Abstract
Keywords
Author Hollis is working toward a better understanding of how people use cities and what planning approaches are most effective. He cites the research of William Whyte on the declining sociability of cities, which negatively affects culture and commerce. Whyte noted, “What attracts people most is other people. Many urban spaces are being designed [?] as if the opposite were true (Whyte, W.H. [1988], City: Rediscovering the Centre, p. 86). Whyte’s disciples worldwide have moved toward creating more flexible city spaces and evolving multiple uses for public space versus single mandated ones.
The range and complexity of cities make generalizations difficult, as there are many different reasons why they were founded (beyond their own mythologies) and what makes them grow and prosper, with some shrinking and consolidating and others expanding across the plains. But the major question within the field of urban planning is whether the fabric of a city is determined by the buildings and streets that compose it or by the people and social networks that enliven it.
Looking at the fabric of the city involves complexity analysis of not just the buildings but also of the spaces within and around them and how they are used. This is a view of the city as an organism, and while there is a clear distinction between the stones of a city and the people who live among them, a well-planned city can unquestionably stir the emotions and influence the behavior of the citizens who live there. The architecture of a city can either encourage compliance and order among its citizens or enhance liberation and nurturing. While it is true that some city planners were happier creating a hierarchy of zones versus encouraging the exuberance of an evolving, vibrant commercial and cultural environment, such efforts have most often ended in failure.
The relationship between the place, history, and region of a city and the conduct of its citizens were part of a twentieth-century movement to create managed but humane growth, but the social side of the equation was often missing. As Le Corbusier said, “The design of cities is too important to be left to the citizens.” Instead, he believed this task requires planners to “burn our bridges and break with the past.” Up against this designer of the UN Building and his prophet Robert Mores (father of numerous New York City [NYC] cross-town expressways) was Jane Jacobs, whose 1962 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities threw down the gauntlet to planners by laying out how “cities work in real life . . . to promote social and economic vitality.” In short, Jacobs favored planning from the bottom-up, not from the top-down.
Hollis’s book highlights the discovery of the self-organizing advantages of dense urban areas versus the often lamented problems of overcrowding. These advantages include increases in creativity, innovation, and even civility and tolerance for diversity. The author also feels that cooperation and community should be taken as an urban standard and become a critical element in determining which city one chooses to live in.
And there is no doubt that cities are growing. In 1950, there were 83 cities worldwide with populations exceeding one million—today there are more than 460. As well, in 1950, only New York had a population over ten million, and today the number is twenty-five million. The most interesting question is which of these cities have grown at the margins and without much overall management and which have grown at the centers, with significant rethinking and reorganizing of urban structures and functions. Actually, one of the largest obstacles to effective urban growth everywhere is the failure of city infrastructures to keep pace with the logistic needs of their inhabitants.
As you might imagine, the author is much in favor of growth managed for citizens’ benefit and sees the return to city centers by high-income professionals as a very positive development. It is also a reflection of the growing cosmopolitan nature of cities globally. For example, a growing neighborhood in Copenhagen includes residents representing more than fifty ethnic groups from around the world. Thus, he maintains, the urban “mega-regions of the future need to be planned; they will not happen organically.”
But then the question arises, “Who does this planning?” Will it be nation-states or will megacities and regions have more in common with each other than their countries of origin? And where does the countryside stand if cities continue to accumulate resources and political power in the future? Finally, what is the “identity” of a megacity, if it is no longer that of its native country? In London alone, more than three hundred languages are spoken.
Another interesting observation on twenty-first-century cities concerns the changing situation of women. The growing number of unmarried women in cities (now more than 40% of all women in NYC, for example), especially in professional categories, is due in significant part to the fact that, according to Hanna Roisin in her book, The End of Men, more women than men now hold jobs in the United States and that for every two men who receive a B.A. degree this year in the United States, three women will. Finally, of the fifteen job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade, all but two are presently occupied primarily by women.
These shifts are likely to have significant cultural impacts, especially at the global level. Moving to a city offers substantial opportunities for women compared with a rural lifestyle; these include better education, lower fertility rates, and higher infant survival. In Ethiopia, for example, nearly one-quarter of females in the teen years in a recent survey had come to that country’s largest city simply to escape a forced marriage.
Another shift addressed in the book is the changing attitude toward environmental issues and practices. The rethinking of public transport, waste management, housing, and sustainability generally are critical to the future of cities, especially Asian cities, where over half of South-Central Asian urban residents live in extreme poverty, while in cities like Mumbai, the figure is closer to two-thirds.
As the author says, cities can be complex creatures, “Cities are extraordinary engines of wealth and innovation, but this same mechanism can cause terrible inequality and poverty,” in part because “the world is changing beyond the neighborhood at an alarming pace.” Clearly, the West is no longer the sole measure of where cities are headed. Innovative solutions are arising in Latin America and some of the greatest challenges to the future of cities are seen in Africa.
One of the key features of this book is the series of short but effectively presented case studies used to illustrate specific points which the author has focused on. These include a wide range of geographic, environmental, and architectural variables that help shape whether a city can be termed “good” or “healthy” for its residents. Another term to describe this is “livability.”
Basically, Hollis believes that three critical factors must be addressed for the success of any city in the twenty-first century to be possible: sustainability, equality, and trust. And of the three, trust is the most critical, as it makes the future worth hoping for.