TOWARDS AN URBAN AGE Urban Age is a worldwide series of conferences investigating the future of cities NEW YORK/FEBRUARY 2005 SHANGHAI/JULY 2005 LONDON/NOVEMBER 2005 MEXICO CITY/FEBRUARY 2006 JOHANNESBURG/JULY 2006 BERLIN/NOVEMBER 2006 WWW.URBAN-AGE.NET URBAN AGE CONTACT Berlin Summit Contact T +49 (0) 30 3407 3527 Cities Programme The London School of Economics and Political Science Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE United Kingdom T +44 (0)20 7955 7706 [email protected]Alfred Herrhausen Society Deutsche Bank Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin Germany T +49 (0)30 3407 4201 [email protected]www.alfred-herrhausen-gesellschaft.de ISBN 07530 2045 9
Transcript
TOWARDS AN URBAN AGE
Urban Age is a worldwide series of conferences investigating the future of cities
URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006
the shared faith that the pioneer architecturalmodernists had when they chartered a liner tocruise the Mediterranean in agreeable com-fort, and draw up their vision of what themodern city must be, the charter of Athens.They divided it into functional zones,shaped by sunlight angles. That was a genera-tion that was freed from the luxury of self-doubt. We are not, and that is why we strugglenow when we try to find a renewed sense ofpurpose about what cities should be. We arefull of doubt, or at least we certainly shouldbe. We are the witnesses to soured urbanutopias that were invented by some of thearchitects on that liner, and propagated by apolitical system that measured success in thenumber of new buildings that it could delivereach month.
Politicians love cranes; they need solutionswithin the time frame of elections. The resultis a constant cycle of urban demolition andreconstruction that is seen as the substitutefor thinking about how to address the deeperissues. Engels and Ruskin reeled in horror atthe impact of urbanisation in 19thcenturyManchester (a fraction of the scale of that inthe 21st century Pearl River Delta). The greatGerman architect, Karl Friederich Schinkel,went there to learn the secrets of industrialbuilding: you can now see huge areas thatwere originally built up in the 1880s anddemolished in the 1930s, and built up anddemolished again twice since then.
Visions for cities tend to be the creation ofthe boasters. City builders have always had tobe pathological optimists, if not out-and-outfantasists. They belong to a tradition that con-
nects the map makers, who parcel up pack-ages of swamp land to sell to gullible pur-chasers, and the ‘show’ apartment builderswho sell off plan, to investors in Shanghaiwho are banking on a rising market makingthem a paper profit before they have even hadto make good on their deposits.
There are visions of cities as machines formaking money, if not for turning the poorinto the not so poor, which is what attracts theambitious and the desperate to them in thefirst place.
But there are other less tangible kinds ofvisions too that no city can do without forlong. In the end it is the vision of what a city is that gives it a shared sense of itself. A city is an à la carte menu, that is what makes it different from a village which offers so much
less in the way of choice. A positive vision ofurbanity has to be based on ensuring thatmore and more customers can afford to makethe choice.
Those who seek to understand the contem-porary city have a lot to learn from novelists,and film makers. Architects and city plannersare story tellers too, coming up with a narra-tive long before they ever build anything.They offer a story, or more often, a myth, ofcommunity, or of greenness: an image ofmodernity, or of tradition. It is the literaryview of the city from Dickens and Zolaonwards that allows us to understand itsnuances of light and shade. They help usunderstand the flawed but rich nature of citylife that does not survive the conventionalresponse to urban reality, which is to try tosweep the dark underbelly of the city away.To sweep away the darkness is to risk the col-lateral damage that will destroy the very quali-ties that make a city work. It is to turn a cityinto a village, which is no place for the dis-possessed and the ambitious, desperate toescape from poverty.
In London the Urban Age discussed thearea known as the King’s Cross railway lands,a gash in the urban fabric that has neverhealed since the canals and railways tore intoit at the start of the 19th century. It reflects thereality of city life in the most brutal andextreme form. Hookers and addicts share thepavements with the commuters, skirting thevast swathe of canals and sheds, trappedbetween the Euston Road, and the residentialstreets of Camden Town. It is undergoing aparoxysm of development that irresistiblyrecalls the feverish transformation of this verypiece of land portrayed by Charles Dickens inDombey and Son. Dickens captured the surre-alistic dislocation of houses left stranded byrailway embankments, and roads that lead
he city is a subject that is appar-ently about everything. It isabout climate change and racialtolerance, social justice and eco-nomic development, cultureand personal memory, nationalidentity and civil liberty. Butwithout some sort of focus, or
some framework applied to the ways in whichwe think about it, the city as a subject that is soall-embracing can end up being about every-thing and so, in the end, about nothing.
Berlin, an atypical western European city,that, unlike the other places that the UrbanAge caravan has examined in the last twoyears, is attempting to accommodate shrink-ing expectations, rather than expansion on anexplosive scale. Here our ambition is to pro-vide that framework, to move beyond the col-lection of data, and to put some of our cardson the table.
To help us we have the statistical lessonsthat we have tried to absorb over the journeycharted by the LSE and the Alfred HerrhausenSociety. We also have the impressionistic oneswe have acquired that can be as important.Personally, I will take with me the view ofJohannesburg from the 50th floor of theCarlton Centre, a perfect specimen of anSOM (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill)designed tower of the early 1970s, adjusting tothe new realities of South Africa. I willremember the non meeting of minds of RemKoolhaas and Peter Eisenman, in New York,where they demonstrated the difficulty thatarchitects can have in communicating with awider audience. I will not forget the suddensilence that spread over a terrace on the Bundin Shanghai when the news of multiple back-pack bombs being detonated on the Londonunderground filtered through from half aworld away. I will remember the splendour ofthe room in Mexico City in which the confer-ence met, built at the turn of the 20th centuryto house the boardroom of the ministry ofpublic building and works with a grandeurthat signalled the ambitions and dreams of anew republic, and now a museum piece.
It is chastening, but valuable for a critic tobe confronted with how little they reallyknow. I hadn’t, before the Urban Age confer-ence in Shanghai, understood that of its 18million or so people, fully a quarter were ille-gal migrants, or that the city had levels ofinequality of an order close to Manhattan’s.Impressive, or a depressing change for thecountry that Mao clothed in monotonous
olive. I knew that Johannesburg was a cityshaped by Apartheid, but I hadn’t understoodwhat it would mean to try not just to deal withinequalities, but to operate against a back-ground of a Soweto that was deliberately builtto exclude the possibilities of urban life. Icould not have imagined what it is like for thecity’s transport officials to work with a subur-ban rail system which saw dozens of itsemployees murdered last year – until I metone of those officials. And until I had seenwhite South African planners use the word
comrade to describe the black ANC council-lors whom they worked for in the way thattheir London equivalents might use the wordMr, I did not really appreciate the nature ofpolitics in that city. Probably I still don’t.
Before I went to Mexico City earlier thisyear, I had not grasped that it was no longerthe untameable monster that the world hasalways assumed. Nor had I considered the significance of the networks linking its street traders with the factories in China supplying them.
In Mexico, it was Benjamino Gonzales’ bril-liant presentation on the Faro communityarts project that stays in my memory mostvividly. It was flagged up as being a talk abouturban spaces. But in reality it was about some-thing more important: self-organising urban-ity. Then there is that mysterious quality ofcitiness that the Urban Age conference hasbeen in pursuit of ever since it first met inNew York two years ago.
The most salutary lesson from the privilegeof being able to plug into the networks thatshape a different metropolis every fourmonths, is the understanding that no matterhow much the world’s cities operate as part ofa single global system, acquiring the samekind of landmarks, museums, airports, free-ways, and subject to the same quack remediesof tax incentives and marketing programmes,just how different and distinct they remain.
We do not belong to a generation that has
TLISTENING TO THE CITY
A city is an à la cartemenu, that is whatmakes it differentfrom a village whichoffers so much less inthe way of choice
a worldwide series of conferences investigating the future of cities
organised by the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Alfred Herrhausen Society, the International Forum of Deutsche Bank
This publication is the seventh and final edition in the series of Urban Age newspapersdesigned to coincide with a two-year cycle of conferences in cities around the world.Organised by the London School ofEconomics and Deutsche Bank’s AlfredHerrhausen Society, the Urban Age confer-ences are an international and interdiscipli-nary investigation into the connectionsbetween urban form and urban society.Conferences have taken place in New York,Shanghai, London, Mexico City andJohannesburg, as well as the German city of Halle. This first cycle of urban research will conclude with the Urban Age Summit in Berlin on 10-11 November 2006. A booksummarising the Urban Age findings will be published by Phaidon in summer 2007.
Further information on all Urban Age activities can be found at www.urban-age.net
oes the gradual disappearance ofpublic space have an impact onour concept of the city?
Public space is a complexnotion. New York and London,in their voluntary endeavours torevitalise former derelict spaces,have progressively defined
which users they envision will use futureembellished spaces that look public but in factare subject to control; either from privatesecurity guards (ie waterfronts, commercialmalls), or from publicly hired securityemployees (semi-public parks), or by regularpolice officers. The problem does not arisefrom the transgression of laws, which wouldlead to sanctions, but from the very identity of people who are considered to fit the ‘unde-sirable’ category, and whose presence maygenerate a stop and search, or even a ban ofspatial use.
Such a process can be observed inShanghai, where obvious public spaces likethe Bund along the river or the public gar-dens, are inviting many kinds of flâneurs tostroll, among a pleasant diversity and densityof people. However, although perhaps lessapparent, control is nevertheless present,emanating from two sources: from under-cover policemen in charge of order who mixwith the crowds, and from society’s internalsocial control system; which emerges whenthose who do not ‘belong’ are spotted by othercitizens. Freedom yes, but under surveillance.
What about the two other largemegapolises of the South that are part of theUrban Age selection?
In Mexico City, more than one millionresidents each gave one peso to bring realityto one of those numerous utopian visions ofparks, meant to coalesce a great variety ofvisitors at the same time and in the samespace. The park designers aimed for a socialcohesion, transcending class divisions andthey relied on universal needs for peace,entertainment and recreation within cities.Micro control systems are however at work;guards make sure that smooth processes,organising movements, will be respected.They act invisibly, they interpret situations,they make sense of them, and they suggestalternatives to CCTVs and other high-techsurveillance methods.
The most problematic case is probablyJohannesburg, where so little public space isallocated to density and diversity, unlike Rio(Copacabana) or São Paulo (AvenidaPaulista). It is indeed strange that, despite theefforts deployed by the city council, so many
public roads should still be barred from pub-lic access and that so many private guards(four to one public policeman – the second-highest proportion in the world) should turnneighbourhoods into fortresses, without anyreal public debate on the issue. We are awarethat many changes are on their way and thatthe reformed country is only twelve years old.But, it seems that insufficient support andresources allocated to reforms slow theprocess of change.
That urban violence is used as an excuseto refuse to live together and that enclosuresreinforce segregation cannot be ignored. Suchattitudes are lethal to cities. An anti-urban
discourse linking cities, fear and violenceshould be resisted. The answer to urban fear isnot to exit the city, buy a gun and get shelter ina gated community. In Venice, Norman Fostercourageously suggested that those whochoose to get away from the rest of the worldand contribute to the sprawl phenomenonshould pay very high taxes. When the happyfew require roads and power stations in orderto live on the edge, they indeed detourresources and energies that should be allocat-ed to the improvement of collective services
and spaces for the common good. More inclu-sive cities are the solution.
Solutions are complex and must be tailor-made for each city (sometimes thenegotiations over ‘turf ’ ownership are strenu-ous and costly), but they do exist. Teams of innovative architects, planners, scholars,mayors and community representativesexpressing various residents’ aspirations havelearned how to weave back the social fabricand interplay into space and agency. It takestime, patience, imagination, skills andresources to bring failing neighbourhoodsback to recovery.
Success exists and examples that shouldbe publicly brought forward and shared –Urban Age’ s purpose – abound. Sometimeshigh-tech firms settle in an unlikely place, andsubsequently public transportation improvesand critical masses of affordable homes forthe middle classes transform the identity ofspace. Sometimes an art institution in MexicoCity, or a university and research centre pro-viding top-quality expertise, or a new Courtof Justice including social services in a poorerneighbourhood in New York, have a similareffect. Each of these ‘solutions’ reveals a mix-
ture of various imaginations, voices, expert-ise, trust and political will which link spaceand agency. Public space is in those cases(almost) synonymous with tranquillity.Invisible or more visible alchemists have actedto give each (resident, user, commuter,investor) the sense of his or her belonging in ashared urban space.
To summarise: cities have good news totell, relative to ongoing mutations and to theways they can thrive, working differently.
Sophie Body-Gendrot, Director and Professor ofPolitical Science and American Studies, Centerfor Urban Studies, Sorbonne, Paris
IS THE CONCEPT OF PUBLIC SPACE VANISHING?
DTo summarise: citieshave good news to tell, relative to ongoingmutations and to theways they can thrive,working differently
URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006
nowhere. Almost the same thing is happeningagain. The huge glass and white steel boxtacked onto the back of Victorian St PancrasStation, designed to handle the high speed raillink to Paris and Brussels is nearing comple-tion. It represents a construction project thatmatches those of the Victorians, in its scale ifnot in its confidence or architectural ambi-tion. Negotiating the area, you thread yourway through new viaducts that erupt from themud, past tower cranes, and ancient ware-houses and gasometers. The landscape is byturns pastoral, and derelict. As it is now,King’s Cross is a mud-splattered, anarchicmess that reveals the shifting tectonic plates ofurban life. The new King’s Cross will be apolite, comfortable place for commuters todrink café latte on their way from the train tothe office. But it is unlikely to be a city in thesense that Dickens or Zola would understand.
Urban space is something that Mexico Citymakes you aware of in some provocative andunexpected ways. The sheer size of the Zocalo,reminding us of the Aztecs who laid it out,and its mismatch with the colonial architec-ture that forms its rim catches you by sur-prise. It makes you think about Mexico’s orig-inal builders, and their continuing, if some-times submerged presence in the colonialperiod. When you come to think about it, theZocalo is a public space defined as much byabsence as presence. The Zocalo’s continuinguses are also political. Demonstrators form upoutside the offices of the federal districtadministration, their banners fixed, under theshadows of that enormous national flag,demanding to be heard.
You could see another kind of public spacein Mexico presented in some of the diagramsseen in our sessions on mobility and trans-port. Professor Bernardo Navarro Benitez’suncanny diagrams looked like organic crystal
forms, or art works, that seemed to be tryingto tell us something important about howspace works, how space can be brittle andfibrous, complex and multilayered. Theylooked almost like the circuit boards forMexico City, the machine code revealedbeneath the pixels on the surface. The nervoussystem underneath the skin.
It wasn’t quite the same kind of space asthat explored by Hermann Knoflacher withhis provocative pedestrian walking machine,and its wry demonstration of the destructivecapacity of the car; or the layer upon layer of bus circuits and parking lots for theNational Autonomous University. Diagramsthat tell us why a University city is not yet acity, precisely because it is too easy to map itsmovement patterns.
The diagrams are all telling us somethingimportant about the city, and how it moves.And of course public space without the possi-bility of movement in it is like a dead butterflyin a specimen case. Because movement meansaccess, which is the real issue about space. Andas the Zocalo tells us, in Mexico or London,Berlin, Shanghai, Johannesburg or New York,space is as much about the symbolic and thetheatrical as it is to do with the technical.
There are other kinds of vision that start, as
so many urban visions have done, with anattempt to deal with the pathology of the city:modernism after all was probably as muchabout notions of hygiene as anything else.
The city is a complex interaction of issuesand ambitions that are shaped by the everydaychoices of its citizens as much as by theirpolitical leaders, and their officials. The devel-opment of a city involves oil companies andcar builders, as much as the financial institu-tions that make house building possible. Itinvolves the law, and investment regimes, aswell as such apparently simple ideas as beingable to take a breath of air without worryingabout the harm it’s going to do us, or our chil-dren. A city is a vision as well as a mechanism,in the sense that Bogatá’s bus lanes representeasy movement for the masses, as opposed toa regulatory system to force through changeon private car drivers. But given the costs andobligations that come with the privileges ofurban life, a city is also a test of the limits ofthe power of persuasion, as opposed to com-pulsion. And in the end, a genuine city canonly be about the persuasion and not thecompulsion.
Deyan Sudjic, Director, Design Museum,London
Visions for cities tendto be the creation ofthe boasters. Citybuilders have alwayshad to be pathologicaloptimists, if not out-and-out fantasists
That urban violence is used as an excuse torefuse to live togetherand that enclosuresreinforce segregationcannot be ignored.Such attitudes arelethal to cities
Expanded informal economies areemerging as part of these advanced urbaneconomies, evident in all our Urban Age cities,whether in the global North or South. It is easyto think of informalisation as anomalous, asbelonging to an older order. But in my readingit is part of advanced capitalism. Informalityassumes a whole range of new meanings. Atthe most abstract level it can be seen as multi-plying the range of practices – economic,artistic, professional – possible in these cities.Complex cities allow for this multiplicationand diversifying in a way that neat suburbs donot. While at one end of the scale informalityis a form of injustice and powerlessness, at theother end it enables actors to ‘make’ neweconomies – and is a form of survival but alsoof creativity. Many immigrant entrepreneursstart informally, because it allows a moreexperimental form of business we might say.Many Silicon Valley tycoons started informal-ly in garages. But we also saw informal archi-tectural practices in all our Urban Age cities –from Mexico to Berlin.
The growing inequality and the massiveconcentrations of power now evident in maj-or complex cities form a basic context withinwhich some of these trends need to be situat-ed. Cities have long had inequality, but whatwe see today alongside older forms is a newtype of inequality. Homelessness has longbeen part of cities. But where it once concern-ed a single man – the hobo – now it is familyhomelessness, with children the largest groupof homeless in large cities. These social andspatial inequalities probably assume theirsharpest and most visible form in global cities.
There are also new technical histories inthe making. The city is one moment in oftencomplex processes that are partly electronic,such as electronic markets, or part of hiddeninfrastructures, such as fibre optic cables.Embedded software for handling mass sys-
tems, such as public transport and public sur-veillance, is an often invisible layer in a grow-ing number of cities. Such embedded softwareis guided by logics that are not necessarily partof the social repertory through which weunderstand those systems. As the use ofembedded software expands to more andmore infrastructures for daily life, we willincreasingly be interacting with the artefactsof technology. Technical artefacts becomeincreasingly actors in the networks throughwhich we move. Buildings are today densesites for these types of interactions. Theseacute concentrations of embedded softwareand of connectivity infrastructures for digi-tised space make the city less penetrable forthe ordinary citizen.
RE-INVENTING THE POLITICAL
The city is also potentially the site where allthese systems can become visible, a potentialfurther strengthened by the multiple globali-ties, from economic to cultural to subjective,that localise partly in cities. This in turn bringsup political challenges: at various points inhistory cities have functioned as spaces thatpoliticised society. This is, again, one of thoseperiods. Today’s cities are the terrain where
people from all over the world intersect inways they do not anywhere else. In these com-plex cities, diversity can be experiencedthrough the routines of daily life, workplaces,public transport and urban events such asdemonstrations or festivals. Further, insofar as powerful global actors are making increas-ing demands on urban space and thereby dis-placing less powerful users, urban spacebecomes politicised in the process of rebuild-ing itself. This is politics embedded in thephysicality of the city. The emergent globalmovement for the rights to the city is oneemblematic instance of this struggle. Inurbanising rights it makes them concrete: theright to public space, to public transport, togood neighbourhoods.
One question is whether a new type ofpolitics is being shaped through these con-flicts, a politics that might also make the vari-ety of inter-city networks into platforms forglobal governance. Most of today’s majorsocial, political and economic challenges arepresent in cities, often in both their mostacute and their most promising form: thesharpest juxtapositions of the rich and thepoor, but also struggles for housing; anti-immigrant politics, but also multiple forms ofintegration and mixtures; the most powerfuland globalised economies, but also a prolifer-ation of informal economies; the most power-ful real estate developers, but also the biggestgroup of builders in the world today – peoplemaking shanty dwellings. How can we not askwhether networks of cities can become plat-forms for new types of global governance?
Saskia Sassen, Centennial Visiting Professor,LSE and Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology,University of Chicago
The urban footprint of the global corporate economykeeps expanding; we can measure thisexpansion in kilometres and ingrowing densities
y the mid-20th century, many ofour great cities were in physicaldecay, losing population, eco-nomic activity, key roles in thenational economy, and share ofnational wealth. As we moveinto the 21st century, cities havere-emerged as strategic places
for a wide range of projects and dynamics.The Urban Age project allowed us to establishthis directly for a set of very diverse cities.
MAKING NEW ECONOMIC HISTORIES
Critical, and partly underlying all the otherdimensions, is the new economic role of citiesin an increasingly globalised world. The for-mation of inter-city geographies is contribut-ing a critical infrastructure for a new globalpolitical economy, new cultural spaces, andnew types of politics. Some of these inter-citygeographies are thick and highly visible – theflows of professionals, tourists, artists andmigrants among specific groups of cities.Others are thin and barely visible – the highlyspecialised financial trading networks thatconnect particular cities, depending on thetype of instrument involved, or the globalcommodity chains for diverse products thatrun from exporting hubs to importing hubs.
These circuits are multidirectional andcriss-cross the world, feeding into inter-citygeographies with both expected and unex-pected strategic nodes. For instance, NewYork is the leading global market to tradefinancial instruments on coffee, even thoughit does not grow a single bean. But a far lesspowerful financial centre, Buenos Aires, is theleading global market to trade financialinstruments on sunflower seeds. Cities locat-ed on global circuits, whether few or many,become part of distinct, often highly spe-cialised inter-city geographies. Thus if I wereto track the global circuits of gold as a finan-cial instrument, it is London, New York,Chicago and Zürich that dominate. But if Itrack the direct trading in the metal,Johannesburg, Mumbai, Dubai and Sydney allappear on the map. The number of cities thatget drawn into these inter-city geographies isgrowing fast. For instance, the top 100 globalservice firms together have affiliates in 315cities worldwide. Looking at globalisationthrough the lens of these specificities allowsus to recover the particular and diverse rolesof cities in the global economy.
While many of these global circuits havelong existed, what began to change in the1980s was their proliferation and theirincreasingly complex organisational andfinancial framings. It has been the new challenge of coordinating, managing, andservicing these increasingly complex, spe-cialised and vast economic circuits that hasmade cities strategic.
MAKING NEW SPATIAL HISTORIES
It is perhaps one of the great ironies of ourglobal digital age that it has produced notonly massive dispersal but also extreme con-centrations of top-level resources in a limitednumber of places. Indeed, the organisationalside of today’s global economy is located, andcontinuously reinvented, in what has becomea network of about 40 major and not so major
global cities; this network includes all theUrban Age cities. These global cities need tobe distinguished from the hundreds of citieswhich are located on often just a few globalcircuits: while these cities are articulated withthe global economy, they lack the mix ofresources to manage and service the globaloperations of firms and markets. The reasonfor this new strategic role can be captured inthe following microcosm: the more globaliseda firm’s operations and the more digitised itsproduct, the more complex its central head-quarter functions become and hence themore their execution benefits from dense,resource-rich urban environments.
As a result, the interaction of centralityand density takes on a whole new strategicmeaning in global cities. The urban footprintof the global corporate economy keepsexpanding; we can measure this expansion in kilometres and in growing densities. Thefive Urban Age cities we have worked withthus far all show expansion and multiplica-tion of central spaces along with physical den-sity. This is the urban form hosting anincreasingly complex set of activities for themanagement, servicing, designing, imple-menting and coordinating of the global oper-ations of firms and markets. Architecture,urban planning and civil engineering haveplayed a critical role in building the newexpanded urban settings for this organisa-tional side of the global economy. This isarchitecture as inhabited infrastructure.
The much talked about homogenising of the urban landscape in these citiesresponds to two different conditions. One is the consumer world, with homogenisingtropes that help in expanding and standardis-ing markets to the point where they canbecome global markets. But this is to be dis-tinguished from the homogenising involvedin the organisational side of the global econo-my – state-of-the-art office districts, airports,hotels, services, and residential complexes forthe strategic workforces.
This reshaping responds to the needsassociated with housing these neweconomies, and the cultures and politics theyentail. I would say that this homogenised
environment for the most complex and globalised functions is more akin to an infra-structure, even though not in the convention-al sense of that term. It is not simply a visualcode that aims at signalling a high stage ofdevelopment, as is so often posited in much of the commentary on the matter, and is thebelief of many developers.
We need to go beyond the visual tropes
and the homogenising effect, no matter howdistinguished the architecture. The keybecomes understanding what inhabits thishomogenised state of the art urban landscapethat recurs in city after city. We will find farmore diversity and distinct specialisationsacross these cities than the newly built urbanlandscapes suggest. The global economyrequires a standardised global infrastructure,with global cities the most complex of theseinfrastructures. But the actual economicoperations, especially their organisationalside, thrive on specialised differentiation.Thus, as the global economy expands andincludes a growing diversity of nationaleconomies, it is largely in the global cities ofeach of these that the work of capturing thespecialised advantage of a national economygets done. To do this work requires state-of-the-art office districts and all the require-ments of luxury living. In that sense then,
much of this architectural environment iscloser to inhabited infrastructure – inhabitedby specialised functions and actors.
MAKING NEW URBAN HISTORIES
These conditions themselves have produced avariety of responses, from renewed passionsfor aestheticising the city, preserving the cityand ensuring the public-space aspect of cities.The massive scale of today’s urban systemshas brought with it a revaluing of terrainvagues and of modest spaces – where the prac-tices of people can contribute to the makingof public space, beyond the monumentalisedpublic spaces of state and crown. Micro-architectural interventions and informalarchitectures can bring built complexity intostandardised spaces. This type of built com-plexity can in turn engage the temporarypublics that take shape in cities in particularspaces at specific times of the day or night.
URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006
CITIES AT THE INTERSECTION OF NEW HISTORIES
B
The formation ofinter-city geographiesis contributing a critical infrastructurefor a new global political economy, newcultural spaces, andnew types of politics
around capital intensive systems like heavyrail which may not have an extensive catch-ment area, yet require enormous fundingstreams. Transport modes used by the majority of people in these cities, mainlywalking, cycling and microbuses, receive farless attention.
Fortunately, land-use patterns in relationto transport are being looked at with increas-ing interest. In Mexico City, asentamientosirregulars [informal settlements] such asCiudad Neza have been upgraded with publicfunding, transforming the traditional squat-ter settlement into a vibrant city of 1.5 millionpeople. There is a healthy mix of housing andwork places, and a large number of businesseshave been integrated providing nearly 65% ofjobs to local residents. Aiming for more innercity housing, Mexico City has also imple-mented its bando dos policy which requireshigher residential density levels while restrict-ing new housing in the outer districts. InJohannesburg, the debate about transportand accessibility focuses increasingly on theproblems arising from the deliberately lowdensity levels of the Apartheid city; this hasled to first attempts for densification in town-ships like Soweto.
Over the last decade there have been seri-ous efforts in all six cities to bring land-useand transport strategies closer together.However despite investments and expertise,
the process of moving towards more sustain-able urban structures, where movement isbased on public transport and non-motorisedmobility, has been rather slow. If cities in thefuture will have to rely on sustainable trans-port, then we need to move rapidly towardsunderstanding the forces that promote tradi-tional car use with its vast need for space, par-ticularly through parking. The consumptionof cars is still on the national agenda for eco-nomic growth in five of the six countries towhich the Urban Age cities belong, and onlythe UK’s economy is largely independentfrom the production of automobiles. All sixcities certainly face strong pressure from indi-vidual desires for motorisation and have onlybeen successful in resisting these pressureswhen putting forward a widely accepted agen-da prioritising quality of life in cities.
We need to work out the governancestructures and technology by which publictransport can save rapidly expanding citiesfrom simply adopting Western mobilitycycles. We need to understand what forces arerequired to break the path dependencies inthe mature Urban Age cities to move towardssustainable mobility in the near future.
The professional crisis of transport plan-ning differs greatly to that of urbanism, whichwas humiliated by a complete loss of controlduring the last 30 years. The transport plan-ning profession instead struggles first of all
with the fact that its subject is more aboutpolitics than about economics, engineering orany other scientific discipline. The secondchallenge results from focusing only onorganising movement where, at least in thecase of the city, it needs to organise movementand space. Still, it has been the professionalcommunity around the world that has advo-cated the most innovative urban transportsolutions for more than 30 years before theywere finally implemented as a result of strongpolitical leadership. Bogotá’s rapid bus systemand cycle network, London’s congestioncharge and Berlin’s multi-modal transportapproach are just three examples. Ultimately,the future focus has to be the integration ofland-use and transport strategies as well asthe relationship between connecting placeswhile at the same time creating locations.Once again, this needs to be understood on apolitical level before it will begin to happen.
Hermann Knoflacher, Professor of TransportPlanning, Vienna University of Technology
Philipp Rode, Project Manager, Urban Age andAssociate, Cities Programme, LSE
o society can exist without themovement of people, goods andinformation, and it is generallyregarded as a means for evolu-tion, be it the facilitation oftrade or most importantly forhuman interaction. Moderntransport is what collapses the
distances between two points and as such, itneeds to be available to all equally. But trans-port is also deeply intrinsic and is often asmuch of an end in itself. It offers the mostdirect emotional experience of technicalprogress; it is a lifestyle marker, the physicalrepresentation of great political achievementsand the raison d’être for the world’s leadingindustrial sector. The consequences are obvi-ous: transport is one of the most contesteddevelopment areas, and while offering anendless number of solutions remainsextremely controversial.
Cities initially promised high levels ofideas and product exchange by creatinggreater proximities. In doing so, they becamea transport solution themselves, one based onthe principle of avoiding transport or at leastof reducing its necessity. Economic, geo-graphic and cultural factors drove the evolu-tion of cities over time, but it was not until thewidespread use of the private motorcar thatthe most basic concept of the city, that ofphysical proximity and coexistence, was seri-ously challenged. Suburban sprawl – drivenby the desire for more personal living spacewith direct car access, combined with elevatedmotorways, decentralised business parks,shopping malls and vast car parks – wasindeed a radical shift in spatial development.It was the overall unconvincing outcome ofthe latter model and its enormous social andenvironmental cost that has, over the last 30years, introduced the return to normativequestions about the use of urban space intime. Why cities, why proximity and what arethe right transport solutions?
This debate has made enormous progressand has resulted in extensive urban regenera-tion efforts in cities around the world. Inaddition, and differing from initial predic-tions, the latest transport revolution based oncommunication and information technologyhas turned out to be supporting the city with
its genuine character. The advantage ofreduced commuting and less money spent ontravelling is as critical in the developing worldas are the benefits associated with urban liv-ing for the more individualistic and atomisedsociety in the global North. Both require acompact city at a human scale that allows forextensive interaction, complexity and publiclife. The initial question about the right trans-port solutions bounced back as one about thecity and its form, which ultimately is the ques-tion about how we want to live together. Thisnew consensus looks at land use and rehabili-tates the concept of dense urban environ-ments with public transport as their back-bone. It acknowledges that there is a thresholdlevel of car use beyond which cities are seri-ously at risk; it puts pedestrian-friendly envi-ronments at the top of the agenda and regardswalking and cycling as serious contributionsto urban mobility.
The older, mature cities investigated bythe Urban Age programme – New York,London and Berlin – include many examplesof this paradigm shift. London is currentlyimplementing its 100 public space pro-gramme, the number of cyclists has doubledwithin the last 5 years, and the city’s conges-tion charge has reduced car use in centralLondon by 15% while subsidising the 40%increase in bus use since 2001. New York Cityhas made an enormous effort to upgrade itspublic transport system by investing morethan €32 billion ($40 billion) since 1982 andhas seen a 13% decline in car ownership levelsbetween 1990 and 2003. In Berlin, 32% of alltrips are done on foot or by bicycle, and since1990 its public transport infrastructure hasbeen upgraded to cater for a potential extra 1million inhabitants with its S-Bahn, tram andregional rail network. The city has also beenactive in promoting car sharing and multi-modal transport. Regarding these trends itneeds to be emphasised that innovation wasled by smaller cities mainly in continentalEurope. Barcelona, Copenhagen and Viennainformed public space strategies in London;Zürich and Karlsruhe were highly influentialfor the rehabilitation of tram lines as surfacepublic transport in Berlin and around theworld; while Amsterdam and Freiburg gener-ally pushed the agenda for urban cycling.
Apart from these trends, the status quo inthese three mature Urban Age cities is still oneof dominating car use at the metropolitanlevel, despite an extensive public transportsystem. The overall rising energy consump-tion for transport is best illustrated by a steepincrease of Sports Utility Vehicles even withinthe city’s boundaries.
On the other hand, developments in therapidly expanding cities investigated byUrban Age – Shanghai, Mexico City andJohannesburg – follow a distinctively differ-ent pattern. A vast majority of the populationhas long been and still is dependent on walk-ing, cycling and public transport, the lattermainly organised by the informal sector.Access to private cars is still the preserve of asmall minority. Historically these three citieshave been different in many aspects. Shanghaiinvested heavily in its cycling infrastructureuntil the mid-1980s and it was only with theopening of China’s economy that majorchanges of government policy were broughtabout. The central government in Beijingdeclaring car production as pillar industry iscritical to understanding city level transportstrategies that produce elevated highways,satellite towns and mono-functional districtswhile putting human scale transport infra-structure on the back burner. Shanghai is successful in attracting more car use whichdoubled between 1995 and 2004 leading toincreased average commuting distanceswhich also doubled. During the same period,the city’s official policy to reduce cycling ledto a drop from almost 40% to 25% of all trips.
Similar decisions were taken in Mexico City.Here, around 50,000 minibuses andmicrobuses are handling the majority of thetrips while 40% of the city’s transport budgetbetween 2000 and 2006 has been spent on itsSegundo Piso, an elevated highway builtexclusively for private cars and used by noteven 1% of residents.
Johannesburg’s public space has beentaken over by traffic, shockingly illustrated by its accident statistics of 56 fatalities per100,000 inhabitants per annum compared to 3 in London and 7 in Mexico City. The cityseems to have surrendered to the safe and private environments of shopping malls.Marginalisation and containment plannedunder Apartheid has been perpetuated in thepost-Apartheid period. The percentage ofstranded people who walk to work for morethan 30 minutes, often under dangerous cir-cumstances and unable to afford any form of public transport, has increased. 46% ofhouseholds are spending more than 10% of their income on daily commuting. Themain public transport provision, the city’smini bus taxis, receives no operating subsidywhile the provincial government is planningto invest €2.1 billion ($2.7 billion) in a rapidrail project.
Clearly, car-based mobility solutions dis-proportionately dominate transport agendasand investments in the three rapidly expand-ing cities, mocking statements, intentions andpolicy goals on sustainability, resource man-agement and social inclusion. If put forward,sustainable transport concepts are centred
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MOVING PEOPLE, MAKING CITY
If cities in the futurewill have to rely onsustainable transport,then we need to moverapidly towardsunderstanding theforces which promotetraditional car usewith its vast need forspace, particularlythrough parking
vate; out of such conditions comes the unex-pected encounter, the chance discovery, theinnovation. Her view, reflected in the bon motof William Empson, was that ‘the arts resultfrom over-crowding’.
Jacobs sought to define particular strate-gies for urban development, once a city isfreed from the constraints of either equilibri-um or integration. These include encouragingquirky, jerry-built adaptations or additions toexisting buildings; encouraging uses of publicspaces which don’t fit neatly together, such asputting an AIDS hospice square in the middleof a shopping street. In her view, big capital-ism and powerful developers tend to favourhomogeneity: determinate, predictable, andbalanced in form. The role of the radical plan-ner therefore is to champion dissonance. Inher famous declaration: ‘if density and diver-
sity give life, the life they breed is disorderly’.The open city feels like Naples, the closed cityfeels like Frankfurt.
For a long time, I dwelt in my own workhappily in Jacobs’ shadow – both her enmityto the closed system (though the formal concept is mine, not hers) and her advocacyof complexity, diversity, and dissonance.Recently, in re-reading her work, I’ve detect-ed glints of something lurking beneath thisstark contrast.
If Jane Jacobs is the urban anarchist she isoften said to be, then she is an anarchist of apeculiar sort, her spiritual ties closer toEdmund Burke than to Emma Goldmann.She believes that in an open city, as in the nat-ural world, social and visual forms mutatethrough chance variation; people can bestabsorb, participate, and adapt to change if ithappens step by lived step. This is evolution-ary urban time, the slow time needed for anurban culture to take root, then to foster, thento absorb chance and change. It is why Naples,Cairo, or New York’s Lower East Side, thoughresource-poor, still ‘work’ in the sense that
people care deeply about where they live.People live into these places, like nesting. Timebreeds that attachment to place.
In my own thinking, I’ve wondered whatkinds of visual forms might promote thisexperience of time. Can these attachments bedesigned by architects? Which designs mightabet social relationships that endure, justbecause they can evolve and mutate? Thevisual structuring of evolutionary time is asystematic property of the open city. To makethis statement more concrete, I’d like todescribe three systematic elements of an opencity: 1. passage territories; 2. incomplete form;3. development narratives.
1. Passage territories
I’d like to describe in some detail the experi-ence of passing through different territories ofthe city, both because that act of passage ishow we know the city as a whole, and alsobecause planners and architects have such dif-ficulties designing the experience of passagefrom place to place. I’ll start with walls, whichseem to be structures inhibiting passage, and
then explore some of the ways edges of urbanterritory function like walls.
a. Walls: The wall would seem an unlikelychoice; it is an urban construction which lit-erally closes in a city. Until the invention ofartillery, people sheltered behind walls whenattacked; the gates in walls also served to regu-late commerce coming into cities, often beingthe place in which taxes were collected.Massive medieval walls, such as those surviv-ing in Aix-en-Provence or in Rome, furnish aperhaps misleading general picture; ancientGreek walls were lower and thinner. But wealso mis-imagine how those medieval wallsthemselves functioned. Though they shutclosed, they also served as sites for unregulat-ed development in the city; houses were builton both sides of medieval town walls; infor-mal markets selling black-market or untaxedgoods sprung up nestled against them; thezone of the wall was where heretics, foreignexiles, and other misfits tended to gravitatetowards, again far from the controls of thecentre. They were spaces that would haveattracted the anarchic Jane Jacobs.
But they were also sites that might havesuited her organic temperament. These wallsfunctioned much like cell membranes, bothporous and resistant. That dual quality of themembrane is, I believe, an important princi-ple for visualising more modern living urbanforms. Whenever we construct a barrier, wehave to equally make the barrier porous; thedistinction between inside and outside has tobe breachable, if not ambiguous.
The usual contemporary use of plate-glass for walls doesn’t do this; true, on theground plane you see what’s inside the build-ing, but you can’t touch, smell, or hear any-thing within. The plates are usually rigidlyfixed so that there is only one, regulated,entrance within. The result is that nothingmuch develops on either side of these trans-parent walls, as in Mies van der Rohe’sSeagram Building in New York or NormanFoster’s new London City Hall: you have deadspace on both sides of the wall; where youwould expect life in the building to accumu-
late. By contrast, the 19th-century architectLouis Sullivan used much more primitiveforms of plate glass more flexibly, as invita-tions to gather, to enter a building or to dwellat its edge; his plate glass panels function asporous walls. This contrast in plate glassdesign brings out one current failure of imag-ination in using a modern material so that ithas a sociable effect.
The idea of a cellular wall, which is bothresistant and porous, can be extended fromsingle buildings to the zones in which the dif-ferent communities of a city meet.
b. Borders: Ecologists like Steven Gould drawour attention to an important distinction inthe natural world, that between boundariesand borders. The boundary is an edge wherethings end; the border is an edge where differ-ent groups interact. In natural ecologies, bor-ders are the places where organisms becomemore interactive, due to the meeting of differ-ent species or physical conditions. Forinstance, where the shoreline of a lake meetssolid land is an active zone of exchange; hereis where organisms find and feed off otherorganisms. The same is true of temperaturelayers within a lake: where layer meets layerdefines the zone of the most intense biologicalactivity. Not surprisingly, it is also at the bor-derline where the work of natural selection isthe most intense. Whereas the boundary is aguarded territory, as established by prides oflions or packs of wolves. The boundary estab-lishes closure, whereas the border functionsmore like a medieval wall. The border is a liminal space.
In the realm of human culture, territoriesconsist similarly of boundaries and borders –in cities, most simply, there is a contrastbetween gated communities and complex,open streets. But the distinction cuts deeperin urban planning.
When we imagine where the life of acommunity is to be found, we usually look forit in the centre of a community; when wewant to strengthen community life, we try tointensify life at the centre. The edge conditionis seen to be more inert, and indeed modern
The result of over-determination is whatcould be called theBrittle City. Modernurban environmentsdecay much morequickly than urbanfabric inherited fromthe past
HE CLOSED SYSTEM: THE BRITTLE CITY
The cities everyone wants to livein should be clean and safe, pos-sess efficient public services, besupported by a dynamic econo-my, provide cultural stimulation,and also do their best to heal society’s divisions of race,
class, and ethnicity. These are not the cities we live in.
Cities fail on all these counts due to gov-ernment policy, irreparable social ills, andeconomic forces beyond local control. Thecity is not its own master. Still, something hasgone wrong, radically wrong, in our concep-tion of what a city should be. We need toimagine just what a clean, safe, efficient,dynamic, stimulating, just city would looklike concretely – we need those images to con-front critically our masters with what theyshould be doing – and it is exactly this criticalimagination of the city which is weak.
This weakness is a particularly modernproblem: the art of designing cities declineddrastically in the middle of the 20th century. Insaying this, I am propounding a paradox, fortoday’s planner has an arsenal of technologi-cal tools – from lighting to bridging and tun-nelling to materials for buildings – whichurbanists even a hundred years ago could notbegin to imagine: we have more resources touse than in the past, but resources we don’tuse very creatively.
This paradox can be traced to one bigfault. That fault is over-determination, bothof the city’s visual forms and its social func-tions. The technologies, which make experi-
ment possible, have been subordinated to aregime of power that wants order and control.Urbanists, globally, anticipated the ‘controlfreakery’ of New Labour by a good half-centu-ry; in the grip of rigid images, precise delin-eations, the urban imagination lost vitality.In particular, what’s missing in modernurbanism is a sense of time – not time lookingbackwards nostalgically but forward-lookingtime, the city understood as process, itsimagery changing through use, an urbanimagination image formed by anticipation,friendly to surprise.
A portent of the freezing of the imagina-tion of cities appeared in Le Corbusier’s ‘PlanVoisin’ for Paris in the mid-1920s. The archi-tect conceived of replacing a large swath of thehistoric centre of Paris with uniform, X-shaped buildings; public life on the groundplane of the street would be eliminated; theuse of all buildings would be coordinated by asingle master-plan. Not only is Le Corbusier’sarchitecture a kind of industrial manufactureof buildings, he has in the ‘Plan Voisin’ tried todestroy just those social elements of the citywhich produce change in time, by eliminatingunregulated life on the ground plane; peoplelive and work, in isolation, higher up.
This dystopia became reality in variousways. The Plan’s building-type shaped publichousing from Chicago to Moscow, producinghousing estates which came to resemble ware-houses for the poor. Le Corbusier’s intendeddestruction of vibrant street life was realisedin suburban growth for the middle classes,with the replacement of high streets by mono-function shopping malls, by gated communi-
ties, by schools and hospitals built as isolatedcampuses. The proliferation of zoning regula-tions in the 20th century is unprecedented inthe history of urban design, and this prolifer-ation of rules and bureaucratic regulationshas disabled local innovation and growth,frozen the city in time.
The result of over-determination is whatcould be called the Brittle City. Modern urbanenvironments decay much more quickly thanurban fabric inherited from the past. As useschange, buildings are now destroyed ratherthan adapted; indeed, the over-specificationof form and function makes the modernurban environment peculiarly susceptible to decay. The average lifespan of new publichousing in Britain is now 40 years; the average lifespan of new skyscrapers in NewYork is 35 years.
It might seem that the Brittle City wouldin fact stimulate urban growth, the new nowmore rapidly sweeping away the old, but againthe facts argue against this view. In the UnitedStates, people flee decaying suburbs ratherthan re-invest in them: in Britain and on theEuropean continent, as in America,‘renewing’the inner city most often means displacing thepeople who have lived there thus far. ‘Growth’in an urban environment is a more compli-cated phenomenon than simple replacementof what existed before; growth requires a dia-logue between past and present, it is a matterof evolution rather than erasure.
This principle is as true socially as it isarchitecturally. The bonds of community cannot be conjured up in an instant, with astroke of the planner’s pen; they too requiretime to develop. Today’s ways of buildingcities – segregating functions, homogenisingpopulation, pre-empting through zoning andregulation of the meaning of place – fail toprovide communities the time and spaceneeded for growth.
The Brittle City is a symptom. It repre-sents a view of society itself as a closed system.The closed system is a conception that doggedstate socialism throughout the 20th century asmuch as it shaped bureaucratic capitalism.This view of society has two essential attrib-utes: equilibrium and integration.
The closed system ruled by equilibriumderives from a pre-Keynesian idea of howmarkets work. It supposes something like abottom line in which income and expensesbalance. In state planning, information feed-back loops and internal markets are meant toensure that programmes do not ‘over-com-mit’, do not ‘suck resources into a black hole’ –such is the language of recent reforms of thehealth service, familiar again to urban plan-ners in the ways infrastructure resources fortransport get allocated. The limits on doingany one thing really well are set by the fear ofneglecting other tasks. In a closed system, alittle bit of everything happens all at once.
Second, a closed system is meant to be anintegrated system. Ideally, every part of thesystem has a place in an overall design; theconsequence of that ideal is to reject, to eject,experiences that stick out because they con-test or are disorienting; things that ‘don’t fit’are diminished in value. The emphasis onintegration puts an obvious bar on experi-ment; as the inventor of the computer icon,John Seely Brown, once remarked: every tech-nological advance poses at the moment of itsbirth a threat of disruption and dysfunctionto a larger system. The same threateningexceptions occur in the urban environment,threats which modern city planning has triedto forestall by accumulating a mountain ofrules defining historical, architectural, eco-nomic, and social context – ‘context’ being apolite but potent word in repressing anythingthat doesn’t fit in, context ensuring that noth-ing sticks out, offends, or challenges.
Thus, the sins of equilibrium and integra-tion bedevil coherence, for planners of educa-tion as much as planners of cities, as planningsins have crossed the line between state capi-talism and state socialism. The closed systemthus betrays the 20th-century bureaucrat’shorror of disorder.
The social contrast to the closed system isnot the free market, nor is a place ruled bydevelopers the alternative to the Brittle City.That opposition is in fact not what it seems.The cunning of neo-liberalism in general, andof Thatcherism in particular, was to speak thelanguage of freedom whilst manipulatingclosed bureaucratic systems for private gainby an élite. Equally, in my experience as aplanner, those developers in London, as inNew York, who complain most loudly aboutzoning restrictions are all too adept in usingthese rules at the expense of communities.
The contrast to the closed system lies in a different kind of social system, not in bruteprivate enterprise – a social system that isopen rather than closed. The characteristics of such an open system and its realisation inan open city are what I wish to explore inthis essay.
THE OPEN SYSTEM
The idea of an open city is not my own: creditfor it belongs to the great urbanist Jane Jacobsin the course of arguing against the urbanvision of Le Corbusier. She tried to under-stand what results when places become bothdense and diverse, as in packed streets orsquares, their functions both public and pri-
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THE OPEN CITY
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The role of the radicalplanner therefore is tochampion dissonance
planning practices, such as sealing the edgesof communities with highways, create rigidboundaries, lacking any porosity. But neglectof the edge condition – boundary thinking, ifyou like – means that exchange between dif-ferent racial, ethnic, or class communities isdiminished. By privileging the centre we canthus weaken the complex interactions neces-sary to join up the different human groups thecity contains.
The porous wall and the edge as bordercreate essential physical elements for an opensystem in cities. Both porous walls and bor-ders create liminal space; that is, space at thelimits of control, limits which permit theappearance of things, acts, and personsunforeseen, yet focused and sited. The biolog-ical psychologist Lionel Festinger once char-acterised such liminal spaces as defining theimportance of ‘peripheral vision’; sociologi-cally and urbanistically, these sites operatedifferently from those places which concen-trate differences in a centre; on the horizon, atthe periphery, at the border, differences standout since one is aware one is crossing out ofone territory into another.
2. Incomplete Form
This discussion of walls and borders leads log-ically to a second systematic characteristic ofthe open city: incomplete form. Incomplete-ness may seem the enemy of structure, butthis is not the case. The designer needs to cre-ate physical forms of a particular sort, ‘incom-plete’ in a special way.
When we design a street, for instance, sothat buildings are set back from a street wall,the space left open in front is not truly publicspace; instead the building has been with-drawn from the street. We know the practicalconsequences; people walking on a streettend to avoid these recessed spaces. It’s better planning if the building is brought forward,into the context of other buildings; thoughthe building will become part of the urbanfabric, some of its volumetric elements willnow be incompletely disclosed. There isincompleteness in the perception of what the object is.
Incompleteness of form extends to the very context of buildings themselves. In clas-sical Rome, Hadrian’s Pantheon co-existedwith the less distinguished buildings that
surrounded it in the urban fabric, thoughHadrian’s architects conceived the Pantheonas a self-referential object. We find the sameco-existence in many other architecturalmonuments: St Paul’s in London, RockefellerCenter in New York, the Maison Arabe inParis – all great works of architecture whichstimulate building around themselves. It’s thefact of that stimulation, rather than the factthat the buildings are of lesser quality, whichcounts in urban terms: the existence of onebuilding sited in such a way that it encouragesthe growth of other buildings around it.And now the buildings acquire their specifi-cally urban value by their relationship to eachother; they become in time incomplete formsif considered alone, by themselves.
Incomplete form is most of all a kind ofcreative credo. In the plastic arts it is conveyedin sculpture purposely left unfinished; inpoetry it is conveyed in, to use WallaceSteven’s phrase, the ‘engineering of the frag-ment’. The architect Peter Eisenman hassought to evoke something of the same credo in the term ‘light architecture’, meaningan architecture planned so that it can beadded to, or more importantly, revised inter-nally in the course of time, as the needs ofhabitation change.
This credo opposes the simple idea ofreplacement of form which characterises theBrittle City, but it is a demanding opposition.
When we try to convert office blocks to resi-dential use, for instance.
3. Narratives of Development
Our work as urbanists aims first of all toshape the narratives of urban development.By that, we mean that we focus on the stagesin which a particular project unfolds.Specifically, we try to understand what ele-ments should happen first, what then are theconsequences of this initial move. Rather thana lock-step march towards achieving a singleend, we look at the different and conflictingpossibilities which each stage of the designprocess should open up; keeping these possi-bilities intact, leaving conflict elements inplay, opens up the design system.
We claim no originality for this approach.If a novelist were to announce at the begin-ning of a story, here’s what will happen, whatthe characters will become, and what the storymeans, we would immediately close the book.All good narrative has the property of explor-ing the unforeseen, of discovery; the novelist’sart is to shape the process of that exploration.The urban designer’s art is akin.
In sum, we can define an open system asone in which growth admits conflict and dis-sonance. This definition is at the heart ofDarwin’s understanding of evolution; ratherthan the survival of the fittest (or the mostbeautiful), he emphasised the process ofgrowth as a continual struggle between equi-librium and disequilibrium; an environmentrigid in form, static in programme, is doomedin time; bio-diversity instead gives the naturalworld the resources to provision change.
That ecological vision makes equal sense ofhuman settlements, but it is not the visionthat guided 20th-century state planning.Neither state capitalism nor state socialismembraced growth in the sense Darwin under-stood it in the natural world – in environ-ments which permitted interaction amongorganisms with different functions, endowedwith different powers.
4. Democratic Space
When the city operates as an open system –incorporating principles of porosity of terri-tory, narrative indeterminacy and incompleteform – it becomes democratic not in a legalsense, but as physical experience.
In the past, thinking about democracyfocused on issues of formal governance, todayit focuses on citizenship and issues of partici-pation. Participation is an issue that haseverything to do with the physical city and its design. For example, in the ancient polis,the Athenians put the semi-circular theatre to political use; this architectural form pro-vided good acoustics and a clear view ofspeakers in debates; moreover, it made theperception of other people’s responses duringdebates possible.
In modern times, we have no similar modelof democratic space – certainly no clear imagination of an urban democratic space.John Locke defined democracy in terms ofa body of laws which could be practiced any-where. Democracy in the eyes of ThomasJefferson was inimical to life in cities; hethought the spaces it required could be nolarger than a village. His view has persisted.Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, cham-pions of democratic practices have identifiedthese with small, local communities, face-to-face relationships.
Today’s city is big, filled with migrants andethnic diversities, in which people belong tomany different kinds of community at thesame time – through their work, families,consumption habits and leisure pursuits. Forcities like London and New York becomingglobal in scale, the problem of citizen partici-pation is how people can feel connected toothers, when, necessarily, they cannot knowthem. Democratic space means creating aforum for these strangers to interact.
In London, a good example of how this can occur is the creation of a corridor connec-tion between St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tate Modern Gallery, spanned by the newMillennium Bridge. Though highly defined,the corridor is not a closed form; along boththe south and north bank of the Thames it isgenerating regeneration of lateral buildingsunrelated to its own purposes and design.And almost immediately upon opening,this corridor has stimulated informal mixingsand connections among people walking thespan within its confines, and has prompted an ease among strangers, which is the founda-tion for a truly modern sense of ‘us’. This isdemocratic space.
The problem cities face today is how to cre-ate, in less ceremonial spaces, some of thesame sense of relatedness among strangers. Itis a problem in the design of public spaces inhospitals, in the making of urban schools, inbig office complexes, in the renewal of highstreets, and most particularly in the placeswhere the work of government gets done.How can such places be opened up? How canthe divide between inside and outside bebridged? How can design generate newgrowth? How can visual form invite engage-ment and identification? These are the press-ing questions which urban design mustaddress in the Urban Age.
Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology, LondonSchool of Economics and MassachusettsInstitute of Technology
URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006
here are four key topics thatUrban Age has raised about citygovernance in New York,London, Shanghai, Mexico City,Johannesburg, and Berlin: thefragmentation of the metropoli-tan areas in which the cities arelocated; the organisation of the
cities themselves as vehicles for the provisionof governmental services; the impact of theconcept of being a ‘global city’ on city deci-sion-making; and the role of privatisation incity planning and service delivery.
None of these cities is large enough toencompass its entire region, and none is everlikely to do so. But that doesn’t mean that theregion is already the ‘real’ city. Since noregional political organisation exists that canreact to or help direct public or private deci-sions, the fragmented municipal governments– along with the national and (for some cities)state or provincial governments – make thenecessary policy decisions. The questions arewhether and how to change this.
The cities themselves can be seen not justas too small to be effective but also too large.Most, but not all, of them subdivide the citygovernment to deal with local matters. But theorganisation of these boroughs, districts, andsub-regions differs radically, and the questionis how best to set them up. This issue and theneed for regional thinking are not unrelatedtopics. The empowerment of a region withmillions (in Shanghai tens of millions) ofpeople would not allow for meaningful dem-ocratic participation by local citizens. Thecurrent boundaries of the principal cities arethemselves inadequate to this task. Sub-citygovernments, by contrast, can enable citizens’participation in the daily governmental deci-
sion-making that affects their lives.How does one understand the impact of
their global city status on the power of thesecities? More precisely, what is the role of thecity government in producing, or at least fur-thering, the process of becoming a global city?There is little doubt that government officialsin all of the cities now seek to promote theirglobal city status. But none of them can easilycontrol such a development, let alone rethinkor redirect city policy away from such a goal.Yet many city residents have no connection tothe global business network or even to theneighbourhoods where it is located. And tra-ditional city services (education, sanitation,housing, policing) have to compete forresources against those seeking to support theglobal city policy from a limited city budget.Should the national (or state) governmentsdelegate greater power to these cities to revisetheir current global city focus?
The city efforts to promote being a globalcity are but one example of the trend towardsprivatisation in these cities. Perhaps the mostsignificant illustration of this trend is the cur-rent emphasis on ‘governance’, rather thangovernment, as the vehicle for public policydecision-making. This emphasis and the
focus on being a global city reinforce eachother. Governance imagines ‘stakeholders’being ‘at the table’, working with city officialsand others to formulate policy through con-sensus. It’s unimaginable that representativesof global business enterprises will be excludedfrom such a meeting. It’s quite imaginable,on the other hand, that there will no one there from the floating population, the infor-mal economy, or representing the poor new-comers who have recently immigrated fromanother country. Given the embrace by city officials of a globally oriented policy,the invited stakeholders can easily think that the overall direction of city policy isuncontroversial – indeed, is a worldwide phenomenon that no one in the room couldconceivably resist.
The issues of privatisation and of the fos-tering of the global city are intimately con-nected with the first two topics listed above:
regional planning and sub-city democracy.The latter two topics focus on the nature andpower of government institutions, not on pri-vatisation or public-private structures of gov-ernance. Making government work better,and making it more responsive to its citizens,strengthens the role of government as it seeksto develop a ‘partnership’ with private andnon-profit institutions. Creating regional andsub-city structures is one way to do so. Achange in the current method of governingcities can thus have an impact, not only ongovernment but also on governance – on therole of democracy in the world’s major cities.If public-private partnerships are the wave ofthe future – at least, the wave of the near-termfuture – it is important to re-invigorate the‘public’ half of the arrangement.
Doing this in the six very different con-texts we have examined would be carried outby six different policies. Some cities encom-pass a sensible subdivision of their region(London, Shanghai) and some don’t (NewYork, Mexico City, Berlin). Some are con-trolled directly by the national government(Mexico City), some by state government(New York), and some are simultaneouslycities and states (Berlin, Shanghai). Somehave subdivisions that may be too powerful(London), some that may be too weak(Mexico City, Berlin), and some don’t haveeffective subdivisions at all (New York). Somehave vigorous democracies and one(Shanghai) does not have an elected govern-ment. It’s possible to outline a subdivisionand regional structure – and a conception ofcity power – in general terms. But their appli-cation in each of these contexts will differenormously. The same can be said about gov-ernance and the focus on being a global city:New York and London, on the one hand, andMexico City and Johannesburg on the other,are not similarly situated on either score. AndBerlin and Shanghai are not comparable toany of the other four – or to each other.
Gerald Frug, Louis D Brandeis Professor of Law,Harvard University
GOVERNANCE AND LEGALSTRUCTURES
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The cities themselvescan be seen not just astoo small to be effec-tive but also too large
Making governmentwork better, and making it moreresponsive to its citizens, strengthensthe role of governmentas it seeks to developa ‘partnership’ with private and non-profit institutions
URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006
When the city operatesas an open system –incorporating princi-ples of porosity of territory, narrativeindeterminacy andincomplete form – itbecomes democraticnot in a legal sense,but as physical experience
public investment in facilities and openspaces, could end up with environments thatlack the vibrancy and urbanity of the city’sdiverse neighbourhoods.
Leaving New York in a snowstorm after afour-hour taxi ride to JFK airport and takingthe 373 km/h, fifteen-minute MagneticLevitation (Maglev) train journey fromShanghai airport to the ‘centre’ is bracing atmany levels. New York feels delicate and evenfragile in contrast to the heroic scale and paceof change in China’s febrile mercantile city –where over 5,000 towers with more than 8storeys high have been built within 25 years.The raised Maglev monorail flies over a land-scape of serial duplications of cookie-cuttergated communities – regimented apartmentblocks neatly aligned at equal distances – withvast billboards advertising the very same realestate opportunities, and isolated reflectingglass skyscrapers that constitute Shanghai’surban experiment-in-the-making in a city ofover eighteen million people. The driversbehind this hyper-scale residential develop-ment are not only the high levels of in-migra-tion typical of so many cities of the globalSouth, but also the overpowering demand bythe city’s residents, especially its emergingprofessional class, for more space and facili-ties inside their homes. Only fifteen years ago,the average space available to a single personin Shanghai was six square metres, roughlythe size of small car. Today, that size has atleast doubled, fuelling the housing boom thatmarks the skyline, and, more significantly forits negative impact on the public realm, theground level in every corner of the city. Thedecision to accommodate growth by buildinghigh, with single point blocks surrounded bycar ramps and empty open space, is damagingthe subtle urban grain of a city of immensecharacter and dynamic street life – so visiblythreatened by the design and typology of the
vast majority of new developments.Shanghai’s city planners are aware that in
the pursuit of economic progress, ‘mistakes’are being made that at some point in time willneed to be ‘corrected’. Forced relocation ofinner city dwellers (to remote highriseestates), the banning of bicycles and motor-cycles on selected streets (because they causecongestion), the construction of more elevat-ed motorways (to supposedly relieve conges-tion), and the cynical appropriation of primesites by corporate behemoths (especiallyalong the Hung Po River) are indicators of anunsustainable development pattern balancedby significant public investment in the under-ground system with the addition of 218 kilo-metres (over half of New York City’s entirenetwork) in the next years. The much cele-brated policy of eleven new satellite towns onthe fringes of Shanghai’s vast metropolitanarea, each themed according to nationalflavours – the ‘German’ Town, the ‘Italian’Town, the ‘Scandinavian’ Town, and so on –has been quietly abandoned in favour of amore pragmatic response to the needs of arampant real estate sector – one of the manyambiguities of this independent Socialist citywhich has recently witnessed the effect ofBeijing-directed Communist Party purgesamong its ruling élites.
London is also juggling with the interplayof private interests and public intervention, asit once again – like New York – faces a periodof intense growth after decades of decline.While a mere 750,000 people will be added toLondon’s current total of 7.3 million by 2015– a modest figure in comparison to thegrowth rates of Shanghai or Mexico City –most new Londoners will be from outside theUK and many from the enlarged EuropeanUnion attracted by 400,000 new jobs in thecity’s strong service and business sectors. Thecity’s spatial configuration – a dispersed,
multi-centred, green organic urban structure,unevenly distributed on both sides of thewinding River Thames, which flows from theaffluent west to the poorer east – has in manyways determined the shape of its future devel-opment. One of the first decisions taken bythe new Mayor of London in 2001 (theMayoral Office, itself a new institution in thehistory of governance of this 2,000-year-oldcity) was to accommodate all growth withinthe city’s existing boundary – the so-calledGreen Belt. The combination of a demo-graphic and economic growth, a strong prop-erty market and the availability of brownfieldsites – ex-industrial areas, old railway goodsyards, redundant gas and electricity depots –has kick-started an unprecedented process ofurban retro-fitting that is transforming theimage as well as the reality of living and work-ing in London. Clusters of highrise buildingsare springing up around existing and newbusiness hubs, while the townscape of theThames is filling up with a new generation of office and residential structures that addlittle to the urban quality or grain of the city,reemphasising the lasting value of London’s
traditional stock of terraced housing, which,like Berlin’s perimeter housing or New York’smansion block, has demonstrated enormouscapacity for change and adaptation as the cityundergoes cycles of economic, social and cul-tural change. London still has one of the old-est and most expensive underground systemsin the world, which is about to undergo amassive facelift through a controversial pub-lic-private finance initiative that will affecttravel in London for the next decades. To pro-tect Londoners from spiralling prices –according to UBS, London in 2006 is theworld’s most expensive city – there is arequirement that 50% of any new housingproject must consist of affordable housing,not only for families on ‘waiting lists’ but forkey-workers like firemen, nurses and police-men who are otherwise being progressivelypriced out of the market. The reality in manyof London’s inner city areas is still bleak,where over half of all children live in poverty(52%), and across the city 85,000 children livein temporary housing, many in 150,000 offi-cially ‘overcrowded’ households. The newgeneration of housing typologies currentlybeing designed for London’s new communi-ties – with a large concentration in theThames Gateway in the ex-Docklands area –has the potential for relieving pressure onhousing demand, but risks polarising the rela-tively diffuse distribution of wealth inLondon, that determines its diverse character.
Two years of urban travel and investigationhave – as Saskia Sassen has put it – turned agroup of urban ‘nomads’ into an urban ‘tribe’.Together we have felt and observed howunderneath the skin of at least these six worldcities lie deep connections between socialcohesion and built form, between sustainabil-ity and density, between public transport andsocial justice, between public space and toler-ance, and between good governance and goodcities that matter to the way urban citizens live
their lives. Perhaps more so than ever before,the shape of cities, how much land they occu-py, how much energy they consume, howtheir transport infrastructure is organisedand where people are housed – in remote,segregated environments behind walls or inintegrated neighbourhoods close to jobs,facilities and transport – affects the environ-mental, economic and social sustainability of global society.
Ricky Burdett, Director, Urban Age, LSE
FEELING THE URBAN AGEwo years. Six cities. New York,Shanghai, London, Mexico City,Johannesburg and Berlin.Together they offer a cross-sec-tion of our Urban Age in thevery year that more than half ofthe world’s population hasmoved to urban areas. In one
generation’s time, by 2050, three quarters ofthe planet’s 8 billion people will be urban,while only a century ago 90% of humanitywas living in villages and fields. Today, onemillion people a week move in the oppositedirection – from the fields to the city. Behindthe dramatic statistics lie very different viscer-al realities that link urban form to urban soci-ety, shaped by the homogenising impact ofglobal flows of capital, people and energy.And each city form – compact, high-rise, low-rise, hyper-dense, sprawling, dispersed, poly-centric, mono-centric, organic, geometric,informal or unplanned – brings with it itsown set of social, economic and environmen-tal consequences.
Of the six cities visited, Mexico City epito-mises the tensions between spatial and socialorder. Its endless low-rise spread, with 60% ofits 20 million inhabitants living in illegal andinformal housing, conceals a fast developinglandscape of difference exacerbated by thedominance of the car in a city where petrol ischeaper than mineral water. Investment intotwo-tier motorways, rather than into the type of sustainable public transport that has so successfully transformed Bogotá orCuritiba, are pulling the city even further
apart, lengthening commuting times for itsworkers and pushing the poor to the farfringes of this seemingly limitless city. Herethe rich seek protection in golf-course resi-dential typologies in armed and gated com-munities, or the emerging vertical ghettoes ofSanta Fe with their shimmering high-risesoverlooking the organic but well-establishedshanty towns, where the vibrant informal sec-tor constitutes 60% of the city’s economy.Despite the high quality of the city’s early 20th-century well-planned, compact neighbour-hoods of Condesa and Roma, architects andplanners are struggling to convince their civicleaders that intensification of the city’s centraldistricts is the solution to its massive infra-structure deficiencies – poor public transport,lack of water, crumbling terrain and lack ofopen space – while the absence of any form ofgrowth boundary or development controloutside the city’s legal boundaries makes anyattempt at city planning meaningless.Yet,architecture and urban design are still manag-ing to play a significant social role. Even thecontroversial private sector led regenerationof the recently abandoned Centro Historico,with street improvements, pedestrianisationand city centre housing, reflects the impactthe built environment can have on the imageand identity of a city struggling to establish itscredentials as a democratic and economicallythriving city, in a period of intense politicaland economic change. Having perhapsreached a natural limit to its horizontalexpansion, Mexico City needs to untangle itsmessy governance structures and recognise
that parallel policies of region-wide growthcontainment coupled with a re-densificationof its more central neighbourhoods andextensive rail-based public transport are theonly way forward in responding to the city’sseemingly intractable spatial problems.
The civic leaders of Johannesburg face sim-ilar but more extreme challenges in tacklingthe radical demise of its Downtown. Home tothe city’s major financial institutions up to theend of Apartheid in 1994, the central, grittydistrict of Hillbrow has become a no-go areato black and white residents alike in the spaceof a few years. At night the Downtown area iseerie, with flickering lights of makeshiftkitchens in multi-storey apartments indicat-ing the presence of a new, disenfranchisedurban subclass. The effect of this transforma-tion has been profoundly spatial. A large per-centage of the city’s business institutions havemoved out – recently completed hotels andoffice blocks remain empty or boarded up inthe centre – to the anodyne suburban centresof Sandton and Rosebank, surrounded by afast expanding sea of walled shopping centresand gated residential communities – inhabit-ed by white families and the new emergingclass of ‘economically empowered’ blacks.Soweto and Alexandra, the formerly segregat-ed black townships with single-storey shacksor two-storey homes laid out on a regulargrid, remain physically, if not politically, seg-regated, with little or no public transportexcept for the unreliable and expensive com-munal taxi service which constitutes the onlylifeline to jobs. In a region that will becomeone of the most populous in Africa – thetwelfth largest in the world by 2050 despitethe effects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and an average life expectancy of 52 – and has set itself the target of becoming a ‘global city region’, Johannesburg’s 3 million plus
population is growing at a significant pace,creating a physical landscape that celebratesdifference over inclusion – behind gates, cam-eras and barbed wire – where public spacefails to perform its democratic potential as aplace of interaction and tolerance, and wherea non-existent public transport systemreduces the possibility of economic progress.As a new generation of civic leaders begin totackle these complex urban questions, onlytwelve years after the birth of a new SouthAfrica, Johannesburg is in a position to redi-rect its considerable economic power towardsthe construction of a more compact and inte-grated environment, through policies andactions that prioritise public transport andinvestment in the centre, retro-fit its disen-franchised communities with social spacesand facilities and contain the proliferation ofout-of-town shopping malls and gated com-munities, preparing the ground for a newphase of development that will inevitably fol-low as the region continues to expand.
Like all the other cities of the Urban Age,with the exception of Berlin, New York is alsogrowing, once again, having experienced andrecovered from a period of relative conflict,crime and economic decline. Today the dens-est city in the USA is building on its ‘meltingpot’ status as the only American ‘majority-minority’ city, where over half of the 8 millionpeople living in the city’s five boroughs are ofnon-white, non-Hispanic origin. Its compacturban core, with residential blocks arrangedalong a tight and regular urban grid andactive street frontages lined by shops, has
demonstrated resilience, accommodatingwaves of colonisation by different ethnicgroups, artists and cultural entrepreneurs,and varying forms of economic activity –from garment sweatshops to corporate head-quarters – underscoring the importance ofbuilt form in sustaining cycles of urbanchange. Despite the growth in business andservices, New York’s less affluent residents stillsuffer from an acute shortage of affordablehousing, high levels of crime and poor innercity schools in one of the world’s richest cities,where the average GDP per person is $40,000.The sheer density of the city and its physicaldistribution between the Hudson and Eastrivers supports what is one of the most effi-cient public transit systems in the world, usedby over half the population to go to work (inLos Angeles it is only 20%). Despite hugeinvestment in its transport system over thelast decades – over $40 billion – the ‘city’ ofNew York suffers from a flawed system of gov-ernance where the budget of the Mass TransitAuthority is determined hundreds of milesaway in the state capital of Albany – ratherthan by the Mayor of New York – resulting inpoor strategic coordination, best illustratedperhaps by the ongoing Ground Zero débâcle.Together with a string of new housing projects on the edges of Manhattan,Brooklyn, Queen’s and the Bronx, a series oflinear parks and open spaces are being devel-oped on derelict industrial sites that have thepotential of creating a ‘Blue Belt’ aroundManhattan, providing an urban lung for itshigh density residents. While this large scale,private sector ‘urban retro-fitting’ initiativeresponds to overheated market demands, itrisks fuelling an inevitable process of gentrifi-cation of the next generation of ‘target areas’which, without the appropriate policies thatdetermine social mix of people and uses, or
URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006
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London is also jugglingwith the interplay ofprivate interests andpublic intervention
At night the Downtownarea is eerie, withflickering lights ofmakeshift kitchens in multi-storey apart-ments indicating thepresence of a new,disenfranchised urban subclass
URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006
In one generation’stime, by 2050, threequarters of the planet’s 8 billion people will be urban,while only a centuryago 90% of humanitywas living in villagesand fields
tepping out from underneaththe glass arches of Berlin’sbrand new main railway sta-tion, the Hauptbahnhof, one isgreeted by a plethora ofgrandiose architectural gesturesset against the backdrop of avast expanse of undeveloped
ground. One’s gaze may come to rest on theFederal Chancellery, designed by AxelSchultes, or on the ‘Band des Bundes’, the‘Federal Belt’ of newly constructed govern-ment buildings; one may take in NormanFoster’s Reichstag cupola or the completelyredeveloped Potsdamer Platz and recall that, amere fifteen years ago, none of these struc-tures existed. What is even more striking fromthis vantage point is that the city, as people’sliving space, does not seem to intersect withthe Berlin that is the new representative centreof Germany. City dwellers and citizens evi-dently inhabit two decidedly distinct spheres.Unlike many other European cities, Berlin hasno clearly defined city centre complete withmarket square, city hall and cathedral. Suchcentral space simply does not exist here. Morethan ever, Berlin is a conglomeration of paral-lel worlds, a hotchpotch of stages on whichlong-established residents, newcomers andtourists make their respective entrances.
The Berlin Wall saved the Western part ofthe city from the fate that, after the War, hadtypically befallen so many other West Germancities with their emptying town centres andfraying edges, their populations slowlyspilling over into the surrounding country-side.Yet there was a price to pay for this inBerlin, namely the destruction of a coherenturban structure. The bombings of World WarII and the subsequent partition had carved upBerlin’s infrastructure, its canalisation, its net-work of roads and its railway system.Vastareas of derelict land soon became a hallmarkof this fragmented city.
When the Berlin Wall fell and Berlinbecame, albeit by a narrow parliamentarymajority, the capital of the newly unifiedGermany, expectations ran high and grandvisions abounded. Surely, the city would soonbe home to six million people, and all mannerof fanciful plans were drawn up for this newmetropolis: Berlin was to become the power-house of the new Republic, the focal point foran entire ‘Generation Berlin’, the ‘hub’ thatwould connect East and West, a veritable ‘lab-oratory of unification’. Such promises weredirectly rooted in the rhetoric and practices ofthe Cold War, when, thanks to huge subsidiesprovided by the two respective German states,West Berlin had been established as a‘Window on Freedom’, while East Berlin stoodproud as the ‘capital of the first Workers andPeasants’ State on German soil’. On either sideof the Wall, Berliners themselves tended toview such labels – which bore precious littlerelation to the realities of their everyday lives– with a healthy amount of scepticism. Whileothers were certainly welcome to entertainillusions of grandeur, Berliners’ first loyaltieslay with their neighbourhoods and their lov-ingly tended urban allotments.
Since the early 1990s, Berlin has, above all,been a huge building site, and architectureoften had to grapple with paradoxical expec-tations: on the one hand, the ‘PlanwerkInnenstadt’, a decidedly anti-modern re-urbanisation and city-centre revitalisationdirective, decreed that the ‘historical city’should be recovered; on the other hand,politicians and residents alike expected the
architectural fraternity to create a metropolisof the future. As a result, a lot of sound yetmiddling designs, but few masterpieces, wererealised. Bold and innovative architecturalstatements are indeed very few and farbetween in this city. Today’s general sense ofdisappointment with this state of affairs hasless to do with the buildings themselves thanwith the hopes and expectations of the 1990s.People had once more been prepared to puttheir faith in the redemptive power of goodarchitecture, only to discover yet again thatredemption is the one thing architecture can-not offer. Most importantly, however, the newgovernment buildings or the redevelopedPotsdamer Platz failed to project an imagethat Berliners could recognise. The cityremained as fragmented as ever.
In the midst of this unparalleled buildingactivity, and while ever more grand expecta-tions were projected onto Berlin, the city’seconomy collapsed: the Eastern part of thecity as well as its Brandenburg hinterlandwere labouring under the consequences ofdeindustrialisation, while the Western part of the city grappled with the effects of the end of subsidisation. Since 1994, populationfigures have been steadily declining, andtoday, an entire suburban belt is economicallydependent on Berlin. Meanwhile, in the cityitself, more than 100,000 apartments standempty. For years, both commercial and resi-dential properties have been in plentiful sup-ply and remarkably cheap to get hold of.Compared to Paris, Warsaw or London, thisseems an anomaly.
Maladministration and wastefulness haveleft the city1 crippled with debt and effectivelybankrupt since 2002. The state of Berlin haswithdrawn from all major building projects,which are now exclusively in Federal hands.The attempts at regenerating the city’s urbaninfrastructure have been largely successfuland, for the most part, the effects of war andpartition have been overcome, but there is apainful lack of resources when it comes tomaintaining the city’s libraries, schools, the-atres and universities. Berlin is a poor, eco-nomically weak city that is terrifically cheap to live in.
Contrary to initial expectations, no newurban élite has emerged post unification. Abourgeoisie, in whatever shape or form, thatwould set the tone, function as a socialbarometer, speak out on behalf of the widerpublic and take the lead on issues of commonconcern, simply does not exist in Berlin.Berlin is a city of ordinary people, students,newcomers fleeing the provincial backwatersof their childhoods, and a fast living and mer-curial bohemian crowd made up of artists,intellectuals, journalists, freelancers and plaindrifters. This latter set shapes the mood andlifestyle that dominates Berlin’s inner city dis-tricts. Most of these people lead rather precar-ious and uncertain lives, but they have cer-tainly made Berlin the only German city inwhich a carefully chosen witticism, a surpris-ing gesture or an ingenious performancecount for more than status and income.Indeed, money plays an astonishingly minorrole in the social life of the city. And Berlinerslike to take things slowly – a fact that surpriseseven Swiss visitors to the city.
This bohemian scene has found a perfectform of expression in the ‘intermediate utili-sation’ of disused buildings. There are manysuch empty structures all over Berlin, andsquatters are swift to move in and put them to creative use – dissolving traditional bound-
aries between art and entertainment, aestheticambition and nightlife fun. The first suchproject was the ‘Tacheles’ on OranienburgerStraße, and eventually even the ‘Palace of theRepublic’, the former cultural-centre-cum-seat of the East German parliament, (now inthe process of being demolished) was turnedinto a temporary arts venue. Three old arm-chairs and a hastily cobbled together installa-tion usually suffice to transform the fleetingmoment into a memorable one. This cultureof the transitory, a legacy of our love affairwith everything crumbling, seems uniquelysuited to the character of the city, and Berlinowes much of its attractiveness for tourists toprecisely this idiosyncrasy. It has put Berlinfirmly on the map in the European imagina-tion and proves that, here at least, everythingis possible and anything goes, no matter howlimited your resources. A spirit of freedom isindeed key to people’s life in this city.
Berlin’s economic plight, its poverty, itslack of an effective élite, its fragmentation andabundance of disused spaces, the weakness ofits administration and the continuing East-West divide – all these are the very conditionsof Berlin’s intellectual as well as real life char-acter. Three factors will determine the city’sfate over the coming years: immigration fromEastern Europe, a brain drain among theyoung, and the continuing lack of a city centrein the good old European sense of the word.
For most of its history, Berlin has been arather dismal one horse town. It became thecapital of Germany because it had been thecapital of Prussia. Since the dissolution ofPrussia, it has become apparent that the city isbarely able to survive by its own efforts, sur-rounded as it is by an impoverished regionthat is gradually being abandoned by itsinhabitants. The political task of counteringthis state of affairs with strong and effectiveinstitutions is currently tackled only hesitant-ly and without much energy or conviction.
What Berlin teaches architects and urbanplanners is, above all, humility. The buildingand planning frenzy of the 1990s showed thatarchitecture cannot be expected to counteractthe provisional and temporary nature of thiscity, nor relieve its social frailty. What it cando, however, is continue to create stages andproject images. Good metropolitan architec-ture has much in common with good stagedesign – a fact more apparent in Berlin thananywhere else in the world.
Jens Bisky, journalist, Süddeutsche Zeitung
Translated from German by Alexa Alfer
1 Like, for example, Bavaria or Hesse, Berlin is a federalstate in its own right.
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a worldwide series of conferences investigating the future of cities
organised by the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Alfred Herrhausen Society, the International Forum of Deutsche Bank
BERLIN: A PROFILE
ermany is currently rediscov-ering the city. The themes ofcrises and decay, which havelong dominated discussions onthe city, are being supersededby a new passion for the city.For some decades, Germancities have been losing popula-
tion and jobs. This problem affected cities inEast Germany the hardest after unification, asthe loss of jobs, the decline in population andthe moving away of young people with quali-fications meant that they were faced with dra-matic levels of negative growth. However,from the beginning of the 21st century, therehave been clear signs pointing to a change inurban development trends.
Some profound economic changesoccurred in cities, further accelerated by theenormous effects of globalisation and digiti-sation. The change from an industrial to aservice-led economy, based on science andculture, particularly in the large West Germanurban regions of Munich, Frankfurt, Cologneand Hamburg, meant the development of anew urban dynamic. We can now see a re-urbanisation in terms of employment as wellas population, and even in East German citiessuch as Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin the popu-lation is once more increasing.
The urban system in Germany, as in manyother countries, shows that globalisation anddigitisation do not lead to a disintegration of the city, as predicted by many experts, butto a re-evaluation of the city and the develop-ment of a new form of urban centrality,which, in Germany, takes the form of aprocess of urbanisation.
While in most other countries, dominantglobal cities have emerged, Germany hasnone, but instead has a multi-polar urban
system. As presented very convincingly bySaskia Sassen in various publications, the newtype of global city takes on a strategic role.The control, integration and managementfunctions of the commodity chains that arespread throughout the world are concentrat-ed in the global cities. At the same time, theglobal city is a central location for productionand a transnational market place for highquality, knowledge-based services.
How can we explain the absence of aGerman city high up in the hierarchy ofglobal cities, even though Germany has heldthe position of ‘export champion’ for manyyears and has been exceptional with regard to the integration of its economy into theworld market?
In answer to this question, the peculiaritiesand interruptions in German history areoften referred to. Germany only gained onecommon capital city when the Prussian dem-ocratic empire was founded in 1871. Berlinbecame the seat of government and devel-oped into Germany’s dominant economicand cultural city but never achieved the cen-trality of London or Paris. After the historicdisasters of the Nazi regime and the SecondWorld War, Berlin’s central role was totallydestroyed by the break-up of the GermanReich and the splitting of Germany into fouroccupation zones. Many companies movedtheir headquarters from Berlin to WestGermany. Following a resolution by theAmerican occupation government, the newBank Deutscher Länder (Bank of GermanStates), which was the predecessor of theDeutsche Bundesbank, was founded inFrankfurt after the closure of the Reichsbankin Berlin. As a consequence, the DeutscheBank and the Dresdner Bank moved theirheadquarters to Frankfurt. At the same time,
the American occupation government decid-ed to develop Frankfurt airport to be the cen-tral base of the US Airforce in Germany.Frankfurt’s function as a gateway and aninternational financial centre was a directresult of these decisions. Similar historicaldecisions led to the specialisation of othercities: Munich became Germany’s high-techmetropolis; Hamburg, its news and mediacentre; and, with the creation of the GermanFederal Republic in 1949, the seat of govern-ment was moved to Bonn. Although the roleof political capital was given back to Berlinafter unification, it is unlikely that Berlin willever regain its former central economic role.
This historical sketch implicitly classifiesGermany’s urban network as a special case inthe hierarchy of the global urban system. CanGermany really be considered to be a specialcase that shows deficits?
An alternative explanation can be found inthe discussion on ‘Varieties of Capitalism’(Hall/Soskice). If it is true that modern capi-talism is not a homogeneous entity, but thatdifferent models of capitalism have developedunder different historical conditions, then it isnot unlikely that these different models alsohave correspondingly different patterns ofurbanisation. The ‘belated’ industrial nationof Germany had already developed an alter-native to the liberal production system at theend of the 19th century, which can be charac-terised as a form of regulated, corporate mar-ket economy. This model of ‘Rheinian Capit-alism’ combined with strong federal struc-tures, formed the basis for the economic andsocial system of West Germany. It is very likelythat Germany has not only created an alterna-tive model of production, but also an alterna-tive and effective model of urbanisation.
Characteristic of this model of urbanisa-tion is both the polycentrality of the urbansystem with its distinct complementary divi-sion of labour between individuals cities, andthe phenomenon of regional ‘manufacturingservice districts’.
Whereas globalisation in the 1980s and1990s led to a strong global dispersion ofindustrial functions in Anglo-Saxon coun-tries, the urban regions in Germany still have
a strongly interactive dynamic of developingknowledge-intensive industries. Further-more, the German urban system is connectedto the European and global networks of cities.The individual cities can only develop theircapacity and innovativeness in their spe-cialisms with the help of very effective net-works and cooperation.
As Saskia Sassen rightly points out, a globalcity is by definition part of a network. Thisapplies even more strongly to the urban sys-tem in Germany, whose multi-tiered net-works are of a regional, national, Europeanand global nature. Thus the German urbansystem could prove to be a valid future alter-native to the highly centralised model of theglobal city.
Dieter Läpple is Professor of Regional & UrbanEconomics at HafenCity University Hamburg
Translation from German by Anne Rigby
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URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006 URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006
CAR OWNERSHIPENERGY CONSUMPTIONURBANISATION, 2005 YOUTH
URBAN AGE: GLOBAL OVERVIEW
The relentless pace of contemporary urban growth becomesparticularly evident in a number of rapidly expanding cities,where the number of new city residents increases by the hour.As is the case with other indicators of contemporary urbanisa-
tion, the fastest growing cities in the world are located outsidethe advanced capitalist core. Lagos is adding an average of 67new residents every hour, putting enormous strains on itsalready challenged urban infrastructure. Cities in the Indian
subcontinent are also expanding rapidly: New Delhi adds 64residents an hour, Mumbai 49 and Dhaka 61.
URBANISATION OF THE WORLD
HUMAN FOOTPRINT
URBANISATION AND KEY INDICATORS BY COUNTRY
In the contemporary urban age, the spatial effects of city-basedeconomies, cultures and societies are being felt in virtuallyevery corner of the planet. Beyond the massive expansion ofurbanised areas and the consolidation of regional cities reach-
ing continental scales, it is estimated that over 80% of theEarth’s land surface is influenced by the human footprint.Activities as diverse as agriculture, industrial development andtourism are spreading across the world linked to urban centres
through thick networks of production and consumption.There is a strong interconnection between an urban agenda ofsustainable development for cities and a global environmentalagenda.
Out of the four indicators urbanisation, energy consumption,car ownership and youth, higher levels of the first three are gen-erally indicating more advanced economies and only youthwith its extreme concentration in Central Africa appears as a
proxy for the developing world. This far, higher levels of urbanpopulations are accompanied by higher energy consumptionand car use but not with youth.
URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006
low concentration
high concentration
low impact
high impact
growth 2005 to 2015 5 mi (2005)
Urban agglomerations,UN Population Division
Urbanisation of the world / Source:Urban agglomerations, UN PopulationDivisionHuman Footprint / Source: Center forInternational Earth Science InformationNetwork (CIESIN) , Columbia University.Car ownership / Source: The World Bank
Energy consumption / Source:International Energy Agency (IEA), 2004Urbanisation, 2005 / Source: WorldUrbanisation Prospects, 2003 Revision,UNYouth / Source: World UrbanisationProspects, 2003 Revision, UN
THE SIX CITIES: REGIONAL OVERVIEW
Metropolitan regionMetropolitan regionMetropolitan region
LeipzigLeipzigLeipzig
State of BerlinState of BerlinState of Berlin
50%
100%
150%
200%
Unemployment19.0%
Foreign born13.7%
Car ownership303/1,000 people
One person households50.7%
GDP/capita€ 23,400
Berlin
Germany
Metropolitan regionMetropolitan regionMetropolitan region
New York CityNew York City
50%50%
100%100%
150%150%
200%200%
Unemployment5.8%
Foreign born36.6%
Car ownership206/1,000 people
One person households31.9%
GDP/capita€ 46,800
New YorkUSA
Metropolitan regionMetropolitan regionMetropolitan region
Shanghai MunicipalityShanghai Municipality
50%
100%
150%
200%
Unemployment4.4%
Foreign born0.7% Car ownership
62/1,000 people
One personhouseholds9.7%
GDP/capita€ 6,400
ShanghaiChina
Metropolitan regionMetropolitan regionMetropolitan region
BirminghamBirminghamBirmingham
Greater LondonGreater LondonGreater London
50%50%
100%100%
150%150%
200%200%
Unemploymen6.9%
Foreign born27.1%
Car ownership340 cars/1,000 people
One person households34.1%
GDP/capita€ 32,200
LondonUK
Metropolitan regionMetropolitan regionMetropolitan region
PueblaPueblaPueblaToluca De LerdoToluca De LerdoToluca De LerdoMexico D.F.Mexico D.F.Mexico D.F.
50%
100%
150%
200%
Unemployment4.8%
Foreign born0.7%
Car ownership397/1,000 people
One person households9.7%
GDP/capita€ 12,200
Mexico CityMexico
Metropolitan regionMetropolitan regionMetropolitan region
City ofJohannesburgCity ofJohannesburgCity ofJohannesburg
50%
100%
150%
200%
Unemployment37.4%
Foreign born6.7%
Car ownership183/1,000 people
One person households25.1%
GDP/capita€ 3,100
JohannesburgSouth Africa
BERLIN NEW YORK SHANGHAILONDON MEXICO CITY JOHANNESBURG
Today the population ofBerlin stands at approximate-ly 3.4 million. During the lastcentury, Berlin’s growth, rela-tive to other large Europeancities like London, has beenfairly slow. In fact Berlin pres-ents an anomaly in a world ofcities that are rapidly expand-ing. By the end of the 20th cen-tury, the city’s populationshowed a mere 72% increasefrom its level in 1900. Evenmore striking, in the pastdecade of increased invest-ments to Berlin there was apopulation decline of 1.5%.
At €23,354 per capita,Berlin’s Gross City Product issubstantial.Yet this, thelargest city in Germany, has
only a 3.5% share of thecountry’s GDP and a limitedcentrality within the Germaneconomy. The city’s embat-tled public finances compli-cate its economic recoveryand limit its employment anddevelopment policies.
Berlin covers approximate-ly 892 square kilometres,stretching out along the SpreeRiver and its plateaus. InBerlin, open space has notbeen an afterthought to cityplanning; open and recre-ational space accounts for45% of the city’s surface. Thegross residential density ofBerlin is about 3,800 peopleper sqkm.
For the first time in its histo-ry, New York City’s popula-tion passed the 8 millionmark in the year 2000 after adecade of strong growth.Since then, the city has con-tinued to add residents, andthis trend is expected to con-tinue over the next ten years.Regional growth outside thecity has also continued apace.
With a Gross City Productof approximately €39,500per capita, New York is one ofthe world’s richest cities. Thisjuggernaut urban economygenerates up to 4% of theentire US GDP. It has beenpointed out often that evenwith the enormous wealthgenerated by the city, there is
a persistent level of poverty inNew York.
New York City coversapproximately 830 squarekilometres, of which 25% isdedicated to open and recre-ational space. The gross resi-dential density of New YorkCity is about 9,600 people persqkm, by far the highest in theUnited States. However, thisdensity level drops signifi-cantly outside the city. Also,densities across New York areunevenly distributed, andvary widely from peaks inparts of Manhattan to the rel-atively low densities in theouter boroughs with anotably suburban character.
Within China’s current legalframework, Shanghai can beunderstood as a city-state: itextends over 6,300 squarekilometres and has more than18 million inhabitants.Whereas its traditional cityboundaries demarcate an areaof 289 square kilometres, inwhich 6.5 million people liveat very high residential densi-ties, most of Shanghai's terri-tory is now consideredurbanised and reaches anaverage density of 2,900 peo-ple per sqkm, arranged in aseemingly chaotic patchworkof agricultural, residentialand industrial land uses.
Since 1992, the Shanghaieconomy has shown rapid
growth, and it is expected tocontinue, expanding by morethan 10% annually for at leastanother decade. The urbaneconomy is also modernising:approximately half of thelabour force now works in theservice sector, while 36% areemployed in a diversified setof industries. The YangtzeRiver Delta – Shanghai'swider economic base reach-able within a three-hour drivefrom the city – comprises22% of China's productivecapacity and generates 30%of its exports.
After a decade and a half ofsignificant populationgrowth, Greater London cur-rently has about 7.5 millionresidents; projections indi-cate that this figure will reach8 million within the nextdecade. Greater London cov-ers approximately 1,600square kilometres of land areaat a gross residential densityof about 4,700 people persqkm. However, almost halfof this surface is comprised ofopen and recreational space.The city has decided toaccommodate the expectedpopulation growth within itsexisting urbanised areathrough structural densifica-tion.
In recent times London, aservice-led urban economywith a global orientation, hasexperienced what is perhapsan unprecedented economicbonanza. Currently its GrossCity Product is estimated at€34,500 per capita account-ing for almost 20% of theUK’s national economy.Yet ahard core of poverty lingers inInner London, particularly inits eastern and southernareas.
The current population ofMexico City MetropolitanArea is estimated at 18 mil-lion, of which 8.6 million livewithin the Federal District.Both the population andurbanised area of Mexico CityMetropolitan Area haveexpanded dramatically sincethe mid-20th century. Bothcontinue to grow in complexpatterns – whereas the urbancore has regained some popu-lation, suburban sprawl con-tinues apace, fuelled by low-cost mortgages and a lax reg-ulatory framework.
The Federal District coversabout 1,488 square kilome-tres. In the urbanised north-ern portion, open and recre-
ational space is scarce. Thegross residential density inthis part of the district isabout 2,090 people per sqkm.Expanding the amount ofrecreational space and thenumber of cultural facilitiesfor the residents of this high-density area is considereda fundamental priority amongmany Mexican town planners.
Mexico City is of para-mount importance for theMexican national economy.Its Gross City Product(€105,000 million) con-tributes 22% of Mexico’sGDP.
The current population in theCity of Johannesburg is ca 3.2million. It is estimated thatthe city grew 4% per year onaverage in the late 1990s andsome projections present agrowth scenario in whichmetropolitan Johannesburgwill reach almost 15 millionpeople by 2015. The urbancore of Gauteng province isexpected to become theworld’s twelfth largest city-region, behind Lagos yet larg-er than Los Angeles.
Johannesburg is consid-ered the economic engine ofSouth Africa and its urbaneconomy has a growing con-tinental and global reach. In2003, its share of South
Africa’s total economic out-put was c 17%. Johannesburgis a service-oriented econo-my: 74% of people areemployed by services, busi-nesses or the real estate sector.
With Johannesburg’s newboundaries, the city nowstretches over 1,600 squarekilometres, reaching a grossresidential density of ca 1,900people per sqkm. This is a lowurban density by internation-al standards, yet the highest ofall urban areas in SouthAfrica. Densities vary widelyacross the metropolis, reach-ing peaks in both disadvan-taged inner-city neighbour-hoods and the peripheraltownship of Alexandra.
0 mi
5 mi
10 mi
15 mi
20 mi
20001990198019701960195019401930192019101900
� New York
� Johannesburg
� Shanghai� Mexico City
� Berlin
� London
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
203020202010200019901980197019601950
� United States
� China
� Germany� United Kingdom
� South Africa� Mexico
POPULATION GROWTH
Population growth in the sixUrban Age cities follows avariety of different patterns.London, New York and Berlinhad their period of exponen-tial growth at the beginningof the 20th century; MexicoCity, Shanghai andJohannesburg did not start togrow at similar rates beforethe 1950s. By 1910, London
and New York had already atotal population of above 5million and share a period ofdecline followed by growth inrecent years. It was not until1990 that populations ofMexico City and Shanghaicrossed the 15 million mark.
BERLIN COMPARED TO GERMANY
LONDON COMPARED TO THE UK
NEW YORK COMPARED TO THE USA
URBANISATION BY
SELECTED COUNTRIES
All three countries withadvanced economies includ-ing the US, Britain andGermany were already largelyurbanized by 1950. Sincethen, the proportion of urbanpopulation in these countrieshave only grown frombetween 65 and 80% to levelsbetween 80 and 90%. Mexico
and South Africa started withsimilar levels in 1950 of about43% but Mexico urbanizedmore rapidly and is about topass 80% within the nextdecade. The case of Chinais one ofextreme change wherethe key phase of urbanisationis a phenomenon of thepresent.
URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006 URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006
MEXICO CITY COMPARED TO MEXICO
SHANGHAI COMPARED TO CHINA
JOHANNESBURGCOMPARED TO SOUTH AFRICA
So
urce:
Wo
rld U
rban
isation
Pro
spects, 2003 R
evision
, Un
ited N
ation
s
Unemployment
HOUSING AND URBAN NEIGHBOURHOODS: DENSITY
BERLIN
NEW YORK
SHANGHAI
LONDON
MEXICO CITY
JOHANNESBURG
Johannesburg �
Mexico City �
Berlin �
Shanghai �
New York �
London �
0
100
200
300
400
500
2826242220181614121086420
people per hectare
km from city centre
DENSITY GRADIENTS
The world cities studied bythe Urban Age project presentdivergent distributions ofurban density, land-usearrangements and growthmodels. The highest gross res-idential density peak isreached in some central cityneighbourhoods of Shanghaiwhich accommodate over 600people per hectare. However,Shanghai as a whole is not thedensest city in the group asdensity falls abruptly as soonas one leaves the city centre.With 96 people per hectare onaverage, New York occupiesthat position. Mexico Citycomes close, but withoutreaching Manhattan-likepeaks in its centre and main-taining a more homogenoushigh density throughout theentire urban area. TheEuropean cities, London andBerlin, show the flattest densi-ty curves, nevertheless achiev-ing a higher overall densitythan Johannesburg. In this
African metropolis pockets ofextreme high density in theinner-city and underservedareas in black townshipsbreak the low-density monot-ony of urban sprawl.
Cities throughout theworld need to respond to thedemographic pressures lead-ing to rapid urban growth.Densification rather thanhorizontal expansion is howgrowing cities can take moreenvironmentally sustainableand socially inclusive devel-opment paths. Achieving thisgoal requires a careful mix ofinfrastructure investments,land-use coordination, socialpolicies and urban design.The latter is particularly cru-cial to maintain the liveabilityand broad attractiveness ofurban environments under-going processes of densifica-tion. More research is neededto understand the varyingcapacity of different streetgrids and block layouts to
accommodate growth whilepreserving urban characterand insuring adequateamounts of personal andhousehold space. Sufficientamounts of open and greenspace are another necessarycomponent of sustainabledensification.
Even in cities experiencingdemographic decline, as inthe case of Berlin, design-based interventions have thepotential to manage change,re-adapting existing struc-tures to new conditions andeven generating an attractive-ness of place that could leadinto an urban turnaround.
URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006 URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006
The transport infrastructureand mobility patterns of thesix Urban Age cities offer astriking illustration of veryspecific geographic, historicand political conditions.Regardless of the differencesbetween the six cities there isclearly one identifiable sub-group that includes the older,mature cities like New York,London and Berlin. All threeare characterised by an exten-sive urban rail system. Berlin’sU- and S-Bahn systemextends over 396 km withinthe city. New York’s subway is370 km long and was stronglyinfluenced by the administra-tive landscape that cut off thesystem from urbanised areaswest of the city’s core.London’s 480 km of under-ground rail mainly serves
North London due to the lim-itations of early 20th-centurytechnology to deal with geo-logical constraints south ofthe River Thames. In addi-tion, all three cities rely on anextensive network of regionalrail servicing their metropoli-tan regions while being suffi-ciently connected to intercityrail. Mobility patterns reflectthis extensive availability ofpublic transport with modalsplit shares of over 50% forwork-related trips in NewYork, and around 30% of alltrips in London and 27% inBerlin. Public transport affin-ity in the three cities comesalong with similarly high lev-els of walking and biking:32% in Berlin and 25% inLondon. In Manhattan walk-ing to work is the mode of
choice for more than 22% ofits residents.
Transport patterns in thethree rapidly expanding cities– Shanghai, Mexico City andJohannesburg – are morediverse. In all three the periodof exponential growth andinfrastructure building camemuch later. Mexico City wasthe first of the three and start-ed building its undergroundin the late 1960s and todayoperates an efficient 200 kmlong network. Despite being areliable system, it is only usedby 14% of the city’s popula-tion. Meanwhile, minibusservices account for morethan half of all trips.Johannesburg has no under-ground rail system and mostof the 120 km of surface railserves only the older areas of
the city. The majority of newaffluent developments rely onthe private car. The 12,500privately run mini taxis areused for 20% of journeys towork while 40% of all jour-neys to work are still done byfoot. Shanghai’s first under-ground metro line wasopened only a decade ago.The total length of the currentmetro system is 65 km, butanother 10 lines totalling 218km are under construction,reflecting the scale of growthand reach in the city’s infra-structure. The share of publictransport is rapidly growingwith 23% of daily trips towork using some form ofpublic transport, includingrail, metro and bus.
The distribution of employ-ment by sector in all of theUrban Age cities shows theextent to which cities havechanged into service-basedeconomies. For all of thecities, the service sectoremploys more than half of theurban labour force. This tran-sition appears the most farreaching in New York andLondon where less than 10%of the urban labour force isengaged in industrial activi-ties.Yet cities are far frombecoming mono-cultural‘office economies’, in factfinancial and business servic-es are the main employmentcategory only in London.Even in New York, it is ‘otherservices’ that make up almosthalf of the city’s employmentbase. This broad categoryincludes a diverse range ofurban activities includingpersonal, social, health, edu-cational and entertainmentservices. All of these niches
require specialised workplaces from where they cancontribute the most efficient-ly to the urban economy.
The reduced employmentshare of urban manufactur-ing does not diminish theimportance of this sectorwithin urban productioncomplexes, supporting lead-ing sectors of a city’s econo-my. Moreover, Shanghai,which is one of the fastestgrowing urban economies inthe world, retains an impor-tant manufacturing base.Shanghai’s various industriesemploy up to a third of thecity’s labour force and areseen as one of the pillars ofthis rapidly expanding globaleconomic node.
URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006 URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006
So
urce: S
enate d
epartm
ent o
f urb
an d
evelop
men
t Berlin
So
urce: U
K cen
sus 2001 an
d T
ransp
ort fo
r Lon
do
n 2004
So
urce: U
S cen
sus 2000 an
d N
ew Y
ork T
ransit 2004
So
urce: D
esarrollad
ora M
etrop
olitan
a SA
So
urce: T
he 3rd
com
preh
ensive tran
spo
rt investig
ation
of S
han
gh
ai 2005
So
urce: S
tatistics So
uth
Africa C
ensu
s 2001
So
urce:
Prices an
d E
arnin
gs, U
BS
2006
(all trips)
(all trips)
(all trips)
(all trips)
(all trips)
(commuting only)
Social inclusion is one of the most important challenges forcontemporary cities. All of the six cities – Berlin, Johannesburg,London, Mexico City, New York and Shanghai – present signifi-cant concentrations of socially disadvantaged populations,even though most of them are in a period of economic expan-sion and sustained physical development. Urban concentra-
tions of social disadvantage appear in manifold geographicalpatterns. Some cities are characterised by their socially andphysically decayed inner cities, as can be seen in parts of Eastand South London and parts of New York City’s boroughs out-side Manhattan. Others relegate their disadvantaged popula-tions to underserved metropolitan peripheries as is the case in
Shanghai and Mexico City. Berlin and Johannesburg present acombination of both patterns, each of them showing a specificgeography inherited from their unique development historiesand recent transformations.
SOCIAL DISADVANTAGE
24 or less 25 to 49 50 to 84 85 to 124 125 or more
BERLIN NEW YORKLONDON
INFANT MORTALITY
SHANGHAIMEXICO CITY JOHANNESBURG
URBAN AGE SUMMIT BERLIN NOVEMBER 2006
So
urce:
Cen
ter for In
ternatio
nal E
arth S
cience In
form
ation
Netw
ork (C
IES
IN), C
olu
mb
ia Un
iversityS
ocial h
elp receip
ients; so
urce: S
enate D
epartm
ent o
f Urb
an D
evelop
men
t
Ind
ex of m
ultip
le dep
rivation
; sou
rce: UK
censu
s 2001
Po
pu
lation
belo
w p
overty lin
e; sou
rce: US
censu
s 2000
Overcro
wd
ing
; sou
rce: Institu
to N
acion
al de E
stadística G
eog
rafía 2000, sup
plied
by D
esarrollad
ora M
etrop
olitan
a S.A
.
Overcro
wd
ing
; sou
rce: Th
e 5th cen
sus o
f Ch
ina, 2000
Un
emp
loym
ent, so
urce: S
tatistics So
uth
Africa C
ensu
s 2001
privileged area average disadvantaged area severely disadvantaged area
