The year cities ate the world (Edition Introduction)
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Julianne Schultz
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Julianne Schultz's biography and other articles by this writer
In 1853 Georges-Eugène Haussmann was given what a lesser man would have considered an impossible task – the transformation of Paris. Two years after his coup d'état Emperor Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte set Baron Haussmann a series of objectives: make it healthier, clear the slums, free up traffic, make the suburbs accessible, build new stations, provide water and sewerage, limit civil disturbance – in short, create a monumental city the world would envy.
At the time Paris was home to a million people, about half the number who lived in London where construction of the infrastructure essential to modernisation and sustainable population growth was more advanced. Paris was a vile, overcrowded, polluted, disease-ridden place with high unemployment, insufficient water, no sewerage and virtually no parks.
Fast forward 155 years and there are hundreds of cities that could be described like this but twenty-first-century emperors prepared to give ambitious, egotistical planning czars their head are hard to come by.
The master planner of Paris managed to create one of the most beautiful cities in the world, until the limits of his debt-financed model caught up with him. ‘City builders have always had to be pathological optimists, if not out-and-out fantasists,' architecture critic Deyan Sudjic recently observed.
A century before John Maynard Keynes proposed a way to ‘save capitalism from itself', as the frieze on the wall at the top of the New York World Trade Centre once declared, Haussmann devised a way to save the city from itself. His ambitious demolition and rebuilding programs generated political opposition but produced jobs and a more sanitary city. Within a decade one in five people were employed on his projects, people flocked to Paris and they too found work. There were still slums behind the beautiful five-storey limestone façades of the apartment buildings that lined the boulevards but, on balance, life was immeasurably better. The urban age began to gather momentum.
In the process Haussmann invented an approach to city planning, regulation, suburban development and financial management that by an almost Darwinian process of evolution has since been hard-wired into generations of planners, politicians and property developers. His can-do style, grand successes and niggling failings provided the template for many successful cities: clear regulation and building codes, adequate ring-roads, efficient infrastructure and transport, access to debt finance, the possibility of speculative profits, space for parks and residential suburbs, a sprinkling of monuments and the motivational spark of global competition to get it done quickly.
The challenges facing political leaders and urban planners today are at least as great as those Napoleon and Haussmann confronted, but few of the solutions show much sign of creating elegant useable spaces that are likely to be treasured a couple of centuries hence.
At least regulation is now an accepted fact of urban life, as the great urbanist Sir Peter Hall, who is optimistic about the future of cities, wrote in his magisterial 1998 tome, Cities in Civilization (Phoenix): ‘A very important part of [urban] living, and the creativity that comes out of it, has consisted of finding solutions to the city's problems of order and organisation ... much of it is mundane, even invisible: aqueducts and sewers and subways, asylums and workhouses and gaols, laws and regulation.'
WHILE HAUSSMANN focused on the centre of the city, the people who once lived in the areas he razed were pushed to its edges, to what was described as ‘Parisian Siberia' – at least until annexation expanded the city and his sphere of influence by creating new residential arrondissements.
The outer limits of Paris are now much more distant and the stressed neighbourhoods marked by high-rise modernist buildings where recent waves of immigrants have settled lack the uniform charm of Haussmann's city of light – or the parks, or the jobs.
The shambolic edges of cities are now arguably as important to the future of humanity as the glossy centres. Even in the developing world, city centres have become consumption precincts where cultural icons stand next to corporate offices, immaculate global designer outlets and lavish locally branded department stores while on the footpaths street hawkers who travel in from the city's edges sell food, flowers and cheap sunglasses, umbrellas, handbags and perfumes that have tumbled off the backs of trucks.
At the beginning of the twentieth century 90 per cent of the globe's much smaller population lived in the country; only sixteen cities housed more than a million people. This year, for the first time in history, most people – in the developed and the developing world – will live in cities. And by 2050 nearly seven billion people are likely to do so. Homo urbanis has prevailed.