First published 2011 by Pluto Press
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Copyright Austin Williams and Alastair Donald 2011
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Introduction
The Paradoxical City
Alastair Donald
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Cities, according to the United Nations, are dynamic centres of creativity, commerce and culture. Are they not sometimes hectic, tense, polluted and crowded? But then again, are these two characterisations mutually exclusive? Arent they both what cities are meant to be?
For the first time in human history, 3 billion people more than half of the worlds population live in cities. The number of urban dwellers is predicted to reach 5 billion by 2030, at which time the urban populations in the developing world will be four times as large as those in the more economically developed countries. Yet while this explosion of urban life could be greeted enthusiastically as a sign of progress and development moving people off the land and out of back-breaking labour rapid urbanisation is in fact often seen through the contemporary prism of social, political and ecological concerns: overpopulation, fears over the breakdown of traditional communities, and the dangers cities create for the broader environment, to name but a few. Within the West, as cities grow, it seems that with them grows a heightened sense of social unrest, violence, urban blight and a community breakdown. So much for architect Daniel Libeskinds belief that cities are the greatest creations of humanity.
This book explores the paradoxes and contradictions, opportunities and challenges of an urban world. Is the city the place of anonymity, or of civic engagement? Will developing countries lose cultural identity in their transition to urban economies? If so, will it be worth it? Are cities dynamic centres arent we building new cities in the West? Conversely, are emerging economies developing their urban centres too fast, with scant regard for the long term? And what about those cities in decline should they be saved, or buried?
THE CHALLENGES
If cities are at the centre of human civilization and invention,
At a time when the population of the worlds cities is swollen every single week by more than a million migrants mostly in the cities of the developing world a number of the chapters in this book consider the latest challenges of the urban emergence and the transition to a modern world.
For some years, change has often been at its most rapid and exhilarating in cities shaped by the dynamic economies of China and India. Migrants often take their place on the sprawled edges
Yet in , The Dynamic City, Alan Hudson, Director of Oxford Universitys Leadership Programme for China, reports that the relationship between urbanisation and citizenship is considerably more complex than that. In economically dynamic Chinese cities, many are only citizens in a formal sense, and millions of migrants with no formal registration are not citizens at all. Certainly, the onset of the modern world has destroyed traditional relationships and hierarchies, but does city air make the new urban masses free? Hudsons essay explores the tensions and opportunities that exist in cities operating at new scales of interconnection, where global meets the local, but the state rarely meets the citizen.
The emerging urban centres of Africa are less well celebrated, but their growth is such that the continent has become the fastest-urbanising region in the world. Around 2030, it will cease to be predominantly rural. If the setting for urban life is where garbage mountains meet open sewers, then why do migrants continue to make their way there?
In for todays urban migrants to go through the same experiences as their migrant forefathers?
It is the tensions, conflicts and contradictions so central to the dynamic of cities that we grapple with throughout this book. In doing so, we avoid succumbing to the numbers game that paints pictures with statistics. The architect Rem Koolhaas bemoaned the fact that urbanists no longer develop theories of what to do with cities, but merely write portraits in the hope of understanding them. While data are important, the welter of information published on densities, pollution, travel distances, carbon emissions, crime, and so on, is indicative of the tendency of todays urbanists to fall back on data as a means to justify, and sometimes post-rationalise, their position. In this sense, statistics have become a crutch, a substitute for critical enquiry and engagement with urban issues. All too often, people in cities and their social relations are reduced to numbers. This book discusses data, but we hope that we deal with uncomfortable political and professional realities, too.
One reason for challenging conventional wisdom is to get beyond the sham objective standards at the heart of much research, and uncover important aspects of the debate that often remain unexplored. For example, in , The Crowded City, Patrick Hayes points out that apparently neutral categories of investigation related to overcrowding are less the product of science-based neutrality than of subjective prejudice. As Hayes reveals, the issue is less about the number of people we pack onto trains, roads, and so on, but rather about how we view public space, our fellow citizens, and indeed our common humanity. Why today is the crowded metropolis something to fear rather than to accept, or even celebrate?
