Making cities work

[imomus]

Urbanism and sustainability are subjects I just can't seem to get enough of. This year, for the first time in the history of humanity, more people will be living in cities than outside them. But the future of the city isn't particularly rosy: in many places, shanty towns of the ultrapoor have sprung up, containing up to 35% of the population of cities like Mexico City. These are places without basic amenities or law and order; meanwhile, the rich retreat to gated communities.

Making Cities Work, a three-part series by Deyan Sudjic for BBC World Service, explores these and other issues. After the grim scenarios sketched out in Mexico City and Moscow, I particularly liked the third programme, on sustainabile design experiments in China. All the shows can be downloaded as mp3s, I link them below. (The image shows Cai Guo-Qiang's "Clear Sky, Black Cloud".)



1. Mexico City
A page about the show.

2. Moscow
A page about the show.

3. Huangbaiyu
A page about the show.

I leave you with two thoughts from the third programme.

"One way of measuring sustainability is something called ecological footprint, which is actually the area of land that's needed to support a person's life, to generate food, to generate power and electricity and energy, and to absorb waste and to provide water. In the UK and Europe we typically have an ecological footprint of 6 hectares per person, which is about 3 planets' worth, if you take the total number of people in the world. And in the US it's about 10 to 12 hectares, which is about 5 or 6 planets' worth. In China, at the moment, if you average right across China -- if you take all the people and all the land area -- the average is only about 1.5 hectares per person." Peter Head, director of ARUP Dong Tang sustainable city project.

"In order to imagine sustaining cities, we have to speak of the future in the present tense. And we have to imagine what the perfectly exquisite would look like in order to achieve the practically impossible. So we look at the future of cities and imagine that we could take all the earth and raise it up onto the roofs and farm the roofs, so that from a bird's perspective nothing has happened. Then we still maintain our farmland. If China's urban development will mean that we lose 25% of Chinese farmland by 2020, then wouldn't it be marvellous if the cities could lift the soil up and we could farm the roofs." William McDonnagh, chairman of group building sustainable houses.

Comments

[hunchentoot.livejournal.com]

The governmental and infrastructural forces at play are still very much against repopulating the city, and the realtors are still taking a genuine risk even with lavish incentives. There are lots of suburbanites who would like to see the city revive, but crime and all of the other problems outweigh the hipness of occupying a former industrial building as one's primary residence. Many hip young people do move to the city, but then move on once more after they have kids or are the victim of a crime one time too many.

I'm always amazed how so many medium-to-large cities in the U.S. are deserted or blown out yet some still allege we're the shiny-bright happy-land beacon to the world. Manhattan alone can't make up for the rest of the country. Look at Detroit on Google Earth to see former neighborhoods returning to pasture (my favorite local blogger documents this often (http://www.detroitblog.org/?p=287)), and see that repeated in Flint, Saginaw, Toledo, Cleveland, Gary, and even tracts of Chicago, the Midwest's brightest point of optimism.

Is it this country? Or is it the nature of the city to fail in stages? Maybe I'll listen to the rest of this series...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's a pretty great blog about the greening of Detroit. America's decline is producing some nice poetry! Reminds me of that Talking Heads song "Covered in Flowers".

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(Nothing But) Flowers.

[constructionism.livejournal.com]

I must object here. I grew up near Gary, and as I keep insisting, its worst days (cocaine wars) are behind it. Yeah, we have all of those abandoned lots and fields, but being close to Chicago, there is a lot of potential.

The so-called "decline" of the industrial Midwest has a lot to do with port cities and the drug trade. Right now we are not so much in a period of "decline" and death (though it may look that way to outsiders) as a period of recovery.

My father, among others, used to work for repair and maintenance firms in the steel industry. Currently his work has taken him to reconstruction and repair efforts around the southeast side and port of Chicago, where a lot of federal money is going into both reparation of the infrastructure and into ecological projects. Only a matter of time before other industrial cities see a similar effort.

In short, a lot of this "damage" has to do with the careless economies of the eighties and nineties, which left these communities vulnerable to a drug market which is considerably smaller these days.

[hunchentoot.livejournal.com]

I didn't intend to be entirely pessimistic or to slam these cities. Detroit, too, with the right vision, has magnificent potential and there is indeed a lot of repair being done. Look here (http://www.modeldmedia.com/) for some of the good stuff that's happening or even browse my good friend's blog (http://vegan27.livejournal.com/) to see how enthusiastically he is restoring his historic Detroit home. Some development news can be a little too rose-colored, but the blight reports are also often too grey.

I agree that the 80s and 90s seem to have been the worst of the decline and in some cases the end of it, but this positive seedling of new life and reinvestment is still delicate and vulnerable. I've heard it has sprouted a bit more outside of Michigan.

[constructionism.livejournal.com]

Oh, of course, and I didn't mean to mis-read you. It's just that I am from the area and our biggest "enemy" right now is one of perception.

I get frustrated because people think that twenty years of damage = permanence. I don't think so, because these are urban areas - even the suburbs around Gary are more urban and have better infrastructure than areas of sprawl, and I think these would be good places for urban "spillover". In short, they are underused, even though some of them are half an hour or forty-five minutes from downtown Chicago.

Cities like Flint, Michigan, however, may face an entirely different set of problems. In our case, it's a matter of a ecologically valuable area (sand dunes, rivers, wetlands) being misused and wasted.

Thank you for your links, though - I saw your friend's blog and will keep an eye on it. Being from a similar area, I have a strong interest in Michigan.

I haven't been to Detroit since I was a kid, but we always felt a kinship with them.