This book seeks to examine the dynamics of urban life, showing that new opportunities can be maximised and social advances realised in existing and emerging urban centres. The book explores both the planned and organic nature of urban developments and the impacts and aspirations of the people who live and work in them. It argues convincingly that the metropolitan mindset is essential to the struggle for human liberation.
The short, accessibly written essays are guaranteed to spark debate across the media and academia about the place of cities and urban life in our ever-changing world.
This book seeks to examine the dynamics of urban life, showing that new opportunities can be maximised and social advances realised in existing and emerging urban centres. The book explores both the planned and organic nature of urban developments and the impacts and aspirations of the people who live and work in them. It argues convincingly that the metropolitan mindset is essential to the struggle for human liberation.
The short, accessibly written essays are guaranteed to spark debate across the media and academia about the place of cities and urban life in our ever-changing world.
The Lure of the City: From Slums to Suburbs
224
The Lure of the City: From Slums to Suburbs
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Overview
This book seeks to examine the dynamics of urban life, showing that new opportunities can be maximised and social advances realised in existing and emerging urban centres. The book explores both the planned and organic nature of urban developments and the impacts and aspirations of the people who live and work in them. It argues convincingly that the metropolitan mindset is essential to the struggle for human liberation.
The short, accessibly written essays are guaranteed to spark debate across the media and academia about the place of cities and urban life in our ever-changing world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783714797 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 09/12/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 721 KB |
About the Author
Austin Williams is author of The Enemies of Progress (Societas, 2008) and co-editor of The Future of Community (Pluto, 2009) and The Lure of the City (Pluto, 2008). He is the founder of ManTownHuman, director of the Future Cities Project and convenor of the infamous 'Bookshop Barnies' book discussions.
Alastair Donald is researching Urban Systems and Metropolitan Design at the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies, University of Cambridge. He is co-editor of The Future of Community (Pluto, 2009) and The Lure of the City (Pluto, 2011).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Dynamic City
Citizens Make Cities
Alan Hudson
All human progress, political, moral, or intellectual, is inseparable from material progression.
Auguste Comte, 'The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte'
The central concern in this chapter is to re-pose the question of how a city might come to be, or to be defined as, dynamic. 'Re-pose' because, although at one level it may seem to be a semantic quibble, the physical fabric of cities ultimately amounts only to a large collection of inanimate objects: citizens make cities, not the other way round.
It may seem strange, therefore, to illustrate my argument through the example of Chinese cities in general, and of Shanghai in particular. On the one hand, the inhabitants of Chinese cities are 'citizens' in only a formal sense – indeed, millions of migrant workers are not citizens at all. Under the household registration (hukou) system in China, every person has a permanent place of registered residence that can only be changed with official approval. The terms 'migrant' and 'floating' population denote those people who leave their places of residence without officially moving their hukou. Historically, this has been difficult to do, leaving the migrant without much entitlement to social provision – although in recent years this has changed, at least at the legislative level.
On the other hand, the Chinese city – through aggressive planning, state-sponsored market intervention and economic growth – is to all intents and purposes, and certainly in relation to the contemporary developed world, singularly dynamic. The peculiar feature of contemporary China is the close association of a central Five Year Plan (FYP), written in detail for national, provincial and municipal levels of government, with a capitalist market ring-fenced by state authority. The quintessential relationship is between a party official and a property developer, although they may be the same person.
Thus, the argument is not that planning, growth and action on a grand scale are not important – far from it. The reconfiguration of my argument is rather that the relationship between, on the one hand, technical expertise and the activity of experts, and, on the other, the active understanding, involvement and participatory collaboration of citizens, both as individuals and as groups, is out of joint. There is, in a sense, a double dynamic. But it works in parallel rather than in series, and therefore undermines the mutual reinforcement of the life of the city (the citizen) with its activity (planning). There is no clear mechanism for effective communication between the city plan and the activities of the population. At the same time, the inhabitants' activities are predominantly in the economic and not the social or political spheres. Such activities have a huge economic impact, but in a sense they happen behind the back of the plan. Similarly, large developmental projects, although planned, happen with little regard to the overall social environment of the city.
Chinese officials are not oblivious to this contradiction – in relation to both the actual erosion of trust and legitimacy in their system, and the potential for civil dissatisfaction and opposition. The need to reconcile economic development with social justice is central to both the 11th and 12th Five-Year Plans (those for 2006–10 and 2011–15). But it is perceived as being a technical problem with a technical solution; there is little or no perception that the separation of economic growth from public engagement may not only be problematic, but that it actually detracts from the vitality and ambience of the city.
HONGQIAO CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT
In December 2010, I hosted a delegation from Shanghai and chaired a seminar on urbanisation. The purpose of the delegation's visit was to glean ideas, and policies, for the development of a new business district in Shanghai, Shanghai Hongqiao Central Business District (CBD).
The delegation leader – who had been seconded from the Chinese Executive Leadership Academy, Pudong, a national party school for the training of city mayors, young leaders and state enterprise executives – was in charge of research and planning for the Hongqiao project. He explained he would coordinate the activities of 23 government and parastatal agencies, including eight police forces. Nevertheless, the research phase would be concluded in 18 months, the plan presented by 2012, and the project completed in the following five years.
After watching the promotional video for Hongqiao and listening to the delegation leader's polite request for advice, the assembled experts and academics offered their comments: 'Don't have any roads'; 'Buy my software for the central monitoring of energy use in public buildings'; 'Think about solving the technical problems of the future and not just of today'. The delegation listened politely. My impression was that buried within the comments might be some useful advice that could be incorporated into the master plan. But my overwhelming sense was that there was nothing new or exciting on offer.
Hongqiao is already developed as a transport hub. It is the site of Shanghai's second, more domestically orientated airport, and will be the terminus for the high-speed rail link to Beijing (4.5 hours), Hangzhou (38 minutes) and Nanjing (42 minutes). This multidirectional, high-speed network will complete the fusion of the Yangtze River Delta's 'half-hour circle'. The daily traffic flow is projected at 1.4 million people.
The current population of the core area of 3.7 square kilometres is 50,000, while the larger area designated as Hongqiao, covering 26 square kilometres, is home to 650,000 people. By 2020 the population of the core will have tripled, while the wider area will have almost doubled, to reach 1.2 million. To put this in perspective, within the space of a decade, the new business area will be built out to provide enough additional accommodation for the entire population of the City of Glasgow. Or Dallas – or the whole of Bahrain. Clearly, this demonstrates no shortage of energy and ambition.
Low-carbon technologies and high-speed communication for a smart city are already de rigueur in Chinese cities. Shanghai already has twelve metro lines, five of which pass through the transport hub. Early reports of the content of Shanghai's 12th Five-Year Plan (FYP) indicate that IT infrastructure is a key priority. Shanghai's city mayor, Han Zheng, has pledged to invest 100 billion yuan (around £10 billion) in support of the city's key industries: IT, biotechnology, high-end equipment manufacturing, new energy, and the new materials sector. The low-carbon city is already built into the Hongqiao CBD plan. This is not, it should be noted, a green argument against growth, or an apologetic rationalisation for a lack of money, but instead stands as capital investment for the twenty-first century.
What was absent was any discussion about the involvement of the people who are and will be living there. This was not because the delegation had no concern for the population. Indeed, the whole idea is that the slogan of Shanghai Expo 2010 – 'Better City, Better Life' – will be realised through economic growth. One of the delegates commented: 'Of course construction companies can build in the core area where former residents have moved to a large residential district nearby.' So, while the overall population will increase, that will involve the displacement of the present residents and their replacement by a population geared to the central function of the new CBD: 'We expect the area will grow into a high-end innovation business center for the Yangtze Delta Region and that urban development of suburban Qingpu and Songjiang districts can be fostered as well.' This incredible project does open up exciting commercial prospects. As one happy architecture company announced, having won a slice of the action:
The New Central Business District will be an energy efficient and environmentally conscious development characterized by its highly pedestrian-friendly environment. Located next to what will become the world's largest intermodal transit facility, the development will focus on reducing carbon dioxide emissions through a series of sustainable strategies, such as integration of highly efficient transportation systems, rain water collection and on-site water treatment, on-site renewable energy generation, and energy efficient building envelopes and systems.
What was not part of the formula was the activity of the citizen. The citizen is but the passive recipient of a rather amazing plan. Since the urbanisation of China is acknowledged policy, considered the means of facilitating economic growth and social justice, the dynamism of the citizen has to find a release in conjunction with planning and economic dynamics.
CHINESE URBANISATION
The scale and dynamism of urban development in China are touchstones for the city in the new century. In 2008, for the first time in human history, more than 50 per cent of the global population lived in urban areas. China is moving rapidly towards the 50 per cent benchmark, after which urbanisation will continue. This is part of the largest and most significant movement of populations in human history. Around 15 million migrants arrived in the USA between 1881 and 1911, while around 300 million people have moved from rural to urban areas in China within a similar 30-year period. If China achieves an urbanisation rate of 50 per cent by 2040 (and this is the government target), then the shift of population will incorporate 500 million people. These are dizzying numbers.
The movement of population is a crucial component of the dynamism of Chinese cities. Migrant populations are by their nature dynamic. These are the people who have taken the risk, and grasped the opportunity, to move and seek a better life, often with their eyes set on future possibilities rather than present realities. It might be argued that this is less true when the scale of the movement is so vast, but the contemporary experience of Chinese cities testifies to the strength of both aspiration and dynamism.
Much more important than the sheer scale of this experience are its qualitative aspects – both actual and potential. The biggest cities of the future will not be in China. Although Beijing, Shanghai and others are huge, they will not be as big as Dakar, Manila, Cairo and the megacities of the South. But size is not everything. The rapid urban population growth in many cities of the South does not follow the historically progressive model of urban development. Far from being built on surplus and the extension of the division of labour, it is instead associated with rural poverty and its relocation to urban disaster areas disconnected technically and socially from the pre-existing city.
Chinese urban growth is explicitly based on economic surplus. This is not by any means to say that life for a migrant worker is easy; but it does represent a significant advance on the inexorable grind of peasant subsistence. Moreover, the ongoing network of social and economic relations between the newly arrived city-dweller and their village of origin consolidates the relationship between the two, serving to urbanise the countryside.
In contrast to much contemporary urban growth elsewhere, and in line with Chinese urban policy, there will be many provincial and regional hubs alongside the great cities of the east coast. Chinese cities of 1 million and more will be numbered in the hundreds: each enough for a football team, a symphony orchestra, and the economies of scale that can make for the pleasures of a diverse and balanced urban environment.
In 2010 I visited the new city of Fang Cheng, in the previously less developed south-western province of Guangxi. Located on the Gulf of Tonkin, Fang Cheng is part of a regional development stretching from the coastal resort of Beihei in the east to the Vietnamese border in the west. The old port is being transformed in order to open the ASEAN countries to Chinese goods, while bringing ASEAN raw materials into China's western hinterland. Alongside the port, and linked to it by a bridge system, will be a new city, built around water and parkland, which within the space of the next decade will be home to a million people: double the current population. When the new migrants arrive from the rural hinterland, they will be freed not only from rural idiocy, but also from the need to travel the long distances to the eastern seaboard for the opportunities associated with urban life.
It is worth putting some facts about contemporary Chinese urban development into their historical context. For a start, urbanisation will mirror and advance upon the most sophisticated directions taken in the city regions of Tokyo–Osaka, the Boston– New York–Philadelphia nexus, and much of western Europe. These city regions are being replicated and surpassed in Beijing– Tianjin, Shanghai–Hangzhou–Nanjing, and the Pearl River Delta including Hong Kong. But there are also less well-known examples: Nanning–Beihei as part of China's aforementioned ASEAN strategy, Chongqing in the west, Shenyang–Dalian in the north, and so on.
Chinese urbanisation is a phenomenon for which the rather old-fashioned term 'uneven and combined development' is apt. But it is plausible, although not a given, that China's extraordinary economic dynamism will enable it to avoid the infrastructural and human costs of urban development associated with the rapid urban development of Europe and North America from the end of the eighteenth century. The Chinese model is spurred by the classical historical model of urbanity: a surplus inextricably linked to productive capacity. It is a beneficial and progressive model for global urban development.
Finally, the extent to which technical developments have mediated rather than a direct relationship with social change implies an extension of social possibilities and new sets of relationships between people. But, of course, there are no guarantees. As a simple example of the potential benefits, take the national high-speed rail network, which may open up a new relationship to space for millions of people. New forms and patterns of connectivity, however, do not guarantee the emergence of new content within the resulting new matrix of social relationships.
CONCEPTUALISING THE CITY
In May 2010 I attended a conference in Shanghai and listened to a highly respected specialist in urban planning explain that what the current discussion in China lacked was a sociological aspect. This might seem like a significant step in the right direction; but the role of sociological enquiry here was to integrate the citizen as a component part of the plan – a distinct but controllable factor. This represents not quite the engineering of souls, but, in the historic spirit of urban sociology, planning to adjust the responses of the citizen in alignment with the plan, intended to be in the best interests of both. This theorisation of the city, derived from both Chicago city planners and the Chicago School of sociologists,emphasises the positive benefits of planning in social control. The human ecology of cities is proving an attractive area for Chinese academics, since it allows the planner to retain the position of agent of progressive change, rather than ceding it to the less predictable citizen.
The mechanisms and processes through which this may be achieved are of great interest to Chinese policy-makers. One of these – economic growth – is immediately in their own hands. The second – social justice – is the element that eludes them, and for which they seek practical and technical answers, such as 'consultative procedures'.
Added to this, and in line with the two traditions of Chinese thought and Western sociology, is the urge and even the perceived responsibility to manipulate the environment in order to educate and improve the quality of citizens. The Chinese call this suzhi or 'population quality'. It entails the idea that individuals carry with them a capacity and a responsibility to be good citizens. The word can be used in common speech, but it also refers to a central government initiative designed primarily to assign responsibility for poverty to individual behaviour rather than to the erosion of the national welfare system. The government, in turn, must find ways to encourage and inculcate good behaviour. Those without 'quality' must be educated, or trained, in citizenship.
The question of China's urban development has reinvigorated the perennial discussions associated with urban modernity and the impact on the people who live in it and through it. This is why I think it is worth exploring some of the nuances of how the city is described and conceptualised, not just in relation to its objective, built reality, but also to the subjective reading of the city through its impact on the hearts and minds of citizens.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Lure of the City"
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Copyright © 2011 Austin Williams and Alastair Donald.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: The Paradoxical City by Alastair Donald1. The Dynamic City: Citizens Make Cities by Alan Hudson
2. The Emerging City: Africa’s Metropolitan Mindset by Alastair Donald
3. The Crowded City: People on the Move by Patrick Hayes
4. The Planned City: Make No Little Plans by Michael Owens
5. The Historic City: False Urban Memory Syndrome by Steve Nash and Austin Williams
6. The Sanitised City: If You’ve Done Nothing Wrong… by Tony Pierce and Austin Williams
7. The Eco-City: Utopia, Then and Now by Austin Williams
8. The Visionary City: Things Will Endure Less than Us by Austin Williams and Karl Sharro
Conclusion: The Civilised City by Austin Williams