatial continuities illustrate the high degree of integration that has developed between cities and their respective regions. Looking beyond North America and Europe, we identify other areas of intense urban dynamism. From the sky, the entire Japanese archipelago – a relatively older urban system that shares many commonalities with North America and Europe – looks almost like an urban continuum. This reflects the fact that Tokyo’s capital region can be accessed from anywhere in the country in a few hours’ time via a sophisticated high-speed rail network. In Tokyo, nearly 80 per cent of the population use public transport to get to work (in Los Angeles, by contrast, 80 per cent use private cars), which provides a model for efficient growth for what is today the world’s largest metropolitan area with over 30 million people. After a period of relative economic stagnation, Tokyo is beginning to once again explore its unique characteristics; its architects and planners engaging with issues of public space and particularly the relationship to water within this dense and fragmented mega-city. The world map clearly indicates the extensive city-regions that are rapidly forming in southern Asia and coastal China, areas expected to concentrate close to half of the world’s urban population within a couple of decades. According to the United Nations, Mumbai – India’s dynamic powerhouse – is set to overtake Tokyo as the world’s largest city by 2050, but nowhere is the dizzying velocity of this transformation as tangible as in the largest Chinese conurbations. Shanghai is now one of the world’s fastest growing cities while Beijing is hurriedly transforming itself in anticipation of the 2008 Olympic Games. As Shanghai grapples with the social challenges of integrating a ‘floating population’ of rural in-migrants numbering perhaps five million people – the population of greater Milan – it continues to grow at a breathtaking rate in both height and breadth, with nearly 3000 buildings over ten storeys high in a city that had less than 300 only ten years ago. CITIES, ARCHITECTURE AND SOCIETY Urban constellations – the earth from space at night. Image by Craig Mayhew and Robert Simmon, NASA.
Transcript
35 | 9PB | 9 3
This issue of the AR focuses on the 16 cities that feature in the main display of the 10th International Architecture Exhibition at the Arsenale in Venice. Cities have been selected to ensure a degree of consistency in size – they are all above 3.5 million people – and geographical distribution across the globe. Above all, though, they have been chosen because each city is undergoing a period of significant change that has a direct impact on its urban form, city policy and future development. The following 32-page section provides an overview of each city, comprising a short personal account of everyday life and a complementary analysis of social and spatial attributes, developed by the team at the London School of Economics. Together they provide a unique perspective on global urban change.
Imagine that we could see the entire earth from space at night-time. The enormous patches and cordons of light closely mirror the world maps of urban extents and the wider human footprints associated with them. If we think of the concentrations of consumption of electricity as representations of human settlements, then large-scale patterns of urban development begin to take shape before our eyes. From this we see that most of Europe is criss-crossed by urban development and that a dense band of urbanisation is consolidating at the core of this continent, stretching from southern England to northern Italy. In North America, vast parts of the United States, except perhaps its deserts, are covered by an almost geometric grid that also links sections of Canada and Mexico. These spatial continuities illustrate the high degree of integration that has developed between cities and their respective regions.
Looking beyond North America and Europe, we identify other areas of intense urban dynamism. From the sky, the entire Japanese archipelago – a relatively older urban system that shares many commonalities with North America and Europe – looks almost like an urban continuum. This reflects the fact that Tokyo’s capital region can be accessed from anywhere in the country in a few hours’ time via a sophisticated high-speed rail network. In Tokyo, nearly 80 per cent of the population use public transport to get to work (in Los Angeles, by contrast, 80 per cent use private cars), which provides a model for efficient growth for what is today the world’s largest metropolitan area with over 30 million people. After a period of relative economic stagnation, Tokyo is beginning to once again explore its unique characteristics; its architects and planners engaging with issues of public space and particularly the relationship to water within this dense and fragmented mega-city.
The world map clearly indicates the extensive city-regions that are rapidly forming in southern Asia and coastal China, areas expected to concentrate close to half of the world’s urban population within a couple of decades. According to the United Nations, Mumbai – India’s dynamic powerhouse – is set to overtake Tokyo as the world’s largest city by 2050, but nowhere is the dizzying velocity of this transformation as tangible as in the largest Chinese conurbations. Shanghai is now one of the world’s fastest growing cities while Beijing is hurriedly transforming itself in anticipation of the 2008 Olympic Games. As Shanghai grapples with the social challenges of integrating a ‘floating population’ of rural in-migrants numbering perhaps five million people – the population of greater Milan – it continues to grow at a breathtaking rate in both height and breadth, with nearly 3000 buildings over ten storeys high in a city that had less than 300 only ten years ago.
CITIES, ARCHITECTURE AND SOCIETY
Urban constellations – the earth from space at night. Image by Craig Mayhew and Robert Simmon, NASA.
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Cities with populations over 1 million in 1950.
Cities with populations over 1 million in 2000.
But rapid urbanisation is not always paralleled by the exponential economic growth and comprehensive infrastructure investments of the Asia Pacific region. In central and coastal Africa, what may appear as dim clusters of light during the night are actually massive urban agglomerations sheltering millions of residents with, as indicated by the scanty reach of their electrical grids, only the most basic and deficient infrastructure. Demographic pressures are bound to continue – by 2015 with each passing hour, Lagos will add 67 new residents, Kinshasa 34 – leading to a disproportionate concentration of young people in the southern hemisphere that coincides with a global imbalance of social indicators such as literacy and income levels. In Egypt, one child is born every 20 seconds and many people move to Cairo within the space of one generation. In this city, over 60 per cent of the population lives in informal settlements with buildings up to 14 storeys high in a city with only 1 square metre of open space per person (each Londoner, by contrast, has access to 50 times that amount).
Even Johannesburg, that economic and cultural engine of southern Africa, is challenged to maintain its current levels of infrastructure provision in the face of a growth scenario whereby its population may double in a matter of decades. In this post-apartheid city that is struggling with crime, fear, segregation and AIDS, there are attempts to bring people back to the abandoned downtown, from which in the last decade many businesses fled to anonymous corporate areas on the urban fringes,
with small-scale projects around transport hubs (or ‘taxi ranks’) that are designed to re-humanise the public realm of the city otherwise hidden behind security fences and inside gated communities.
There is a growing awareness that the urban agenda is a global agenda. The environmental impacts of cities are enormous, due both to their increasing demographic weight and to the amount of natural resources that they consume. Every aspect of urban living has significant implications for the planet – from the billions of people driving cars along metropolitan highways to the energy required to either heat or cool buildings and to bring in food, often from the opposite corner of the world. In the developed economies, it is estimated that over 50 per cent of energy is consumed by buildings and 25 per cent by transport. So, a slight change to this energy equation in cities will have a massive impact on the global stage. It has been argued that the degree of dispersion of urban forms can be related to consumption of non-renewable resources and emissions.
A generation of urban leaders is rising to meet these challenges. In Europe, for example, many big-city mayors are implementing important urban reforms that will enable their cities to be more competitive in the global economy and smarter producers of knowledge and culture. These cities are responding to contemporary social challenges, in some cases accommodating the large-scale influx of new residents and in others managing demographic decline without imploding irreversibly.
Around the world, urban leadership is acquiring a growing momentum, from metropolitan coalitions for smart growth and growth with equity in the United States, to the big-city governments in China whose social reforms may allow for less segregated urban settlements and more integrated labour markets. Some of the most innovative urban interventions of the past twenty years have in fact come from Latin America, a region otherwise mired in macroeconomic problems and widening social inequalities. Following the exemplary case of Curitiba in Brazil, Bogotá today stands out as a perhaps unexpected best practice case of egalitarian urban transformation. The effect of a series of coordinated actions by successive mayors has turned a once violent, car-dominated city facing dramatic levels of in-migration from its rural hinterlands, into a calm and well-managed city that still exudes the passions and experiences of its syncretic Latin American culture.
From this partial and selective survey of the state of the world’s cities, we see that our current urban age is problematic, and rife with urgent challenges, yet also promising, in that it offers the potential to re-think the meanings, functions, capabilities and virtues of different city forms and urban strategies. This is where architects and the design professions can and must contribute to the construction of an environmentally and socially sustainable world. Although each city faces its own particular and complex set of challenges, there is a growing consensus on some broad issues which cities in virtually every region of the world must address if
they are to harness their economic potential and at the same time become more socially-equitable and ecologically sound.
We could simplify our understanding of the situation by arguing that the basic task at hand is how to accommodate the masses of newcomers in dense conditions and with constrained resources. Yet this straightforward phrasing would mask the complex intersection of economic, social and environmental dimensions that must be tackled and the range of mutually-reinforcing interventions that need to be devised. Providing affordable and dignified shelter in areas well-connected with their surrounding urban fabric; creating safe, beautiful and well-designed public spaces conducive to social integration; generating employment with liveable wages and sound workplace conditions that stimulate creativity, virtuous circles of skills generation and synergetic team work; securing cheap, fast and reliable mobility for all of the city’s residents with integrated public transport networks; in sum, designing the constituent pieces of a contemporary, sustainable city. These are some of the elements of our global urban era which demand multidisciplinary analysis and intervention. Rather than proclaim a one-size-fits-all manifesto, we intend that the comparative social and spatial data, marshalled for the purposes of the 10th International Architecture Exhibition but also with wider scope, will reach architects as a call-to-action for the creation of innovative morphological practices, honed to suit the unique challenges and assets of each city system, and above all, its citizens. RICHARD BURDETT
Cities with populations over1 million in 2015. All maps from World Urbanisation Prospects, United Nations, 2003.
