A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg

23 October 2015The Just City EssaysAfrica, Justice, Participation/Democracy, Planning, PolicyBen Bradlow

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Introduction, Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen and David Maddox Tearing down Invisible Walls Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, Toni L. Griffin In It Together, Lesley Lokko Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame, Carla Sutherland Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, Darnell Moore Ceci n'est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris, François Mancebo Reinvigorating Democracy Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century, Lorena Zárate How to Build a New Civic Infrastructure, Ben Hecht Turning to the Flip Side, Maruxa Cardama A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society, Marcelo Lopes de Souza Public Imagination, Citizenship and an Urgent Call for Justice, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Designing for Agency Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination, Mahim Maher Up from the Basement: The Artist and the Making of the Just City, Theaster Gates Justice that Serves People, Not Institutions, Mirna D. Goransky Resistance, Education and the Collective Will, Jack Travis Inclusive Growth The Case for All-In Cities, Angela Glover Blackwell A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, Benjamin Bradlow Creating Universal Goals for Universal Growth, Betsy Hodges The Long Ride, Scot T. Spencer Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China, Pengfei XIE The Big Detox A City that is Blue, Green and Just All Over, Cecilia P. Herzog An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, Mindy Thompson Fullilove Justice from the Ground Up, Julie Bargmann Elevating Planning and Design Why Design Matters, Jason Schupbach Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right, P.K. Das Home Grown Justice in a Legacy City, Karen Freeman-Wilson Epilogue: Cities in Imagination, David Maddox

There are two main legacies that define urban inequality in South Africa: housing and transport. Apartheid was not only a racial ideology. It was also a spatial planning ideology.

Johannesburg’s development into a wealthy, white core of business and residential activity, with peripheral black dormitory townships, was a result of specific legislation and government action accountable only to white citizens. Black people were confined to houses in townships that had little economic value. Black townships were synonymous with urban poverty. These houses were far away from business activity and jobs. As population movement controls eroded in the late 1980s, informal settlements began to concentrate next to formal townships. The story of Johannesburg, the financial center of South Africa, can help understand how the struggle to build these connections defines the extent to which Johannesburg can be considered “just.”

Key is linking opportunities for expression of political will beyond the ballot box to policies concerning the distribution of resources for which the public can both advocate and hold authorities accountable.

Today, Johannesburg offers unique insights into the prospects for other cities in Africa. This is not because most cities in Africa are similar to or are likely to become similar to Johannesburg. But Johannesburg has a basic historical characteristic that resembles that of many African cities: it was planned for inequality. Johannesburg’s uniqueness also marks it as a lodestar for other African cities. It is a meeting point of migrants from all over the continent, and an economic engine of growth on the continent. These flows of people, money, and goods, in and out of the city, mean that the impact of the city is continental.

The notion of a just city in Africa will have to accommodate the extent to which the hopes of earlier generations of social scientists and policy-makers for rural-led development on the continent have now been rendered moot by economic patterns that are both global and local. In Johannesburg, one of the most industrialized cities on the African continent has become a magnet for rural South Africans, and international migrants from other African countries. The primary infrastructural challenge is not only about identifying technical shortcomings or mere numbers of delivery. It is about generating the voice from below to demand that infrastructure reach those who need it most, and to ensure the political will to manage contentious distributional decisions about land and public finances.

I want to show why this is so difficult, and how, in order to make the decisions that are “just,” we need to first make sense of the history that lies behind those decisions.

To consider the meaning of a “just city” is not a new endeavor. Cities have been sites of struggle for as long as humans have realized advantages to living and working close together. But the gains to urban agglomeration are founded on major infrastructural needs. A fundamental role for government institutions in cities has been to provide the basic services and infrastructure such as water, sewers, roads, and trash collection, which are required for the health and opportunity of the people who live in cities. Building the infrastructure of a just city requires a consideration of the political relationships that underpin what might otherwise seem like a simple question of technical engineering.

Behind infrastructure lies the basic consideration of a just city: politics. And the stakes are always high. To those with easy access to land, services, and infrastructure, both health and economic opportunity are much easier to come by than to those who must navigate life in the city without basic services and economic infrastructure.

Often, proposals to address the severe strain on services and infrastructure that characterize the rapid urbanization process in the Global South fall into three not entirely distinct categories. (1) The state should provide through big, top-down plans; (2) the market should provide through privately-funded infrastructure that addresses business needs; (3) communities of urban residents should provide through self-help mechanisms because of failures of both the state and the market.

Though I have observed and participated in such debates in cities throughout Africa over the last 5 years as an urban planning professional and researcher, I am disheartened at how little the debate seems to be moving towards generating practical processes for achieving meaningful scale of delivery of services and infrastructure. This is especially alarming when one considers the persistent growth of inequality and exclusion in cities, which are the primary hope for improving health and economic outcomes.

In this essay I propose a basic barometer of just city-making that can help move beyond old debates that have resulted in benefits for a few and a persistent struggle for the many in African cities. In short, the extent to which a city is just will depend on the extent to which a city has the institutional mechanisms to effectively connect the state with both the market and ordinary residents.

The ballot is only democracy in its crudest form. A city that moves towards more “just” outcomes anticipates both conflict and collaboration with representative groups of various segments and interests of society. These social groupings express themselves not merely during periodic elections. Without effective connections between the state and residents, cities will struggle to have the information and political will to address their infrastructural requirements in order to access health and opportunity. Likewise, without effective connections between the state and the market, cities will find it difficult to create the conditions for privately sourced investments that address public needs.

We are faced with what is, in practice, an often confusing cycle: just processes will depend on just outcomes, and just outcomes will depend on just processes. Primarily, this means linking opportunities for expression of political will beyond the ballot box to policies concerning the distribution of resources for which the public can both advocate and hold authorities accountable.

When South Africa made the transition to parliamentary democracy in 1994, municipal government structures across the country were in flux. After the first elections, a delayed process of urbanization took flight. On the one hand, new migrants from rural areas heralded an explosion of informal settlements near black townships and in the traditional central business district. On the other hand, new inflows of private investment heralded an explosion of new shopping malls and corporate offices that sprawled northwards. Taken together, these two processes strained the existing infrastructural capacities of the city.

While talk of infrastructure often foregrounds considerations of engineering and construction, the changes brought on by population growth and private development highlighted considerations that were not technical, but political. The challenge of the past two decades has been to link hard infrastructural investments to pathways to economic opportunity for the poor majority still excluded from so many of the benefits of the city. In Johannesburg, a municipal government designed to serve only white residents, was progressively merged with neighboring municipalities to integrate overwhelmingly poor black townships with much more affluent and white areas. In the early 1990s, a semi-formal body known as the Metropolitan Chamber represented a possibility of constructing a post-Apartheid city that would highlight principles of equity. Some community groups, key NGOs, business leaders, and officials from all local municipalities in the Johannesburg region, all sat together to develop a participatory vision of possible spatial transformation of the city. While some community-based activists have complained to me that this institution was not wholly inclusive of all parties in the city, it did produce a plan that represented a significant integration of a city planned to exclude, especially through public transport and more inclusionary location of public housing.

By 2000, the city was formally amalgamated into a metropolitan municipality, which unified the tax bases of poor and rich areas. In interviews that I have conducted with private developers who work in different areas of the city, the overwhelming majority report next to no interaction with city authorities on planning matters prior to the amalgamation of five separate municipal authorities into the metro municipality in 2000. Likewise, city officials note that no spatial development framework existed for the city until 2003, and that spatial planning was more or less a dirty word up to that point, because spatial planning was the essence of Apartheid planning. A fiscal crisis in the city in 1997-98 led to a corporate reorganization of the city that ring fenced departmental budgets, which created a number of municipal-owned entities for electricity, trash, and roads. While this solved a short-term financial crunch, it meant that operational management of the city was increasingly fragmented.

Most significant is that grassroots organization has diminished in the past 20 years. Community-based activism was strong in Johannesburg in late 1980s and early 1990s, helping to bring down Apartheid through rent boycotts, strikes, and protests against illegitimate “local authorities” in black township areas. The civics movement, as the community-based activist groups were known, had joined hands with the trade union federation COSATU to form the United Democratic Front (UDF), the most significant part of the internal struggle to bring down Apartheid. When leaders of the ANC returned from exile, they resolved to dissolve the UDF. Civic movements and organizations, which had once comprised a large part of the UDF, struggled to survive as the new, democratically-elected government, led by the African National Congress, pledged to deliver what was essentially a technical fix: housing and services for all. It was difficult to organize without an obvious common enemy, especially when so much has been promised.

Yet, despite great success in terms of the technical scale of delivery, so much of post-Apartheid opportunity in Johannesburg remains linked to where one lives. The South African government has built over 2 million houses across the country in the past 21 years. But the scale of need in cities, especially in the fast growing urban centers like Johannesburg, has grown faster. There are an estimated 180 informal settlements in Johannesburg today. Moreover, the public housing investments that have been made, are primarily located far away from economic opportunity. Building large amounts of housing on cheap land makes it easier to achieve scale in delivery, but compounds the spatial legacies of Apartheid. Despite major public investments in basic infrastructure in township areas in Johannesburg, especially in the southern parts of the city like Soweto, only some retail development, and no major corporate development, has followed.

Absent effective state intervention or well-directed public investment in infrastructure, developers have told me that they sought cheap land, producing spatial change in the city that is uncoordinated and encourages single use. The sprawl northwards has stretched the bulk infrastructure of the city, which depresses the possible effects of significant public investment. The city has been unable to build or encourage more inclusionary precincts based on principles of mixed-use, high-density, and mixed housing.

The state, developers, and community organizations have progressively moved apart at the same time that only strong political will could have reduced the spatial gap that defines post-Apartheid inequality. Across the city, opportunity literally evades the poor by virtue of their distance from jobs.

The current city government has plans for public transport-led development to stitch together the divided city. The mayor, Parks Tau, calls this plan the “Corridors of Freedom,” in which projects like a bus rapid transit system will make it cheaper and quicker for poor workers in township areas to reach their places of employment. The city plans to use its own land holdings and is buying up land around the corridors linking townships to business nodes. But it will be difficult for the city to reshape the property market along these corridors using only its existing land holdings. Tools to incentivize development, such as tax increment financing, and cross-subsidization of market-rate development for more affordable development are still embryonic. The uncertain political will to direct land and public finances toward a more equitable development trajectory remains at the heart of the urban infrastructure story of Johannesburg. It is difficult for civil society groups to coalesce around a citywide vision for inclusion in the city because of a historical institutional trajectory that has fragmented planning responsibilities and progressively shut down opportunities for public deliberation.

Johannesburg’s future prospects hinge on the same issues that define other rapidly urbanizing cities and city-regions on the continent. Indeed, the infrastructural deficits are even greater in most other major African metropolises than those in Johannesburg. Every city has its own particular stories and trajectories. Yet, there is a general thread that emerges from the experience in Johannesburg—especially for other rapidly urbanizing contexts—across Africa. These are contexts in which the demands for new infrastructure to accommodate new urban residents dovetail with severe inequalities due to historical legacies. In this sense, the challenge of urban development in African cities is to create the institutional spaces for deliberation and democracy that can enable civil society to articulate a vision of citywide change. This voice and this vision will be the basis of capable institutions of urban governance to actually deliver this change.

African urban futures are not wholly path-dependent. But technical fixes alone will not solve the highly consequential challenges of what is emerging as Africa’s first urban century. A half a century ago, people in many countries on the continent struggled for the end to colonial rule. Now there is a new basis of struggle for opportunity: urban space and infrastructure.

The gap between the slum and the gated villa is characteristic of African urban development today. This makes the deficit of “democratic infrastructure” a fundamental issue. Inclusion, equity, and justice, in Africa, will be defined by how social demands for infrastructure and spatial integration in the city are both articulated and realized.

Benjamin Bradlow
Boston

Cape Town Pride. Cape Town Shame

22 October 2015People & Communities, Place & Design, The Just City EssaysAfrica, Awareness, Communities, Gender, Justice, LivabilityCarla Sutherland

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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I have lived in an array of fascinating cities, and visited a host of others. I have loved many (New York, Hong Kong, Harare and Berlin); been miserable in a few (London and Pretoria); oddly disappointed by some (San Francisco, Dublin and Sydney) overwhelmed by others (Shanghai and Cairo); and frankly terrified by at least two (Port Moresby and Lagos).

There is a growing impatience that 20 years after democratic elections in South Africa, Cape Town remains smugly indifferent to the vast gap in lived experiences within its city boundaries.

But there’s only one city I have ever really called home: Cape Town. When asked where I am from, I never say “South Africa,” always just “Cape Town.” Despite the fact that I have not lived there for the past 15 years, it remains my cultural and geographical touchstone. Last year, the New York Times and the Sunday Telegraph both named Cape Town as the most desirable city in the world to visit:

You can go almost anywhere to experience the city’s in-your-face beauty—adrenalin junkies plunge into the marine-rich waters around Dyer Island to go nose-to-nose with Great Whites; shoppers scour Woodstock for the latest in Afro-chic design, then quench their thirst with local craft beer; foodies are spoilt for choice in valleys carpeted with vines, where world-class chefs prepare Michelin-rated fare at bargain prices.[1]

And much of that is true. Each time I return to Cape Town, I think to myself, “it can’t be as beautiful as I remember.” But when I sweep over the curve of Mandela Boulevard, and begin the descent to the City Bowl, I always catch my breath in wonder. On the left, Table Mountain with a rolling white table-cloth of cloud; the pink evening sea-skyline broken only by the umbrella cranes of the harbor on the right, and our brooding Lion’s Head on Signal Hill peering down over the multi-colored houses of Bo-Kaap and District Six.

Sadly though, my home-city, like many a family home, is deeply dysfunctional. Putting on its Sunday best for visitors, it works hard to sweep undesirable realities under the carpet. In particular, this means hiding family members who can’t (or won’t) be part of its pretty facade, behind closed doors.

One of the most persistent legacies of apartheid is its geography. This is particularly true in Cape Town. Many descriptions of the city begin with a plane sweeping majestically over Table Mountain, and then effortlessly leap-frog into the natural beauty surrounding the Afro-chic of the city center. Hardly ever is a mention made of the informal settlements surrounding the airport: the tin shacks of Cross Roads, that are home to around one in four residents of Cape Town. No comment is made about the soul-destroying legacy of the ‘Coloured’ (mixed race) population group’s housing under apartheid: sullen, concrete hostels that pepper the sides of the highway into town, and continue to sustain the drug-fueled gangster culture that is largely responsible for making Cape Town one of the murder capitals of the world. Driving instructions to the ‘must visit’ Cape Wine Lands seldom refer to the dusty Cape Flats you’ll pass along the way—home to the estimated 100,000 gang members of Cape Town—or to Khyalitsha township, Cape Town’s Soweto, hidden behind barren windswept dunes. Little more than 20 minutes from the city center, they are a world apart from the ‘craft beers of Woodstock’ and the ‘Michelin-rated fare at bargain prices’.

Like white South Africans under apartheid, the geography of Cape Town enables visiting tourists the opportunity to see only what they want to. This is especially so for ‘gay Cape Town’. Centered around the tiny, privileged enclave of De Waterkant, the annual week-long Cape Town Pride celebrations are deservedly a firm fixture on the global gay agenda. On a continent in which 34 countries (out of a total of 52) outlaw homosexuality, five with the death penalty, Cape Town has come to be called the ‘Gay Mecca of Africa’. Embracing this designation is a conspicuous part of the city’s carefully curated global image of a city that celebrates diversity and prides itself on opportunity, equality and justice for all.

My vision of a ‘just Cape Town’, however, is one that shifts this from being (at best) an aspirational intention or (at worst) cynical marketing to something that is real and genuine for more than just the wealthy, mostly male, overwhelmingly white participants that currently flock from across South Africa and around the world to attend Pride events such as the Millionaire’s Ball and Beach Sports Day. Such activities suggest that the struggle for visibility, dignity, respect and safety are well and long won for queer people in the city. While this is true for the small minority that live and visit the city bowl and surrounding historically white suburbs, it is certainly not so for gay, lesbian and gender non-conforming township residents, squeezed into the less lauded and visited parts of greater Cape Town.

There is a growing impatience that 20 years after democratic elections in South Africa, Cape Town remains smugly indifferent to the vast gap in lived experiences within its city boundaries. During pride week, for instance, not even lip-service is paid to the fact that township based NGOs estimate that at least 10 lesbians are raped each week, to punish them for transgressing gender norms and boundaries. If even one of these vicious acts happened in or around De Waterkant, the response would an outraged howl for action. But most of these rapes happen behind the windswept dunes of Khayelitsha or in the darkened tin shacks of Cross Roads, so no speeches or protests are made about that devastating reality during Pride. No demands are made on the City Council to work towards improving policing, housing and transport for vulnerable sexual minorities who are protected, at least in name, by the national constitution, which however flawed still sets South Africa apart from the state-sanctioned homophobia of most countries on the continent.

For me, building a just Cape Town would involve transforming Pride from being a week of parties and celebrations to becoming a year-long campaign to make Cape Town a safe and welcoming space for all queer people. Central to such a process would need to be queer people themselves. Grassroots LGBTI organizations have a deep knowledge of challenges facing queer people outside of historically white apartheid Cape Town. Such knowledge is a critical resource to plot what is needed to transform Cape Town. The wealthy party crowd that makes up much of Pride has an enviable level of social capital that could open doors, networks and resources to profoundly influence urban planning and development in Cape Town. But experience has shown that being queer has not in itself provided enough cohesiveness or empathy to overcome the differences caused by other factors such as race, class, and gender. Repeated attempts to change Pride, almost since its inception, have collapsed in acrimony with organizers’ protests about the need to deliver on events that will appeal to essential corporate sponsors being dismissed amid accusations of racism and deliberate exclusion.

What might help to overcome this impasse? I think some of the most creative development and transformation approaches being explored in South Africa, and indeed across the continent and the global South, are focused on ways in which city (rather than national) policies can promote greater social integration and advancement for vulnerable and excluded groups. But I have found no documentation that looks at how sexual minorities can be included in this cutting edge thinking.

But then, neither have I have seen much evidence of LGBTI organizations linking their struggles to other equally compelling social justice issues. For instance, it’s an oft-cited statistic that in South Africa poor girls are more likely to be raped than to finish school, such is the pervasive endemic of gender based violence. In such a context, it makes little sense to seek solutions specifically for “lesbian rape”.

Hence, I am convinced that if we are to ever build a Cape Town that truly welcomes, celebrates and protects all her queer residents, that the starting point needs to be to a recognition that single-issue, identity politics simply doesn’t work in profoundly unequal and systemically violent cities. That in such spaces, addressing the needs of one vulnerable and marginalized group cannot hope to bring about the structural transformation that is required to ensure a life free of fear, stigma and discrimination.

So I recognize that for my vision of a just Cape Town to become a reality it will need to involve a real rainbow coalition of the marginalized, excluded, exploited and abused. n other words, a coalition with the capacity to speak to the needs of not only queer people, but also the aged, the homeless, the unemployed, victims of gender based violence (particularly women and children), and migrants.

Now that would be a Pride worth attending.

Carla Sutherland
Cape Town

Notes

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/citybreaks/11271025/The-worlds-best-cities.html

A City That Is Blue, Green and Just All Over

22 October 2015People & Communities, Place & Design, The Just City EssaysBiodiversity, Communities, Conservation, Design, Ecological footprint, Ecosystem services, Justice, Landscape, Livability, South AmericaCecilia Herzog

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Since humans settled about 10,000 years ago, we have significantly altered and explored the landscape to create the civilization we now have. The landscape has been a source of material and non-material resources, feeding us in all senses. Ecologically rich landscapes associated with technologies were essential for all societies to emerge. The shape of landscapes along our history, have reflected how we produce our habitat and the goods that sustain us, our economies, and the way we live and relate to each other.

Every single urban dweller deserves the right to green landscapes—safe and healthy with trees and clean waters, silent and peaceful.

What do I mean by “landscape?” Landscape is the outcome of human interventions and natural processes and flows that transform environments along time; they are a dynamic and continuous change in urban, suburban and rural areas. The result is a mosaic of gray (buildings and infrastructure—transportation, water, sewage, and energy systems), and green and open areas (ecosystem remnants; parks and squares; rivers, lakes and ocean fronts; urban trees; green roofs and walls and so on). Urban landscape is where we live, work, play, learn, create and get together. Therefore, healthy urban landscapes are indispensable for just cities.

Healthy landscapes are multifunctional and biophilic—they prioritize people and biodiversity over other uses—and are closely correlated with human’s physical, mental and spiritual health and well being. For instance, in Boston, the Emerald Necklace was conceived in the late 19^th Century to regenerate the polluted industrial city. It is an early example of a green infrastructure along the Muddy River that connects parks, squares, the Jamaica Lake, and the first built wetland. After more than a century, the greenway protects the river from diffuse pollution, erosion and rainwater run-off, biodiversity thrives and people move and have multiple passive and active activities. So, there are genuine intrinsic material and non-material values of a green-blue landscape.

Why is that? I believe we need nature in our lives, and the landscape we live in and access everyday matters a lot! Every single urban dweller has the right to such green landscapes—safe and healthy with trees and clean waters, silent and peaceful. Ecological components (parks, squares, green streets, community gardens, green school yards etc.) should be distributed in the urban tissue, accessible to all people. In Rio de Janeiro some beaches are known to be the most democratic spaces, where all people meet and enjoy nature.

The market has ruled over the urban landscape, with economies prioritizing urban sprawl and segregation from the early times of industrialization, investing in high and fast economic return. Today, the city is a huge business, and the land is the precious asset that is in an unfair dispute between the corporations and the population. Corruption is a tremendous driver to maintain the urban expansion changing the landscape, and perpetuating the concentration of decisions and financial gains in the hands of few, in spite of the needs of the common.

There is a factor that plays an important role in many societies: fear. Security comes first, and what is the response of frightened urbanites? Divide the city! Divide the landscape! Live in “safe” gated developments. The market loves and uses this fear in its favor. And what about the rest of the working population? Depending on the educational opportunities to which they had access, they may have to live in poorly serviced degraded landscapes, in distant neighborhoods with precarious transit systems, or in worst-case scenarios, slums in vulnerable areas where the formal market cannot operate. In both cases most of the landscape has been depleted and converted into inert inhospitable surfaces, and their gardens and plants play a mere cosmetic role.

Rio de Janeiro is an excellent example of hostile and segregated urban landscape, in spite of its stunning hills and ocean views. The area was originally covered by Atlantic Rainforest. The steep hills and waters in the lowlands dominated the landscape until the late 1800s. In the process of the fast urbanization after the 1900s, the landscape was deeply transformed, land was created and ecosystems disappeared. Most of its wetlands and rivers vanished underground or in drainage canals connected to sewage disposal. The city has sprawled since the 1960s, driven by car-oriented transportation. The lack of proper social housing left almost no choice for less privileged people but to live in areas vulnerable to landslides (the steep slopes in the massifs that divide the city) and floods (the lowlands), or in distant regions. The city is socially segregated, with wealthier people living in areas close to the ocean and green areas, and poorer residents residing in the favelas (slums) located in the slopes facing the fabulous sights. Air, water and even beach pollution is a serious issue that threatens the health and well being of the population, both rich and poor. Fear dominates residents from all social classes. Old and new buildings, residential and commercial complexes are gated and hire private security.

How to achieve safe and healthy landscapes for all is a huge challenge. I believe people and biodiversity have to be the top priorities. The urban form matters and requires a proper balance between multiuse built and open vegetated areas in dense, socially diverse urbanization. Urban sprawl impacts not the only the landscape but also requires heavy investments to keep the entire territory healthy (pollution free) and safe under official public control.

There must be effective participation by the residents, not only in the process, but in the choices and outcomes that affect their daily lives. There is a people-nature reconnection movement that is happening all over the world. Citizens are fighting and working together to protect and enhance green and blue (water) areas, they are collectively planting food. These civic movements are improving the sense of community and the local culture. There are many examples that are blooming and transforming hearts, minds and landscapes, gathering people in public spaces to learn about the sources of life. They are even inspiring an increasing number of cities to prioritize the conversion of gray surfaces into high performance landscapes, building green infrastructures and emphasizing mass and clean transportation for all. Social media is playing an important role to connect people with varied social, cultural and educational backgrounds and enable the exchange of knowledge and experiences.

An excellent example of citizens’ engagement power is Verdejar, a social-environmental NGO founded 18 years ago. It is located in one of the largest and most problematic favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Their activities started with one resident planting native trees in a degraded slope at the Misericordia Hills to provide shade, prevent erosion, and protect it against further invasions. Others joined and became dynamic members. People gained environmental and civic awareness. The result today is a vigorous shift in the former depleted landscape. Part of the hills is covered by replanted forest, agroforestry and vegetable gardens. Landscape social and ecological functions are restored, with a focus on local culture enhancement. The mission of Verdejar is both educate and apply local sustainable development in a very harsh social environment.

The quality of the landscape can be measured to assess how just and livable an urban landscape is. Ecological, social, and disaster loss indicators (quantitative and qualitative) can be used to evaluate how the landscape performs, and how it both benefits and threatens people (e.g. biodiversity, waters, air, Urban Heat Islands, well-being and happiness, health, access to green public spaces, mobility, degree of concentration/pulverization of land ownership, floods and landslides). Freiburg, Germany is a pioneer green city, where residents articulated to fight against a nuclear power in their vicinity in the 1970’s. The city is now a reference on green technologies, but not only. It has developed new green districts based on landscape planning and design, as Rieselfeld and Vauban. The development strategy was to sell the public land in small lots, combining privately financed and subsidized housing construction. The districts’ landscapes have integrated built and green areas, natural drainage systems, bioclimatic architecture, clean energy and transportation. The results are high living standards in safe, healthy, socially active and ecological diverse landscapes for all.

In the current scenario, the risk of extreme weather events affect mostly—but not only—poor and vulnerable people. Adaptation of cities to a changing climate based on ecosystems is a smart decision and residents must be aware of how the landscape can be planned and managed, know what is at stake, and decide on what they want for now and for their future. I believe Verdejar is an excellent model of how ecological education and resident’s engagement valued and transformed the landscape into a more resilient and adaptive form, where heat waves, strong storm threats and pollution are mitigated.

Ecological landscape planning and design with the introduction of green infrastructure have a great potential to reshape lifeless cityscapes, regenerating natural processes and functions, enhancing people’s lives. In Seattle the Thornton Creek landscape project regenerated a water course that was buried under a parking lot, with community’s participation reaching public and private goals to support economic development and environmental sustainability.

Committed interdisciplinary practitioners and scientists’ teams, stakeholders representing all segments of society with a deep landscape comprehension, combined with education and engagement of decision makers may be a strategic approach to leverage the urban transformation we urgently need.

I believe it is time to reshape our modern paved urban landscapes that reflect the social and ecological predatory society we have been living in for the last two centuries. We must recreate resourceful new habitats for all of us, and for the biodiversity we depend upon.

My vision of a just city has a green-blue landscape that permeates human interventions, and offers well being for all residents on a daily basis. This landscape has clean waters surrounded by greenways, mimics nature and the natural flows, is full of life, and connects people and biodiversity in urban environments. The green landscape incorporates built structures with green roofs and walls, has productive gardens and the aesthetics looks like the native ecosystems, requiring low maintenance. The landscape is essential to enable all urbanites to understand how biodiversity and waters are critical to just, safe, prosperous, sustainable, resilient, and livable cities.

Cecilia Herzog
Rio de Janeiro

Paleo Cities and the Return of the Hunter Gatherer

21 October 2015Essay, Science & ToolsAwareness, Biodiversity, Biophilia, Experiencing Nature, What is urban nature?Russell Galt

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Why do you feel and behave the way you do?

Have you ever noticed how incredibly adept you are at bargain-hunting in the local supermarket; beachcombing for washed up treasures; or foraging for mushrooms, nuts, and berries? Have you ever wondered why sweet melodies of birdsong and fertile meadows of fragrant flowers lull you into a serene sense of security? Or why you so readily disclose secrets to a barber or hairdresser?

Are you familiar with the rush of adrenaline, tunnelling of vision and sharpening of focus that attends the sudden tightening of a fishing line, the spotting of a stag in the mist, the aiming of an arrow, or the placement of a penalty kick? Are you familiar with that ecstatic trancelike state of mind in which your feet need neither encouragement nor instruction to hurtle up steep mountain trails in pursuit of some invisible quarry?

When a dark shadow passes overhead, do you flinch with panic as if being preyed upon? When the traffic growls beneath your office window, do you feel anxious and irritable as if threatened by wild beasts?

How easily do you lose track of time staring into the warm flames of a log fire, perhaps enthralled by a storyteller? How often do you jolt out of sleep having dreamt of falling from a high branch or cave ledge, only to find yourself lying safely on a mattress? Do you struggle to fall asleep when the moon is full?

Why do you take such an interest in nature; in observing and contemplating species and their ecological interactions—which trees bear fruit, where a bird builds its nest, when a pod of dolphins enters the bay? Why do you watch Animal Planet, book expensive wildlife safaris or read articles on The Nature of Cities?

Perhaps these feelings and behaviours are relics of our deep evolutionary past.

Try as you might, you’re no urbanite

Between 7 and 10 million years ago, our primate ancestors split from the line that led to our closest ape relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos (Hecht 2015). By 4.4 million years ago, our ancestors were walking upright, and by 1 million years ago, their brains were very much larger than those of other apes and they were able to use fire, fashion tools, hunt animals, gather wild foods and live in social groups (White et al. 2009). Agriculture appeared and began spreading merely 10 thousand years ago. It has still not reached all humans. If, 1 million years ago, our ancestors qualified as humans, then for over 99 percent of human history, we have been hunter-gatherers.

Humans are remarkably adaptable creatures. We have colonised virtually every corner of the planet and may one day colonise other planets, too. However, notwithstanding several examples of recent and relatively speedy human evolution—mutations responsible for lactose tolerance, blue eyes, and malaria resistance have all appeared since the dawn of agriculture (Schaffner and Sabeti 2008)—it seems reasonable to suggest that many of our uniquely human traits are adaptations to the hunter-gatherer way of life.

According to Professor Yuval N. Harari, “Our eating habits, our conflicts and our sexuality are all the result of the way our hunter-gatherer minds interact with our current post-industrial environment, with its mega-cities, aeroplanes, telephones and computers.” The modern world gives us more material resources and longer lives than any generation before us, but “it often makes us feel alienated, depressed and pressured” (Harari 2014). Indeed, the Paleolithic world which shaped us and which we may still subconsciously inhabit bears little or no resemblance to the modern industrialized world and least of all to cities.

The return of the hunter-gatherer

In recent years, a movement has swept through trendy urban neighbourhoods, affecting restaurants, gyms, running clubs, retail outlets and even hospitals. The growing popularity of so-called ‘Paleo-living’ has manifested in the mushrooming of self-help guides such as the Primal Blueprint (Sisson 2009), snack foods such as kale chips and coconut yoghurt, minimalist fitness crazes such as CrossFit and barefoot running, and professional bodies such as the Paleo Physicians Network promoting ‘Evolutionary Medicine.’

Proponents of Paleo claim that by emulating the eating habits, social dynamics, sleeping patterns and physical movements of our ancient ancestors, we may live longer, healthier and happier lives.

To the average urban dweller, chasing deer to the point of exhaustion, scavenging carrion from cackling hyenas, scaling lofty trees to earn a few berries, or scrabbling through soil to yank up tubers may seem like outlandish and unnecessary behaviour. Yet certain lifestyle principles can be gleaned from our hunter-gatherer past that are entirely relevant to our urban future.

With respect to our diet, we can steer clear of the artificial additives, refined sugars, industrial oils and other processed foods that pervade most grocery stores today. Instead, we can opt for foods less obviously alien to the hunter-gatherer palate. This leaves us with many options as their diets varied considerably – seeds and nuts accounted for roughly two thirds of the traditional !Kung diet, whereas the Inuit people ate little but meat and fish (Jabr 2013). We can certainly eat fresher, rawer and more varied foodstuffs; we can ‘go organic,’ espouse entomophagy, and make use of apps such as Falling Fruit to locate edible fruit trees and reap urban harvests.

Socially, we can eschew the greed and self-interest that neoliberal capitalism rewards and instead foster cultures characterised by the type of sharing and cooperation that were central to hunter-gatherer society (Hefferman 2015). We can relearn the healing powers of play and positive touch (Gray 2009). We can choose to cuddle our children and devote meaningful time to their upbringing (Newman 2010). We can refuse to discard the elderly as “economically unproductive” and rather embrace them as the ‘libraries of society.’ We can prioritize small, tightly-knit and highly-dependable friendship circles over superfluous undependable online networks (McRaney 2012).

In terms of exercise, we can escape the gym, kick off our shoes and try moving ‘naturally,’ as if fleeing a predator, tracking prey, hauling a carcass, climbing a vine, clinging to a cliff-face, hopping across boulders, or building a shelter. Exercise is not only about moving our bodies, it is about exposure to the elements, the sun, moon and stars. Erwan Le Corre, founder of MovNat, detests confined environments, insisting that “we are not meant to be disconnected from the natural world and our own true nature… chronic pain, immobility, depression and lack of vitality, these are the symptoms of the zoo human syndrome.” Similarly, Christopher McDougall, author of the international bestseller, “Born to Run,” speculates that “perhaps all our troubles – all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can’t overcome – began when we stopped living as Running People… deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way” (2009).

The birth of Paleo Cities

Readers of The Nature of Cities may wonder whether the Paleo movement holds any promise for the liveability, sustainability and resilience of cities. For instance, could the Paleo principles provide a useful framework for addressing chronic urban challenges such as nature deficit disorder, obesity, malnutrition, loneliness, inequality and ecological degradation? Could they be applied to urban design, planning and management to foster more cohesive communities, engender intergenerational friendships, induce play and collaboration, and reconnect citizens with nature?

It may still rest on slender science and bold assumptions, but Paleo-living is on the rise. Love it or loathe it, the movement merits our attention. With a little imagination, we may yet witness the birth of Paleo Cities and the return of the hunter-gatherer.

Russell Galt
Cape Town

On The Nature of Cities

References

Hecht, J. (2015). Ape fossils put the origin of humanity at 10 million years ago. 2 October 2015, New Scientist. Available here.

White, T.D. et al. (2009). Ardipithecus ramidus and the Paleobiology of Early Hominids. Science 326(5949), 75-86.

Schaffner, S.F. & Sabeti, P.C. (2008). Evolutionary Adaptation in the Human Lineage. Nature Education 1(1), 14.

Harari, Y.N. (2014). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Harvill Secker) at p.45.

Sisson, M. (2009). Primal Blueprint (Malibu: Primal Nutrition Inc).

Jabr, F. (2013). How to Really Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer: Why the Paleo Diet Is Half-Baked. 3 June 2013 in Scientific American. Available at: [accessed 16 October 2015].

Hefferman, M. (2015). Why it’s time to forget the pecking order at work. Presentation on TED. Available here

https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_why_it_s_time_to_forget_the_pecking_order_at_work?language=en

Gray, P. (2009). Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence. American Journal of Play, 1, 476-522.

Newman, S. (2010). Raising Baby Hunter-Gatherer Style: Can today’s parents follow our ancestors’ parenting practices? 12 October 2015. Available here

McRaney, D. (2012). You are not so smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself (Oxford: Oneworld Publications).

McDougall, C. (2009). Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (New York: Random House Inc.).

Cities in Imagination

21 October 2015Art & Awareness, People & Communities, Place & Design, Science & Tools, The Just City EssaysArt, Communities, Justice, Livability, Participation/Democracy, Resilience, SustainabilityDavid Maddox

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Resilience is the word of the decade, as sustainability was in previous decades. No doubt, our view of the kind and quality of cities we as societies want to build will continue to evolve and inspire new descriptive goals. Surely we have not lost our desire for sustainable cities, with ecological footprints we can afford, even though our focus has been on resilience, after what seems like a relentless drum beat of natural disasters around the world. The search for terms begs the question: what are the cities we want to create in the future? What is their nature? What are the cities in which we want to live? Certainly these cities are sustainable, since we want our cities to balance consumption and resources so that they can last into the future. Certainly they are resilient, so our cities are still in existence after the next 100-year storm, now due every few years. And yet…as we build this vision we know that cities must also be livable. Indeed, we must view livability as a third indispensible leg supporting the cities of our dreams: resilient + sustainable + livable.

A key problem for the idea of a “just city” is that it works so well in metaphor. Making a reality of justice is harder.

But we have to hope that justice hasn’t gone out of style. Because while resilience is the word of the decade, we’ve struggled with just cities for a much longer time. Largely we have come up short.

So this imagining needs a fourth leg. These are the cities of our dreams: resilient, sustainable, livable, just.

Let’s imagine.

We can imagine sustainable cities—ones that can persist in energy, food and ecological balance—that are nevertheless brittle, socially or infrastructurally, to shocks and major perturbations. That is, they are not resilient. Such cities are not truly sustainable, of course—because they will be crushed by major perturbations they’re not in it for the long term—but their lack of sustainability is for reasons beyond the usually definitions of energy and food systems. We can imagine resilient cities—especially cities that are made so through extraordinary and expensive works of grey infrastructure—that are not sustainable from the point of view of energy consumption, food security, economy, or other resources.

We can imagine livable cities that are neither resilient nor sustainable.

And, it is easy to imagine resilient and sustainable cities that are not livable — and so are not truly sustainable.

Easiest of all is to imagine cities of injustice, because they exist all around us. The nature of their injustice may be difficult to solve or even comprehend within our systems of economy and government, but it’s easy to see.

The point is that we must conceive and build our urban areas based on a vision of the future that creates cities that are resilient + sustainable + livable + just. No one of these is sufficient for our dream cities of the future. Yet we often pursue these four elements on independent tracks, with separate government agencies pursuing one or another and NGOs and community organizations devoted to a single track. Of course, many cities around the world don’t really have the resources to make progress in any of the four.

Metaphor

A key problem for us, in all of these concepts, is that they exist so beautifully in the realm of metaphor. They work in metaphor. Everyone can agree that “resilience” is a good thing. Who wouldn’t want that? Raise your hand.

I thought so.

But an operational definition is really about difficult choices. Bringing a word like resilience—or sustainability, or livability, or justice—down from the realm of metaphor is hard because it quickly becomes clear that it is about nothing else but difficult choices. Choices that often produce winners and losers. We have to be specific about the choices involved in resilience or sustainability or livability or justice, and the trade-offs they imply. As societies we have to be explicit about these trade-offs—about their consequences. I think often we don’t have open and fair conversations about these issues because we don’t want to know about these trade offs, maybe not so much because we care about the losers, but because the winners of the world have so much to lose. Think developers who consume green space—often with the government’s blessing—without concern for sustainability issues or accommodations for the less wealthy. Or the growth- and consumption-obsessed nations driving the climate change that may destroy communities around the world, communities that have little responsibility that climate change.

Green

Most people in my circles make strong claims about the critical value of nature and ecosystems. Nature is thought to provide key benefits for resilience, such as technical aid to storm water management. Nature—and we way we use it—is the key foundation to sustainability. Nature cleans the air and water. It provides food. Nature provides beauty and serenity for people. This is all to say that nature and “green” provide immense and diverse benefits to societies, cities, and their people.

Do we believe these benefits are real? Are true? I do. If we believe in these benefits, then who should have access to them? Everyone. Does everyone have access to these benefits? No. That’s as true in Cape Town as it is in Los Angeles or Manchester.

If the benefits of green are true—in the broad sense of nature and in our approach to the built environment—then it is clear that issues of green and nature are also questions of justice, and that there is a key and essential role for nature to play in the notion of just cities.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has long had a definition of environmental justice. It intends to specifically address the fact that environmental “bads”—dumps, incinerators, legacies of industrial pollution, and so on—are disproportionally placed in poorer neighborhoods. That’s a fact that results from a host of reasons: inadvertent, economic, political and sometimes more cynical. Here is the EPA’s definition. Environmental justice will achieved:

…when everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn and work.

Many have written about the limits of this definition, although to me it is pretty strong and progressive, especially the part about decision-making. But it lacks the idea that everyone also deserves equal and fair access to environmental “goods” and the services they provide: healthy food, resilience to storms, clean air and water, parks, beauty. So an improvement to the definition, a more complete manifesto of belief, would be that environmental justice is achieved:

…when everyone enjoys the same degree of strong protection from environmental and health hazards, the same high level access to all the various services and benefits that nature can provide, and equal access to the decision-making processes for both to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, work, and prosper.

Although some of the world’s cities are better than others in fulfilling this dream, probably none fully achieve it, although more embrace the idea of it. Most don’t even come close.

For example, there is a crisis of open space in many of the world’s cities. My city, New York, offers about 4m² of open space per capita in the form of parks and plazas. Although the distribution of this open space is not entirely equitable (and some of the parks in poorer neighborhoods are of less quality) New York is to be commended for an explicit PlaNYC (New York’s long term sustainability plan) goal that says every New Yorker should live within a ten-minute walk of a park. We’re about 85 percent of the way to achieving this goal. This is the kind of specificity that can take green’s contribution to livability down from the level of metaphor and into on-the-ground evaluation and action.

Many of the world’s cities don’t fare so well. Although New York is a fairly dense city, Mumbai has 1 percent of the open space per person that New York has, its public commons gobbled up by cozy and opaque relationships between government and developers.

Not that the United States has so much to brag about. The Washington Post reported that in Washington DC there is a strong correlation between tree canopy and average income—the richer people get the benefit of trees. In Los Angeles, areas dominated by Latinos or African Americans have dramatically lower access to parks (as measured by park acres per 1,000 children) than areas dominated by whites. Countywide only 36 percent of Los Angelenos have close access to a park.

These are patterns the world over: when there are open spaces and ecosystem services at all, they tend to be for the benefit of richer or more connected people. This has to change in any city we would call just.

Values

“It is difficult to take in all the glory of the Dandelion, as it is to take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.”

Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) is legendary for his watercolor landscapes, painted near his Buffalo, NY, home. He was also a great journalist and over his lifetime wrote over 10,000 pages in various handmade volumes. It was there, on 5 May 1963, that he wrote the quote above.

And so they are difficult to take in, both for their beauty and their complexity. How can you describe and assess them? Convey them to one who hasn’t seen? You finally stumble, awestruck, into saying that they are “beautiful,” or “majestic,” or just “amazing.” But all of us—as scientists, decision-makers, participating citizens—typically have to comprehend, describe and quantify such entities and then communicate the results in ways that aren’t hopelessly obscure—that are somehow specific and not just metaphorical. That is, we need to communicate a very complicated thing in a simple, essential and, above all, useful way.

We need to communicate what we value and build our cities accordingly.

Words like improvisation and imagination and intuition can sound awkward in the context of city-building and policy. Yet these are the very abilities that we require to be able to see past and beyond the details—this object is here, that process is there—to create and understand how a vast and majestic thing works and how it might change.

Perspective is another important word—a sense of what you value in the vision you are creating. The Dandelion seeds are close up in Burchfield’s picture. He values them. The sky is there too. You need to see the patterns and perspective and not only the details—the beating of the heart and not just the heart’s location in the chest.

How do you “take in” a complicated multidimensional thing like a mountain? Or a park? Or a community garden? Or a city? Or justice? It starts with an act of imagination.

It is this act that requires of us that we imagine, in specific terms, what the just city would look like. I think it would look something like the modified EPA definition I presented above. We already know what this just city doesn’t look like. You probably just have to drive around your own city. (My apologies if your city has solved this. Shout your solution from all the rooftops and soapboxes. The world needs to know.)

We need the imagination to dream about what this just city looks like, the nature of it, if you will. And then we need the courage to make it happen on the ground, by creating actual urban plans that address justice explicitly, that put justice into literal practice, in law and regulation and real action, the imagining of, say, the EPA definition, in detail, in all cities around the world.

To say this requires a sense of hope. Given the distance we have to travel to achieve just cities, in greenness or most any other sense, we have to hope.

A closing idea from Buzz Holling

One key [to resilience] is maybe best captured by the word “hope.”

Although Buzz Holling was an original elucidator of the ecological resilience concept, here he used a word that is fundamentally a human concept. What does it mean to hope? At its most basic, it is a desire for and the belief in the possibility of a certain good outcome.

So, here’s my vision of the just city. It’s green. It’s full of nature’s benefits, accessible to all. It is resilient, and sustainable, and livable, and just. It is a city that has a clear and grounded vision of what these words mean. It acts on justice and the place of nature in the city. It has the hope to believe that these things can can be achieved, and the courage and faith to bring them to life.

David Maddox
New York

Ceci n’est pas une pipe: Unpacking Injustice in Paris

21 October 2015Europe, People & Communities, Place & Design, The Just City EssaysCommunities, Design, Development, Europe, Green Infrastructure, Justice, Livability, Participation/Democracy, Pollution, socialFrancois Mancebo

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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“We all know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?” says a famous Zen Koan. At first consideration, it seems impossible to conjecture about the “just city” without having already in mind what is an “unjust city,” and vice versa. But my opinion is that this is wrong: It is possible to define what a “just city” is per se. To give flesh and substance to this essay I will focus on Paris and sustainability. First, because they are my fields of expertise, but also because sustainability and justice are two alleged priorities cited lavishly by the planners and elected officials to promote their urban policies. Their doxa considers that these two priorities are perfectly synergistic, but they are not. Planning for one may produce redlines in the other: sustainable policies often increase social injustice, as shown by Elizabeth Burton in a large sample of UK cities, or by Neil Smith when he denounces the veil thrown over profoundly unfair environmental dynamics that involve the departure of socially vulnerable people out of newly gentrified ecological neighborhoods. In fact sustainability and justice are like two rival brothers, and combining them in urban policies is certainly challenging.

It’s sitting everyone at the table, so that all the inhabitants understand that the urban affairs are also their affairs. It is about erasing the invisible walls.

One among the many challenges of urban sustainability is reestablishing the inclusiveness of the urban fabric instead of just popping-up buildings and projects. But generally, it doesn’t work like that. Mayors, representatives and other elected officials adore showcasing constructions, and they love them brand new. They are so much more visible. They are less interested in urban design and holistic approaches, which are more important to foster sustainability but harder to implement and less profitable as an electoral issue.

Thus, a sustainable city should result from the confrontation—or the synergy—of choices made by multiple actors, each acting for its own concern. But usually, only elected officials, developers and technical staff are invited at the table, which is a big mistake. All those who are affected by the decisions should be involved in the process of decision-making, as shown by the failure of the Trames Vertes et Bleues (Green and Blue Grid) in the region of Paris (a land management tool for the preservation of biodiversity). Local and regional authorities forgot a few things when fixing them. They forgot that livability, justice and sustainability are technically three different things, but three things that should contribute together to what the people affected by their policies will call a “good environment.” A “good environment” is one in which the improvement of environmental conditions stricto sensu (water quality, air, biodiversity, etc.) leads to improved living conditions. A polluted environment can be a place where life is good. Conversely, an environment with clean air and clean water can be quite intolerable as evidenced by windswept segregated social-housing complexes settled in the middle of nowhere, where the quality of life is low. The developers of Trames Vertes et Bleues just didn’t care to ask the people what a “good environment” was for them, even less did they make room for them at the decision-making table, as I explained in a recent paper. Do you know that the current regional master plan of Paris proposes—as an important mean to foster sustainability—a quantitative objective of 10m² of public green area per inhabitant? As though it were sufficient to display “green” to become suddenly sustainable. Amazing, isn’t it?

In fact, urban sustainability should be about designing a new social contract that addresses the following questions: What type of society do we want to live in? Which compromises are necessary between the goals and interests of the different actors?

Well, the very notion of a social contract has a lot to do with justice—at least social justice—right? Which raises a tricky issue: What can we say about “Justice and the City?” (No, it is not a new sitcom, it is a real question.)

Let me dig into my own history to answer this question as clearly as possible. I was born in Paris. I grew up in a neighborhood called La Goutte d’Or, east of Montmartre, bordered by railways, technical facilities, and railroad tracks. Not a nice place to live. In the 19th century, Émile Zola set there the plot of his novel L’Assommoir, depicting it as a miserable slum. In the sixties, it was a highly disadvantaged place, characterized by substandard housing and violence in the streets. It still is.

I remember that in the seventies the Paris City Council initiated a program of urban renewal: libraries, parks and gardens (square Léon and square Amiraux-Boinod) were created, as well as swimming pools (piscine des Amiraux, piscine Bertrand Dauvin). Did it change anything? Not even the slightest. The content of the trashcans still littered the streets. Substandard housing was still there. So were the drug dealers and thugs. What happened, or better, what did not happen that should have? Well, nobody frequented these new libraries, parks and pools. The population stuck to its usual way of living, as if these amenities were not for them. They were perceived as vague threats, put there only by the will of planners and local moguls, rather than opportunities for a richer life. It was not so much a matter of access and capability really. The people decided not to use them, because they considered that they didn’t belong to their world. They built an invisible wall between themselves and these amenities.

Nowadays, La Goutte d’Or has become a “Sensitive Urban Zone” (ZUS), a prioritized urban area characterized by high percentage of public housing, high unemployment, low percentage of high-school graduates, and huge security issues. For the record, it was the ZUS that were misrepresented by Fox News in January 2015 as “no-go zones”.

As a teen, each and everyday day I crossed another invisible wall to go to a Parisian high school in Montmartre, which was already a fashionable place to live. Lucky me! My father was a refugee from Spain, and I benefited from a better cultural background than most of the kids in my age group. I skipped a grade and had the chance to integrate into a high school outside La Goutte d’Or. Out of more than 200 kids in my neighborhood, only three of us had this option. When I wonder what my other schoolmates became, I feel a bit depressed. Anyway, three of us were going to school out of La Goutte d’Or, and I remember our discussions: Why do we never meet our old friends there? Why do they never cross the line? We did, everyday, and nobody ever treated us badly. There were no official boundaries, no gates confining them in a ghetto. They could go to the cafés, to the movies or just walk the nice streets and hang out there. But they didn’t. They didn’t feel like they belonged to this other Paris.

What does my experience say about justice and the city in Paris? It says that people suffering from bad living conditions, are not only victims of planning procedures, hidden political agendas, segregation or whatever else—or at least they are not only victims in need for help. They also are actors whose choices, convictions and presuppositions contribute to maintain, to worsen, and even in some cases to create the miserable condition in which they live. In the case of La Goutte d’Or internal social barriers got transformed into internal spatial barriers—invisible walls.

These invisible walls go both ways. Let’s turn our attention to the case of Seine-St-Denis, north of Paris. The place has a very negative image, both for its inhabitants as well as for the Parisians living outside. It is associated with environmental shortcomings due to its industrial heritage. The prejudice remains very strong despite deindustrialization forty years ago and despite many major urban regeneration programs, among them sustainable neighborhoods and green areas. To this day it is a “bad area” and a stigmatizing place to live in. It is not a coincidence that almost all of last year’s French urban riots took place in the large housing complexes of Seine-Saint-Denis. As mentioned by Susan Fainstein, desirable end states and the forces to achieve them should be contemplated simultaneously in urban planning.

This means that fostering a just city is not about repairing previous mistakes to help people reduced to the status of “victims.” It is not about undoing what seems unjust. It never works. The expressions of injustice are exactly what they look like: expressions, representations, and symptoms that something has been going wrong. They are like the pipe in the famous painting of Magritte, called “The Treachery of Images.” It shows a pipe, and written under it are the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). This statement means that the painting itself is not a real pipe. You can’t smoke it. You can’t touch it. Similarly, the expressions of injustice are the result of complex dynamics. We cannot make things better only by opposing the expressions of injustice in the city. It would be like treating a disease only by addressing only the symptoms, or trying to smoke the pipe of Magritte.

Oh, wait a minute . . . but we tried for decades and are still trying, with nothing to show for it but gutted neighborhoods.

Two or three years ago, I paid a visit to La Goutte d’Or. Nothing had changed. Well, actually it is not all that true. The environmental goods that rained down La Goutte d’Or—parks, plazas, cleanups, etc.—produced some results, though very slowly, and not the ones that were expected. In the last two or three years the structure of the population has begun to change in some patches, such as place de l’Assommoir, villa Poissonnière or rue Polonceau. An embryonic gentrification is underway there, with a continuous and lasting rise in house and apartment prices (+ 144 % in only 4 years). Where are the evicted people relocating? Who knows? If this is going to be the only result of these “repairing” policies, it really is a miserable one.

The more top-down repairing planning procedures, the fewer results. Building a just city is something different, completely. It requires involving everybody in the decisions and the definition of the policies, not only of their neighborhood but also of the city as a whole, as I showed in a recent article where I developed how local actors, non-market organizations, local communities and individuals able to form self-determined user associations should be involved in the making of the city. The just city requires the right to decide and the power to create, renewing and deepening what Henri Lefebvre calls Le Droit à la Ville (The Right to the City).

It’s sitting everyone at the table, so that all the inhabitants understand that the urban affairs are also their affairs. It is about erasing the invisible walls. In a very recent post for The Nature of Cities^. I showed how the inhabitants of La Fournillière—a neighborhood of the French city of Nantes—erased one of these walls by turning a wasteland into a very popular park, combining leisure amenities and urban agriculture. They did it outside any legal framework, but they knew how to play the eternal game of deception and force, confrontation or bargaining with the local authorities, so that at the end of it their reputed “illegal” initiative turned into an official amenity.

I don’t pretend that sitting everyone at the table will suddenly make poverty, segregation, or lack of access disappear. It will not. But such an approach—even if insufficient—is the necessary condition to design and carry out a just city.

François Mancebo
Paris

Turning to the Flip Side

20 October 2015People & Communities, Place & Design, The Just City EssaysEconomics, Housing, Justice, Livability, Planning, PolicyMaruxa Cardama

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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On the flipside you can do anything (…) the flipside bring a second wind to change your world. Encrypted recipes to reconfigure easily the mess we made on world, side B —Song ‘Flipside’, written by Nitin Sawhney and S. Duncan

My brainstorming for this essay started thinking about the comprehensive list that follows the affirmation of “a just city is a city that…” But my brain fell to the temptation of looking at the task from the reverse angle. What are the key ingredients of the perfect recipe for the mess of injustice in a city?

Urban development has been dominated by silo thinking and action, aggravating the interconnected challenges that lead to injustice, and running against environmental sustainability.

For me, in a nutshell, the key ingredients are poor, inadequate, or opaque or simply inexistent frameworks, spatial planning, management, financing and governance. All these inefficiencies put together, we get a city that is trapped in, or inexorably marching towards, injustice.

The main point I would like to make is that frameworks, spatial planning, management financing and governance are essential foundations and enablers for a multidimensional conception of justice in a city. Why? Because justice in a city is about social, political, economic and environmental justice. Once more, why these enablers? Because not only they can, but actually in many cases will, deliver better results if conceived and operationalized with the city-region scale as their wider framework. Justice in a city goes beyond its administrative boundaries. Ultimately a city will not be just if it is triggering injustice in the peri-urban or metropolitan areas or the wider region it relates to.

Frameworks, spatial planning and management

Today cities are home to half of the world’s population and three quarters of its economic output, and these figures will rise dramatically over the next couple of decades. Urban development, with its power to trigger transformative change, can and must be at the front line of human development.

We seem to forget, though, that urban development is a complex process. It is a social process, and one that develops over time. To avoid getting trapped in morally abhorrent injustice, it is about time we collectively realize that urban development, like any other complex social process, needs to be soundly and sufficiently framed, planned and managed. City and regional spatial planning—territorial planning—can be an essential enabler of justice.

The majority of population growth in cities is the result of natural increase, rural-urban migration and the reclassification of formerly non-urban areas. It is also predominantly taking place in cities in developing countries, most notably in Africa and Asia. In many areas of the world, cities tend to endlessly sprawl, consuming the periphery land and, ultimately, nullifying the social, economic and environmental advantages of agglomeration. Spatial planning at the city-region scale can achieve balanced territorial development. It can promote mutually reinforcing urban and rural development and hence control and correct scenarios where cities trigger injustice in the peri-urban or metropolitan areas or the wider region they relate to.

Spontaneous proliferation concludes in forcing and segregating the most deprived and those facing vulnerability; those too often trapped in a life of morally unacceptable slum-like conditions. Spatial planning and urban design for the just city can secure a grid that enables food systems across the rural urban continuum and that provides access to affordable, safe and sustainable housing, water and sanitation, energy, waste management and mobility. In case these were not enough elements of justice, let us not forget their inextricable links with human and environmental health, prosperity and socio-economic development, community resilience, and, ultimately, respect for human rights.

Statistics show that in unplanned cities, public green space and publicly accessible open space virtually disappear. Gone with these public spaces are their benefits for social cohesion, equality, intercultural and intergenerational exchange, healthy lives and environmental sustainability—aspects inextricably linked to a multidimensional notion of justice. Spatial planning and urban design can offer solutions to fix this; solutions that can be exponentially empowered with strategies and norms to regulate the private ownership of land.

In a global sample of 120 cities, the sum of all urban areas that are not covered by impervious surfaces was estimated between 30 percent to almost half. Out of the 40 cities studied by UN-Habitat, only 7 allocated more than 20 percent of land to streets in their city core, and less than 10 percent in their suburban areas. In Europe and North America the cores of cities have 25% of land allocated to streets, whilst suburban areas have less than 15%. In most city cores of the developing world, less than 15% of land is allocated to streets and the situation is even worse in the suburbs and informal settlements where less than 10 percent of land is allocated to street. This is a reflection of the huge inequalities in many cities of the developing world. Over the last 30 years, public spaces are becoming highly commercialized and have been replaced by private or semi-public buildings. Commercialization divides society and eventually separates people into different social classes.

The United Nations programme for cities and human settlements, UN-Habitat is proposing a set of targets for the amount of land allocated to streets and public space in urban areas to ensure adequate foundation for the city. It is proposed that 45 percent of land should be allocated to streets and public space. The World Health Organisation recommends a minimum of 9 square meters green space per capita and that all residents live a 15-minute walk to green space.

Cities in their socio-cultural, economic and environmental complexity contain systems — cities are systems of systems. For far too long, urban development has been predominantly dominated by silo thinking and action. This has resulted in the aggravation of interconnected challenges leading to injustice in cities, including running against environmental sustainability and its notion of planetary boundaries. An integrated and systems-based management for our cities can take us very far in correcting and preventing the socio-economic and environmental injustice many cities face.

On the positive side, several pioneer cities across the globe have make proof of political and technical commitment to find planning and management solutions for sustainability in its three dimensions: social, economic and environmental. For the curious reader, I would vividly recommend taking a look at the inspirational collection of case studies that the network ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability has recently compiled. This collection of case studies sees the light on the occasion of the historic adoption of the global 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, including the unprecedented SDG11 to “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable in the horizon of 2030.”

Important examples include the integral urban development project of Medellín (Colombia); the district energy pilot project in Rakjot (India); the framework for uniting municipalities around a regional food system in Vancouver (Canada); the actions to turn trash into food in Mexico City (Mexico); the integrated moves to tackle city growth traps in Dongguan (China); the “Ecological Capital” approach in Curitiba (Brazil) as a world renowned model for innovative integrated planning and management; the strategies for protecting a world treasure of biodiversity from urban pressures in Cape Town (Africa); or the multi-annual efforts in Bristol (UK) to win the European Green Capital Award. All these and many more are examples of real tools and approaches to commit to sustainable urban development and rip its benefits for social, political, economic and environmental justice.

A last but not least crucial point needs to be highlighted. Spatial planning at the city-region scale, as well as integrated and systems-based city management are indeed answers for reconfiguring the mess of injustice in cities. However, this does not equal leaving it all to the sole action by the city or the regional levels. Achieving just cities will require strong action by governments and policymakers at all levels. Strategic frameworks and plans at the national level are a 21^st-century must-have in order to achieve social, political, economic and environmental justice in a city and beyond its administrative boundaries. National urban policies, adapted to the needs and assets of a country, its regions and cities, and crafted by close collaboration among all levels of government, must be incentivized by international frameworks and implemented at the national level. With 70 percent of global population projected to live in cities by 2050, it is profoundly disconcerting that only around 30 countries have national urban policies.

Financing

Local and regional/state governments across the globe are regularly responsible for the provision of housing, public services and utilities, among other important services and tasks for justice in a city. Besides, many cities face the costly struggle of adapting to increased vulnerability to climate change and natural disasters. All this while they can no longer afford the cost of updating infrastructural backlogs. Around the globe, it can be said that on average the revenue and expenditure share of local and regional/state authorities is not commensurate with the strenuous financial burden these three realities impose on them. In this predominant context of inadequate financing the ability of local and regional/state governments to effectively combat poverty and inequality is reduced.

The highly political question of mobilisation of resources for and at the local level is also an issue of justice in the city. It cannot be left only to local and regional/state governments because the prevailing models for financing and for access to financing across the globe are leaving them hand-cuffed. International and national frameworks must change course to empower and enable new models for financing local and regional/state governments, as well as to open further access to financing for them.

Perhaps we could dream of a break-through in this political impasse, if the international financial institutions, the multilateral organisations and national governments could assess this question from the perspective of socio-economic and environmental justice for people and their communities. Enablers to reconfigure the mess exist, can be incentivized by international frameworks and operationalized with sustained dialogue among all levels of government.

Updating the level of national transfers and/or authority to generate additional income through taxes, as well as non-tax mechanisms will enable improvements. Local and state/regional governments need to be empowered to raise local revenue and tap local resources, while linking revenue enhancement with service delivery and transparency. Strengthening municipal finance is key for these levels of government to become credit worthy and access external financing.

There are other enablers to reconfigure the mess and enable the mobilisation of more resources for local and state/regional governments to invest in social, political, economic and environmental justice programmes. Improving the capacity of these levels of governments to capture land value is one. Another example is implementing frameworks for their access to capital markets. A third enabler is strengthening their capacity in areas of bankable infrastructure project development, land-based financing, and access to municipal development banks and/or pooled municipal financing. The set up of city and regional investment funds, combined with green growth funding and social enterprise funds, for instance, can also support justice objectives. Last but not least, participatory budgeting can provide a collectively owned framework for investment in multidimensional justice at the neighbourhood and city scale.

Governance

For me, governance and justice in a city are two sides of the same coin. The list of enablers to reconfigure the mess of injustice here is so naturally long, that it would be impossible for me to honour it in the space provided for this essay. Different words may be used, but I would like to believe that those who share my passion for urban and territorial development for their people and by their people would agree that governance is the lifeblood of a just city.

There are two obvious and fundamental enablers to reconfigure the mess: the empowerment of healthy democracies at all levels of governments, as well as of decentralisation in respect of the principle of subsidiarity. The principle of subsidiarity indicates that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if possible and more efficient, rather than by a central authority. I am saying that these are obvious and fundamental enablers; not that they are easy in the current state of world affairs.

Other enablers to reconfigure the mess of injustice in a city that I would like to focus on relate to the critical decisions that will be taken at the United Nations within 2016. These decisions will operationalize the universal 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals—including SDG11’s “Make cities and human settlements safe, inclusive, resilient and sustainable.” Moreover, in 2016 urban development leaders will be adopting the “New Urban Agenda” for the next 20 years at the Third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development Habitat.

Indicators that will assess progress against goals and targets will be crafted. Monitoring and review systems will also see the light of the day. Justice in cities calls for data collection that provides the basis for disaggregation down to the micro-level, to the neighbourhood level. Situations of social, economic, political and environmental injustice in cities cannot go hidden behind national averages.

Grass-roots data collection systems and citizen-generated data, involving directly the urban poor and other disadvantaged groups should underpin monitoring systems. Data should be legitimated via institutionalized arrangements between regional and local governments and the experts collecting it and should focus on identifying community-driven priorities, with particular attention to the needs of those living in vulnerable situations and of the urban poor. Moreover, data should remain publicly available and accessible to all citizens and communities.

An inspiring ongoing initiative of grass-roots data collection is the project of Shack/Slum Dwellers International with the Ghana Federation of the Urban Poor (GHAFUP) for profiling Accra’s slums, which builds upon several previous projects carried out in other countries.

Transparent, inclusive and participatory accountability and review systems from the international to the local levels are non-negotiable and constitute enablers to reconfigure the mess of injustice in cities and beyond cities.

Multi-stakeholder partnerships for the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, for the implementation of each SDG and for the “New Urban Agenda,” if well managed, will be powerful enablers to reconfigure, re-invent and imagine. The frameworks for these partnerships at all levels must ensure the engagement and participation of civil society and all relevant stakeholders. They should also build capacity in all levels of governments for fair, transparent and human-rights anchored public private partnerships, which are central to the provision of public services and utilities to urban dwellers.

All these enablers to reconfigure the mess of injustice we have made on the side B of our cities are not exempt of complexity, political cost, innovation and bravery. Just sustainable urban development is not an easy task but my arguments above show that we have tools and approaches to plan it, manage it, fund it, govern it and achieve it. As humankind, over the centuries and the different civilizations we have found solutions to evolution challenges.

We learned to make fire. We invented the wheel, the steam engine and the airplane. We discovered penicillin. We get a bit further in outer space every year. We have propelled an information technology revolution that has changed at unprecedented pace the face of what we deemed possible.

I am not ready to accept that we would let the complexities of operationalising just sustainable urban development shy us away from the moral imperative of achieving it.

Maruxa Cardama
New York

A Just City is Inconceivable without a Just Society

20 October 2015People & Communities, Place & Design, The Just City EssaysAwareness, Communities, Design, Development, Justice, Participation/Democracy, Planning, South AmericaMarcelo Lopes de Souza

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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Once upon a time the city was called the “marvelous” one: Rio de Janeiro, cidade maravilhosa. Rio was the birthplace of samba, chorinho and bossa nova; internationally famous for supposedly being a city of fun and carnival 365 days a year, it has been the capital city of Brazilian proverbial optimism. Austrian novelist, playwright and biographer Stefan Zweig regarded it as the symbol and epitome of the whole of Brazil in his book Brazil, Land of the Future, published in 1941. Sure, it was as an idealization, some would say an ideological invention. After all, there were dictatorships (between 1937 and 1945 and again between 1964 and 1985) and their cortege of atrocities; there were huge socio-economic disparities; and so on. But the idea of a “marvelous city” seemed at least plausible. No ideology survives if there is not at least a grain of truth in it.

But then, things began to change.

If cities mirror their societies, then we surely need to talk about how radical social change can be ignited—not forgetting that the cities can and must play a decisive role in this process.

The poor became less and less “patient” and “tolerant” with what they began to realize as injustice and not simply as fate. The magic powers of soccer and carnival became less effective; not only because “the people” (o povo) were politically more conscious, more demanding and less submissive now, but also because they could no longer be tamed by an increasingly commercial and elitist carnival and an increasingly corrupt soccer.

It happened a week ago. A sunny Saturday, the Copacabana beach full of people having fun—flirting, playing, drinking coconut juice—or just resting after a week of hard work. Suddenly, a scream of despair was heard. More people screaming, many of them began to run or were simply paralyzed. Dozens of teenagers from neighboring favelas or even from the distant periphery were robbing and stealing. If one resists, one can be beaten at the moment. Everything occurs very quickly, is a matter of a few minutes; the police were unprepared and taken by surprise (the police are almost always unprepared, unless it is organizing its own corruption schemes). Panicked beach-goers ask for help, some people cry in despair, some try to escape (leaving some of their belongings behind).

It happened last Saturday, but the phenomenon known as arrastão (literally “dragnet”) had already occurred many times in Rio since the 1990s.

Who are the victims? Who is to blame? Is there a simple answer for these questions?

Again, the mass media reverberate the deepest fears and angst of the middle classes in a superficial, sensationalistic way. Facing the fact that it is economically and politically unfeasible to remove all favelas (or even a small but significant part of them), many middle-class people and even some journalists have seriously advocated “solutions” such as the following (among others) in the last two or three decades: to enclose the favelas with wired rope and even walls; to cut off some bus lines that connect the periphery with the affluent South Zone and their beaches; to strictly control the access to the beaches and demand entrance fees from the beach-goers. Probably they really believe these “solutions” are compatible with Brazilian “democracy.” Ironically, they are probably right — these “solutions” do not seem out of place in a “democracy” with quotation marks.

“Marvelous city”? Maybe. But do not poverty, residential segregation, class resentment and racial prejudice also make it ugly?

Social scientists have conceptualized “the city” for generations, but there is a very simple fact about this geographical entity: it is always a mirror of the society in which it exists. In light of this, residential segregation and urban poverty cannot be adequately understood without a whole social context characterized by inequality and prejudices; traffic problems cannot be adequately understood without paying attention to the economic interests that support and live from the car industry; consumerism (or rather frustrated consumption on the part of so many worldwide) cannot be understood without the cultural framework—”to have” as the very foundation of “to be”—nurtured by advertising and ultimately by capitalism itself at a very anonymous level; environmental degradation cannot be adequately understood without reference not only to the economic circuits but also to the consumption habits that are so functional from the perspective of capitalism’s maxim “grow or die”; crime and violence cannot be adequately understood without reference to all those institutions and systems (mass media, electoral machineries, the whole penal system, etc.) which have more often than not a clear interest in nurturing collective fear (by the way, an extremely useful tool of government). And so on.

It is against this background that we should see the failure of the academic contributions to a so-called “sustainable urban development” that have appeared in the last two decades. The problem of “sustainability” is usually discussed in a superficial way because the tacit premise is that we cannot challenge the pillars of our socio-economically very unequal and ecologically irrational society (capitalism as a mode of production and statecraft as a mode of government). Therefore, we can read and watch passionate debates around consumerism, depletion and waste of resources, poverty, “cultural emptiness” and the like, but at the end of the day a certain feeling is unavoidable: most people are just beating around the bush. Sure, we can find interesting and useful technical contributions from time to time (sooner or later co-opted by the status quo); however, technology can be in the best of all cases a part of the solution, never the solution itself.

How can we achieve a city that combines social justice (lack of structural asymmetries in terms of power and wealth) and environmental qualities (fresh and clean air, availability of and accessibility to green and recreational spaces, etc.)? Considering the intrinsic limitations of both the state apparatus and private capital in terms of offering and implementing long-term solutions, the main ideas must surely come from elsewhere else. We need emancipatory social movements, but ones that do not simply resemble pressure groups and lobbies. And they must cooperate with each other in order to combine different (but complementary) agendas and efforts. As different kinds of problems are inextricably linked (environmental problems, different types of oppression, and so on), so must be the possible solutions for the problems, too.

Many people around the world have already begun to develop their own solutions, more despite and/or against the state apparatus than together with it. Some intellectuals have called this mixture of “do it yourself” and “give a good example here and now” “prefigurative politics,” which seeks to demonstrate the future societies we want through personal or group actions. Yes, it is not acceptable to endlessly postpone the achievement of less unjust social relations to a post-revolutionary, chimerical “perfect society.” In spite of all difficulties and limitations, it is essential to begin with the building of ethically defensible and inspiring alternatives here and now. The Zapatistas in Chiapas (Mexico) could be mentioned as an example, but we can find several examples in large metropolises, too. When the Argentine economy became “dolarizada” and the peso totally lost its importance at the beginning of last decade, the people on the ground (at the periphery of Buenos Aires, in the villas miseria, in the barrios) organized themselves not only socio-politically but also economically: they created circuits of “solidarity economy,” self-managed some services and facilities, grounded cooperatives, took over and managed bankrupt factories. More important perhaps, they began to develop new ways of sociability, based on more solidarity and self-reliance.

However, the naive maxim “think globally, act locally” must be avoided. We must grasp the fact that our main urban problems arise as a complex of interwoven factors and processes at various levels (local, regional, national, international) at the same time. Progressive “prefigurative politics” is politically-pedagogically inspiring, but it has its limits.

A just city is a city in which spatial resources and natural amenities will be available and accessible to all (that will require imagination and cooperation, not to mention the limitation if not the end of private property of the soil, considering that space cannot be reproduced and multiplied as easily as TV sets or cars).

A just city is a city where the burden of disposal of waste, pollution etc. will be not carried by some groups (inevitably the poor and some minorities) much more than by others. In other words, a just city requires environmental justice.

Furthermore, a just city cannot be built on the basis of a lack of a radicalized form of solidarity: if we want to achieve environmental justice, we have to see that less pollution at home (in our city or country) cannot be achieved at cost of more pollution (and very often terrible forms of pollution and disposal of toxic waste) abroad. Environmental justice (and social justice in general) must be conceived not only “inter-generationally” but also socio-geographically.

A just city cannot be a city where many people do not have access to places, simply because they cannot afford the costs of travel. And it goes without saying: a just city cannot be one where public transportation is a factor of segregation.

A just city cannot be a city where some of its districts and neighborhoods (call them favelas, ghettos, barriadas, villas miseria, callampas, townships, bidonvilles . . . ) are stigmatized just because the people who live there are dark-skinned or belong to an ethnic minority. If the city is the place of encounter and dialogue par excellence, then segregation and intolerance cannot be compatible with a democratic city.

Without all of that, our cities—and I mean above all but by no means exclusively the big cities and metropolises of the Global South—will be increasingly unsustainable in the long run. We do not need only cities which are environmentally sustainable, but cities which are socially sustainable—as places that are truly inspiring, as representatives of humanity at its best in terms of culture and democratic politics.

I would like to mention examples of what mainstream urban planning literature has called “best practices” of urban management. However, I do not know any example of a big city that pass the test of social justice in a truly persuasive way from the point of view summarized above. That is understandable: if cities mirror their societies (and if taking partial examples out of the whole socio-spatial context can be very misguiding), then we surely need to talk about how radical social change can be ignited—not forgetting that the cities can and must play a decisive role in this process. We need to rely more on progressive “prefigurative politics” if we want to achieve just cities and just societies. Worldwide, as inequality and injustice at the local and national level is constantly influenced and shaped by inequality and injustice at the global level.

As we see as soon as we share the premises of the previous account, there is no easy solution. But we cannot dare—for the sake of our children and grandchildren—to think that there is no solution; or, as Margaret Thatcher once said, that “there is no alternative.”

Marcelo Lopes de Souza
Rio de Janeiro

Urban Latin America: How’s it Going?

19 October 2015Review, Science & ToolsAna Faggi

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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A review of the status of and need for green urban work in Latin America as of 2015.

Throughout the Latin American continent, metropolitan areas and intermediate cities are growing rapidly with their individuality and particular regional features. More than 80 percent of the population in Latin America lives in cities, and by 2050 the number is expected to reach 90 percent. The region is simultaneously the world’s most urbanized one, has some of the world’s largest social and economic inequities, and hosts a quantity of the world’s most biodiversity-rich ecosystems (Pauchard and Barbosa 2013). Occupancy patterns and urban development are in many cities far from sustainable. Sprawl, loss of vegetation and fragmentation of ecosystems, waste pollution and water contamination, diminish life quality.

South America is simultaneously the world’s most urbanized region, has some of the world’s largest social and economic inequities, and harbors a significant quantity of the world’s most biodiversity-rich ecosystems. There is much green urban work to do.

On the other hand social inequality in Latin American determines that cities are strongly dual, divided, and segregated spatially with many of them showing uneven distribution of green space availability and quality within cities. The perception of insecurity has escalated in the last years to become the number one public concern in many Latin American countries. As reported by UNDP (2013) today, although the region shows stronger economies and less poverty, crime and insecurity are greater than before and higher than for other regions. As reported by LAPOP-UNDP (2012), as an example, 23.6 percent of Argentine and 25.8 percent of Colombian respondents have limited their visits to places of recreation for fear of becoming a victim of crime. Nevertheless, across the region cities are working hard to change the current models of urbanization, making urban centers more inclusive and sustainable. In line with this there is an increasing attention by Latin American planners on the need to revitalize the public space through important transformations in aspects that include poverty reduction, security, education, service provision and social inclusion.

Presently city’s urban planning is highly influenced by the Barcelona model and these results can be seen in urban interventions reshaping cities with solutions to the growing challenges facing their communities. Following this model some significant changes can be recognized in many cities. Public intervention linked to the demands of the local community, transportation enhancement, encouragement of innovative architecture and thinking, the creation of new communal open spaces in strategic areas encouraging social mixing and strong political and local leadership to drive the regeneration process, are some of the drivers observed.

The new government building of Buenos Aires city (Foster+Partners). The administration has placed an emphasis on the construction and renovation of urban infrastructure in the southern part of the city, a strategy of social inclusion that aims to integrate the poorest districts in the urban development of the city. Photo: Ana Faggi

Transportation improvement in Bogotá. A green roof at the bus stop. Photo: Ana Faggi

The “Transmilenio” and “Metrobus” following the model developed by Curitiba many years ago, improved transportation in Bogotá and Buenos Aires cities fostering at the same time the emerging of new areas and others coming back to life.

Jan Gehl’s legacy is also visible in the region. As a practicing urban design consultant and university professor of urban design he has transmitted his findings about smart uses of public space throughout many Latin American cities. His recommendations for public space improvements, based on the knowledge of how the city is being used, have become to practice across the region,

“First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works.” Jan Gehl ‘s advices in Buenos Aires. Photo: Ana Faggi

Since 1999, the city of Bogotá, capital of Colombia, has won many international awards for innovative urban planning showing a very successful recovery of public space and its advanced public transportation system. Communal spaces and residential areas became meaningful and attractive as diverse activities occur in combination and feed off each other.

Last September the city of Bogotá was home of two significant meetings: the III International Forum for Public Space (8-9 September) and the 1st International Symposium of Urban Ecology (8-10 September) showing how imperative these issues are for Latin Americans. The first meeting had the motto “Transforming spaces for people” and was an opportunity to share existing public / private strategies, seeking revitalization, and recovery of public space for and from the community. Special emphasis was put into governance, the empowerment of public space by citizens and development of practical tools for improvement.

The 1st Symposium of Urban Ecology, which took place in the Bogotá’s Chamber of Commerce, placed the importance on other bias. It focused on ecological services and benefits of the different components of the urban ecosystem. As a major collaborative project, the event was organised by the International Society for Urban Ecology (SURE), EcoNat, and the Humboldt Institute.

SURE fosters and develops knowledge and implementation of urban ecology worldwide by strengthening contacts and enriching the dialogue between researchers and practitioners.
EcoNat is a consulting firm providing professional advice in environmental issues, while the Humboldt Institute is mainly devoted to research on biodiversity and ecosystem services for decision making with close contacts with universities and ministries.

The symposium brought together 400 people, who came to attend nine keynote presentations and several talks to discuss many themes on urban ecology. In addition, more than 200 people followed the three days of activities by streaming.

Urban Ecology Symposium in Bogotá. Photo: Ana Faggi

Some of them posed questions. How should Latin-American cities be? Which shape should they be? What are the consequences of their sprawl? What role should Nature play in daily life and how we can we make our cities more liveable and equitable for bothSociety and Nature?

The event aroused much attention, to the point of having numerous members of the public involved. Those coming to the Chamber of Commerce have been selected to take part, ensuring the even representation of different society groups. This particularity was then reflected in the discussions, as the audience participated very actively with smart questions and interesting, multidisciplinary proposals.

The event was also an encouraging opportunity for some active members of The Nature of Cities blog, including Cecilia Herzog (Brazil), Martha Fajardo, and Diana Wiesner (Colombia), to share experiences that could enhance the urban environments in which they live and work.

Speakers emphasized that cities are complex socio-techno-ecological systems and that, in the Latin-American region, there is a big need for managers and citizens to consider the city as an ecosystem, with different ecosystem services that are necessary to maintain. This vision, which is common in the academic world, is presently very little incorporated into the management of Latin-American cities. Nevertheless, it is an essential tool for municipal planning and management, because it shows the interrelationships between Nature and human well being.

Although numerous towns and cities have begun multiple transformations, many of them are struggling with the difficulties of integrating the multiple aspects of sustainable development. Political commitment, the use of experience gained from previous work, environmental education, and civil participation appear to be key elements to achieve success, according to Diana Wiesner.

The Symposium’s message was this: Latin-American cities should raise awareness on societal dependency on ecosystems, as the use of technology has made us forget that we are only one link in the ecosystem chain. This lack of understanding is the reason why there is a physical and cognitive decoupling of urban dwellers and the surrounding Nature, as discussed by Erik Gómez-Baggethum.

Several examples along Latin America showed that urban horticulture can give an excellent opportunity to reconnect with Nature, Cecilia Herzog said. The economic valuations of different enterprises indicated that urban horticulture’s greatest strength is in its ability for “place-making,” for providing experiences with Nature and education, and to reinforce community sense. Linear parks along rivers or connecting small remnant green areas are chances to re-green the city. Also, urban horticulture can sustain landscape integrity, serving many purposes at the same time, such as recreation, nature conservation, and floodwater management, just to mention some.

A central concept that was stressed was that each urban conglomerate should not forget the ties to its rural area and to the eco-region where it is located by trying to reduce its ecological footprint. At this point, the conservation of urban reserves, national parks, or botanical gardens plays a decisive rolein the sustainable debate because they are living resources that can promulgate a strong message about the links between urban health and the health of the region.

Chingaza National Park near Bogotá. A vital source of fresh water for the city. Photo: Ana Faggi

A good example is the Botanic Garden, Jose Celestino Mutis, in Bogotá, which we were able to visit during the Symposium. It contributes to the conservation of the flora of the Capital District, to the environmental sustainability of its territory, and to the use of their genetic heritage through scientific research, technology transfer, and environmental education. Much more than keeping a collection of plants, the garden is committed to advising the city on issues of urban forestry and greening. A distinctive aspect is that the garden has developed a special sector devoted to urban agriculture, green roofs, and ecological treatment of pruning waste,demonstrating the organization’scommitment to mitigating the effects of climate change.

Green roof at the Botanic Garden Jose Celestino Mutis . Photo: Ana Faggi

Cecilia Herzog taking a photo of an edible green wall at the Botanic Garden. Photo: Ana Faggi

Martha Fajardo’s talk reminded us of the importance of the landscape as a common good to be respected and valued. Cities should guarantee a living and liveable landscape. Her lecture was illustrated by many good-looking projects that demonstrated that respecting the landscape is the way to create resilience against avalanches, floods, and other climate changeimpacts. Also, the construction of eco- neighbourhoods may be opportunities for improving socio-economic conditions in under developed municipalities.

Supporting these concepts, many contributions presented during the Symposium´s afternoons showed the importance of investing in green and blue infrastructures, representing win-win strategies for reconciling urbanization with the maintenance of ecosystems services.

Martha Fajardo showing some ecological friendly own projects in Colombia.Photo: Ana Faggi

Some examples of the diverse green Infrastructure in Bogotá city. Photos: Ana Faggi

Through the lens of this meeting, it was evident once again, that Latin American cities share great similarities in their cultural heritage, development history, planning tradition, and social structure, offering big opportunities to share successful experiences for a sustainable future. Following this spirit during the symposium, the Latin-America chapter of SURE was launched in order to exchange information and expertise in the coming future. At this point, we are delighted to invite TNOC’s readers and writers interested in joining SURE to become members of the society, with a special invitation to those from Latin America. Our understanding of urban ecosystems is already emerging, but with little explanation of how these ecosystems function. A collaborative exchange will bring a better understanding, allowing cities to build a harmonious society with Nature.

Please follow the SURE LatAm Chapter on Facebook.

Ana Faggi
Buenos Aires

On The Nature of Cities

References

Gehl J. 2010. Cities for people. Island Press.

LAPOP-UNDP 2012 Latin American Public Opinion Project. Vanderbilt University.

Pauchard A, O Barbosa. 2013. Regional assessment of Latin America: rapid urban development and social economic inequity threaten biodiversity hotspots. In. Elmqvist, Th., Fragkias, M., Goodness, J., Güneralp, B.,Marcotullio, P.J., McDonald, R.I., Parnell, S., Schewenius, M.,Sendstad, M., Seto, K.C., Wilkinson, C. (Eds.) Urbanization, biodiversity and ecosystem services: Challenges and opportunities. Springer.

UNDP (2013) Seguridad ciudadana con rostro humano: Diagnóstico y propuestas para América Latina.

Karachi and the Paralysis of Imagination

19 October 2015People & Communities, Place & Design, The Just City EssaysAsia, Awareness, Design, Development, Economics, Justice, Livability, Participation/Democracy, Planning, PolicyMahim Maher

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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You want to read about a vision of a just Karachi? The contract killer ($50 a hit) ripping up the road behind Disco Bakery on his Honda 200CC and the secret service colonel cracking skulls in a Clifton safehouse will both cite one vision: Dubai. This happens to also be the vision of the one-armed Afghan refugee selling Beijing socks off a cart in Saddar bazaar and the unsexed Karachi Port Trust shipping agent waiting for shady clients to cough up cash so he can escape to Phuket. To borrow from an old Urdu election rallying cry: Chalo, chalo, Dubai, chalo. Come, come, let’s go to Dubai.

A vision of a just Karachi? I am laughing. Visions are supposed to create. What do you call wanting to undo?

Vision presupposes the ability to see what is in front of you, and based on the understanding this seeing yields, you can plan with some measure of wisdom to create what you do not want to see in the future. And so, it is noble to ask what could be a vision of a just Karachi—except that this is an unfair assignment given that this city completely confounds the senses. Just when you think you have some idea of what Karachi is, the landscape will chimerically shift. It is small wonder that the people who live here are forever trying to explain Karachi to themselves and to each other, to define it and even try to form some vision of what it should be. But the city is elusive. In our desperate attempts to exercise some control over this kind of existence, we tend to do two things in reaction: look outwards or backwards.

Those who look outwards have fixated on Dubai, a long-time employment destination for the Pakistani laborer who idealizes it as a city where the streets are paved with gold. Given that Dubai is a 90-minute flight away, the elite and upwardly mobile middle classes of Karachi exalt it as an escape from Karachi’s filth and madness. Dubai fits their vision of a shiny, clean, crime-free metropolis where you can exhaust yourself in air-conditioned malls with their Nine West stores, JC Pennys and Starbucks. Dubai assuages our near-Catholic sense of Islamic guilt of enjoying things too Western; not only is the city Arab but if it is kosher for the sheikhs to order hickory barbecue (chicken) bacon cheeseburgers at the Hard Rock Café, so can a Muslim from Karachi without going to hell in a breadbasket. Stories of Dubai’s real estate bust or the effects of its sterile soullessness and hidden human rights violations don’t figure much in conversations in Karachi.

So, one vision of Karachi is to become a Dubai. Sadly, this is the vision of policymakers in Karachi and the powers that be in our federal capital of Islamabad, who hold the purse strings to our infrastructure development. You can see this vision manifest on our streets in the 44 pro-car and anti-pedestrian overpasses, the new malls, the gated communities. We look outwards when we want to envision Karachi. We would rather mimic instead of indigenously assessing what Karachi is and what its people—rich or poor—need.

Those in Karachi, who do not worship Dubai as an urban model, look backwards. They are full of nostalgia for a postcolonial port city that had dance halls, cinemas, nightclubs, booze, cabarets, promenades, bars, even the British. Dizzie Gillespie came to Karachi in 1956. Custard was served at the Scottish Freemason Hope Lodge. The nostalgia is dated to the 1980s, however, when political violence started to erupt. But oh, before that you could walk around the old city parts of Saddar and not get murdered. Now you can’t even wear your diamonds beyond Sind Club (where a sign once said, “No women and dogs beyond this point”). The lament for this Kurrachee, as the British spelt it, and the yearning for it to return, conveniently ignores that it was, as Karachi historian Arif Hasan puts it, “a culture of a colonial port city with a colonial administration under the Empire.” It was bound to eventually end as it did in a decade with the exit of the British upon Partition in 1947.

Either way, Dubai or Kurrachee, at least these residents of Karachi have some idea of what they want this city to be like. I envy them. I look—but I see nothing. I am afraid to form a vision of Karachi, much less one for a just Karachi. This should not be a challenge given that I know and love this city as a journalist can. Each day, for fifteen years, I have been editing news about it, writing it, scouring it, cajoling reporters and photographers to go forth to negotiate with it. We are reluctantly intimate with its subterranean economies, its government extortions, its skins, its rejections, its hidden mercies, not to mention where to get the best goat curry.

Oddly though, the knowledge of these Karachis has had the opposite effect of creating confidence to comment with any authority on the city. If anything, I know that you cannot know anything about it for sure. I have come to see it as intellectually dishonest to hold forth on Karachi. To generalize, especially, is a sin.

Take for example, the long-held view of the residents of Karachi and its police that our slums are the root of crime and religious extremism. It is a convenient snobbery to declare that the poor are criminals. More specifically, we assume that the Afghan refugees, who flocked here from their homeland upon the Russian invasion in the 1970s, are holed up as the Taliban or are the only ones peddling crack on our streets. Crime statistics reveal a more nuanced picture that criminals also live in middle class apartments and not just our ghettoes. When crime shoots up the police and paramilitary forces raid slums. Young men are rounded up, blindfolded and trundled off to police stations only to be released a few days later because there is no evidence against them. The crime graph doesn’t budge a coordinate. We fool ourselves into thinking we know this city.

Perhaps my caution when it comes to reaching conclusions—and hence developing any vision—about Karachi seems extreme. But even if I suspend it for an essay to try to envision a just Karachi, I am stumped by a paralysis of imagination. I baulk at drawing on the examples of cities in the global North because there are no guarantees that what works for New York will fit for Karachi. The catch phrases resilience and smart city fail to resonate with Karachi (so much so that a friend in urban studies has started a “Dumb City Project”). Similarly problematic is casting an envious eye towards our neighbor India with its Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, Ministry of Urban Development and e-Seva services. I have come to believe that this inability to even dare to dream of a just Karachi is in part a symptom of living in a city that has been forced to run on crippled formal systems or none at all. Where would I even begin? By shamefacedly admitting that we don’t even have an office of the mayor? We have not had an elected city manager since 2009 but it is only now that the Supreme Court is trying to push the provincial or state government to hold local government elections before the year ends. (In the meantime a handpicked bureaucrat, officially referred to as a city administrator, has been in charge. But his mandate is not to run the city efficiently as he is not answerable to the people of Karachi.)

To be fair, though, not all of what Karachi is today can be attributed to the current failure to form local government. But if I am to draw from the accepted international standard of having city government systems in place to run our cities, I can be forgiven for assuming that this would be a prerequisite to forming any vision in the first place. Isn’t it supposed to be like this: You elect the best qualified mayoral candidate who presents what is closest to your vision for your city?

Instead, over the decades, there has been an erosion of the institutions that have traditionally managed Karachi, with the office of the mayor being the last nail in the coffin. With the recession of these formal systems has come a slow descent into informality, which explains why the city keeps spinning. Our water doesn’t flow from the tap because a tanker mafia steals it from the bulk mains at source and sells it back to us at Rs2,500 (US$25) for 2,000 gallons. The government’s inability to provide affordable housing has left people at the mercy of loan sharks and real estate middleman who squat on state land by developing slums. Informality is the only formality we know. To borrow from beat writer Richard Fariña: “Been down so long it looks like up to me.”

In this ‘down,’ Karachi has learned how to survive and keep working. There is a special Urdu word for this: Jugardh. It means ‘make do’ or ‘quick fix,’ to put it roughly. This is our new city social contract in the absence of government. If we want to get anything which the city management would otherwise do for us, we have to rely on informal networks. If you want to get a sewage pipeline fixed in your street, for example, you call up your uncle who happens to know the managing director of the water board.

I understand that perhaps people who have lived in cities with long histories of experimenting and honing the formula for local government are now wondering if a certain measure of informality or organic bottom-up self-determination isn’t a better model. This is a position that can be taken by someone within the luxury of a working system. To me a system is a safeguard from inequality. The system applies to everyone, not just those with enough powerful connections. Inequality and justice are two sides of a coin to me. Isn’t justice, by one definition, the administration of the law or authority to maintain what is fair and reasonable? If so, then without an elected City Council with its Treasury and Opposition to keep in check a mayor and his administration (called the Karachi Municipal Corporation), nothing this city decides for itself will be fair and reasonable. Systems inherently carry checks and balances because they are premised on rules. If informality is the only ‘system’ we have then no rules apply.

One example stands out in memory. When we did have an elected city council from 2001 to 2009 Opposition councilors from one political party locked horns with the Treasury members and the mayor, Mustafa Kamal, over the distribution of funds to their neighbourhoods. They could prove to the city, their voters and those who gave Karachi city its funding that they had been gypped. Don’t get me wrong; our experiment with devolved local government was not untainted by corruption, which emerged at the smallest city unit, the union council level. But at least people living in UC-9, for example, had someone to go to with their needs and that councilor could take it to the town nazim who could make a noise in the city council in front of the mayor.

A vision of a just Karachi then perhaps just asks for a basic system of governance. Its residents—whether they drove Mercs or motorcycles, lived in mud huts or mansions — should be able to elect their own representatives. And through them the people would be able to provide their own sense of a just Karachi or at least be able to fight an unjust one.

In the absence of a city council we have been left at the mercy of the ‘vision’ of ill-informed bureaucrats who have been handpicked by the province’s (state’s) powerful political parties to ‘run’ Karachi as puppets. So we have a Karachi Administrator instead of a mayor and he runs the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation which includes, for example, the departments of transport and communication, sanitation services, parks, land management and local taxes. This has essentially allowed the only two powerful political parties on Karachi’s scene to make unchallenged decisions about the city’s resources. Let me give one example of a series of coordinated yet unexamined decisions that were made without any input from Karachi’s residents that will have devastating effects on the future of the city.

In 2010 the government created a new high density law and declared 11 zones in Karachi, many of them slums, open for high-rise construction. Height-related restrictions were removed. The amalgamation of plots was allowed, plot ratios were removed and the sizes of buildings were increased. The reasoning provided by policymakers was that Karachi’s population was rapidly growing and densification was needed. No one pointed out that the areas earmarked for high density zones were already dense and there were plenty of rich neighbourhoods with sprawl that were untouched.

This law has opened the door to mega real estate projects without any oversight from the city’s Master Planning department, which has essentially a fairly good design for the city till 2030. This important department has been administratively placed under Karachi’s building control authority, which doles out permits for all construction in the city. The world over this hierarchy is the opposite; only if a building adheres to the plan the city has made for itself can it get the green signal.

For those of us who have tried to keep track of the changing face of Karachi it is dismaying to behold a constant slipping away of its beauty and charm, or that intangible magic that makes us love this city despite its madness. It is being taken over by the untrammelled development of gated communities. The timber mafia keeps felling its ancient Banyan trees. We had a water crisis this summer because no one is at the helm to plan for the future of our supply or fix our leaky pipes. Our footpaths are disappearing under billboards. Our parks are being taken over by the offices of political parties. Public spaces are being taken over by parking lots.

A vision of a just Karachi? I am laughing. Visions are supposed to create. What do you call wanting to undo?

Mahim Maher
Karachi

Right to the City for All: A Manifesto for Social Justice in an Urban Century

19 October 2015People & Communities, Place & Design, The Just City EssaysDevelopment, Housing, Justice, Planning, Policy, SustainabilityLorena Zárate

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[The Right to the City is] the right to change ourselves, by changing the city. —David Harvey, 2008

The cities we have

The cities we have in the world today are far from being places of justice. Whether in the South, the North, the West or the East, the cities we are living in are a clear expression of the increasing inequalities and violence from which our societies suffer, as a direct result of putting capital gains and economic calculations—greed!—before people and nature´s well being, dignity, needs and rights.

Many governments have abandoned their responsibility for any urban-territorial planning, leaving “the market” to freely operate the private appropriation of urban spaces.

The concentration of economic and political power is a phenomenon of exploitation, dispossession, exclusion and discrimination whose spatial dimensions are clearly visible: dual cities of luxury and misery; gentrification processes that displace and evict traditional and low-income populations; millions of empty buildings and millions of people without a decent place to live; campesinos without land and land without campesinos, subjected to abuses by agro-businesses, mining and other extractive industries and large scale projects. In other words, the injustice that emerges from destruction of public and community´s goods and assets, and the weakening of regulation, redistribution and welfare policies in States that instead facilitate private appropriation and accumulation of the commons, the resources and the collectively created wealth.

The conditions and rules currently present in our societies are globally condemning more than half of the world population to live in poverty. The inequalities are increasing both in so-called developed and developing countries. What real opportunities are we giving to young people if, according to the UN, 85 percent of the new jobs at the global level are created in the “informal” economy?

At the same time, the spatial segregation of the social groups, the lack of access to adequate housing and basic urban services and infrastructure, as well as many of the current housing policies in different countries, are creating the material and symbolic conditions for the reproduction of the marginalization and disadvantages of the majorities. Impoverished neighborhoods (“urban slums”) are home of to at least one third of the population in the global South—in most African and some Latin American and South Asian countries it reaches as high as 60 percent or more, including the Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Somalia, Benin, Mali, Haiti and Bangladesh. Not having a place to live and not having a recognized address also results in the denial of other economic, social, cultural and political rights (education, health, work, right to vote and participate, among many others). What kind of citizens and democracy are we producing in these divided cities?

It is not news to anyone that, especially during the past 25 years, many governments have abandoned their responsibility for any urban-territorial planning, leaving “the market” to freely operate the private appropriation of urban spaces, almost without any restriction to real-estate speculation and the creation of exponential revenues. It does not require expertise to realize that almost everywhere land prices have grown hundreds of times while minimum wages have remained more or less the same, making adequate housing unaffordable for the vast majority of the population.

The Cities We Want: Right to the City and Social Justice for All

At the occasion of the World Habitat Day commemoration in October 2000, more than 350 delegates of urban social movements, community based women and indigenous people organizations, tenants and cooperative housing federations, and human rights activists from 35 countries around the world got together in the great Mexico Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) over an entire week to exchange concrete experiences and build proposals for more inclusive, democratic, sustainable, productive, educative, safe, healthy and culturally diverse cities.

Under The City We Dream motto, this first World Assembly of Inhabitants produced what would become one of the pillars for the elaboration of the World Charter for the Right to the City, a process developed inside the World Social Forum between 2003 and 2005. For the past decade, that document has inspired several similar debates and other collective documents of the city we want, as the Mexico City Charter for the Right to the City (2010), not as simple wishing list but as a clear roadmap on how to achieve it. Many of those are now included in political and legal instruments signed by local and national governments, as well as some international institutions.

Based on that foundation, the Just City for an Urban Century must be based on the six strategic principles of the Right to the City:

Full exercise of human rights in the city

A just city is one in which all persons (regardless of gender, age, economic and legal status, ethnic group, religious or political affiliation, sexual orientation, place in the city, or any other such factor) enjoy and realize all economic, social, cultural, civic and political human rights and fundamental freedoms, through the construction of conditions of individual and collective wellbeing with dignity, equity and social justice.

Although universal as they are, provisions should be taken to prioritize those individuals and communities living under vulnerable conditions and with special needs, such as homeless, people with physical disabilities or mental and chronic health conditions, poor single parents, refugees, migrants, and people living in disaster-prone areas.

As duty holders, national, provincial and local governments must define legal frameworks, public policies and other administrative and judicial measures to respect, protect and guarantee those rights, under the principles of allocating the maximum available resources and non-retrogression, according to human rights commitments as included in international legal instruments.

Cities around the world, like Rosario in Argentina, Graz in Austria, Edmonton in Canada, Nagpur in India, Thies in Senegal and Gwangju in South Korea, among several others, have declared themselves as Human Rights Cities, going beyond specific human rights programs to try to instill a human rights framework in the city daily life and institutions. Of course they face many contradictions and challenges, but they also represent a concrete path for other cities to consider.

The social function of the city, of land and of property

A just city is one that assures that the distribution of territory and the rules governing its use can thereby guarantee equitable use of the goods, services and opportunities that the city offers. In other words, a city in which collectively defined public interest is prioritized, guaranteeing a socially just and environmentally balanced use of the territory.

Planning, legal and fiscal regulations should be put in place with the required social control, in order to avoid speculation and gentrification processes, both in the central areas as well as in peripheral zones. This would include progressive increase of property taxes for underutilized or vacant units/plots; compulsory orders for construction, urbanization and priority land use; plus-value capture; expropriation for creation of special social interest and cultural zones (especially to protect low-income and disadvantaged families and communities); concession of special use for social housing purposes; adverse possession (usucapio) and regularization of self-built neighborhoods (in terms of land tenure and provision of basic services and infrastructure), among many others already available instruments in different cities and countries, like Brazil, Colombia, France and the United States, just to mention a few.

Democratic management of the city

A just city is one in which its inhabitants participate in all decision-making spaces to the highest level of public policy formulation and implementation, as well as in the planning, public budget formulation, and control of urban processes. It refers to the strengthening of institutionalized decision-making (not only citizen consultancy) spaces, from which it is possible to do follow-up, screening, evaluation and reorientation of public policies.

This will include participatory budgeting experiences (being used in more than 3,000 cities around the world, with some important examples like Dominican Republic, Peru and Polonia), neighborhood impact evaluation (especially of social and economic effects of public and private projects and megaprojects, including the participation of the affected communities at every step of the process) and participatory planning (including master plans, territorial and urban development plans, urban mobility plans, etc.).

Several other concrete tools are already being used in many cities, from free and democratic elections, citizen audits, popular/civil society planning and legislative initiatives (including regulations around granting, modification, suspension and revocation of urban license) and recall election and referendums; to neighborhood and community-based commissions, public hearings, roundtables and participatory decision-making councils.

Nevertheless, several countries—specially in the Middle East and the South Asian region—still have strong, centralized, and in many cases non-democratic national governments, that appoint local authorities and hinder more participatory decision-making process to happen.

Democratic production of the city and in the city

A just city is one in which the productive capacity of its inhabitants is recovered and reinforced, in particular that of the low-income and marginalized sectors, fomenting and supporting social production of habitat and the development of social and solidarity economic activities. It concerns the right to produce the city, but also the right to a habitat that is productive for all, in the sense that generates income for the families and communities and strengthen the popular economy, not just the increasingly monopolistic profits of the few.

It is known that in the Global South between half and two thirds of the available living space is the result of people’s own initiatives and efforts, with little, if any, support from governments and other actors. In many cases, these initiatives go against many official barriers. Instead of supporting those popular processes, many current regulations ignore, or even criminalize, people’s individual and collective efforts to obtain a decent place to live.

At present, few countries—namely Uruguay, Brazil and Mexico—have put in place a system of legal, financial and administrative mechanisms in order to fully support what we call the “social production of habitat” (including access to urban land, credits and subsidies, and technical assistance); but even there, the percentage of the budget that goes to the private sector remains above the 90%, for the construction of “social housing” that remains unaffordable for more than half of the population.

Sustainable and responsible management of the commons (natural and energy resources, as well as cultural patrimony and historic heritage) of the city and its surrounding areas

A just city is one whose inhabitants and authorities guarantee a responsible living relationship with the nature, in a way that makes possible a dignified life for all individuals, families and communities, in equality of conditions but without affecting natural areas and ecological reserves, cultural and historic patrimony, other cities or the future generations.

Human life and life in urban settings is only possible if we preserve all forms of life, everywhere. The urban life takes a vast diversity of the resources it needs from outside the formal administrative boundaries of the cities. Metropolitan areas, regions that include smaller towns in the countryside, agricultural and rural areas, and rain forest are all affected by our urban behavior.

There is an urgent need to put in place more strict environmental regulations and use of appropriate technology at an affordable cost, promote aquifer protection and rain-water collection; to prioritize multimodal public and massive transportation systems; to guarantee ecological food production and responsible consumption, notably including reuse, recycling and final disposal; among several other urgent measures.

Democratic and equitable enjoyment of the city

A just city is one that reinforces social coexistence, through the recovery, expansion and improvement of public spaces, and its use for community gathering, leisure, and creativity as well as critical expression of political ideas and positions. In recent years, and especially as a local and spatial consequence of the neoliberal policies, a great part of those spaces that are fundamental in the definition of the urban and community life have not been taken care of, have been abandoned or left in disuse or, worse yet, have been privatized: streets, plazas, parks, forums, multiple-use halls, cultural centers, etc.

Infrastructure and programs to support cultural and recreational initiatives, especially, those that are autonomous and self-managed with strong participation of youth, low-income sectors and minority populations are needed. In short, public policies must guarantee the city as an open space and as an expression of diversity.

* * *

In an urban century, the meaning of justice will necessarily include all the dimensions of social life: political, economic, cultural, spatial (territorial) and environmental. The just city of the new century will be a city in which the decision making processes are not monopolized by few “representatives” and political parties, but are in the hands of the communities and the citizens; the land, the infrastructure, the facilities and the public and private resources are distributed for social use and enjoyment; the city is recognized as a result of the productive contributions of the different actors and the goal of the economic activities is the collective wellbeing; all human rights are respected, protected and guaranteed for everyone; and we conceive ourselves as part of nature, and nature as something sacred that we all should take care of.

In an urban century, the just city would be the result of, and at the same time the condition for, a just society on a healthy planet.

Lorena Zárate
Mexico City

Claiming Participation in Urban Planning and Design as a Right

19 October 2015People & Communities, Place & Design, The Just City EssaysAsia, Communities, Justice, Openspace, Parks, Participation/Democracy, PlanningPK Das

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I believe that Urban Planning & Design (UP&D) should be considered a ‘Right’ and brought to public dialogue. The democratization of UP&D would be a significant step towards the achievement of just and equal cities. Exercising this right would be an effective means for bringing about much-needed socio-environmental change.

The impact of urban spaces on our lives is so enormous that it is necessary to focus on the planning and design undertaken by governments and various private agencies, planning that reshapes spaces continuously through time. As a matter of fact, planning and design can be effective democratic tools of social change and therefore must be brought to public domain and popularized in order to free it from the shackles of manifold control and exclusivity. Moreover, cities are built not merely with physical structures—buildings and infrastructure—but also with social and civic capital, for which building inclusive cities is a priority. Sadly, the two realms are polarized. Barriers between people and development decisions are continuously reinforced by sophisticated government policies and programs. This often leads to unacceptable and unsustainable growth with alarming social and environmental consequences.

Claiming urban planning and design rights has to be understood as part of larger movement for claiming “right to the city,” as much as other democratic rights movements, enshrined in law.

Mainstream UP&D ideas that predominantly reflect the political ideology and interest of the ruling class and their agents are often in conflict with larger development interests. This has been realized through many examples world over, including in the historical cases of Haussmann’s plans for Paris and Moses’ plans for New York, and the protests that followed in both cities. Plans for cities could be utilized for exactly the opposite objective: to achieve social integration by engaging communities as agents of change, as has been championed by Jane Jacob and others. In the context of rapid urbanization, people’s movements in and across cities claiming “Urban Planning and Design Rights” have therefore come to be essential. It is heartening that people in different parts of the world are intervening in decisions that affect their lives and questioning the plans and projects that are being forced on them. Communities in different neighborhoods and cities are demanding public discussion on matters relating to planning and design issues.

In India, for reasons that suit the policy makers and governments, UP&D are not considered important in defining the nature of cities. Instead, city building is driven by policies without any understanding or assessment of their impact on built-form. By claiming planning and design as a right, people across communities would no more be casually or cynically invited by governments to participate and respond to decisions after their formulation and announcement. Rather, they would have opportunities to engage in the process of decision making right from inception of plans, deciding the objectives and intent of proposals. This demand for planning and design rights goes beyond the generally accepted notion about the limitations of their right of participation.

Public perception in India is that planning requires exclusive knowledge and only few are capable. This must be de-mystified and expose its bluff. It is important for people to not merely respond to change but envision change. Most important, the democratization of UP&D would hopefully facilitate unification of the fractured cityscapes and heal deep social and cultural fissures.

Urban planning and design dialogue

In my own city Mumbai, where I have worked for many years as architect-activist, the exclusion and marginalization of the majority from development decisions has produced critical levels of social alienation and apathy. Meanwhile there has been unsustainable and anarchic growth of the city.

Today, citizen’s movements in many Indian towns and cities are actively engaged, not just in questioning the government’s plans, but also evolving people’s vision and alternatives for democratization. A notable example is Mumbai, where there are two important movements: the Open Mumbai plan, by this author; and the integration of slums into the development plans and programs of the city, by Nivara Hakk, an housing rights movement by slum dwellers. I have been a key participant in both these movements.

CAPTION: Left: Slums & open spaces mapping (in red) carried out by Nivara Hakk and this author in the year 2012, is the first comprehensive viewing of the slums occupied areas. Right: the vast extent of natural areas (in green) of Mumbai, bringing out facts that expose many myths and bluffs. Both these efforts brought critical data to public view.

In Mumbai, close to 5.5 million people, constituting nearly 50 percent of the city’s population, live miserably in slums. They occupy just 8 percent of the cities developable land, living under traumatic high-density conditions, without adequate services, infrastructure or open spaces.

Over the years, through various sophisticated slum redevelopment policies, the slum lands are forcibly taken-over for free by private builders. Under this policy existing populations in slums are squeezed to one third of the land they occupied prior to redevelopment. The land reclaimed from slums is built over with expensive housing and commercial projects for sale in the open market. This development model is leading to further slummification of the city and worsening living conditions for slum dwellers. Displacement and dispossession continue to characterize slum clearance and redevelopment schemes. Tragically, there is no space and opportunity for participation and engagement of the slum dwellers in the redevelopment of their areas.

Slums proliferate in Mumbai because there is no construction or availability of affordable housing in the formal market, for both the poor and middle class people. Slums are spread widely, and mostly are informally located (i.e., without government sanction or planning), thus adversely affecting the quality of life and environment of the entire city. As a matter of fact, Mumbai, or Bombay as it was once and sometimes still is called, is referred to as ‘Slum-bay’ by many academicians and activists. A documentary film jointly produced in 1989 by the Indian Institute of Architects and the Commonwealth Association of Architects and co-directed by this author is titled Slum Bombay.

Yet Mumbai’s official development plan leaves them as blank areas, without documenting them, and a detailed mapping of the slums has been avoided over the years. For the first time the city got to see and realize the extent of slums across Mumbai is when this author and Nivara Hakk mapped the physical extent of slum land. This map showed that slums were substantial and contiguous. It exposed the myth that slums occupied most of the open spaces, reserved lands and large tracts of mangroves and other natural areas, posing serious threat to the environment of the city. This had been the incorrect claim of middle and upper class people.

More importantly, our mapping put forward a larger vision for slums redevelopment and their integration with the city. The need for comprehensive planning and design finally got acceptance in the government parlors and housing policy documents. The Slums Redevelopment Authority under the state government has now begun a detailed mapping exercise and is considering a new slums redevelopment master plan.

In one of the largest slum demolition and eviction drives in India, ordered by the court, a protracted struggle waged by the over 75,000 slum dwellers families (over 400,000 people) residing in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Nivara Hakk challenged the order, demanding rehabilitation first. Brutal attacks by the demolition forces of the government, deploying armed forces and helicopter surveillance, led to many homes being crushed and lives lost. After legal interventions, the court amended their order of eviction, proposing to the government to undertake rehabilitation of the eligible people at an alternate location and only then carry out demolition.

Nivara Hakk conducted this rehabilitation, successfully carrying out a participatory planning and design exercise, and organized the slum-dwellers into co-operatives at the new site for management and maintenance of their buildings and common areas. Today, more than 12,000 families proudly occupy their new homes.

On the other hand, Mumbai is a unique city having a vast and diverse extent of rich natural assets, covering nearly 240 km², or approximately 50 percent of the city’s total area. These include, wetlands, mangroves, creeks, rivers, watercourses, creeks, hills, forests and beaches. Sadly, over the years, we have not only turned our backs on these valuable natural areas but have continued to abuse them. Rampant destruction of these sensitive areas over the years by land sharks and real-estate agencies has led to threatening environmental situations. Yet the development plan for the city does not document them in detail nor does it record their boundaries and areas. Through the “Open Mumbai” plan, we have demonstrated how creating open spaces all along the natural areas would enable their integration with the city, put them to daily life experiences and ensure their protection through citizens vigilance.

The lack of transparency in planning and urban land use demonstrated by these examples is a problem world over, as governments and their various agencies publish specific plans and projects for public knowledge and response, doing so with a set of severely imposed conditions. In many instances the relevance and need of the project itself is seldom open to question. Instead, they tend to engage the public with technical details with which most people cannot engage. As a result, only select individuals and groups respond with their suggestions and objections. Such a situation has lead to systematic exclusion of large sections of the public who are adversely affected by the very plans that should benefit them. For most people, their interaction and relationship with the city is limited, apparently by design of those in power.

A key objective of open dialogue in land use and planning is to inform and educate the public on the ideas, objectives and impact of various plans and development programs that are promoted not just by governments but also by powerful private agencies that have achieved specific development rights. This way people who are detached from the city can get closer to it. Ironically, urban design as a tool has been most often used to promote discriminatory and exclusionary practices, as in Mumbai and other Indian cities, operating within the confined and barricaded city spaces.

Values: a paradigm shift for cities

Today, planners and architects are operating within a web of contradictions. With market driven city builders being increasingly obsessed with construction turnover, they have come to consider designers as mere service providers. In turn most designers express very little or no concern for larger socio-environmental causes. The prevailing context of exclusion and discrimination, and the city’s fragmentation, along with environmental abuse, has to be radically altered towards the achievement of social and environmental unification. These objectives have to form the basis of urban planning and design programs, leading to a paradigm shift in the idea of cities and their built forms and structures. This shift requires going beyond the obsession with viewing cities only through the lens of financial valuation and into an assessment of socio-political and environmental economy.

Public dialogue ensures that governmental organisations and elected representatives are answerable throughout their tenure and not just during election period, turning urban development into a dynamic, vibrant and sustainable process.

Let’s review an example from Mumbai. Recently the Municipal Corporation and the state government put forward the new Draft Development Plan 2012-2032. The plan was clearly anti-people and detrimental to the ecology and environmental interests of the city. It avoided the question of slums redevelopment and their integration with the city, and proposed plans that would further cut down the meager open spaces. Mumbai has a miserable ratio of less than 1.5m² per person open space. In comparison, London has 31.68, New York, 26.4, Tokyo, 3.96.

Citizens groups, NGO’s, workers, slum-dwellers and even the middle class organized public meetings in protest. Concerted effort to build public opinion forced the government to recall the plan and start the process all over again. Earlier appointed consultants for the preparation of the plan were terminated and the municipal corporation in charge of it is presently going through public hearings, evaluating over 50,000 suggestions and objections filed by individuals and organizations. Hopefully a more acceptable plan will emerge reflecting the development needs and demands of all the people.

Such participatory momentum needs to be sustained and expanded, not just in Mumbai, but also in all towns and cities across India, and today, there are such movements around the country. They are of vital importance.

Rights to concessions in a neo-liberalized world

From rights to concessions is yet another oppressive social and political trend that has come to prevail, particularly evident in the neo-liberalised world. Public freedom and rights over a wide array of issues that affect life in cities have been turned into matters of negotiation and concessions, leading to reductions in open space and little opportunity for public participation. Land deals are led by private agencies bargaining for concessions in monies and goods rather than engaging in issues of basic rights. It is only when there are people’s uprisings that the governments begin to grant fringe or peripheral benefits to the public under the guise of public largesse, without altering the very foundations upon which colonization, exclusivity and private empires are built across cities. Increasing commodification under expanding markets has engulfed basic social and human development needs, and has substantially eroded fundamental rights of most people.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel due to the innumerable rights struggles the world over. People’s collective’s are intervening and participating in the development and governance of public spaces, for example in movements to reclaim Mumbai’s waterfronts, led by various citizens groups along with this author. For management and governance of these waterfronts, a tri-partite between citizens, government and private agencies has been established with the residents association at the top of the pyramid.

Similarly, housing rights movements by Nivara Hakk has forced governments to reluctantly recognize land rights of the poor. But, policy after policy continues to doll out concessions to regulate people’s demands in measured doses, without altering the fundamental premise of permitting land grabs for real estate business interests by private agencies.

The way forward

Considering neighborhoods as the base for organising movements for effective democratization of UP&D is key. Such an approach facilitates local people’s active participation in matters concerning their area, which they know best, while influencing the city’s planning and development decisions.

Through a neighborhood-based development approach it would be possible to decentralize and localize projects and their designs, breaking away from mega-monolithic planning and design ideas with enormous investments that impose unbearable burdens on the lives of most people. Neighborhood based UP&D approaches would also facilitate closer interaction between people and their elected representatives. Importantly, neighborhood work creates a more collaborative approach to city and place making. The various movements reclaiming public spaces in Mumbai — the seafront development in Bandra; the Juhu beach redevelopment work; and the “Juhu Vision” plan with work along the watercourses called Irla Nullah — have amply demonstrated the gains of neighborhood based approaches to city development. For citizens, these projects have allowed the immediate reclamation, redesign and re-programming of public space.

With public space being the main planning criteria, we hope to bring about a social change: promoting collective culture and rooting out alienation and false sense of individual gratification promoted by the market. Our experience of neighborhood actions in Mumbai has come to confirm that such initiatives can influence long- term change in ways cities development is understood. Interventions by citizens, as in Bandra, Juhu and other areas of Mumbai, would have never been anticipated by a ‘master plan’ for the city.

Conclusion

Urban Planning & Design can be oppressive. But on the other hand it can be progressive and liberating. As city spaces have been fragmented and colonized, reflected in the growth of gated communities and other exclusive spaces, it is our challenge to use UP&D tools to network the disparate spaces and people into a cohesive and accessible city. It is only through active dialogue and participatory programs that individual, family and community relationships can be nurtured.

Claiming ‘urban planning and design rights’ has to be understood as part of larger movement for claiming “right to the city,” as much as other democratic rights movements, enshrined in law. To claim Urban Planning and Design rights is to assert peoples’ power over the ways in which our cities are created, with a determination to build socially and environmentally just and democratic cities.

P.K Das
Mumabi

Turning Migrant Workers into Citizens in Urbanizing China

19 October 2015People & Communities, Place & Design, The Just City EssaysAsia, Design, Justice, Livability, Planning, PolicyPengfei XIE

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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One of the root causes of inequity is urban and rural differentiation

China is experiencing a massive migration to the cities, mostly due to the availability of jobs and better facilities. But the way the government administers citizenship also creates inequity and poverty. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the country has adopted an administrative system of dualistic rural and urban structure in order to promote industrial development and to guarantee food security of what was then a poor nation. The Chinese central government prioritizes urban development over rural development. Rural and urban areas carry out and implement different mechanisms of land ownership, housing, household registration and social welfare policies. Compared to the rural areas, many more resources are concentrated into urban districts, including public services, investment and labor forces. This drives huge disparities of employment and well-being, and results in the relative poverty of non-urban areas.

Millions of farmers leave the land each year for urban jobs, but they are not allowed to have registered permanent urban residence status and so can’t enjoy the facilities and services that non-migrant urbanites do.

With the rapid urbanization in China, millions of farmers leave the land each year for urban jobs. But because they are not allowed to have registered permanent urban residence status—called HUKOU—their residency remains in their original territory; these migrant workers and their families can’t enjoy facilities and services as the non-migrant urbanites do, including social insurance and health care. This has caused inequity, poverty and the potential for social instability in many Chinese cities. Migrant rural children in urban areas do enjoy free schooling, in theory. But the opportunity costs for attending school for rural children are higher than for urban children. For example, the price of rent for an urban house rent and living expenses are usually unaffordable for them.

Disposable per capita income differences 2003 to 2012: urban in blue; rural in red; Unit: CNY. Source: China Statistical Year Book 2014

“Citizenization” of migrant workers is critical to address the Chinese urban justice problem. It is, in essence, the equalization of basic public services for migrant workers, which include stable employment opportunities, full coverage of social insurance and medicare, education, municipal services, affordable housing and ecological and environmental safeguards. Only by achieving this can migrant workers enjoy the same facilities and services as their urban counterparts do, and thus become actual citizens of the city. This is a big challenge given the huge amount of money needed and the enormous population involved. The Chinese central government realizes this issue and puts citizenization at the top of its agenda in its New-Type of Urbanization Plan, which requires local governments to solve the problem through innovative practice. Chongqing municipality demonstrates a good case of citizenization of migrant workers.

Innovation and reform of supporting policies

There’s a whole set of issues related to citizenization of migrant workers. How to solve the financing problem? Where to accommodate them? And so on. It is estimated that the citizenization cost for one-household migrant workers in Chongqing is 80,000CNY (12,600US$), and each year, thousands of farmers move into the city. This means huge amounts of capital demand and housing needs. To solve these problems, Chongqing has taken creative actions in reforming supporting policies.

Creation of a Land Ticket system and household registration reform: In China, rural property belongs to farmers collectively, while urban property is owned by the state. Rural land transactions between farmers and urbanites is prohibited. Nowadays, rapid urbanization has created new demands: the government needs money and land to citizenize migrant workers; farmers want to take full advantage of their only asset: the land; and food security should be guaranteed for a growing urban population.

In response to the new situation, Chongqing government created a system called Land Ticket, or DiPiao in Chinese, allowing proper rural land to be sold on the market. Vacant rural collective land can be reclaimed and reclassified as arable land. Such arable land (“proper land”) can be sold on the market. For this arable land, farmers receive a Land Ticket for the same land size, which can be sold in the primary land market. Property developers buy the Land Ticket (and its land quota) and certain construction is allotted to them within the urban construction areas. Farmers get 85 percent of the land sales revenue [1]. This system is beneficial to both the government and the farmers. In the last three years, Land Tickets worth 17.5 billion CNY (2.78 billion US$) have been transacted in Chongqing.

Chongqing’s household registration reform is China’s largest in scale, influencing over 10 million people [2]. Its features are: (i) lower requirements to become registered permanent urban residents, and (ii) a comprehensive package of social benefits. In addition to HUKOU, the government offers social welfare, medicare, education, affordable housing and vocational training for the migrant workers; this reform effort also (iii) safeguards farmers’ rights by retaining their homestead in the country, so that they can return home if they no longer want to stay in town; (iv) and gives consideration to urban carrying capacity by promoting the reform incrementally, and with a spatial balance (migrants are guided to distribute in new towns/districts, county towns and central urban areas)[3]. From 2010 to 2014, 4.09 million migrant workers became registered urban residents [4] in Chongqing.

Migrant workers get their social security cards in Dazu District, Chongqing. Source: http://cq.sina.com.cn/city/cqfb/2012-12-11/48593.html — Migrant workers get their social security cards in Dazu District, Chongqing. Source

Affordable housing and regulation: In most Chinese cities, housing is one of the main influencing factors of urban justice. Due to unsuccessful regulation policies, the housing price to income ratio has reached high levels. It is difficult for low-income groups to meet housing demands through market means. In recent years, Chinese local governments began to push affordable housing programs required by the central authority. Chongqing is a good example of how to control soaring prices and offer affordable housing to those in need.

Hua Fu Jia Yuan-Chongqing’s largest low-rent housing projects. Source: http://www.xinhuanet.com/chinanews/2010-07/14/content_20328916.htm — Hua Fu Jia Yuan-Chongqing’s largest low-rent housing projects.
Source

Among the four municipalities directly under the central government (the other ones are Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin), Chongqing’s housing prices are the lowest, thanks to its successful regulation policies. Chongqing’s program is: (i) Real estate investment is controlled below 25 percent of the total fixed-assets investment every year; (ii) Land prices are strictly managed so as not to exceed one-third of the housing price; (iii) Property tax is only introduced for larger houses; (iv) Examine and approve urban planning in accordance with the national standard for housing area of 30m² per person; (v) Each year, affordable housing areas must be about 30 percent of the total floor space completed [5]. Because of these policies, Chongqing is able to keep the housing price to income ratio at about 6.5:1, which can be affordable for ordinary Chongqingners.

Creation of a compact city and walkable communities

Physical planning can promote spatial distribution of resources in a fairer manner through even and compact distribution of public facilities and services, convenient living and working environments, and walking-friendly communities. This is not always available to all in Chinese cities, especially to the low-income groups.

Clustered development and compact urban form: Chongqing’s urban layout features clustered development with multiple centers, which is determined by its mountainous location. Compact and mixed land use strategy is applied within each growth center. Compared to scattered layouts, compact urban forms reduce development costs, promote fair and efficient use of facilities, minimize energy use, decrease greenhouse gas emissions, and reduce urban sprawl.

In Chongqing, clusters are divided by impenetrable natural barriers or mandatory natural protection areas, or green belts. (i) Construction within green belts between clusters is strictly prohibited by law and urban planning regulations; (ii) Rules promote high density development surrounding each cluster center, and strengthen its service functions, so as to form a centripetal development force [6]; (iii) The form arranges mixed functions of residential, business and office facilities within walking distance from dwelling places to public transit, reducing repetitive transportation needs; (iv) Business, work and frequently used areas are arranged in the surroundings of public transit [7]; (v) Centers focus on public transit centers as hubs to carry out the organization of urban clusters and community layout, taking comprehensive consideration of the integral spatial layout of transportation, work and living facilities.

Compact Chongqing-down town of Yuzhong district. Source: http://www.cqyz.gov.cn/web1/info/view.asp?id=3888 — Compact Chongqing-downtown of Yuzhong district.
Source: http://www.cqyz.gov.cn/web1/info/view.asp?id=3888

Walkability [8] and equity: As a way of transportation, walking has social, economic, environmental and public health implications. The relationship between walkability and urban equity reflects in three aspects: (i) walkable communities strengthen interpersonal communications, and cultivate common sense of belonging [9]; (ii) public amenities of walkable communities are accessible to people from all walks of life; (iii) walking reduces private motorized transport, prevent unchecked urban sprawl and decrease social segregation.

In a mountainous region such as Chongqing, the task of building walkable communities becomes all the more difficult. Chongqing has undertaken the following efforts: (i) Integrating the walking/non-motorized transport facility construction/renovation projects with other larger projects like urban renewal, new town/district building, environmental improvement, ecological reconstruction and historical preservation; (ii) Small blocks and narrow road networks are planned within the communities, to form a highly social space of human scale, enhance urban vitality and diversity, and promote walking friendliness; (iii) Active engagement of the general public/relevant stakeholders in the renovation process by conducting field survey to understand the pedestrian behavior, interviewing local residents to know their real needs, and monitoring the after-renovation usage to evaluate the implementation effect; (iv) Exploring low cost and small scale renovation patterns, such as adding street furniture along the sidewalks, coloring the pavement as safety reminder, and improving sidewalk paving to increase connectivity.

Dynamic walking space in Chongqing. Photo: Pengfei Xie

Towards a just city: suggestions

In the rapid development of urbanization, Chinese cities, in particular, need to successfully deal with the relationship between efficiency and equity. The above paragraphs show Chongqing’s efforts in tackling urban equity problems from institutional and spatial perspectives. Building a just city is a long and complicated process.

From my personal observation of Chinese cites, I would like to give two more suggestions:

Professionals from NGOs or other civil organizations should participate in the examination and approval, and supervision of urban plans. In Chinese cities, investors/developers and government officials usually have the power to influence urban plans. In order to protect public interest, professionals (such as urban planners, architects and engineers) from recognized third-party organizations, who have no personal interest, should be involved in the making, amendment, and supervision of urban plans.

New towns and new urban districts should be built on demand, and provide accommodation for migrant workers. A just city is one in which everyone has access to affordable housing, in China’s urban migrant communities this is not the case. Developing new towns and new urban districts is very popular in today’s China: 92.9 percent of the prefectural level cities have proposed plans to build such. Local governments invest huge amounts of money in it. The current scale of new towns/new urban districts in China is already enough to accommodate 3.4 billion people!The problem is: some new towns/urban districts are only for the high-to-medium classes, as most residential buildings are luxury houses that affordable only to the rich. So on one hand, migrant workers can’t find proper accommodation in cities. On the other, many new towns/new urban districts become ‘ghost towns’ with very few residents.So in order to build a just city, I would like to strongly suggest that new towns/ new urban districts accept migrant workers as their formal residents.

Pengfei Xie
Beijing

Acknowledgements: I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. David Maddox (The Nature of Cities), Professor Toni Griffin (City College of New York) and Dr. You You (Institute of Economics of Education, Peking University) for their suggestions and help in drafting this essay.

Notes:

[1] Luo wenjian and Liu Zhongyan. A probe into the value of Chongqing’s “land ticket” in balancing urban and rural development and reforming household registration system. Journal of Ningxia Communist Party Institute. 2012(5):78-80

[2] Li Yanchang. Household registration reform in Chongqing: feature and revelation. Administrative management reform. 2011(5):77-80

[3] Li Bo. Household registration reform promotes new type urbanization: the Chongqing case. China Economic Herald. 2013. 6.25

[4] Yang Shuhai. Household registration reform for migrant workers in Chongqing: practice and thinking. Study Times. 2015.5.25

[5] Sun liming and Ao Xiangfei. Discussion on Chongqing’s housing price regulation. Chongqing Commercial Daily. 2009.9.7

[6] Yi Zhen. The Evolvement and Development of the Clusters Urban Structure of Chongqing. Urban Planner. 2004(20): 33-36

[7] Yu Yin and Hu Wantai. Compact City: A Study on the Space Structure Pattern of Chongqing Urban Area. Urban Studies. 2004(4): 59-66

[8] Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) China Program is evaluating Chinese cities’ walking-friendliness by a City Walkability Index System, the first of its kind in China. The aim is to advocate green transportation and catalyze public awareness. By now, NRDC has evaluated 35 Chinese cities, and has released the first annual report on walkability evaluation in August, 2014. The report has extensive impact on media and government. NRDC will continue to evaluate more cities, and release the walkability report on an annual base.

[9] Jane Jacobs. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vantage Books. 1961: 117-119

In It Together

19 October 2015People & Communities, Place & Design, The Just City EssaysAfrica, Architecture, Art, Awareness, Design, Justice, Planning, PolicyLesley Lokko

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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“[A city where] everything comes together . . . subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the trans-disciplinary, everyday life and unending history.” —Edward Soja [1]

No other city that I know of piques the imagination quite like The African City, wherever in Africa that is. I live in Johannesburg; I grew up in Accra: two African cities that have as little—or as much—in common as Chicago or Shanghai, but whose broad geography binds them together in ways that are both entirely fictitious and entirely real. By their very nature, cities are both generic and astoundingly, endlessly specific.

An inclusive urbanism relies heavily on notions of shared values and a shared understanding of the public realm.

The same broad categories of infrastructure, environment, equality and access to amenities apply to all urban centres, almost irrespective of scale. Yet there’s something in—or of/about—The African City that defies easy categorisation. African cities, to paraphrase Soja above, are places where “everything comes together,” in an almost dizzying panoply of contradictory binaries. Black/white; rich/poor; chaotic/controlled; hi-tech/lo-tech, as though there is no space or appetite for the nuance, the in-between, or the subtleties that make up any urban narrative in which most citizens somehow locate, negotiate and recognise themselves.

When the invitation to contribute to The Just City essays project arrived in my email inbox, I was struck by its timing. It’s probably just over ten years ago that I met Max Bond in Accra, sadly for the last time, as it turned out. He was visiting the Ghanaian architect Joe Osae-Addo, and the three of us had dinner at the Golden Tulip Hotel on Independence Avenue whilst waiting for Accra’s terrible, gridlocked traffic to die down. I no longer recall our exact conversation, just its aura. Africa, the African diaspora, race, identity, architecture…the state (and not just in a physical sense) of African cities. What could African-American architects and urban designers bring to the table? What had Americans learned about race, class and culture that might prove useful to a new generation of African architects, planners, city-makers? Bond was better placed than most to answer the question: Ghana had been his home in the 1960s, in the first heady decade after independence. He’d seen more of the country than many Ghanaians, myself included, and his views were wide-ranging and broadly cosmopolitan, yet at the same time deeply personal and intuitive. We were joined a little later by another African-American architect, Jack Travis, also a close friend of Bond’s. Four architects, two continents, one and a half generations between us and many, many questions, though perhaps fewer answers.

Today, I’m sitting at my desk in Johannesburg with half an eye on the American sociologist Richard Sennett’s recent book, “Together,” a fascinating examination of the cooperative skills people need to sustain everyday life, and half an eye on the television. BBC World News has been screening a series on American cities post-Ferguson, “Summer in the City.” There’s a sense of déjà-vu: race, class, culture and the city. Plus ça change. But the blurb on the back of Sennett’s book suddenly jumps out at me. “Living with people who differ—racially, ethnically, religiously or economically—is one of the most urgent challenges facing civil society today.”[2] Both the book and the television screen provide a surprisingly neat framework for this essay, In It Together, given that so many other things have coalesced around its writing.

I teach architecture, the science of space, one might call it. More than any other discipline (and perhaps contradictory to its finished product), architecture is fluid, concerned with an endless series of translations—from idea to drawing; drawing to building; building to city; city to society; and so on. Every single one of my students at the University of Johannesburg is multilingual, sometimes in as many as four languages. It seems to me that there’s an interesting parallel between these students for whom the fluidity of daily life, moving between languages and locales, sometimes even whole worlds, mirrors the essential nature not only of their practices (as budding architects), but the daily reality of the multiple worlds they inhabit, contained uneasily within the city, in the same space and time.

For African city-dwellers—cityzens, we might call ourselves—there’s an added dimension to what it means to live in Kumasi, Kigali or Kinshasa, and it has to do with speed: of change, of movement, quite literally: from the slow-death speed of traffic to the speed of information flows, capital and stock…mineral or human, in itself a cruel comparison. For quite some time now, African cities seem perpetually to be described ‘in transition’, though it’s not always entirely clear where we’ve come from or where we’re heading. In Yorgos Simeoforidis’ 1997 essay, ‘Notes for a Cultural History Between Uncertainty and the Contemporary Urban Condition,’[3] he describes ‘the anxiety of the present,’ a new landscape of urban and architectural discourse that has sprung up in ‘an attempt to grasp a perpetually shifting reality, to describe and interpret contemporary urban phenomena.’ For anyone who has spent time in any of the continent’s cities, the terms ‘anxiety,’ ‘shifting’ and ‘uncertainty’ seem to accurately sum up their edgy, urban zeitgeist. African cities are, quite literally, hard to grasp. In the same essay, Simeoforidis makes another interesting observation that finds resonance today: “the anxious desire to understand the present shows through the most official manifestations on architectural culture, Cities and the urban condition now constitute the privileged theme of international exhibitions.[4]

Simeoforidis’ essay was penned almost twenty years ago. Between 2013 and 2016, no less than eight major global exhibitions have featured the ‘African City’ as a major theme, most taking place in locations as diverse (and un-African) as Denmark, Chicago, New York and Munich, to name a few. In each, the notion of ‘justice’, although usually writ large, is often a subliminal, only partially articulated desire: beneath the statistics (woeful); the chaos (bewildering); the infrastructural under-development (paralysing) or the resilience-in-the-face-of-it (heartwarming) that the inhabitants invariably display, there is a genuine desire to create a more just, equitable, inclusive, resilient city, mirroring the larger-scale society in which such a city might stand. But it’s a complex, difficult and at times seemingly impossible task. The “The Sound of Music” suddenly springs to mind: “how do you catch a cloud and pin it down?”[4]

Contemporary architectural and urban discourses over the past decade have been profoundly influenced by events that introduce a new level of questioning. The terminology now centres around a new spatiocultural politics [of] ‘rights to the city,’ civil rights’ and ‘spatial justice,’ which theorists (like Edward Soja, quoted at the top here) believe will ultimately transform architecture and urbanism.

So what exactly is a ‘just’ city? Is it the same as a ‘city of justice’? How would we recognise and assess it? How might one go about creating it and are there rules governing its framework? The American urban theorist and architect Michael Stanton writes of the way “a city divides into forms and attitudes . . . into grand narratives and great collective generalisations. Cities are collaborative works . . . conceived passionately, formed imperfectly, understood and misread by a continually transforming and distracted collective.” If cities really are “collaborative works,” places where people of differing racial, linguistic, religious and economic backgrounds and persuasions come together to enact some form of public (and private) life, then it stands to reason that one place where we might begin the difficult task of building a ‘just’ city is with our definitions of ‘collaborative’, of ‘cooperation’ and ‘collective.’

If I said earlier that no city piques the imagination quite like the African city, then I should also add that no city destabilises the idea of the ‘collective’ quite like Johannesburg. It is at once a city of anti-collectives and hyper-collectives; endless satellites of tightly-knit, tightly-policed enclaves that sit uneasily together, bound by a network of freeways, roads, taxi-routes and railway lines. For the most part, the enclaves remain intact, policed along class- rather than race-lines, although there are three or four pockets of genuinely mixed occupation (and here I invoke race not class) that have sprung up in the past decade. Within these enclaves, an exaggerated sense of community persists; an ‘us vs. them’ attitude where the terms are interchangeable—one man’s ‘us’ is another’s ‘them’, and so on. As a Jo’burger, the temptation to wallow in the city’s dystopian self-image is all too tempting. Disconnected, segregated, dysfunctional, dangerous . . . these are readily accessible, perniciously familiar tropes. Yet, thumbing through Sennett, it’s comforting (if that’s the right word) to recognise another truth: it was ever thus.

The French philosopher, Henri Lefebvre, whose work has influenced architects and urbanists for half a century, famously offered three definitions of spatial practice — space as it is perceived, represented and lived. These differences find easy resonance across this continent. Most African cities are perceived (by outsiders, at least) to be chaotic and maddeningly unpredictable. They are often represented as such, from Neill Blomkamp’s dystopic District 9 and Chappie to Mad Max 4: The Road to Fury, shot on location in Namibia. However, there’s another side to the question of perception and representation, where the lived experience makes it past the outsider’s disapproving gaze and bursts onto the screen. Nollywood, the $US 5billion industry that originated in the 1960s in Nigeria, is the second-largest film industry in the world, behind the United States and ahead of India. With thousands of films released every year, a quick Google search reveals an interesting glimpse into the way the city, in the African imaginary, is portrayed. Burning City, Who Owns the City?, King of the City, City of War, City of Sin, City of Dragons. Without pressing play, a paradigm emerges of the city as a contested space, at once feared and admired. “An African City”, the new, much-hyped web series conceived, created and directed by a young Ghanaian, Nicole Amarteifio, is billed as “Africa’s ‘answer’ to Sex & the City.” Executive Producer Millie Monyo embraces the connection to Carrie Bradshaw. “It was absolutely an inspiration, and we welcome the comparison. Why can’t we have [that] on our continent?”

But have what, exactly?

Lokko Sex and the African City — Still taken from “An African City” © Nicole Amarteifio, 2015.[5]

I asked the question of Parks Tau, the current mayor of Johannesburg: is Johannesburg a ‘just’ city? How would he define it? His answer was emphatic: no, Johannesburg isn’t ‘just’. It’s a city whose very fabric has been constructed around an un-just paradigm of segregation and inequality. But it is engaged in the serious task of trying to undo its past and build a very different future. “In many ways, I think of Johannesburg as Africa’s most cosmopolitan city,” he said. “We always refer to it as a ‘melting pot’ and it’s the one African city where you have the highest concentration of migrants, peoples, cultures . . . people who bring vibrancy to the city, but also the challenges that come with it. Unfortunately, we inherited a city that was unequal by design and our task is to undo that history by creating a new form of inclusive urbanism, one that will hopefully repair the past. We’re in it together.”[6]

Tau’s use of the word together, spoken as an aside halfway through the conversation, took me straight back to Sennett. In the introduction to Together [7], he lays bare the reason behind his decision to write a trio of books about “the skills people need to sustain everyday life.” The Craftsman, the first in the trilogy, examines craftsmanship, the quest “to make physical things well.” Together, his second book, is an examination of our responsiveness to others, to “the practical application of responsiveness at work, or in the community.” In his last book, as yet unwritten, he turns his attention to cities, to the “task or skill of making cities,” which, in his opinion, we don’t “[do] very well.” In his own words, his task “is to relate how people shape personal effort, social relations and the built environment.” Although Together wasn’t written specifically with cities or urban environments in mind, Tau’s description of an inclusive urbanism relies heavily on the same notions of shared values, understandings and—perhaps most importantly—a shared understanding of the public realm which allows and encourages us to appreciate our common values and at the same time, to tolerate ‘difference,’ however it is expressed.

This notion of an ‘inclusive’ form of urbanity is appealing for all sorts of reasons, but the question of what that might be, how one might construct both a curriculum and a disciplinary framework around such a notion is unclear. In a city like Johannesburg, where the very idea of the collective, collaborative citizen remains a lofty aspiration rather than a daily fact, Sennett’s task seems improbable, even impossible. But somewhere between Tau’s comment and Sennett’s astute observations on the term ‘rehearsal’ lies a glimmer of hope. Sennett talks of rehearsals “of the professional sort, the kind necessary in the performing arts. There is a basic distinction between practising and rehearsing; the one is a solitary experience, the other is collective.” The same distinction can be made between those of us for whom ‘the city’ is both a professional and personal endeavour. We practice our craft: designing, shaping, building our built environments. We also inhabit the results of our endeavour: as citizens, city-dwellers, whether as newly-arrived migrants or natives-of-this-patch. In coming together, we rehearse a collective script that’s been around for centuries: the script of the city, the ‘play’ of urban life.

Is Johannesburg a ‘just’ city?

We’re trying to be. I believe it’s the first time I’ve ever said “we.”

Lesley Lokko
Johannesburg

Notes:

[1] Soja, E. ‘Lessons in Spatial Justice’, in Thirdspace–Journeys to Los Angeles & Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996
[2] Taken from the jacket of Together, Sennett, R., Penguin: London, 2012
Simeoforidis, Y. ‘Notes for a Cultural History Between Uncertainty and the Contemporary Urban Condition’, in Koolhaas, R. et al., Mutations, Barcelona: ACTAR, 1999
[3] ibid., p.415
[4] “Maria,” from the motion picture The Sound of Music, lyrics by O. Hammerstein and R. Rodgers
[5] Retrieved 6 August 2015. Image: Emmanuel Bobbie/Bob Pixel Studios
[6] From a conversation between the author and the Executive Mayor of the City of Johannesburg, at Civic Centre, Braamfontein, Johannesburg on 4 September 2015
[7] Sennett, R., Together, Penguin: London, 2012

The Quest for Governance Modes on Sustainable Urbanization

18 October 2015Essay, Europe, People & Communities, Science & ToolsClimate change, Justice, Livability, Participation/Democracy, Planning, SustainabilityBuyana Kareem

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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However complex the urban sustainability question is, the facts are clear to all. Over the next four decades, the global urban population is expected to nearly double, with the vast majority of this happening in Asian and African cities; if we do not rethink and coalesce our approaches and practices, there will be rising urban inequality and conflicts, underpinned by accelerated resource scarcity and uncontainable environmental impacts.

What modes of urban governance are emerging across the developed and developing world that demonstrate that it is possible to tackle the underlying challenges of urban growth, urban poverty, and environmental unsustainability?

This was the question that brought the authors of this essay together. We write as a group of 18 world social science fellows on urban governance, gathered by the International Social Science Council (ISSC) and Cities Alliance, from Sept. 8-13, 2015 the in Durban, South Africa, hosted by the University of KwaZulu Natal and the Municipal Institute of Learning of eThekwini Municipality, under the professorial guidance of Mark Swilling (Sustainability Institute-Stellenbosch University South Africa) and Etienne Nel (Comparative Research Programme on Poverty, CROP), University of Otago-New Zealand.

Extreme weather and flooding are risks that cities face from climate change.

The task at hand was not to formulate a mode of urbanization governance for urban sustainability, but rather to draw on our differing disciplines—sociology, land management, architecture, political science, social and environmental justice, gender studies, urban geography, anthropology, spatial planning, economics, and environmental science—to generate insights around one question that knitted our case studies: the question delineated above.

Firstly, the question enabled us to realize that demonstrating the type(s) of urban governance that would potentially lead cities into a sustainable future is a task that no single theory or approach can claim to have researched extensively and infinitively, and therefore what works at multiple scales and in different contexts is something that is yet to be established. We reasoned that transformation via adapting to pressures such as climate change, globalization, social fluidity, or relocation projects is not a linear process that would necessarily be inscribed into a model to ultimately have a technical fix.

Therefore we all had, and continue to have, a mutual responsibility to break the disciplinary walls and become transdiciplinarians who can provide useful leads to tackling today’s global urban challenges, majorly: urban poverty, climate change, inequality, social injustice, infectious disease, violence, informal settlement, and the gradual extinction of urban biodiversity.

The case studies

Our case studies were structured around six themes, including: 1) climate change and governance; 2) environmental justice and sustainability; 3) land use, agriculture, and governance; 4) inclusive urban development; 5) urban poverty; and 6) urban environmental sustainability and housing. Although these themes shed light on the nature, extent, and dimensions of sustainability challenges and the implication for urban governance, the general observation was that these consisted of same script, but with different casts. What cut across the different themes is that urban environmental and socio-economic challenges are not site-specific (a feature that the case studies attempted to indicate) and, therefore, are global in nature, thus generating the term glocalities—meaning local examples and evidence that reflect global realities.

The urban heat island effect is most powerful in the densest parts of cities.

Climate change and governance: The overarching concern under this theme was to explore, with data and examples from Delhi, India; Cape Town, South Africa; and Dhaka, Bangladesh, the role of national governments and municipal authorities in tackling climate change in cities. In Delhi, the inter-linkages between land use/cover, air pollution, urban heat island, and human health have become a clear threat to urban health, which requires enhancing disaster management capabilities within government.

This can be realized through complementing the traditional role of regulating and taxing carbon-intensive activities with data-based pathways to draw the attention and influence of decision-makers and by investment in waste recycling and re-use to avert the impending ecological crisis. This discussion was followed by the case from Cape Town, which sought to understand what enables local governments to initiate and follow through with the process of mainstreaming climate change adaptation. In Cape Town, the author found that the enabling factors included: access to a knowledge base, the availability of resources, political stability, and the presence of dense social networks, which all positively affect adaptation mainstreaming (Lorena Pasquini, 2014). On the one hand, it is such factors that different levels of government and stakeholders need to support with a varied set of interventions, while acknowledging the effects of social network characteristics on facilitating institutional change.

On the other hand, the case on Bangladeshi cities pondered the ways through which urban governance systems make resilience to climate change possible. The evidence presented suggested that a city’s ability to conceive and implement resilience plans is dependent on circumventing cyclical political stalemates, with the purpose of creating situations where national, state and city ruling parties can work together quickly and effectively to implement policies and programmes.

Environmental justice and sustainability: Environmental justice for urban sustainability is context-dependent, but this theme focused on: i) transformative urban politics in the megacities of the global south; ii) inclusive approaches to urban climate adaptation planning and implementation; and iii) evaluating equity and governance in sustainable cities. The initial presentation centered on the environmental justice movement in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the series of statist endeavors to use a deeply militant police force to stall the advocacy agendas of metropolitan solidarities. The evidence illustrated that civic environmentalism is a form of urban politics characterized by social discontent, and that it is often perceived as a facilitator of urban crime and insecurity, thus requiring state intervention.

On one hand, the social and political landscape is one characterized by formally elected city councilors and a metropolitan police force that is accountable to parliament, whereas, on the other, there is continued statist control over environmental civil society groups through the use of strict legislations and intelligence services, thus making cities areas where people’s options are constrained by fear and intolerance for popular movements. By drawing on experiences from Quito (Ecuador) and Surat (India), the next case study laid emphasis on the participation of experts, affected communities, and a wide array of citizens to sustain inclusivity in programmes that incorporate local needs and concerns into adaptation processes and outcomes.

The other approach offered by the discussant was on building targeted partnerships between key government, private, and civil society actors to institutionalize robust decision-making structures, enhance abilities to raise funds, and increase means to directly engage with local community and international actors (Eric Chua, 2015). The presentation that followed gave insight on the importance of institutional synergies in delivering on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11: make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Achieving this goal depends heavily on how coherent national and international efforts are in designing criteria for evaluating equity and governance for city sustainability, meaning that indicators for SDG 11 ought to enable countries to adapt global urban targets to their own national contexts.

Land use, agriculture and governance: Urban land use planning, if based on sustainable development principles, can help address the challenge of informal settlement, tenure insecurity, and—ultimately—urban poverty. This is the premise from which discussants emerged to talk about three topics: i) relocation or renewal? The case of Mona Commons, Jamaica; ii) collaborative sub-urban transformation for land use compatibility in Kampala city; and iii) tackling the challenges of urban poverty through “land-use planning for tenure security”: steps and activities for action in Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

Evidence across the three case studies provided participants with an integrated understanding of the dynamics in urban land use and demonstrated how to effectively utilize policies and planning instruments to manage urban growth and achieve sustainable, equitable, and efficient development outcomes. It was acknowledged, however, that sustainable land use planning for tenure security and poverty reduction is frequently a political act characterized by material interests amongst land administrators in national and municipal offices, land lords, and tenants, with forces that operate not only at different geographical and institutional levels but that are also interlocked in nature. The availability of spatial information is often an obstacle, alongside widespread corruption and an inadequate skills, which pose institutional challenges for planning, forecasting, modelling and monitoring land use change and supporting land use decisions, especially in developing countries (Chigbu, 2015).

Urban development strategies must address urban poverty

Inclusive urban development: Due to global capital flows for infrastructure development, economic productivity and affluence have become the manifestations of urban development: special economic zones, office towers, rapid transport corridors, transport terminals, shopping malls, luxury and storied housing projects. Although urbanites at the lowest income scales may seem to have benefited from the economic opportunities that have accompany such growth agendas, the evidence presented by the fellows showed that wealth production in cities has not necessarily contributed to improved living conditions for the vast majority of the urban population.

This urban trend was illustrated across four case studies including: i) avenues in the tropics: trans-disciplinary tools for emerging cities; ii) retrospection of private-state-citizen spatial planning financing model in the global South: potentials and limitations; iii) trajectories of peri-urban futures: mapping spaces of inequality, social justice and sustainability in Manila’s Peri-Urban Fringe; iv) challenges of china’s urbanization and the promise of new-type urbanization. The governance challenge posed by the discussants was how to provide infrastructure and services for rapidly growing populations, how to address multiple issues relating to slums and squatter settlements, and how to deal with the adverse impacts of climate change.

Addressing urban issues, according to the fellows, requires an integrated approach that specifically targets the poor, promotes economic development, treats cities as living ecosystems, and fosters the participation of the private sector and civil society. The role of research and researchers was also questioned in terms of fostering transdisciplinary approaches to generate the knowledge needed to solve urban poverty and to improve the social and environmental living conditions of the vulnerable. The possibilities and benefits of putting the transdisciplinary approach into operation were discussed extensively as a way of enabling researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and urbanites to come together and coproduce knowledge that leads to more collaborative and effective interventions, all in a bid to confront the complexity of solving urban problems.

Urban poverty and governance: What institutions of city governance do impacts poverty, and the fellows under this theme were not referring only to municipal government, but to all agencies of the state that have an interest in the city, as well as private businesses and NGOs. The session illustrated this by centering on two cases: i) urban poverty, neighborhood, and social capital in NYC; and ii) from dumpsite scavenging to waste management systems: political implications for urban governance in the interior of Argentina. In NYC, the evidence indicated that disadvantaged neigbourhoods are characterized by lack of safety and limited resources (low quality housing, low level of trust in neighbors, abandoned public space, limited food resources, limited access to health services and education), which has led to a break down in social capital in three ways: i) bonding (limited contact with neighbors due to lack of trust); iii) bridging (limited contact with persons not experiencing poverty); and linking (limited contact with persons in power). The discussant noted that success in addressing this neigbourhood challenge depends on context, but largely requires anti-poverty interventions that diagnose and act on the three levels of social capital (bridging, bonding, and linking).

Waste management is a challenge for urban governance.

Conversely, the Argentina case, featuring the cities of Mendoza, Cordoba, and La Plata, focused on the different strategies for the inclusion of informal scavengers into formalized waste management systems. In the presentation, several factors were identified as improving the chances of producing effective, sustainable inclusion, namely: political credibility of the leaders, program stability, and step-by-step formal entitlement of the scavengers and their organizations. At the level of program implementation, evidence stressed the need to articulate public and private interests if the value chain of different materials (plastic, glass, cardboard, etc.) are to be streamlined (Zapata et al. 2013). We used the discussant’s example of waste management to delve into the relationship between the state and suburban governments and capital. Fellows were concerned about whose interests are advanced in city sustainability agendas, and whether the power of capital encourages the state to flout agenda setting and policy making to the disadvantage of the poor.

Urban environmental sustainability and housing: Attention under this theme was drawn to: i) reducing inequality, ramping up environmental quality: Just sustainability in coproduced informal settlement upgrading in Johannesburg; ii) Towards environmental sustainability in African cities: addressing the governance inefficiencies on urban green spaces in Kumasi, Ghana; and iii) Local authority responses to climate change and urban challenges in South Africa – transcending administrative boundaries. Key emphasis in this discussion was on exploring governance modes through which cities can deliver and support environmentally sustainable and equitable housing, as well as the attendant services. The discussants noted that housing and the environmental impact on each other in a number of significant ways, including in terms of water usage, biophysical impacts, sewerage, and flooding.

A major dilemma is how responses to the increasing demand for housing, due to rapidly growing urban populations, can be achieved in an environmentally sustainable and just manner. Policy and planning frameworks, according to one of the fellows, should deliver assistance to low-income households on improving the environmental performance of their homes, and also engaging communities in greening projects at neigbourhood to city levels. In particular, the fellows concluded that city visions and policies for more environmentally sustainable housing have to work with—and not seek to displace—poor households. During this session, the multi-level governance approaches and the growing interest in the role that local governments can play in transformative development and climate change adaptation was also considered by one of the fellows. Particular attention was drawn to the role of collaboration between local governments, especially across urban and rural regions for developing and implementing climate change actions, land use planning, and other elements that are central to achieving sustainable development goals (Leck and Simon, 2014).

feature — Transforming urban governance requires experts to become transdiciplinarians

Concluding reflections

After presenting the case studies, the concluding reflection for the urban sustainability question was to search for appropriate governance modes that use an incremental approach and that create relationships that facilitate the coproduction of knowledge through joint work with academics of different disciplines in collaboration with policy makers, practitioners and urbanites of different socio-economic backgrounds. In order to provide more insight to this concluding reflection, three questions emerged:

How can urban theory from the Global South shine light on urban transformation? This is a question that needs answers from different fields of urban studies and, therefore, requires a transdisciplinary approach.
Within a number of complex urban crises, what emerging processes can we identify across our case studies?
Rethinking truth to power: what role/position is there for the researcher within urban transformation? What models of coproduction of knowledge are emerging and how effective are they? How can we enhance/measure coproduction of knowledge?

Buyana Kareem
Kampala
with…Olumuyiwa Adegun (Johannesburg), Collins Adjei Mensah (Cape Coast), Saleh Ahmed (Tucson), Isabelle Anguelovski (Barcelona), Ruishan Chen (Shanghai), Uchendu Eugene Chigbu (Munich), Aakriti Grover (Delhi), Alice Hertzog (Zurich), Tracy–Ann Hyman (West Indies), George Frank Kinyashi (Dodoma), Hayley Leck (London), Karolina Łukasiewicz (Kraków), Martin Maldonado (Cordoba), André Ortega (Manila), Lorena Pasquini (Cape Town), Alisa Zomer (New Haven)

On The Nature of Cities

References

Chigbu, U.E., Masum, F., Leitmeier, A., Mabikke, S., Antonio, D., Espinoza, J. and Hernig, A. (2015). Securing tenure through land use planning: conceptual framework, evidences and experiences from selected countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Presented at the World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, March 23-27, Washington DC.

Eric Chua, I. A. (2015). Inclusive approaches to urban climate adaptation planning and implementation in the Global South. Climate Policy.

Lorena Pasquini, G. Z. (2014). What enables local governments to mainstream climate change adaptation? Lessons learned from two municipal case studies in the Western Cape, South Africa. Climate and Development.

Simon, D. & Leck, H. (2014) Understanding urban adaptation challenges in diverse contexts: Editorial introduction: Special issue on Urban Adaptation to Climate/Environmental Change : Urban Climate. 7, p. 1-5

Zapata C., María J., and Patrik Z., (2013). Switching Managua on! Connecting informal settlements to the formal city through household waste collection. Environment and Urbanization 2013 25: 225.

about the writer
Olumuyiwa Adegun

Olumuyiwa Adegun is presently writing up his PhD thesis at the School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The thesis is based on his exploration of just sustainability in informal settlement intervention and green infrastructure in Johannesburg.

about the writer
Collins Adjei Mensah

Collins Adjei Mensah is a Principal Research Assistant at the Department of Geography and Regional Planning, University of Cape Coast (UCC), Ghana. He is a strong advocate for sustainable urban development, especially integrating natural vegetation into the physical landscape of cities.

about the writer
Saleh Ahmed

Saleh Ahmed is a Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona’s Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Arid Lands Resource Sciences.

about the writer
Isabelle Michele Sophie Anguelovski

Isabelle Anguelovski is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is a social scientist trained in urban and environmental planning and coordinator of the research line Cities and Environmental Justice.

about the writer
Ruishan Chen

Ruishan Chen is an associate professor of geography at School of Geographic Sciences of East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai, China. He examines how urbanization and climate change results in inequalities in urban China and how to achieve urban sustainability.

about the writer
Uchendu Chigbu

Uchendu Eugene Chigbu is a multidisciplinary researcher in land management at the Technical University of Munich. Specific areas of his research are in land governance, policies and actions for transformations in urban, peri-urban and rural settlements.

about the writer
Aakriti Grover

Aakriti Grover, a young geographer, is research scholar at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India. She specializes in urban remote sensing, microclimate, urban health and disaster management.

about the writer
Alice Hertzog-Fraser

Alice Hertzog is an urban anthropologist working at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Her main research interests are in urban migration – exploring how migrants contribute to and transform the city.

about the writer
Tracy-Ann Hyman

Tracy-Ann Hyman is a recipient of a Japanese Government scholarship where she pursued a Masters in Sustainability Science in Environment Systems. She is currently pursuing a PhD on Debris Floods and their impact on communities with no early warning systems.

about the writer
George Kinyashi

George Frank Kinyashi is a Lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning at the Institute of Rural Development Planning in Tanzania. He is currently working on urban economic development focusing on sustainable urbanization in developing countries.

about the writer
Hayley Leck

Hayley Leck is a Research Associate in the Geography Department at King’s College London. She is particularly interested in understanding how individuals and societies in diverse contexts perceive and respond to environmental change and disasters.

about the writer
Karolina Łukasiewicz

Karolina Lukasiewicz is a sociologist specialized in migration studies, urban poverty and policy analysis. Lukasiewicz has nearly ten years’ research experience in analyzing public policies.

about the writer
Martin Maldonado

Martin Maldonado is Assistant Researcher at the Argentine National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research, where he focuses his research on the different measurements of poverty and on the mechanisms that produce and reproduce marginality among the argentine youth.

about the writer
Andre Ortega

André Ortega is a spatial demographer and urban geographer with research interests on spatial politics of peri-urban transformations, dispossession and gentrification, transnational migration, and critical demography.

about the writer
Lorena Pasquini

Lorena Pasquini works at the University of Cape Town, where she is a Lecturer for the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences and the Research Coordinator for the African Climate & Development Initiative.

about the writer
Alisa Zomer

Alisa Zomer is a Research Fellow at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. Her research focuses on urban climate change governance and sustainability policy at both local and international scales.

Dealing with Complex Urban Systems and Uncertainty: Insights from Northeast Thailand

14 October 2015Essay, People & Communities, Science & ToolsAsia, Climate change, Participation/Democracy, Resilience, Stewardship, SustainabilityRichard Friend

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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It is now coming to the end of the rainy season—the point in the year at which the reservoirs across Thailand should be approaching maximum storage levels in order to provide the water resources that are needed for the full range of water uses through the dry season. But as we write this blog, it is difficult to see how the next few months will unfold, and how water needs will be met.

The situation in Udon Thani in Northeast Thailand could well be particularly severe. Water levels in the main reservoir for the province have increased substantially within the last few weeks as tropical storms have moved across the country, but have only risen from 15 to 24 percent. Normally at this time of year, storage capacity should be at least 80 percent. At current levels, Udon is once again facing a major water resource crisis.

1 Houay Louang Drought Markers — Flood markers on the Houay Louang reservoir in Udon Thani province indicate water levels below the minimum. Image © Richard Friend

This is not the first time that such a crisis has occurred in Udon Thani. Recent years have seen more variable and unpredictable patterns of rainfall that pose monumental challenges for the various institutions with responsibility for water supply and distribution, as well as for the farmers, households, and industries that depend on regular water supply. Udon Thani exemplifies many of the problems of climate change and water resources; a changing agricultural landscape alongside urban development; and the political, technical, and institutional challenges of dealing with greater uncertainty and heightened risk.

Once again, places like Udon Thani, with ambitions to take advantage of regional economic integration, appear to be threatened by the combination of climate uncertainty and weaknesses in governance and planning.

The experience of Udon Thani illustrates the importance of governance institutions and processes that can better accommodate changing patterns of uncertainty and risk and the dynamics of an urbanizing region. But building the kinds of adaptive, learning-oriented institutions that can cope with uncertainty and risk is a major challenge. In many ways, these kinds of calls for institutional change do not fit easily with the ways that bureaucracies operate. Yet, through a combination of engaging citizen scientists and opening space for informed public dialogue, local stakeholders have begun to put the challenges of a climate resilient urban future on the policy agenda, and have begun taking actions to reimagine their urban visions.

Urbanization of Udon Thani

Part of the problem lies in the history of urbanization that Udon Thani has experienced. As the city has expanded, demand for water has increased, while precipitation has become more variable and less predictable. The city is now facing problems with water availability and quality. The city is dependent on one main water source—the Houay Louang reservoir—that was built over 40 years ago and designed to meet the largely rural irrigation needs of small-scale rice farmers. The reservoir has a capacity of 135 million cubic meters, but agriculture requires 138 cubic metres per year, and the combined demand from urban areas and industry is already at 22 million cubic metres per year.

The pressures on the Huay Luang have intensified, with the expansion of irrigated rice and other crops across the province and increasing need to meet domestic water demands of the growing urban population. This demand is only set to rise again as urban populations increase further and as industry becomes more established in the area. Udon Thani is well situated in the Greater Mekong Subregion and is positioning itself as a gateway for trade and commerce with expectations of doubling population and urbanized area within the next decade. This also involves building a second ringroad around the city to accommodate the growth in road traffic that has already occurred and that is anticipated to increase further. Public transport is limited, and there are few efforts to address public transport other than through the expansion of the road network. Future climate concerns are distant thoughts in current planning.

As the urbanized area expands there are growing pressures on land and water resources. Udon Thani has one of the highest rates of land price increase in the country. As with other parts of Thailand, much of the land that is targeted for expansion is low value land that offers the highest returns on speculation and conversion. Much of this land is agricultural or public wetland areas. While such land conversion generates enormous profits that might be hard to resist, the implications for the broader waterscape are significant.

2 Udon_Blog_stream — The flow of the Houay Nong Dae stream is now seriously undermined by the expansion of major roads, housing, and commercial estates, undermining the natural drainage of the floodplain areas into which the city of Udon Thani is expanding. Once a viable source of water, the stream is now heavily polluted. Image © Richard Friend

The large wetland of Nong Dae ling to the north of the city on the road to Lao border encapsulates many of these threats and challenges. The 900 rai (355 acres) wetland has been targeted for a series of public and private developments. The natural drainage streams and canals have been much reduced in size and capacity as the road system has expanded, and as warehouses and shopping centres have been built along the highway. Private housing estates have been built on its edges—close to the main road—and are already impacting drainage and flood patterns. Additionally, state plans to fill in 90 percent of the wetland and use the site for an international convention hall, a sports hall, and as parking space for the planned nearby high-speed railway station pose even greater threats.

As well as the threats to natural storage and drainage, demand has increased as water availability has become more variable. Recent conditions appear to be consistent with climate projections that suggest dry seasons will become longer and drier, with precipitation in the rainy season becoming less predictable, and with more intense rainfall falling, often in a shorter space of time. These shifts in precipitation also raise the risk of flooding, which has been further compounded by the expansion of built-up areas across natural floodplains that in turn have altered the natural hydrology.

Recent years have demonstrated the increasing variability in rainfall from year to year, and the cumulative impacts across the years. In 2011, the main pressure on water managers was to manage the dramatic floods that affected many parts of the country. In 2012, reservoir managers released water several times during the rainy season to avoid repeating the 2011 flood crisis. By the release of water meant that at the end of 2012, as they moved into the dry season, Udon was facing a severe water shortage.

In 2013, the main pressure on reservoir managers was to ensure that the reservoir reached sufficient capacity to meet dry season demand. Early in the rainy season, the reservoir had already reached 70 percent of storage capacity when a tropical storm and the threat of intense rainfall moved towards Udon. This led the central department in Bangkok to order pre-emptive release from the reservoir to avoid the risk of flooding downstream of the reservoir and in the city. However, the storm passed without any rainfall, leaving the reservoir well below capacity. It was again a matter of luck that a subsequent but unexpected storm did actually pass through Udon with enough rainfall to refill the reservoir. Even so, in 2014, due to water shortages in the dry season, there were restrictions on allocation of water for irrigation. The levels in the reservoir dropped so low that the Royal Irrigation Department (RID) was obliged to pump the water out of the reservoir to the outflow canals. Fortunately, domestic water supply to the city could be maintained, but at a cost borne by farmers requiring irrigation. After such an intense dry season, RID reservoir managers were keen to ensure that they were able to store enough water in the rainy season to meet the demand of the following dry season.

This year has been even more problematic. With the influence of El Niño, the dry season has been far longer and drier than previously, and rainfall in the rainy season has been far lower than expected. At the beginning of September, when storage is expected to be 80 percent, the reservoir was only at 15 percent of capacity. Precipitation patterns are also proving less reliable than historical trends, making it all the more difficult for reservoir managers to plan when to store and release water.

Facing the challenge of urbanization and climate change

The main challenge has been in putting these issues on the political agenda. Despite a history of increased urbanization and despite reaching the status of a Newly Industrialized Country (NIC) in 1988, Thailand still does not have an effective national strategy or policy framework for urban development. Land use planning has been notoriously weak.

These weaknesses were revealed in glaring detail in the 2011 floods that struck most of the country, but that caused devastation in the Chao Praya basin and Bangkok. Many parts of the basin around Bangkok had been built-up from the early 1990s—agricultural land and land designated as floodways according to earlier land use plans was converted to industrial parks and housing estates with a network of roads cutting across the landscape. The flood risk was certainly well known, but was ignored as the color-coding of land use plans was changed to accommodate commercial interests. The international airport that opened in 2005 is located in King Cobra Swamp—a low-lying wetland area that provides drainage for a city that is built in the delta. As the floods approached Bangkok, there was a desperate attempt to divert the water from its natural flow as it targeted critical economic infrastructure and to steer it towards areas that would not normally flood. After the floods receded, the pressure was on to put floodwalls in place to protect industrial parks, to build walls higher, thereby shifting flood risk elsewhere. The lessons of this experience do not appear to have been learned.

The experience in Bangkok and the Chao Praya basin brought the risks home in other parts of the country. In Udon Thani, local stakeholders are assessing options for managing local water sources. The expansion of the urban area is leading to encroachment and degradation of local water bodies that have traditionally been sources for domestic water supply and that provide important drainage for the city.

Collaborations between ISET, Thailand Environment Institute, the Municipality of Udon Thani, the local Rajabhat University, and the Thai Research Fund (TRF), along with local people across 18 villages, led to participatory action research, mapping, and assessing local water systems—including the flow, areas of flood risk—and identifying the water bodies and wetlands that contribute to urban flood drainage and provide domestic water sources. Traditionally these water bodies provided domestic water (and some irrigation) to local rural communities. However, with limited state funds, these have often been poorly maintained, leading to declines in water quality. At the same time, as the city area has expanded, these formerly rural communities are more directly linked to the urban areas. Many of these small water bodies are being targeted as sites for development of housing estates, often with wastewater discharged from the estates directly into these waterways without adequate treatment. The combination of these pressures has further reduced the water quality. With poor and unreliable water quality, the demand for water from these sources declines, pushing demand towards the piped sources from the Houay Louang.

3 Udon_Blog — Local villagers, including this village headman, present hand drawn maps that identify natural water bodies, drainage, and flood risk zones, as well as the communities that utilize these resources. In addition to the participatory maps, the researchers are using Google Earth and other sources for their research. Image © Richard Friend

Participatory research has pointed to options for rehabilitating and maintaining these bodies in ways that would improve natural drainage for all of the expanding urban areas, as well as providing additional water sources in a more decentralized, modular water supply, thus contributing to the flexibility, diversity, and redundancy of the urban water systems. By bringing different communities across the basin together, this research has built up a more holistic understanding of the broader landscape, and also created a platform for learning and dialogue.

Alongside this citizen science, a partnership with the Institute for Water Resources (IWR) of the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has helped introduce shared vision planning: the application of scenario-based models to shared learning dialogues. Through a participatory process, local stakeholders have developed their own scenario-based models that consider the implications of different development and land use scenarios and analyze their implications. This tool has helped bring different stakeholders to the dialogue table and to consider specific actions. One of the core challenges with urbanization in Thailand is the need for different administrative organizations in the urbanizing area to collaborate on plans for land use and water resource management. This is largely an institutional challenge—there are few incentives for local administrations to contribute their own budgets or to place restrictions on their development ambitions. It is also a technical challenge—there are limited tools to assist the analysis of future development scenarios and options.

An additional challenge is being able to imagine an urban future that might be different from the experience of other large cities, and that might be able to steer Udon Thani away from current trajectories of urbanization. While people in Udon Thani frequently remark that they do not want their city to be like Bangkok, much of the development that is occurring is merely repeating Bangkok’s history. Poor land use planning and investment creates a path dependency; once critical economic assets are located in hazardous locations, the only way out seems to be through further construction of flood defenses that shift flood risk, and ultimately exacerbate the problem further.

With support from local and international architects, Udon Thani has been considering immediate steps to redesign their urbanizing future by establishing green infrastructure that could take advantage of natural wetlands and water bodies. With an interest in promoting bicycling as a viable transport option, there is also the potential for rehabilitating the networks of canals in the urbanizing area as both waterways and cycle paths, addressing some of the region’s water management and transport challenges.

Udon Thani is currently dependent on infrastructure built over 40 years ago and designed for different needs and for a different climate regime. The institutions responsible for policy, planning, and management are similarly structured for different challenges; they are less able to cope with emerging uncertainty and risk, or the need to operate across administrative boundaries. This kind of partnership between citizens, research centres, and government agencies, in which they take the lead in assessing and mapping water sources, is important for the information that it generates. Additionally, such a collaborative research process that involves both citizen and expert-led science contributes to opening arenas for more broadly informed public policy dialogue. These processes lie at the heart of building resilience—creating new arenas for the state and its citizens to enter into informed public dialogues to assess vulnerability and to identify innovative options for action. At the heart of this is the need for reimagining an urban future.

Richard Friend & Pakamas Thinphanga
Bangkok

On The Nature of Cities

Acknowledgements: This article has been prepared with funding under the IDRC/SSHRC Urban Climate Resilience in Southeast Asia (UCRSEA) partnership, an action-research and capacity building program that operates in Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam.

The original action research in Udon Thani was part of the Mekong-Building Climate Resilience in Asian Cities (M-BRACE). M-BRACE is a four–year program funded by USAID that aimed to strengthen the capacity of stakeholders in medium-sized cities in the Thailand and Vietnam region to deal with the challenges of urbanization and climate change. The program was implemented by ISET-International, in partnership with the Thailand Environment Institute and Vietnam’s National Institute for Science and Technology Policy and Strategy Studies. This blog article draws on original research being conducted under the M-BRACE program led by Dr. Santipab Siriwattanapiboon (Rajabhat University, Udon Thani) and Ms. Pattcharin Chairob (Thai Research Fund), as well as the M-BRACE Vulnerability Assessments.

about the writer
Pakamas Thinphanga

Pakamas has a technical background in biological sciences and coastal ecology with a Ph.D. from James Cook University, Australia and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oxford. She joined TEI in late 2008.

Are Individual Practitioners of Civic Ecology the Answer to Sustainability?

12 October 2015People & Communities, Review, Science & ToolsCommunities, Economics, Participation/Democracy, Stewardship, SustainabilityStephanie Pincetl

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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A review of Civic Ecology, Adaptation and Transformation from the Ground Up, by Marianne E. Krasny and Keith G. Tidball. 2015. ISBN: 9780262028653. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 328 pages.

This is a book that seeks to highlight the heroic efforts of individuals to make a difference in the quality of life of their neighborhoods and to advance sustainability-oriented activities. It shows the importance of dedicated leadership and extraordinary people stepping in to address environmental problems. It assumes, for the U.S., that the Tocquevillean impression of the U.S. of civic engagement is a useful compass, especially if based in a Leopoldian ethic of nature. However, the authors go beyond the U.S. to also include examples from across the world.

Civic ecology, for these authors, focuses on hands-on stewardship practices that integrate civic and environmental values (from the introduction). They argue for the importance of people acting as stewards within a social-ecological systems framework, putting the human and nonhuman pieces back together. Their emphasis is on volunteers who perceive problems and who set about trying to repair the damage — both to the people and the environment. Not entirely naïve, the authors acknowledge that civic ecology fills gaps left by the state, that it can be problematic that unpaid volunteers end up working to address the voids, and that these activities can accelerate neighborhood gentrification. Still, Krasny and Tidball wish to celebrate and honor people who defy harsh realities of poor and blighted cities, and who do so out of a sense of civic commitment to fellow residents and the planet.

The book has 10 chapters that showcase people’s work across the globe. I found the organization of the chapters and themes a bit confusing because they alternated between thematic chapters (Stewardship, Health, and Well-Being), which provided a discussion of the topic, examples from different places, and then a specific Steward Story of an individual. I could not tell how the examples were chosen among the many initiatives globally. Were these the most representative? The most transformative? Still, the point of the book is that people care and are committed to doing things to make their communities better, often on a shoestring or volunteer basis.

The book does not provide insight into the scalability of these initiatives and efforts, nor their relative impact. Herein lies the deeper set of questions. Can individual, ground-up efforts, distributed throughout cities, lead to more fundamental transformations? The authors seem to think so and point to the policy entrepreneur as a key element, a person who navigates between expert knowledge and the community, to make more substantive regulatory or institutional change. This is an optimistic message — the individuals and groups exist; they are effective. Yet those persons are rare, and the role is challenging and difficult to sustain.

For me, what was missing in the conversation was a frontal discussion of power and politics. How do these efforts coalesce into social movements that demand changes in cities, changes that offer people paid and meaningful work in creating livable cities that make space for nature throughout? How do we create real funding streams that change infrastructure and enable new work that is rewarding and restorative to the neighborhood and to the locality?

Perhaps this is book two.

Stephanie Pincetl
Los Angeles

On The Nature of Cities

A New Reconnection Agenda for People and Nature

11 October 2015Art & Awareness, Essay, Place & DesignBiophilia, Health, Networks, Sustainability, What is urban nature?Chris Ives

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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I have recently started working on a new project that will explore how reconnecting people with nature can help transform society towards sustainability (see http://leveragepoints.org). ‘Connectedness with nature’ has recently become a buzz phrase, with scientists, journalists and practitioners talking about the problems of disconnection, the benefits of reconnection, and the ways that we can become more connected with nature in our day-to-day lives. (See Tim Beatley’s TNOC blog on the nature pyramid).

(1) Disconnection from nature and the broader sustainability problem

Much of the discussion has been about the implications of connectedness with nature for human health and wellbeing outcomes. And for good reason! There is a growing evidence base that highlights the substantial physical and mental health benefits of interaction with green and natural environments (Keniger et al., 2013). In fact, some experts are now arguing that health outcomes of nature exposure should be considered in terms of dose-response relationships as in traditional medical research (Shanahan et al., 2015). Yet other commentators have flagged society’s disconnection from nature as underpinning broader global environmental and sustainability problems (Folke et al., 2011). If reconnecting people with nature is key to tackling major sustainability problems, what is the role of the city? Are cities part of the problem, or central to the solution?

(2) Are cities the problem or the solution?

Urban living has been cited as a key driver of people’s disconnection from natural environments (Miller, 2005). The ‘extinction of experience’ has been said to be most acute in cities, and is increasing. Children in particular are spending less and less time outdoors engaging in nature-based activities. This disconnection has been highlighted by Richard Louv in his book “Last child in the woods” (2005). His message has struck a chord with the general public, with the book receiving much attention and popular media coverage. There has also been research showing that the time children spend indoors using electronic devices has increased over time. These indoor activities have been related to a downward trend in national park visitation (Pergams & Zaradic, 2006). Cities have even been blamed for luring tourists away from wild and natural areas. The relationship between urban lifestyles and experiential disconnection from nature has been an impetus for the burgeoning growth in urban greening movements in urban planning (e.g. the Biophilic Cities movement). According to this thinking, promoting nature experiences in urban environments is key to tackling broader environmental challenges because cities are home to most people on the planet.

Children_Exploring_Nature — City children are engaging in these kinds of nature experiences less frequently. Image: Crystal E Zobel

While urban landscapes are generally seen as presenting significant challenges to human-nature connections, some commentators consider this disconnection from nature as being positive for environmental outcomes because it concentrates impacts in a small spatial area (e.g. ecomodernist manifesto). Indeed, while local green environments are key for urban dwellers’ experiences of the natural world, low-density cities with many green open spaces may be bad for regional biodiversity (Soga et al 2015).

Therefore, a trade-off potentially exists between cities designed for human-nature experiences and those that minimise broader environmental impacts. In order to explore whether cities are the problem or solution, it’s necessary to unpack the types of human-nature connections that may be important and how these relate to sustainability outcomes.

(3) Types of disconnection

Connection with nature can be considered as encompassing multiple dimensions. Here, I consider four dimensions of nature connection—material connections, experiential connections, cognitive/psychological connections and philosophical connections—and assess the role of cities in fostering or undermining these.

A city is defined as an area of high human population density. For this reason, cities naturally consume lots of resources, ‘metabolise’ them through various socioeconomic activities, and produce waste. This way of looking at cities is often referred to as ‘urban metabolism’. Cities are therefore hugely reliant upon (and materially connected to) natural ecosystems that provide the goods and services that sustain them. However, over the past century, cities have increased in size and number, and the nature of these connections has changed. As seen in Fig. 1, globalisation has led to cities being increasingly “tele-connected” to distant ecosystems in various parts of the globe, rather than intimately reliant upon local ecosystems that provide direct feedbacks.

map — Figure 1. The change over time in the material connections between cities and the ecosystems that sustain them. Image: Ch 2 of CBO Outlook book (www.cbobook.org)

As I touched on already, people’s experiential connections with urban nature characterise their day-to-day life. Experiential connections can be hampered through urban planning decisions that squeeze out green environments from the urban matrix (particularly in response to densification pressures), poor accessibility as a result of transport infrastructure (this is particularly problematic in large cities where it can be difficult to access hinterland environments), or individual behavioural decisions (often as a result of people being disinterested in nature or leading increasingly busy lives).

Cognitive connections with nature relate in part to the information people receive about their choices and behaviours. As Andersson et al. (2014) said in their recent article “[t]he physical and mental distance between urban consumers and the ecosystems supporting them mask the ecological implications of choices made”. These cognitive connections extend from knowing where food products come from through to understanding the ecology of local nature reserves. However, there’s evidence that experiential connections are related closely to environmental knowledge and psychological orientations towards the natural world. For example, a study of an urban park in Germany showed that park visitors who visited more frequently had better knowledge of animal species found in the reserve (Randler et al., 2007). In addition, research from Brisbane has shown that green space visitation rates are more greatly influenced by people’s ‘nature relatedness’ (a psychological measure of a person’s affinity with the natural world) than their proximity to a green space (Lin et al., 2014). This suggests therefore that a positive feedback may exist between people’s psychological orientation towards nature and their experience of nature: the more people experience natural environments (particularly as children), the more they will feel a connection to the natural world, and the more they will continue to visit. Conversely, the less people experience natural environments, the less they may care about them.

The final type of connection with nature might be termed ‘philosophical’ connection, or environmental worldview. Scholars are increasingly noting that different people and societies hold different perspectives on how humans relate to the natural world. The dominant philosophy underpinning modern western society is that of humans controlling nature and valuing the natural world primarily for the instrumental goods and services it can provide. This contrasts with alternative metaphors such as people as ‘stewards’ of the natural world, or as part of a broader ‘web of life’ (Raymond et al 2013). These philosophical perspectives imbue individuals, communities, and corporations and therefore have far reaching implications for sustainability. Because philosophical perspectives are passed between people within specific social contexts, cities are places where these are naturally shaped, developed and communicated.

(4) A new reconnection agenda

Cities are key to global sustainability outcomes. Urbanisation has undoubtedly contributed to the environmental crisis through the consumption of resources and disconnection of people from local environments. Yet cities are also the solution. There is a vital need to reconnect urban populations with nature, but we must also move beyond superficial connections to those connections that will contribute to systemic change. Climate change, species extinction, global poverty, natural resource depletion; these are the big issues that are facing our world today that require huge shifts in how humanity relates to the natural world. Promoting more frequent visits to the local park will not achieve this change. What we need is a wholesale shift in personal and societal orientation towards nature that results in individual and collective behaviour change.

Could focusing on connections with nature in a broader sense provide a key to the type of transformation needed? We need a reconnection agenda that focuses on reconnecting people with the natural world experientially (increased interaction with natural environments), materially (strengthening ties with local ecosystems), cognitively (increasing knowledge of our reliance on nature), and philosophically (engendering respect for the planet). As areas of high population density, cities are ideally placed to drive this reconnection agenda, particularly in regards to cognitive and philosophical reconnection. As cultural hubs, cities promote community interaction and development and ideas are spread quickly in them. Cities are also centres of economic activity and home to corporation headquarters. Institutions that may be instrumental in effecting change for sustainability are based in cities. Cities are even critical to promoting moral and religious messages related to sustainability, as highlighted by the Pope’s recent tour of the US, where he reiterated humanity’s responsibility to steward the environment. If it is value shift that’s needed, then this is most possible in cities.

ZEALANDIA from Air Photo Creit - Rob Suisted — Zealandia nature sanctuary from air. Image: Rob Suisted

So what would this reconnection agenda look like in practical terms? There is not enough space in this blog post to explore it in detail, but I present a few initial ideas here. To increase the value of experiential connections, urban planners and designers should look to enhance biodiversity in green spaces as a way of increasing the ‘intensity’ of the nature experience in what are often quite ecologically sterile landscapes (see Ikin et al., 2015, for ideas). Wellington’s ‘Zealandia’ wildlife sanctuary is a good example of a well managed and popular nature reserve close to the urban centre. In addition to this, there’s a need for cities to promote sustainability initiatives that emerge through grassroots or non-government organisations. Relevant examples include the recent ‘car free day’ in Paris, or WWF’s ‘Earth Hour City Challenge’. These initiatives can be powerful tools for generating attitudinal and behavioural change in individuals and institutions that go far beyond the single event.

Paris_Car_Free — A car free day in Paris. Image: Maxime Lathuilière

Cities are key places for reconnecting people with nature. Yet it is time for cities to take nature connections to the next level: to go beyond making urban landscapes pleasant for their inhabitants to become places that drive transformation.

Chris Ives
Lüneburg

On The Nature of Cities

Towards Building Community Resilience in a Coastal Town in the South of Chile: Before Measuring, Explore Planning Tools

7 October 2015Essay, People & Communities, Science & ToolsClimate change, Coasts, Communities, Disasters/Red zone, Resilience, ToolsPaula Villagra

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In Chile, over recent years, there has been increasing attention to the concept of community resilience, especially in facing natural disasters. Community resilience is the capacity of a community to adapt to changes that occur after natural disasters. Such adaptation capacity is vital for satisfying survival needs (e.g. food and water), as well as for maintaining local identity (e.g. fishermen community) and economic roles for the development of the territory (e.g. tourism). Several studies have been carried out in areas affected by the 2010 earthquake and tsunami on how to measure community resilience and how to increase it (MINVU, 2010; Franco & Siembieda, 2010; Platt, 2011; Rahman & Kausel, 2013; Cartes Siade, 2013).

But little of this research on resilience has been incorporated in the development of cities. This is most probably because this information came too late after the reconstruction process. Besides, resilience involves a variety of detailed quantitative and qualitative indicators which may be quite difficult to measure, evaluate and include in the local planning instruments. These demand extra funding and human capital, increasing the cost of reconstruction considerably. After a disaster, funds are allocated to those needs which are considered most urgent, such as refuge and food. What’s more, these indicators usually come in numbers and textual data instead of maps and specific cartography, which can facilitate the complementation of urban plans.

In facing this problem and following the discussion of the round table on resilience months ago, an interesting question came about in our research group (Laboratorio de Paisaje y Resiliencia Urbana: PRULAB): To what extent does the application of planning tools in cities increase community resilience? This question seems more important than measuring resilience in the context of Chile, which is prone to different natural disturbances, and in which, as in many other developing countries, it is very difficult to measure resilience due to the lack of information required in well-known resiliency checklists (e.g. Cutter et al., 2014). For example, in Chile, most social and economic databases are developed at the regional scale, hence no data is available at the community level. Therefore, it seems interesting to explore whether planning decisions are developed to support resilience enhancement, or otherwise.

This task becomes even more motivating in the local planning environment of the coastal town of Mehuin, in the south of Chile, in which the concept of resilience is not well known and is not directly mentioned in urban planning tools, even though the government of Chile committed to investing in building communities’ resilience to natural disasters and integrating this approach into urban planning tools after signing the Hyogo Framework of Action in 2005.

Figure 1 v2 — Location of Mehuin in Chile (left) and aspects of the city’s resilience, both positive (center) and negative (right).

Planning tools include, for example, the Regional Development Plans, Regulatory Plans, and Emergency and Action Plans, which define land use, urban density, balance between un-built and built areas, amount of green open spaces, urban sprawl patterns, the distribution of socio-economic groups, and economic development, which, among other aspects, are addressed in urban resilience measures. Our idea of measuring the contribution of the current planning tools to building community resilience instead of measuring the community resilience itself is derived from the availability of the tools listed above.

One study, undertaken by a master’s student, focused on developing a ‘resilient study framework’ of urban planning tools. It was developed based on a variety of resilience attributes and variables derived from different hazard management and urban planning literature ((Walker & Salt, 2006, Cutter et al., 2008; Ahern, 2011; Allan & Bryant, 2011; Cutter et al., 2014).). Community resilience is a broad concept and has several dimensions, attributes, and variables. Accordingly, even if the term resilience is not found in the current Chilean urban planning tools, we expected that there might be some aspects of community resilience addressed in these tools. For this reason, the study aimed to reveal attributes (such as diversity, redundancy, multi-functionality, modularity, and adaptability) and variables (such as organizational structure and coordination, local disaster training, evacuation potentials, transportation network and medical care capacity) of resilience embedded in urban planning tools. The framework we developed focused on the “institutional” and “housing and infrastructure” dimensions of resilience (which highly influence urban planning tools).

We found that although the term resilience is not directly mentioned in any of the studied planning tools, there are several aspects in the tools addressing resilience attributes and variables, positively or otherwise. This was a surprising finding because the overall idea in Chile is that, before the 2010 earthquake, there was no resilience approach to the development of cities. Hence, acknowledging that urban planning tools are influencing the resilience of cities is the first big step towards building community resilience. In this sense, it seems more relevant to improve and assure current planning actions that support resilience, and to modify those that restrict it, than to invest time and funds on creating new planning tools.

We also found that not every planning tool contributes to every attribute and variable of community resilience in the same manner. We actually think that this is a very good approach to building resilience. Two very well known premises under the concept of resilience are that we should diversify the system as well as add redundancies. Hence, the diversity of planning tools with different focuses is good for the resilience of cities, as is their redundancy in referring to the same topic (i.e. tourism in the case of Mehuin). If, for some reason (e.g. funding), a particular planning tool cannot develop a specific resilience variable, other tools can take its duty. Along the same lines, it is better that the development of resilience variables and attributes are included in different tools, taking care of assuring the appropriate coordination among them.

Distribution of resilient variables and attributes (x-axis) by planning tools (y-axis)

Overall, our study shows how planning tools are contributing to building community resilience to earthquakes and tsunamis in Mehuin and sheds light on the challenges for achieving resilient urban planning in this area. Moreover, the resilience study framework that we developed can be applied to other coastal communities, contributing to defining the government’s priorities as they follow through on a resilience planning approach. Although we acknowledge the importance and necessity of measuring resilience, we believe our approach represents a short cut for urban managers, allowing them to prioritize their interventions in areas where the planning tools have a weaker contribution to community resilience. This can prevent wasting of time and money associated with measuring and applying resilience actions that cannot be included in local planning tools.

Yet, there is no end for building community resilience, as resilience is a process, not an outcome. Besides, changes in the world, which may affect the equilibrium of a social system, are neither one hundred percent predictable or preventable. Accordingly, we believe there is no level of absolute community resilience to natural disasters; hence, measuring resilience is an approach, but not the solution. Tangible actions are applied through planning. In the case of the application of planning tools, the more the planning tools enhance any or every attribute or variable of resilience, the more resilient the community can be.

Paula Villagra & Mina Fallahzadegan
Los Rios

On The Nature of Cities

References

Ahern, J. (2011). From fail-safe to safe-to-fail: Sustainability and resilience in the new urban world. Landscape and Urban Planning, 100, 341–343.

Allan, P., & Bryant, M. (2011). Resilience as a framework for urbanism and recovery. Journal of Landscape Architecture, August, 34-45.Cutter et al., 2008

Cutter, S. L., Ash, K. D., & Emrich, C. T. (2014). The geographies of community disaster resilience. Global Environmental Change, 29, 65-77

Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2006). Resilience thinking: sustaining ecosystems and people in a changing world. Washington: Island Press.

about the writer
Mina Fallahzadegan

Mina Fallahzadegan is an architect and regional planner. She has worked for several years with The Renovation Organization of Tehran and also Tehran Urban Planning & Research Center.

Rah! Rah! for Rail: Solving Transportation in Cities

5 October 2015Place & Design, Review, Science & ToolsDesign, Livability, Planning, Pollution, TransportationEric Sanderson

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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A review of Rail and the City: Shrinking Our Carbon Footprint While Reimaging Urban Space, by Roxanne Warren. 2014. ISBN: 9780262027809. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 336 pages.

Like a dog with a bone, some of us just can’t let go of the notion of rail in cities. I’m certainly one of them. Since most cities dedicate more than 50 percent of their land area to transportation, and for 100 percent of contemporary cities, the majority of that space is dedicated to the almighty automobile, it is difficult to imagine how the nature of cities gets much better without dealing with the car. And it is easy to see electric rail systems as a compelling alternative, speeding us along green rights-of-way that lead to quiet, mixed-use, work/residential neighborhoods, with access to new spaces for playing and relaxing. One can see cities striving for these idyllic biophilic combinations in Europe and parts of South America, even in Asia, but the arguments put forth by numerous authors from diverse perspectives (myself included) have fallen on deaf ears for generations of Americans, who have found the combination of oil, cars, and suburbs more compelling still.

The most recent person to gnaw this particular femur is the New York City architect and light rail advocate, Roxanne Warren, in Rail and the City: Shrinking our Carbon Footprint While Reimagining Urban Space. Warren bites deep into what she calls the triple tyrannies: traffic congestion, dependency on petroleum, and paved environments. She shows that these three tyrants are mere henchmen at the beck and call of the American emperor pro temp: the automobile. Warren shuttles us through seven chapters that take on various aspects of why the car is bad (urban sprawl, pollution, space requirements, climate-changing pollution) and why trains are good (more space efficient, more energy efficient, better for healthy lifestyles, better for the disabled and elderly).

A long-time leader in “Vision42”, a fascinating proposal for a Manhattan light rail line extending across the island from river to river along 42^nd Street (and possibly circling back via a loop along 34^th Street), Warren knows well the pros and cons of what she writes. Reading her book, I feel like I can hear her in the offices of New York City politicians, or speaking before community groups, or honing the case with her rail friends at conferences, reinforcing her case emphatically and drawing the links between transportation and land use, land use and quality of life. The advantages for urban railways are manifold: less air pollution (including carbon dioxide, as suggested by the subtitle); more available space; less noise; complementarity with walking and bicycling; and the potential to encourage renewable energy. But still, most people don’t get it.

Warren argues that change is on its way, if incrementally, and we should not lose hope. She points out that streetcar mileage has actually been increasing in America over the last few decades (though not in New York City, where the rail du jour is the subway), and that there appears to be a shift in attitude as millennial Americans are opting for car-sharing schemes and urban lifestyles with greater appetite than previous generations. “Flexibility and mobility” [she quotes Richard Florida] “are key survival principles of the modern economy.” She sees what I see and what many others have seen before: that streetcars and light rail systems can provide exactly what’s required to maximize space and minimize energy consumption, as long as the cities around them are built with sufficient density and diversity to support rail travel.

Mixed use and density are not a problem in Warren’s New York. In fact, the main obstacle to light rail in cities, or indeed any form of shared transportation, is that Americans love their privacy and hate the additional governmental cost of public transportation. For all of us who appreciate the benefits of rail in cities, perhaps we need to adopt a new tactic that focuses on interests, not positions. Our interests are in shrinking our carbon footprint and making cities better, not the advocating for or against any one technology. In this light, the part of Warren’s book I found most thought-provoking was a short passage about autonomous cars.

Autonomous cars are not something I wrote about in Terra Nova: The New World Without Oil, Cars, and Suburbs (Abrams, 2013), which covers much the same ground as Warren’s book, nor something that Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl wrote about in Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil (New Society Publishers, 2010), another volume in this vein that I highly recommend. Warren dismisses self-driving cars as just the latest continuation of the space-hogging habits of the vehicles we drive ourselves, but I have begun to wonder if she, or the rest of us rail advocates, should be so hasty. If self-driving cars were electric, they would have the same benefits as light rail and other electrified rail systems, pushing the emissions out to the power plants where they could be replaced by renewable, non-polluting sources such as wind and solar. Warren points out, and autonomous car advocates are fond of telling, that most cars spend 96 percent of the time doing nothing, sitting around filling space that otherwise could be more profitably used. If urban Americans shifted from car ownership to car-sharing, on an “Uber” type model, with self-driving cars that we call up by app, then we would need many fewer cars (by some estimates 40 percent fewer). Fewer cars would mean fewer roads and parking lots and less traffic congestion. And if computers are doing the driving, autonomous cars could move closer together in platoons, perhaps even hitch together, without needing that psychological cushion space that human drivers require. Costs go down because there are no railways, just the streets we have today, and acceptance goes up because not only is it faster, quicker, quieter, cheaper (no car insurance required) and more fuel efficient, but also private.

In other words, is there a way to have all the benefits of rail in city without the rails? If so, then all of us who care about nature in the city should get ready for a ride.

Eric Sanderson
New York City

On The Nature of Cities

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