Cities in the 21st Century

Oriol Nel-lo, Renata Mele, Oriol Nel-lo, Renata Mele

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317312420
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Cities in the 21 st Century provides an overview of contemporary urban development. Written by more than thirty major academic specialists from different countries, it provides information on and analysis of the global network of cities, changes in urban form, environmental problems, the role of technologies and knowledge, socioeconomic developments, and finally, the challenge of urban governance.

In the mid-20th century, architect and planner Josep Lluís Sert wondered if cities could survive; in the early 21st century, we see that cities have not only survived but have grown as never before. Cities today are engines of production and trade, forges of scientific and technological innovation, and crucibles of social change. Urbanization is a major driver of change in contemporary societies; it is a process that involves acute social inequalities and serious environmental problems, but also offers opportunities to move towards a future of greater prosperity, environmental sustainability, and social justice.

With case studies on thirty cities in five continents and a selection of infographics illustrating these dynamic cities, this edited volume is an essential resource for planners and students of urbanization and urban change.

Part One
Urban System

Cities in the global socioeconomic network

The propensity of cities to form a highly interconnected and interdependent system on a planetary scale is a distinctive feature of the contemporary urbanization process. Many studies show that the phenomenon has intensified in recent decades, though it would be wrong to infer that the phenomenon has a single origin and is limited to the recent historical period.

Since its remote origins in the Fertile Crescent, the process of urbanization has developed autonomously in different parts of the world. Various pre-capitalist societies built cities that were of remarkable size and complexity: large Sumerian and Egyptian cities, the classical metropolises of Greece and Rome, Chinese and Indo-Chinese capitals and Aztec, Mayan and Inca towns and sanctuaries. Down through history, urbanization has had many geographical foci, has taken many forms and has been a common feature of very different societies and economic systems.

What Immanuel Wallerstein called the “world system” began to take shape at the end of the Middle Ages. With the consolidation of capitalist production and the expansion of modern colonial empires, this increasingly dense and interconnected set of networks involved all countries of the world. Increasing integration of the world economy has run parallel to contemporary urbanization, reaching its peak in recent decades.

The driving force of this process has been primarily economic, but the consequences have manifested in all areas of social life. In recent decades, exacerbation of the process has been associated with two factors. On one hand, technological advances in the field of transport and telecommunications have dramatically reduced the cost of transporting goods and people, made circulation of capital and information remarkably easy, and favoured diffusion of innovation and knowledge. On the other hand, political transformations have contributed to the globalization of markets and the removal of institutional and trade barriers. These range from general agreements on trade and tariffs to the collapse of so-called “real socialism” and the formation of large regional markets such as the EU and NAFTA.

In this way, what some authors have come to call “time-spaces compression” has occurred: a remarkable reduction of the impediments that the existence of physical distances implies for economic and spatial relations between regions and cities. Thus, the factors of production – capital, goods, information and, to a lesser extent, people – today enjoy an unprecedented capacity of movement, and the entire planet has been integrated into a series of increasingly interdependent networks.

Part 1 contains three chapters that analyze the causes and consequences of integration of the global urban network. In the first, geographer Mireia Belil, general director of the Forum Foundation, draws a picture of the global urbanization situation, provides data on the largest conurbations in the world, outlines the key challenges arising from the latter and concludes by pointing out the need for new forms of governance and management to address them. In the second chapter, the economist Michael Cohen, professor at the New School in New York and former director of the Urban Development Division of the World Bank, explains the role of cities in the globalization of the world economy and what interdependence means for the global financial, trade and manufacturing systems and for living conditions in urban areas. Finally, Julio D. Dávila, director of Development Planning Unit of University College London, explores the relationship between the global system of cities and innovation, as well as the challenges that these issues pose for the training of new urban managers.

The content of the chapters is complemented and illustrated with three brief case studies on the role of various cities in world circuits of capital, goods and population flows. The first piece looks at the city of London as a major player in global finance, the second discusses the role of the city and port of Shanghai in the international trade of manufactured goods, and the third provides insights into the dramatic situation of intercontinental migrations in the North African cities of Ceuta and Melilla.

Chapter One
Changing the city, changing the world

Mireia Belil

1. Introduction

Cities may be considered the best invention of civilization. They are made of stones, people and words. They shelter the civitas (freedom, rights) and the agora (expression, politics). They provide public space, which is a space for reciprocal recognition and conviviality, for people to meet with fellow citizens and strangers, to discuss and debate and confront ideas.

Nowadays, cities and their citizens draft the social, cultural, technological and economic agendas and are the main driving force behind global development. They compete, collaborate, learn from one another and jointly interact. Cities help other cities to improve their urban management, democratic practices, cultural industries, social cohesion, cultural heritage and natural patrimony, and help to boost and build their identities as well as foster innovative ways of producing and relating to each other. The urban system structures city networks that operate with connections, nodes and flows that vary over time. From this point of view, cities enable an urban, networked, collaborative and innovative world economy.

Despite these clearly positive trends, new challenges may require a complete rethinking of current urban models and the huge capital layouts involved in urban development that can lock cities into inertia for decades. Today’s cities are powerful vehicles for wealth creation and shortcuts to equality. However, in the 1980s many cities were defined as hell, though they are neither hell nor heaven. Recent trends and developments of urban places illustrate the paradoxes. The complexities of urban life are full of attractions, contradictions and repulsion, inputs and outputs, actions and thoughts that result in different specific realities. The analysis of the urban system and cities in the global socioeconomic network shows the impossibility of closed solutions for a just and cohesive city. Cities are living things that grow, shrink, change and evolve constantly as cultural, political and economic entities due to international flows and trends, the actions of their citizens, stakeholders and governments, and also the inertia of past urban and economic policies and actions. Cities, especially metropolitan cities and highly urbanized regions, have contradictory dynamics that make it difficult to define an optimal solution to solve their current and future challenges.

2. New urban horizons

With all their contradictions, cities are our horizon for the 21st century. The city is back at the core of debates and hopes, revolutions and changes, good and bad news. After decades of considering cities the main evil of mankind, it is now recognized that humanity is urban and will become even more so. The demographic evolution of the planet puts the city at the centre of the action of the 21st century. Only 2 per cent of the earth’s surface is occupied by cities; 53 per cent of the world’s population lives in cities; cities generate about 70 to 80 per cent of economic output and 75 per cent of CO₂ emissions. This fact is widely repeated, but few understand the importance of this data. It is expected that 7 out of 10 people will live in urban areas by 2050, amounting to about 6.5 billion people.¹ Today, the number of urban residents is growing by nearly 60 million every year. Each month, more than 5 million people become urban dwellers in the developing world. It is also expected that 90 per cent of world population growth will occur in urban areas in the coming years. This is an irreversible historical fact, in the absence of a catastrophic succession of events. Despite these figures, urban growth peaked in the 1950s with a population growth of more than 3 per cent per year and on average should slow to an expected 1.5 per cent per year between 2025 and 2030.

A major shift in the paradigm of growth has occurred. Today, the growth of the urban population follows new guidelines. Some major trends will shape the future of the global urban world and determine the features and dynamics of city systems. First, the largest cities of the world will be in emerging or developing countries. Tokyo, New York, Osaka and London will no longer head the ranking of the largest cities and megacities. They will become millionaires’ cities but far from the largest ones. Only Tokyo and Seoul will remain at the top among cities from emerging and developing countries. Guangzhou, Shanghai, Jakarta, Delhi and Mumbai are expected to become the largest urban areas in the world.

The second key trend is that urban growth will move geographically to Asian cities, displacing the large Latin American cities at the head of the list. Beijing, Shanghai and Mumbai will become the top megacities, leaving Mexico, São Paulo and other Latin American cities behind. Cities like Dacca, Delhi, Lagos, Calcutta, Jakarta and Karachi are expected to have an average annual growth of over 3 per cent between 2006 and 2020.

The third trend is that urbanization will concentrate in small and medium cities, rather than continuing to grow in large megalopolises. It is estimated that by 2020 there will be over 500 urban centers with more than 1 million inhabitants.

Thus, the modern process of urbanization that began mostly in Europe and spread to the rest of the world through capitalist economic relations is moving into a new stage, one in which the first historically established modern metropolises (Europe, North America) will contain a declining percentage of world’s urban population. The portrait of the early 21st century shows an accelerated process of urbanization centered in the so-called emerging countries, especially Asia, and in medium-sized cities.

3. Cities and global challenges

In this context, the city must be at the centre of discussion about how to meet major challenges such as climate change, access to energy, social insecurity and political freedom. Cities offer a unique environment to innovate, develop and scale up new ideas and

Table 1.1 Major agglomerations of the world (July 2014)

processes. Technological innovations occur in urban environments. Social innovations also spring from cities.

Global challenges such as migration flows, poverty, cultural diversity, climate change and governance cannot be tackled without the direct implication of cities. For example, commitments on climate change are not likely to be met without adopting measures at the local level, because it is in cities where policies to mitigate impacts and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases can be implemented. As mentioned before, urban areas already account for more than two-thirds of global CO² emissions, and that share is likely to increase in the coming decades as urbanization drives global economic growth. Some mayors are no longer waiting for national government policies. City networks such as C40 (a network of the world’s megacities taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) are good examples of the role and possibilities of cities acting regardless of policies at national level.

While the growth of cities has generated wealth, fostered greater connectivity and improved quality of life, these improvements have not been accessible to the entire population. Today 1,400 million people living in cities lack access to drinking water, 2,700 million have no basic sanitation and 33 per cent of city dwellers live in substandard and precarious urban environments (slums, favelas, shacks, etc), a figure that could rise by 2020 if the current drift continues.

The picture today is the result of different dynamics and inertia interacting with urbanization processes. As mentioned before, these trends and dynamics are not linear and exclusive. Cities currently manifest big contradictions and paradoxes. Some examples will illustrate our point. Funding for cities is generally subject to neoliberal dynamics, even in cases in which there is a will to develop progressive urbanism. The revalorization of shared history and collective memory collides with the standardization of consumption and corporate architecture. The resources needed for city expansion are destroyed by its own growth. Efforts to attract talent confront an incapacity to generate ideas. The need for proximity is undermined by the construction of physical and administrative barriers that restrict free mobility.

In cities, globalization is reinforced as well as resisted. Here it acquires a tangible dimension. Cities receive immigration flows and are where diversity converges and diverges, where the main sources of employment and wealth are generated, and where cultural expression and scientific development are concentrated. All the features and problems of the globalized world crystallize in cities and it is also here that the main resistance to these dynamics are generated. In a world with accelerated urbanization, cities become the main laboratory for meeting social and environmental demands imposed by global issues (climate change, geopolitics, economic fluctuations, new technologies, etc.).

The process of urban growth, clearly overlapping those of globalization, is complex and involves important issues such as the role of cities as spaces of inclusion or exclusion, as meeting point...