The year cities ate the world (Edition Introduction) - Page 2

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Julianne Schultz

The gravitational pull of the city has become irresistibly an end in itself, decoupled from the needs of industry. Every day on every continent countless people are on the move: for nearly two decades a thousand people a week have been loading removal vans and heading over the Queensland border but that number is moving every day into cities in China and Africa and India. Whole communities move and create instant informal suburbs on the edges of the burgeoning global cities.

It is easy to underestimate the scale of this transformation and what it might mean for the millions of people clustered on the edges of the dozen mega-cities with more than eighteen million inhabitants – larger than many countries – and on the fringes of countless smaller cities where most of the growth occurs.

It is tempting to think that a visionary twenty-first-century emperor with access to money, bulldozers and cranes – Dubai's Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum or Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew for instance – could transform chaotic cities in Asia and Africa, where the number of people living in cities is expected to double to 3.4 billion in the next two decades. Such authoritarian models are, however, unlikely to win widespread acceptance. The challenge of the urban age remains.

As Hall has written, ‘cities have always remade themselves in the image of political philosophies'. Today the United Nation's favoured policy settings advocate respecting the rights of the poor, people-centred development that protects the ecology within the extended ‘urban footprint' and international intervention to improve future urban expansion. The UN Population Fund 2007 report pleaded for a sense of urgency: ‘The approaching urban millennium could make poverty, inequality and environmental degradation more manageable, or it could make them exponentially worse.'

THE TENSION BETWEEN the bucolic countryside and the evil city is as old as human civilisation and has often found expression in literature and art. In 1926 Fritz Lang created enduring images of urban despair – which have inspired generations of filmmakers – in his great film Metropolis that depicts the soulless life of a city a hundred years hence with mesmerising beauty. Not long afterwards American polemicist Lewis Mumford extravagantly decried the ‘shapeless giantism' of the cities that were fast becoming the hub of the industrial economy. Mumford was not alone in believing that these cities would eventually strangle themselves on their own urban entrails – Megalopolis en route to Necropolis.

This has not happened, although it is widely acknowledged that the greatest cities are not earthly utopias but places of stress and actual misery. They are also the places that create civilisation, foster creativity, tolerate diversity and, paradoxically perhaps, also place a high value on the natural environment. The great environmental campaigners found voice and momentum in cities, first protecting neighbours and special places close by then extending their reach to more remote, wild and endangered places.

Climate change is, however, the new unknown ingredient in this cocktail. Brendan Gleeson argues global warming is the quickening of time and nature produced by urbanisation. With population increases and increasingly costly energy, there is a need for consolidated urban policy that cuts through old ways of seeing and addresses the new and urgent problems with a positive and imaginative response that recognises that the age of homo urbanis has arrived and fosters sustainable solutions in the way Haussmann was able to do in Paris in another era.

Chances are you are one of the millions who have spent most of your life in a city. But your grandparents did not. On a good day this seems like a wonderful evolution because as Hall notes, ‘throughout history cities have been places that ignite the sacred flame of human intelligence and imagination' but on a bad day the promise of a quiet life in a little village in the countryside or by the sea, unspoilt by too many people, too much traffic, too much activity, too much stress, is tantalising.

The real and present danger of climate change may provide the impetus that is needed to find solutions that put people at the centre of the cities most of us live in and also keep nature in balance. In the urban age humanity will need to devise quite different solutions to survive and flourish than our forebears adopted in the ice ages, or the ambitious planners of the industrial age.

So the next time – tomorrow probably – you are stuck in traffic that is moving impossibly slowly, don't curse the traffic lights, the other drivers, the transport engineers or even the politicians who sprint like mice on a spinning wheel but never catch their tails. Instead, turn up the music and reflect on your little role as a participant in one of the great social transformations of all time and the challenging relevance of the old German proverb: Stadtluft macht frei – city air makes you free.  ♦