Market Cities, People Cities

The Shape of Our Urban Future

Michael Oluf Emerson, Kevin T. Smiley

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479882922
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

An in-depth look at the urban environments of Houston and Copenhagen How are modern cities changing, and what implications do those changes have for city inhabitants? What kinds of cities do people want to live in, and what cities do people want to create in the future? Michael Oluf Emerson and Kevin T. Smiley argue that western cities have diverged into two specific and different types: market cities and people cities. Market cities are focused on wealth, jobs, individualism, and economic opportunities. People cities are more egalitarian, with government investment in infrastructure and an active civil society. Analyzing the practices and policies of cities with two separate foci, markets or people, has substantial implications both for everyday residents and future urban planning and city development. Market Cities, People Cities examines these diverging trends through extended case studies of Houston, Texas as a market city and Copenhagen, Denmark as a people city, and draw on data from nearly 100 other cities. Emerson and Smiley track the history of how these two types of cities have been created, and how they function for governments and residents in various ways, examining transportation, the environment, and inequality, among other topics. Market Cities, People Cities also outlines the means and policies cities can adapt in order to become more of a market- or people-focused city. The afterword reflects on Houston’s response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. As twenty-first century cities diverge, Market Cities, People Cities is essential for urban dwellers anxious to be active in their pursuit of their best cities, as well as anyone looking to the future of cities around the world.

Part I

How It Happens

1

Becoming Market and People Cities

The reason cities exist has changed over time. This is why we must understand what cities are becoming today, and the choices they can make. For much of human history cities were markets, places to gather and trade agricultural and other goods. Not many people lived in cities. Before 1800, never more than 3 percent of humanity did (and less than 1 percent lived in cities of 100,000 or more people). This is simply because growing enough food for humans—and related activities—consumed about 97 percent of the population. Since cities dwellers did not produce their own food, the percentage of people able to live in cities was directly tied to agricultural technology and production. It still is.

Although not many people resided in cities, a great many people accessed them—to sell their agricultural surplus, to buy goods, to visit holy sites, access the region’s political apparatus, and, at least in later centuries, to be entertained.1 Cities were not only markets but also often religious, political, and at times cultural capitals. They were also places of retreat for protection from raiders. Cities had walls and moats and other lines of defense (including, often, a military). Some cities served all these functions (the biggest of them), but others served just a few functions.

Across time, because they had people who could spend their time doing something other than agricultural production, cities became sites for education, cultural production, and entertainment. Cities typically were not planned, at least in urban terms. Walk the streets of any ancient city center and you will find streets that resemble spaghetti. They “criss” and they “cross,” they run into squares, they curve and meander, they connect to other streets in unpredictable ways and at times simply dead end. Such patterns developed spontaneously, the simple result of people using the land and over time creating pathways for people and carts. The squares of these ancient cities—rarely square—were almost always the great gathering places for trade, debate, announcements, and entertainment. They too were typically unplanned. They just “happened,” and the more they happened, the more they came to be identified as gathering squares, to be preserved as such, since they were where much of city public life occurred.

This helps us understand something else about the functions of cities: planned or not, cities are social spaces. They bring volumes of people into central spots, and people interact. People interact because they need to, and they interact because they like to. Cities left to their own development—away from urban planners, engineers, landscapers, architects, code creators, transportation designers and the like—become great social spaces for people to conduct the functions of life, the good, the bad, the ugly.

Unfortunately, without planning and codes, the ugly can be too visible, deterring the positive functions of cities. Over time, more societies began conceiving of cities as something that must be tamed, something that could be designed, and in so doing emphasize the positives of cities and negate the negatives. Such efforts did not always succeed, but we continue attempting to learn how to best design cities. The original “planned” cities used two main designs—the radial, where there is an expansive center circle or square, and grand avenues radiating out from that center. Think of Paris, for example. The other design, which largely won the day all the way until the 1950s, was the grid pattern. Such a street pattern—running north-south and east-west (think Chicago, for example)—has many advantages: it is orderly, easy to understand and navigate, allows for density and multiple ways to travel to any destination, and can expand almost infinitely in size, given that the pattern is repeatable (the functions of life can always be within a few blocks of all residents). It has some negatives too: it can be repetitive and thus monotonous, and it is not always the most efficient for service provision—such as sewer lines and electrical grids—as redundancy gets built into the system. Since the 1950s, the spine and rib—“American suburban-style development” that has a main transportation road with a multitude of cul-de-sac type roads coming off the spine—has overwhelmingly been the built pattern.

The early planning of cities has led to a growth in city management and development specialists. All sorts of urban planning and management professions now exist to help cities. But to what end? What is the goal?

Any time there is planning, policy and code making, budget lines, designers, urban architects and landscapers, waste management specialists, or any of the many other professions and offices of a city, some underlying assumption about what a city is, what it is to do, and where it is heading is suggested. It is true that cities still today spontaneously develop, but this is increasingly less true. More often they are managed, nurtured, developed, advertised, measured, and assessed. They represent a substantial reach of humanity in a (at least semi-) coordinated effort to do something—be that for developing markets and wealth, serving as spiritual centers, wielding political power, improving defense, displaying wealth, consuming, creating beauty, building centers of education and solution incubators, or allowing humans to flourish.

Deep changes have occurred in the very essence of cities. Consider what has changed: (1) the majority of humanity lives in cities, (2) increasingly people no longer live in cities just for a time (say their twenties) but across the entire life course, (3) people born in cities rather than just migrating to them is on the rise, (4) more often families will live in cities for multiple generations rather than just one or two, and (5) whereas for nearly all of human history almost all of humanity lived in rural areas and visited cities to learn of life there and access its uniqueness, now most of humanity lives in cities and visits rural areas to learn of life there and access its uniqueness.

What the sum total of these changes means for humanity and urban life is profound. Cities no longer are limited to specific, specialized functions; they now are the crucibles of all of human life. Heading into the future most people, across their entire lifespans, across an ever-increasing number of generations, will spend their lives in cities. Apart from “tourist-like” trips to the countryside, human society is now urban. In light of this profound shift in the meaning of cities, we must fully understand the cities of today—the choices they have, the decisions they are making, the directions they are heading—if we are to understand how to best structure the cities of tomorrow.

In our quest to understand the cities of the modern developed world, we now turn to a historical look at the development of our two case study cities of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Houston, Texas. We provide a selective history to help us understand the backdrop of each city so we can better situate where each is today and, most importantly, move forward in understanding the development of and differences between Market and People Cities.

Copenhagen Awakes

From the late eighth to the mid-eleventh century the Vikings—the people of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—raided and traded their way through Europe east and west and beyond. Around 965, the Danish Viking King Harald Bluetooth (yes, the Bluetooth technology of today is named after him) did something that ultimately ended the world of the Vikings and brought Scandinavia into the mainstream of European civilization. He converted to Christianity. And as the king goes, so go his subjects.2

Nearly two hundred years and sixteen kings later, Valdemar I the Great (1131–82) ruled the Danish kingdom (which included what is today Norway and southern Sweden). During his reign, in 1158, Absalon (1128–1201) was elected bishop of Roskilde (Roskilde was at that time the capital of the Danish kingdom), and Valdemar made him his chief advisor. They became close friends.

In a reflection of the times, Bishop Absalon was also a mighty military leader, bringing many victories for King Valdemar I the Great. In what some say was a gift by the king to his trusted friend Bishop Absalon and what others argue was a strategic military and political move, in 1167 the king gave Bishop Absalon an area of land on the far eastern side of the island of Zealand, the island on which Roskilde was located, and Copenhagen was born.

Based on excavations, a fishing and trading post was located there at the time, and perhaps even a more substantial town with a significant market.3 Bishop Absalon had a castle built at the site, and it became an important coastal point of defense against the Wends, Slavic peoples from the south with whom the Danish kingdom warred. Just a year later, Bishop Absalon succeeded in conquering the Wends and Christianizing them. This only increased his importance in the eyes of the king, and later he was made both the archbishop of Lund (across the sound from Copenhagen, in modern-day Sweden) and helped lead the development of Copenhagen as a key military and merchant site within the larger kingdom.4 Indeed, the old Danish words for Copenhagen literally mean “merchant’s harbor.”

The city continued to develop, and it remained a military stronghold.5 And having such a stronghold meant that the soldiers needed supplies—food, weapons, housing, entertainment. So merchants gathered in Copenhagen to supply the soldiers. Copenhagen, situated in a strategic location to control trade heading in and out of the Baltic Sea, began taxing merchants and passing ships. It grew in wealth. A substantial wall was built in the first half of the 1200s, one far too big for the population of the time, but one that anticipated growth.

And growth came. By the early 1400s Copenhagen became the capital of the Danish kingdom. With the relocation of the court, and with the influential Danish navy having its headquarters in Copenhagen, the city could not help but grow.6 Mansions needed to be built, the elite needed goods and services, housing for the navy was required, more merchants came, more workers arrived, and Copenhagen’s population expanded. In 1479 the University of Copenhagen was founded. With the rise of Denmark’s great builder king of the late 1500s and early to mid-1600s, King Christian IV—think of him as the Henry the VIII of Denmark, with similar excess appetites, girth, and influence—Copenhagen became a world city with population growth and massive building projects (to the north of the city, he financed the world’s first amusement park in 1583), increasing wealth through taxation of ships passing through the sound between what is now Denmark and southern Sweden.7 By decree, all population growth was confined within the walls (about 1.5 kilometers in diameter), so significant density of settlement was required.

Most people accessing Copenhagen did not live there or in the surrounding area, though. Just outside of Copenhagen, long lines formed each morning full of travelers and agricultural carts awaiting the long, tedious process of entering through the city gate, one cart at a time. The same process would occur in the evening, as people rushed to leave before the city gates were closed for the night.

After the death of King Christian IV, an absolute monarchy was established and remained in place until 1849. With absolute monarchy, the king was king by birthright, answerable only to God. This concentration of power—and the need to show this power through military might, colonization, and elaborate spending—furthered the growth of Copenhagen, again all within the original walls built many centuries before. Under such a system, Copenhagen was not about the people or the market. It was about the king.

Nearly seventy-five years after the establishment of the United States, the absolute king of Denmark at that time, King Frederik VII, seeing the changing times, agreed to nonviolently establish a democracy, the new government of which would be located in Copenhagen. The Danish royalty of today, in continuous existence for over a thousand years, remain as vital figureheads, occupying a similar role to contemporary British royalty.

The change to a democratic form of government in 1849 was important to the development of Copenhagen. Within a year, Copenhagen was finally allowed to expand beyond its ancient walls (the much-despised gates were the first to be removed). This expansion was desperately needed, as the population within the small confines had swelled to about 150,000 people. Among those walking Copenhagen’s crowded city streets of 1849 were residents Hans Christian Andersen (of fairy tales fame) and the father of existential philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard. To put the crowding at that time into perspective, today Copenhagen’s vibrant city center has 25,000–30,000 people, the number that also lived there in 1650.

Beginning in 1857, the wall circumscribing the city began coming down. This change in the morphology of Copenhagen, its great expansion in physical size, and the building of entire new sections and neighborhoods was not simply due to a new governmental form but to several interrelated world changes. Having been attacked by the British in the early 1800s, with the British navy using technological advances to lob cannonballs from its ships over the walls into the heart of Copenhagen—causing massive fires, city destruction, homelessness, and death—drove home the point being learned across the world of older cities that walls no longer served their protective role.

What is more, at the time of the change in government, the new economic system of industrialization arrived in Copenhagen. As in so many other places, technological advances were driving peasants and farmers from the countryside into cities. In Denmark, they overwhelmingly arrived en masse in Copenhagen. Thus, the confluence of political, economic, spatial, and social changes served to mutually influence the growth of Copenhagen from a compact medieval city to a rapidly expanding industrial city, complete with wealthy neighborhoods and working-class slums so characteristic of the era. As we will see when we turn to Houston’s developmental history, apart from the one-and-a-half-kilometer diameter of Copenhagen’s city center, Houston and Copenhagen developed roughly parallel to each other, both being mostly built and settled since 1850.

The latter half of the 1800s brought substantial changes to Copenhagen. Several new neighborhoods developed. In worker districts, to squeeze out profit (and not tamed by adequate codes), developers built reams of tenement blocks constructed with tiny flats stacked upon one another, no bathrooms, and too densely designed to allow for suitable light, air ventilation, or play facilities for children. This is important because this design has had much influence on Copenhagen over subsequent decades. Industrialization continued in full force, and the population grew substantially, from approximately 150,000 in 1850 to 358,000 by 1900. The large growth of the working class and liberal voting laws put in place during the transition to democracy led to the growing influence of workers—who increasingly organized into unions and formed the Social Democratic Party in 1871.8

The platform of the party then as now was “liberty, equality, and brotherhood.” Fleshed out in more detail, the goal was to create ...