The New Urban Century: Dealing With the Future of Cities

Jonathan D. Hammond

The world is settling into its first “urban century”. Just over 50% of the world’s
population now lives in cities; that amount is likely to increase geometrically with time,
and most of that growing urban population is in the developing economies of the “global
South”. Most of those people are going to live in “megacities” or “maximum cities” such
as Lagos, Manila, and Mumbai/Bombay, where the flow of capital is often scarce to
begin with and the demand for services is only likely to grow as these regions develop.

Nowhere is this truer than in the energy sector. OPEC predicts that demand for oil
will increase by at least 50% by 2030, given current growth rates, even as supply remains
questionably stagnant and fuel prices skyrocket. And given a lack of rural development,
growing urban populations in rapidly developing countries such as China use far greater
energy resources than their country-dwelling counterparts. (This is in contrast to many
developing countries – particularly the United States and Canada, where standards of
living are relatively high and equitable, farming and other rural activities have become
highly industrialized, and energy use in city centers is considerably more efficient in
terms of land area than it is in the sprawling countryside and suburban areas.)

To make matters worse, the poorest people at the periphery of the new maximum-
cities often resort to whatever fuels they can get their hands on – usually dung, charcoal,
and other biomass. These fuels pollute heavily in their own right but also result in
massive deforestation, resulting in turn in further degradation of the environment for
hundreds of miles around; forest turns to grassland, steppe to desert, and so forth.

Thus the need for new and more efficient energy resources is immense, matched
only perhaps by the need to improve the quality of these resources and develop these new
regions in a sustainable and equitable fashion. Thankfully, new technologies and building
techniques are improving the efficiency of urban energy use worldwide. Energy programs
in developing countries such as South Africa have created energy savings of at least 50%
in some areas; meanwhile, LEED certification and other “green building” programs have
grown not only in developed countries but also in regions such as China and Brazil.

Energy is not only being saved but is also now produced using more efficient,
ecologically responsible methods around the world. Co-generation, geothermal heating,
and waste-to-energy programs have done much to improve the efficiency of production
and reduce noxious emissions. However, interest has also grown immensely in renewable
energy sources – first hydro and wind, now solar, as new technologies drive down the
cost of photovoltaics while the price of fossil fuels continues to rise and governments
promote the development of new solar facilities large and small in sun-drenched regions
from Spain to California. Even in the Gulf oil state of Abu Dhabi and famously polluting
China, entirely new cities are being planned to take advantage of their unique renewable
resouorces – the immense winds and sunlight of the Empty Quarter and the Gobi desert.

There is immense promise in a bright-green future that harnesses emerging

technologies to provide sustainable power that satisfies the needs of a rapidly growing
urban world. However, much more can be done than is even being considered now: given
that current solar technologies can provide up to a quarter of U.S. energy needs, Federal
landholders cannot afford to continue to stonewall millions of acres of solar projects. Nor
can we afford not to carefully re-examine alternative sources such as nuclear technology.
As the world grows and threats to our climate and ecosystem loom larger, we must adapt
and grow with it, finding new ways to build our future on the groundwork of nature itself.
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If its course so far has been any indication, the 21st century will be a transmodern,
post-national, multi-polar rush to urbanization and globalization. But this globalizing rush
does not affect everyone equally or equitably; there have been and continue to be winners
and losers. As has been examined before, we are entering the first “urban century”, and it
is the cities – in particular, those cities afforded the most technological, intellectual, and
cultural capital – that will benefit most from the next wave of economic globalization,
and it is the responsibility of the developed world to foster the sustainable growth of new
cities in a manner that benefits all of their inhabitants.

Needless to say, this is not currently the case. As it happens, almost a billion city-
dwellers live in makeshift shantytowns and squatter settlements on the most marginal
land, the only land that is affordable to them and where they are least likely to be forcibly
evicted by the owners-in-right. Meanwhile, the most essential “world cities” have created
their own islands of the superrich: they may be the relatively emergent, open financial
campuses found within or without the city, such as La Defense or Roppongi; or they may
be gated arcological enclaves isolated from the chaos of the central city, such as exist so
often in developing cities such as Hyderabad or Sao Paulo. Despite the ever-increasing
mobility of both groups, these two worlds of global rich and global poor almost never
intersect: in the developing world, the “informal” disadvantaged are effectively “written
out” of formal education, work and financial opportunities, which continue to spiral
outward spatially into the periphery of the urban regions, inaccessible to the poor; in the
industrial world, however, the poor are somewhat more formally included but shunted to
the periphery, while still more exist all but invisibly on the other side of the world.

Ironically, however (and perhaps paradoxically), it is this immigration that largely

fuels the continuing growth of successful cities such as New York and London. Almost
all new growth there has come as a result of immigration, and these cities must adjust to
this valuable influx by finding new ways to accommodate them – both literally in terms
of a dwindling supply of affordable housing, and also in terms of public services, such as
a transportation system that is doubly taxed by rising energy prices and congestion. Thus
affordability – of housing, transport, etc. – becomes the driving issue.

While no one idea will fix these challenges, there are solutions that approach
these complex issues deftly. The modernist program that sought to resolve urban issues
was in some ways very effective; the recent UNESCO award given to Berlin’s Weimar-
era public housing serves testament to that. But planning and architecture, having more in
common with industrial design than with pure art forms, eventually reached a breaking
point of abstraction that atomized world cities, tearing them apart with freeways and
forms alien to normal human use and interaction, creating in their wake sprawling
suburban subdivisions, banlieues and ghettoes that are just now being re-knitted.
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Much of the new way forward depends on context. Cities must be given freedom
not only to mend themselves, but to adapt. It is vital that the developing world be offered
the tools to grow healthily – but at the same time, they must reform so that the “informal”
poor can become part of a fully participatory economy. Meanwhile, the industrial world
must open themselves up to new people and ideas that will help build not only their own
fortunes but increase the well-being of all inhabitants of this new urban future. It is vital
that philanthropists, governments and those with the means to do so put forth a new way
forward to an affordable, sustainable vision of the world city.

One of the first hurdles to making the city sustainable in the developed world is
sprawl. This is often considered a gestalt – one of those ineffable, know-it-when-you-see-
it phenomena. But in fact, sprawl can be almost embarrassingly easy to classify: it is
characterized not by its density or lack thereof, but by its configuration. Sprawl consists
mainly of five “easy” pieces: suburban housing (perhaps apartments, but usually single-
family homes); shopping malls and other retail areas; civic institutions, such as schools;
business parks and other commercial office space; and most importantly, the parking,
highways, roads and other automotive transportation infrastructure that connects all of
these elements with one another. And the automobile is essential; given its privilege in
this environment, all spaces seem outsized, immense, and even hostile without it.

Even with the ostensible simplicity (or more accurately, the inertia) of design
afforded by this program, sprawl seems highly disjointed and discontinuous. Again, this
is by design: the strict separation of uses that characterizes sprawl vis-à-vis more classical
neighborhoods is built into a rigid Euclidian zoning code which mandates such. Beyond
this, even adjacent uses refuse to connect, instead putting forward intimidating barriers to
pedestrian entry and cross-traffic. (In fact, given the piecemeal private nature of sprawl
development, even adjacent neighborhoods with similar land uses refuse otherwise
natural street connections, terminating the road in two culs-de-sac divided by a berm.)

Needless to say, this order of development is highly alienating to pedestrians. But

it even alienates its own residents: much of the open space sprawl was designed for is off-
limits, unusable (psychologically or otherwise) to the people that own it, live around it or
are otherwise expected to use it. As a result of this, private developments are designed to
be self-contained, as it is obvious that very little of value exists outside the office, home
or shopping mall. However, in many cases, they are decidedly not.

Some of this was unintentional. However, much of this was exists as a result of
law, philosophy, and policy, both public and private. These policies of the United States
and many of its largest corporations from the 1930s forward were intended to dismantle
the “slum” conditions then perceived to exist in the city and replace them with an urban
domain whose basis was the automobile. This was in its time seen as a utopian vision: the
1939 “Futurama” World’s Fair pavilion was massively popular in its depiction of what
we would now recognize as a conventional suburban development. (As a corollary, it was
much cheaper to provide the massive quantities of housing expected in time for the post-
war Baby Boom beyond the legal reach of the city. These new homes were necessarily
only accessible by car, shutting out those dependent on transit systems, which were
ultimately systematically dismantled by automotive interests.)

At the time, U.S. housing policy was increasingly focused on homeownership,

particularly among married whites and veterans. Unfortunately, these same policies (in
addition to zoning regulations) shut out many others from attaining this new “American
Dream”. Also important were the basic modernist ideas behind suburbia, taken to their
most abstract by Le Corbusier and his followers, whose intention was to increase the
quantity of valuable public space and personal privacy, but who broke from the original
modernist convention by developing an aesthetic program of disconnected architectural
forms that have very little relationship to each other, much less to the user, whose
consideration should be paramount in any work of planning. It will take a significant
effort in the 21st century to undo these mistakes, however well-intended, of the 20th.