SPECIAL AREAPOSTMODERN METROPOLIS

EDITOR Tania Asnes

ALPACA-IN-CHIEFDaniel Berdichevsky

A World Transformed II: World in Flux

2 0 1 2

SPECIALAREA

®

the World Scholar’s Cup®

CELEBRATING 6 PWAA-TASTIC YEARS!

YEARS

SPECIAL AREA | 1

Special Area Resource 2012: A World in Flux

Table of Contents

Preface ................................................................................................................ 2I. The Rise of the City ..................................................................................... 4

Objectives ..................................................................................................... 4Defining the City ......................................................................................... 4Suddenly, Suburb: The Origin of Cities ................................................... 5The Neolithic World Was Flat .................................................................. 6Civilization 2.0: The Early City-State ...................................................... 6

Case Study: Ancient Greece .................................................................. 7Looking West: Cities of the Mayan and Incan Empires .................. 7

The Industrial Revolution & the Birth of the Really Big City .............8Case Study: London .................................................................................8

The New Megacities ................................................................................. 10Case Study: Lagos, Nigeria ................................................................... 11

Occupy All Streets ..................................................................................... 12II. The Shape of the City ............................................................................... 13

Objectives .................................................................................................... 13City Planning ............................................................................................... 13

Case Study: Paris ................................................................................... 14Suburbs: Making the Bedroom Communities ...................................... 15

Case Study: Levittown, New York ...................................................... 16Urban Sprawl .............................................................................................. 17

Case Study: São Paulo, Brazil .............................................................. 17Transportation and the City .................................................................... 19

Case Study: Shanghai........................................................................... 20The Impact of Cars on the City ............................................................... 21

Case Study: Mexico City ...................................................................... 21Modern Ethnic Enclaves ...........................................................................22Housing Prices in the Modern City ........................................................ 23

III. Life in the City .......................................................................................... 25Objectives ................................................................................................... 25

What Is Urbanity?..................................................................................... 25Key Aspects of Urban Culture ................................................................ 26

Case Study: Tokyo ................................................................................ 28Living in Unlivable Places ........................................................................ 28

Case Study: Dubai ................................................................................. 29Urban Culture and Imaginary Cities ..................................................... 30

Gotham City ............................................................................................ 31From City-State to City-Planet ........................................................... 32

IV. Transforming the Modern Metropolis ............................................... 34Objectives ................................................................................................... 34Cities Transformed by Politics ............................................................... 34

Case Study: Berlin ..................................................................................35Cities Transformed by Environmental Concerns ............................... 36

Case Study: Copenhagen .....................................................................37Back to the Farm ................................................................................... 38

Cities Transformed by Imitation............................................................ 39Case Study: Singapore, Johor Bahru, and Citraland ...................... 39

Cities Transformed by the Internet ...................................................... 40IV. The Future of the City ............................................................................ 42

Larger than Ever ........................................................................................ 42Building Down ........................................................................................... 43Building to Bid ........................................................................................... 44New Ways to Get Around ....................................................................... 45Confronting a Changing World .............................................................. 46New Urban Frontiers ................................................................................ 47Cities in Decline ......................................................................................... 49Hotbeds of Innovation ............................................................................. 50

Conclusion: A City Abandoned .................................................................... 51About the Writing Team ............................................................................. 52

by

Alejandra OLeary Yale University ‘04

edited by Tania Asnes

Barnard College B.A. ‘05

DemiDec and The World Scholar’s Cup are registered trademarks of the DemiDec Corporation.

SPECIAL AREA | 2

PrefaceCities are everywhere, but they aren’t natural. They don’t grow out

of the ground, float in rivers, give birth to cute baby villages, or sprout new leaves in the spring. Cities are human creations, and they

reflect everything good, bad, and ugly about human wants and needs. They transform the world in which we live—and they transform us

when we live in them.

People have always taken advantage of the natural features of the Earth when choosing where to build cities. Many of the very earliest cities emerged near bodies of water. Scan a world map and think of the important role the sea must have played in the development of Athens, London, and Shanghai.1 Or, look further back, to the Nile in Ancient Egypt, and the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia. Waterways were the key to the rise of civilizations. If you wanted your city to thrive, you put it someplace where you had water to drink, water to sail on, and water to bathe in.2

Today, we can transform the environment in new ways, building ski slopes in the desert and new islands in the sea. The next generation of cities is being designed with giant airports, wide streets, and fast subways, and even older cities are reinvented year by year by those living in them—and more people are living in them than ever.

Our ancestors were slow to discover all the glory and gruesomeness of city living. It took humans over 100,000 years to build the first settlement even resembling a small town, and another six thousand for cities of more than 100,000 people to emerge. Athens, in Greece, was probably the first. Even as recently as 18003, only three of every hundred people in the world lived in cities. Today, more than three billion people do—over half the population of the Earth.

No wonder we associate cities with everything busy, big, modern, shiny, and new. Think about how many movies and television series are set in cities4. There’s no such show as CSI: Farmville, and Batman doesn’t live in Gotham Village5. Cities are portrayed as more exciting, as the places where things happen. They are full of extremes: glittering skyscrapers rise above scenes of poverty, danger, and alienation. Many people love cities; many hate them. Even people who live in big cities may have mixed opinions about city life. They may feel uneasy about the hassle, the cost, the noise, the dirt, or just all the people who are always in the way.

“Cities are the abyss of the human species,” wrote the brilliant but grumpy French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.6 “Now you’re in New York / These streets will make you feel brand new / Bright lights will inspire you,” sang a more optimistic Alicia Keys in her hit song “Empire State of Mind”.

1 Look for a big city on the map that is far away from the ocean—and don’t be surprised if you find it sits next to a river. 2 Not that people bathed all that much. Early civilization was probably quite stinky. 3 Just a little bit before your teachers were born. (Also, extra points for anyone who actually cubed 1800.) 4 When a series is set in a small town—such as Everwood—the fact it’s a small town is almost always important to the plot. 5 If Gotham Village existed, by now it would have been gentrified into an artsy community with lots of cafes. 6 Rousseau thought we should live like the Navi.

‘‘What is the city but the people?’’ William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 1608

Watch it On YouTube

This song from the Disney film Oliver and Company speaks to the myth of the city as a place full of both loneliness and hope: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6YTXjOwSL8

SPECIAL AREA | 3

All these cities had to come from somewhere. In this guide, we will examine the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions as key steps on the way to an urban world. We will also spend time on the rapid growth of cities in the 20th and 21st

centuries, which we can think of as the Urban Revolution7.

These transformations build upon each other. Their effects have been deep and long-lasting: you can see their influence whenever you walk down a city street. Rundown neighborhoods in Buenos Aires are full of shuttered factories that once employed thousands of migrants from the Argentinean countryside. You can buy a banana from a street vendor in Manhattan even though the nearest banana farm is thousands of miles away.8

Because of trade, you can get just about any kind of food or service in any major city.9 Trade, agricultural advances, and the creation of a food surplus were at the foundation of the world’s very first cities, and they still keep cities running and eating today. Some of today’s cities are even turning back to agriculture in the form of urban farming.

The best way to explore the theory, history, and future of cities is to “pound the pavement”, digging into real, chaotic, breathing examples all around the world. From transportation to nightlife, from London to Lagos, from Mexico City to Dubai, this guide explores what it means to be urban.

Be sure to read the online articles and watch the videos to which the resource points you. You’ll feel like you’re taking a trip around the world, not just preparing for a tournament. Then, when you really do travel around the world for a tournament, you’ll see Bangkok, Haifa, Dubai, or whatever your destination with newly critical eyes.

I hope you enjoy the journey.

7 One thing to keep in mind when reading about revolutions: they don’t always happen overnight. They are often gradual. 8 If you buy peanuts, you’re almost certainly buying them from a chain of nut stands run by a man from Chile. 9 Though I still get nervous eating sushi when I’m a thousand miles from the ocean.

‘‘We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re gonna live on the Internet!’’

Justin Timberlake, portraying Napster founder Sean Parker in The Social Network

SPECIAL AREA | 4

I. The Rise of the City Perhaps you’ve heard of SimCity. It was a popular 1990s computer game that made you the mayor10 of a brand new city—one you had to build from scratch. As mayor, you had many duties, from dealing with traffic to paying for firemen. Plus, you had to attract people to

move to your city in the first place—and once they came you had to keep them safe and happy.

You started by setting up farms to feed people. You built commercial areas to attract businesses and shoppers. You added neighborhoods where shoppers could live when they weren’t shopping.11 And you had to connect all these areas with roads and power lines.

Then, you could take your city down an industrial path, building row after row of smoke-spewing factories. You could aim for an ecological utopia, with pedestrians humming along on bicycles and monorails. You could construct universities to attract a smarter population—or airports to generate tax revenue. If you weren’t careful, or lucky, you could also see it all destroyed—by air pollution, traffic congestion, natural disasters, or even giant robots.

SimCity was based on processes12 that city planners, historians, anthropologists, economists, and real estate developers have studied for centuries.

Objectives

By the time you complete this chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions.

� What are cities? What makes them unique?

� What are some theories about the origins of the first cities?

� What are the origins of the modern city?

� Why is the world becoming so urban?

Defining the City

If you had to explain what cities were to a group of aliens13, what would come to mind first? Skyscrapers—subways—how to find the nearest Starbucks?

In the 1940s, University of Chicago professor Louis Wirth defined a city as an area whose population has size, density, and diversity. According to Wirth, the presence of many people from many places, packed in a very small space, makes a city. The theory sounds good…in theory. But it may be too

10 They call you the mayor, but, really, you’re more a combination urban planner and god. 11 Though I do sometimes think my sister lives at the mall. 12 Aside from robot destruction. 13 We assume these aliens live on farms—or spaceships.

SPECIAL AREA | 5

simple today. No one would deny San Francisco (population: 800,000) and Shanghai (population: 23 million) are both cities, but are they the same sort of city?14

“Cities are simply no longer recognizable,” says urban scholar David d’Heilly, who is writing a book about modern Tokyo. “They used to be the populated areas around religious institutions or seats of political power. These days they’re whatever an infrastructure can support.”

By studying cities from prehistory to the present, from Dhaka to Detroit, perhaps we can find better ways to describe and understand them in all their overwhelming diversity.

Suddenly, Suburb: The Origin of Cities

In SimCity, you begin by building your city around farms. Today, we often take farmers for granted, but they were not always there to make sure we all had something to eat. Farming was once an exciting new invention15.

Until about 10,000 years ago, humans organized life around hunting and gathering. They preferred gathering: about 80% of their diet came from wild plants. Humans were always looking for food16. Changes in climate or the extinction of certain animals17 could lead groups to go hungry for years at a time. It may have been a golden age of human freedom18, but many free humans starved and froze to death. Life, as philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, was “nasty, brutish, and short.”

With the Neolithic Revolution, people began to settle and harvest land, to select seeds for crops, and to domesticate animals.19 Wherever it took hold—and it did so at different times in different places20—the Neolithic Revolution allowed people to stay put rather than roam in search of food.

Once they stopped migrating, they needed a place to live. Enter the first villages. Over time, they grew in size and density.21 For the first time, people not family or part of the same tribe began to live near each other.22 The steady food supply allowed people to think about and pursue activities other than finding something to eat.

When a village had a surplus of food, it could trade some of it to other villages for goods and materials. Written language and specialized23 jobs emerged. Art, religion, and politics became possible. People could stop focusing on their stomachs and begin cultivating their hearts and minds.

14 They do both have delicious Chinese food. 15 Like the iPhone, but updated less often. 16 Not much has changed. 17 Come back to us, woolly mammoth! 18 At least that’s what some hippies seem to believe. 19 The films Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Marlow & Me are direct results of the Neolithic Revolution. 20 A lot of older people experience their own Neolithic Revolutions when they retire and start vegetable gardens. 21 Who can’t relate to the life philosophy of “go where the food is”? 22 The experience of living around strangers is, of course, a hallmark of life in modern cities—and school dormitories.

Defining the City

In the 1940s, historian V. Gordon Childe listed ten factors common to early cities. The list has been challenged, but remains influential: � Large and densely populated � Supported specialized craftspeople � A food surplus � Monumental public buildings � Taxes paid to ruling elite � Centers for developing ideas � Centers for the arts � Centers for science � Organized by residence, not family � Engagement in trade

SPECIAL AREA | 6

The Neolithic World Was Flat

Historians and archaeologists still debate what made people stop wandering and settle down24. Some think it happened through uneven development; others take a more social evolutionary view.

Believers in uneven development note that the first settlements popped up across Asia and the Middle East in a disconnected way—and that not all of them were based on agriculture. Some, such as Catal Hayuk in present-day Turkey, focused on making and trading simple goods, like clay pots.

Other scholars take a more social evolutionary view. They believe it no accident the first towns emerged within the same 5,000 years25—mostly between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago. There had to be some connection and influence among them, most likely through travel and trade.26 When archeologists discover artifacts from one settlement at a faraway site, they take it as evidence that the Neolithic World was linked. This view of development also claims that farming, domesticating animals, and settling down were all activities that humans “were meant” to do.

The origin of the first trading cities is also debatable. Some historians believe they resulted from the breakdown of tribal culture. Tribal origins still mattered, but they no longer decided where one lived or with whom. Without tribal barriers in the way, people could live closer together. Where you lived took the place of who your grandfather was.

No matter who is right about why the Neolithic Revolution happened, we agree on what happened: people settled down, grew food, built houses, and started living more complicated lives.

Civilization 2.0: The Early City-State

Jump forward a few thousand years. People have lived many generations in towns based on farming and trade. They’ve gotten pretty good at it: they have a steady surplus of food, they’ve traded some of their food (and other goods) with nearby towns, and they’ve even developed rivalries27. Reliable access to food was very attractive, so cities continued to grow over time28.

On the downside, roaming bands of bandits29 were also attracted to cities—probably for the same reason. To keep them out, many cities placed their key buildings on high hills and built imposing walls around their perimeters. If you lived outside them, you were in trouble when the barbarians came.

At the height of their power, early cities were not seen as we see cities today—as parts of a nation. They were nations. The government of a city was the government. Such city-states were the centers of political, economic, and cultural life in their regions.

23 We’re not talking computer programmers quite yet. More like tomb decorators. 24 If they could figure it out, some people would probably want to use it on their significant others. 25 Yes, things that happen a few thousand years apart are actually simultaneous. Why, just the other day in Bethlehem… 26 Probably not by telephone or Internet. 27 Congratulations, prehistoric people of the Earth. You have invented war. 28 If you sent a McDonald’s back in time (and kept it operational), people would probably form a city around it. 29 Yes, that’s why they’re called bandits.

Neolithic Breakthroughs

The Neolithic Revolution gave rise to many aspects of civilization we take for granted: � Permanent houses � Labor specialization � Baking and bread � Class-based societies � Personal property � Non-farming jobs � Trade and barter � Marriage

English Words that Come from Polis

Politics Policy Police Polity

Metropolis Alpacapolis

SPECIAL AREA | 7

Case Study: Ancient Greece

The word “city-state” is often used as a translation of the Ancient Greece word polis. The polis was an idea that changed in meaning as ancient Greek cities grew in size, power, and wealth.

Cities in Greece and elsewhere expanded further during the Bronze Age, a period around five thousand years ago when people first mixed tin and copper to make a stronger alloy called bronze30. Bronze tools meant better farming, more food, greater surpluses, more trading, and bigger cities. Bronze weapons meant a better chance of defending the city—and conquering others.

At first, a Greek polis was just a collection of adjacent towns and villages. Over time these villages were organized into an efficient network—an interconnected city—for distributing food and other resources. With the development of bronze and the increase in trading, the Greeks began building poli along the vast coastline of the Mediterranean. Trading ships would bring goods (such as pottery, honey, and silver) into these poli, often in exchange for food.

The meaning of polis changed into something closer to our idea of a nation when it grew connected to the idea of a government that could collect taxes, write laws, recruit armies, and set up public institutions, such as an army and a church. Greek citizens had deep pride in their cities, and your poliswas thought to have a great influence on your personality and character.31

Ancient Greek civilization during the Classical Era (510-322 B.C.E.) was a collection of independent poli. Each had its own culture, language, and traditions.32 The two most famous were Sparta and Athens. They had very different structures: Sparta was more a network of towns and Athens more centralized, with surrounding “suburbs”. As Greece’s largest trading center, Athens also became a model of the highest ideals of the Greek city-state. (Sparta was better known for its military strength.)

Like many Greek city-states, Athens boasted a rich social and commercial life in its agora. An agora was an open public space in the city center that served as a “place of assembly”. Citizens gathered there to hear political and military news—and, of course, to eat and shop. In English, people afraid of large public spaces are still said to suffer from agoraphobia.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle used Athens to draw conclusions about the nature of man. Only by participating in city life, he said, could man33 achieve his potential. At a time when most of the world did not live in cities, or even know what cities were, Aristotle was as pro-city as they come.

Looking West: Cities of the Mayan and Incan Empires

Because the Greek city-state so influenced modern historians and city planners, you will often encounter Greek words in studies of other cities. Each of the Mayan cities of ancient America, for example, is said to have a “royal acropolis”—though you can be sure the Mayans never called it that.

30 You could, in theory, do this with World Scholar’s Cup 4th and 5th place medals, and tell people you won 3rd place. 31 Similar stereotypes still exist today. Many of my friends from China, for example, have told me that “Shanghainese people” are louder than those from Beijing. 32 All the poli competed in the Olympics. If two were at war when the Olympics rolled around, they suspended the fighting to compete. The same is true today, of course, of countries participating in the World Scholar’s Cup. 33 And yes, he meant man. Greeks were not much into women’s rights: only men were allowed to be citizens.

‘‘Athens is sexy.’’ Aristophanes, Greek playwright, 425 B.C.

Discuss with your team: What is the nearest equivalent to an agora in your own city?

SPECIAL AREA | 8

In the Americas, just as in Europe and Asia, hunter-gatherers began to settle down to grow crops about 4,000 years ago. As the Mayans developed farming techniques, including crop rotation, fertilizers, and terraced fields, their settlements burst into cities. These cities reached their height of power between 250 and 900 C.E. Many had tens of thousands of residents, and these numbers grew during religious festivals that drew people from the countryside.34 Although Spanish invaders later destroyed many Mayan artifacts, the ruins tell a story of a very urban society.

The Mayan city-states were laid out to fit the geography of each settlement. Although the cities were not entirely planned, their centers were orderly. Most used their highest points for their holiest buildings. Entire cities were built around temples, which had to be aligned with the heavens. Raised stone roads called causeways connected their centers with other plazas and with ball-courts, in which important rituals took place.35 Some cities were laid out symbolically: a building in the south might represent the underworld, a northern building the sky.

The city-states of the Maya were some of the best examples of city planning in the ancient world—but some argue the Inca, a thousand years later and three thousand miles to the south, were even more meticulous—and unconventional. Unlike most ancient cities, theirs had no defensive walls. They instead built a fortress near enough to each city that, in times of peril, people could flee inside. Cities were laid out on a precise grid around a central plaza and important temples, and each also featured a complete palace for the Incan ruler—the Sapa Inca—to use when he visited36.

The Industrial Revolution & the Birth of the Really Big City

By the year 1800 AD, some parts of the world were growing more urban while others remained decidedly rural. But a massive transformation was underway that would make cities more necessary than ever: the Industrial Revolution. Many historians consider it the most significant event since—you guessed it—the invention of agriculture.

Case Study: London

By the mid-19th century, Great Britain had become the world’s first predominantly urban nation. Its capital, London, was by far the world’s largest city.

The Industrial Revolution brought mechanization and steam and coal power to industries such as clothing production that had traditionally been much smaller and village-based. Across England, cottage industries were overtaken by giant factories. London became the center of a fabulously large

34 These days, the annual consumer electronics show does the same thing to Las Vegas. 35 This would be like crowning the next English king at Old Trafford Stadium. 36 Perhaps President Obama’s next stimulus bill should look to build a White House in every city in America. 37 It is a good thing that Karl Marx was not applying for a job with London’s marketing department.

Marx: Not Keen on Fish and Chips

Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in London and grouched about the transformations he saw there.

The capitalist class, he wrote, “has subjected the country to the rule of the towns…has created enormous cities…and has concentrated property in a few hands.”37

SPECIAL AREA | 9

and rich new empire. In the 19th century, its population exploded from one to six million.38 Immigrants poured in from all over the world.39

Historian Andrew Jarrett writes that the growth of London startled everyone, even those who took part in it: “Never before had so many human beings been packed in such concentrated numbers.”

Smoke from London’s factories blew eastward, and none of the upper class wanted to live there. As a result, tens of thousands of the working poor, many just arrived from small towns, crammed into downright disgusting conditions in the East End.40

London lacked the public health infrastructure to accommodate so many newcomers. Cholera epidemics spread through the East End’s slums in 1832 and 1848. People who had come to work in the city’s factories were wasting away in their own filth. The song “No Place Like London” from the musical Sweeney Todd captures the sad reality of this period: “There's a hole in the world like a great black pit / and the vermin of the world inhabit it / and its morals aren't worth what a pig could spit / and it goes by the name of London.”41

Fear of cholera motivated London’s elites to improve conditions for the working class. In 1842, reformer Edwin Chadwick published a report drawing a clear link between diseases and overcrowded living conditions. He advocated draining all of London’s waste into the River Thames—the city’s main source of drinking water.42 Sewage control was becoming a major issue for cities bursting at the seams.

London grew despite the filth and pollution. By 1858 the population had overwhelmed the city’s ability to handle it, and raw sewage was seeping up through the floors of people’s homes. All of London stank for months—a summer long remembered as “The Great Stink”.

Necessity breeds innovation. In the aftermath, the engineer Joseph Bazalgette designed an underground sewer system that would soon be copied around the world. “London,” conclude the writers of Lonely Planet, “had become the first modern metropolis.”

Takeaway lesson: modernity equals working toilets.

Industrial London was also making a splash in trade and commerce. England developed a railway system to connect its towns and shipped goods all over the world. In 1880, the Port of London received 8,000,000 tons of goods (up from 800,000 in 1800). A guidebook at the time advised: "Nothing will convey to the stranger a better idea of the vast activity and stupendous wealth of London than a visit to the warehouses, overflowing with interminable stores of every kind."

38 Imagine if the population of your hometown (or of your home) suddenly multiplied by a factor of six. 39 London’s Chinatown is still the largest in Europe. 40 Following London, many European cities built “poor sections” to the east and wealthy neighborhoods to the west. 41 We wanted to feature this song in our music selections, but it has R-rated language. Keep rhyming and you’ll get there. 42 He must have missed another important link, between disease and drinking sewage.

“It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt

from reproach. It is only magnificent.” Henry James, Notebooks

SPECIAL AREA | 10

London’s wealthy and its banks became even wealthier by investing in new industrial projects. Cultural activities for the rich, including theater, opera, and classical music, were well-funded, and the arts flourished. At the same time, the gap between the urban rich and poor was unprecedented43. The German writer Friedrich Engels visited London in 1844 and was astounded and appalled: “All this is so magnificent and impressive that one is lost in admiration,” he wrote. “It is only later that the traveler appreciates the human suffering which made all this possible.”

Engels was critical of the state to which Industrial-era London reduced its inhabitants. “The more Londoners are packed into a tiny space,” he wrote, “the more repulsive and disgraceful the brutal indifference with which they ignore their neighbors.” In London, Engels saw not an urban paradise but the disintegration of society. The community and family ties that had held society together in small villages had fallen away in the modern metropolis.

Other critics called the city “Pandemonium” after the place where devils lived in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. Many felt that London, with its slums, its prostitutes, its crime, its pollution, and its size, was killing the human spirit and public morals.

But, to others, London’s industrial boom was incredibly exciting. Thousands of new jobs were created for civil servants, engineers, teachers, and others who were not working class, but not elite either. It also inspired spectacles of modernity. Six million visited London’s “Great Exhibition of the Wares of Industry of All Nations” in 1851, presided over by Queen Victoria herself. The Exhibition was held in a massive Glass Palace; there, the Queen’s husband, Prince Albert, spoke of uniting the world through industry and technology. Belief in the potential of humanity was at an all-time high.

A series of modern developments followed the Great Exhibition. The first “underground railway” debuted in 186244, and museums, public gardens, and department stores cropped up everywhere.

Perhaps David Copperfield, in the novel of the same name by 19th-century British author Charles Dickens, best sums up the conflicts and contradictions of the modern city. Sighting London from a distance, the young Copperfield notes, “I vaguely made it out in my own mind to be fuller of wonders and wickedness than all the cities of the earth.” Later, speaking for himself in a newspaper article, Dickens favored wickedness over wonder. All he saw in London was a working population doomed to “darkness, dirt, pestilence, obscenity, misery and early death.”

The New Megacities

In 2006, historian Mike Davis foresaw an approaching milestone in our urbanizing world. “Sometime in the next year or two,” he wrote, “a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family to one

43 If Occupy Wall Street had started in this period, it might have been called Occupy Hyde Park. 44 The London Underground is still the world’s second largest underground railway network, after Shanghai’s.

Debate it

Resolved: That inequality is necessary for cities to prosper.

Directed Viewing

Watch this two-minute feature on one of India’s emerging megacities, Lucknow. What are some of the

challenges facing this and other growing cities in India?

SPECIAL AREA | 11

of Lima’s innumerable slums. The exact event is unimportant. Nonetheless it will be a watershed in history. For the first time, the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural.”

As of 2012, this watershed is already long behind us. Over half the people in the world now live in cities, and the ratio continues to increase. Over the next 25 years, the urban populations of Africa and Asia are expected to double as more people move to cities in search of work and opportunity.

To accommodate all this growth, many cities have expanded far beyond their centers. This urban sprawlmakes it hard to calculate the population of a city. It is unclear where a city ends and the countryside begins. Residents of a metropolitan area may not live within a city’s exact borders, but they orient their lives around it. If someone tells you he is from Los Angeles, he might actually be from Torrance, Orange, Riverside, Long Beach, or any of dozens of other “cities” that may even have their own mayors but blend directly into Los Angeles. There are no gaps between them.

The surplus of mayors speaks to another issue: governance. Cities once under the direct control of one government are now spread across many areas with their own governments. Sometimes, cities even sprawl past regional and national boundaries: over half of Kansas City is in Missouri, not Kansas, and Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez is so tightly linked to the American city of El Paso that gunshots fired in Juarez sometimes strike pedestrians in El Paso. Which city’s police department should investigate a crime that involves a bullet going across an international border?

Many of these metropolitan areas have become what scholars term megacities—with fast-growing populations above 10 million. Especially in the developing world, megacities are magnets not only for people, but for all the challenges of modern urban life.

Case Study: Lagos, Nigeria

Not all megacities are thick with poverty and inequality—but Lagos makes for a regrettably excellent case study of the many that are.

The city is built on a group of islands at the edge of the great Lagos lagoon.45 In the 16th century, it became a key trading port between Europe and Africa. It was taken over by the British in 1861; all Nigeria soon came under British rule, with Lagos as its capital.

Nigeria won independence from Britain in 1960. Now a true national capital, Lagos grew rapidly through the oil boom of the 1970s. Today it remains the most populated city in Africa’s most populated country: one in every five Africans is Nigerian, and one in ten Nigerians lives in Lagos.

Because of urban sprawl and the chaos of the city, estimates for the population of Lagos range widely, from eight to over sixteen million. Whatever the number, it is clear the city’s runaway growth has

45 Somewhere, there is probably a city named Mountos next to a mountain.

Debate It

Resolved: That cities ought to provide housing for all.

Directed Research: Megacities Take a look at the top ten megacities in the world today, as documented by Time magazine: http://ti.me/uFpczRDiscuss with your team: in which of these cities would you most or least want to live? Are you surprised to see one or more of these cities on the list?

SPECIAL AREA | 12

overwhelmed its infrastructure. “It is an explosion of raised expressways hanging over mobbed streets of people and traffic,” writes the journalist Paul Clammer, “with wall-to-wall people, bumper-to-bumper cars, noise and pollution beyond belief, a crime rate out of control, and public utilities that are simply incapable of coping.”

About 10,000 people arrive in Lagos weekly looking for work. There are not enough jobs for so many. This shortage has helped give rise to a vast informal economy. People take advantage of traffic jams (called “go-slows” by locals) to sell water, food, and trinkets to people stuck in their cars. Many scrape by rooting through the city’s mountains of trash, looking for plastics and metals they can sell. In desperation, many turn to illegal activities, such as prostitution and drug dealing.

The informal economy extends to housing. Many people sleep anywhere they can find room—under bridges, near trash heaps, in trucks, or resting their heads over the handlebars of their motorcycles. Thousands settle each month in slums that lack sanitation, running water, and electricity. Access to public transportation can be difficult, and emergency vehicles often cannot enter their narrow streets. There is little security. The threat of eviction is constant, especially during “slum-clearance” campaigns. Slums also suffer from high crime and from vulnerability to natural disasters, toxic waste, and disease.

One billion people in the world live in slums today, many similar to those in Lagos, and that number is expected to double by 2030. In 2003, the United Nations found that nearly 80% of urban-dwellers in the world’s less developed countries live in slums, including about 42 million Nigerians. The report concluded: “The urban poor are trapped in an informal and ‘illegal’ world—in slums not reflected on maps, where waste is not collected, where taxes are not paid, and where public services are not provided. Officially, they do not exist.”

Occupy All Streets

People have come a long way since the days of hunter-gatherers struggling to survive in the wilderness. From the Greek city-states to the high-rises of Jakarta, the results of urbanization have been as uneven and unequal as they have been astonishing and beneficial. The majority of those moving into the world’s cities today arrive to poverty—yet few return to the countryside. They stay and hope for better days ahead. As one young man who moved to Lagos explained to a reporter from The New Yorker, “in the village, you’re not free at all, and whatever you’re going to do today you’ll do tomorrow.”

Cities have always been full of promise. Most of the world’s top companies and universities are based in cities; for those seeking the best jobs or the most prestigious education, there is nowhere else to go. Cities still represent an escape from the confines of tradition—and a chance at a new and better life.

Directed Research: The ‘‘First African-Made Capital City’’ In 1991, Nigeria’s government relocated to the master-planned city of Abuja. Learn more about it online—and watch this official promotional video reviewing its history. Then consider as a team: in many countries, including Brazil and the United States, the government is not based in the largest city. Why do you think this is? Should the largest city in a country be its capital?

China’s Approach: Limiting Migration

As early as the 1950s, the new government of China recognized that, left uncontrolled, cities would, like Lagos, grow too rapidly—outstripping the available

food supply. It implemented the so-called hhuukkoouu ssyysstteemm to control city growth. In it, people were

assigned to live only in a specific region of China, and even within a region, to a rural or urban area. People could only migrate to a city or to a different part of China with official permission. Certain hukous were

more desirable than others—for example, the right to live in Beijing—and the government could punish

groups of people by revoking their rights to live in a city and banishing them to the countryside. The

system has been relaxed over the last few years, but, even today, a Chinese citizen’s hukou impacts where

he or she can live, work, and go to school.

SPECIAL AREA | 13

II. The Shape of the City GPS navigation is a wonderful tool for finding your way around a city—except when the city streets are changing so quickly that the

maps can’t keep up.

Even today, the centers of cities like Istanbul and Cambridge feel medieval. Their skyscrapers and highways are wedged between narrow walls and crooked streets. Others, like Valparaiso and San Francisco, may not be as old, but the demands of their hills, rivers, and valleys still make them feel disorderly and organic: roads run into one another at strange angles, and

whole neighborhoods are sandwiched into nooks and crannies.46

Newer cities tend to be built along grids: streets that run mostly north and south, east and west. They may be ringed by highways to improve traffic flow, as in Beijing or Houston. Nearly all cities in Latin America are centered on large pedestrian plazas, not unlike the Greek agoras. The master-planned cities of the Soviet Union were criticized as dreary, but included more extensive parks and gathering places than their counterparts in the West—possibly because they were unprofitable to build.

This chapter of the resource will consider how cities (and their suburbs) are shaped and how people move through them—and the impact of city layout on urban life and culture.

Objectives

By the time you complete this chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions.

� What causes urban sprawl?

� Why is public transportation important to city life?

� What are suburbs—and what are some of their consequences?

� What is gentrification?

City Planning

City planning is nothing new; as we saw earlier, the Mayans and Incans laid out their buildings in a coordinated way, and the ancient Greeks and Romans often drew up streets on a regular grid, with right angles that would feel familiar to a resident of Manhattan.47 Most cities, however, have evolved organically, in fits and starts. In medieval Europe, they often took shape around castles, with the degree of disorder growing the further you were from the castle walls. In the Arab cities of North Africa, cities centered on old walled areas—called medinas—containing maze-like streets and religious monuments.48 In nearly all cities, new arrivals made do with whatever living space they found—meaning even well-planned centers gave way to messier surroundings.

46 Like Harry Potter’s bedroom. 47 Cities aren’t always planned in grids; sometimes they might follow the curve of a lake, or symbolize special beliefs.48 Even today, most medinas are closed to automobile traffic—and, in any case, they wouldn’t fit in most medina streets.

Amazing Industrial Growth Spurts

Many cities experienced population booms during the Industrial Revolution. Chicago grew

from a tiny speck to become America’s second-largest city by 1890. Between 1850 and 1890, Paris’s population doubled, and

Berlin’s quadrupled.

SPECIAL AREA | 14

As cities grew during the Industrial Revolution, the shortcomings of their layouts grew painfully clear. Manufactured goods were hard to transport down narrow streets, and swelling populations built homes wherever they could, often leaving no room for schools and public services. Trains promised an interconnected world, but often there was no room to lay down tracks in a city, or even to build a central train station—not without displacing thousands of people, which some cities did.

Modern city planning meant to address these issues began in this period, with Paris in the 1850s.

Case Study: Paris

If you visit Paris today, it may appear to have dropped fully formed out of the sky. Its major boulevards form a precise star around a monument called the Arc De Triomphe—the Victory Arch. Philosopher Walter Benjamin described orderly Paris as “the capital of the 19th century.” But Paris is the perfect example of a city that was torn up, pulled down, ripped apart, and rebuilt—all on purpose, and all under the direction of a single man.

As historian David Jordan put it, “the Paris we know today, with its grand boulevards, its bridges and parks, its monumental beauty, was essentially built in only seventeen years in the middle of the 19th

century.” During those years, entire neighborhoods of “old” Paris were bulldozed, and the city transformed from a tightly packed collection of neighborhoods into a modern “City of Lights”.

It was inevitable the city would change, with or without direction from above. From 1800 and 1850, its population doubled to a million. The Industrial Revolution brought new jobs and technologies, including railways linking Paris to the countryside. Just as in London, rural laborers flocked to the city’s factories. The city was neither ready for nor welcoming to them: “Whatever the lot of the workers, it is not the manufacturer’s responsibility to improve it,” said one city leader.

Paris, again like London, was not prepared to deal with so many people. Most workers lived in slums and often rioted. The lack of a sewer system to dispose of waste was a deadly problem. Cholera raged through Paris’s crowded neighborhoods. Many Parisians in the early 19th century viewed the city as distasteful, unhealthy, chaotic, and dirty. Visiting Paris, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: “I saw only small, dirty and stinking streets, ugly black houses, an air of filth, poverty, beggars…”

France’s emperor at this peak of the Industrial Revolution was Napoleon III (nephew of the more famous Napoleon Bonaparte). Napoleon III wanted to upgrade Paris, which still had a medieval layout, narrow streets, and no way to accommodate its booming population and new industries, into a modern city deserving to be the capital of a grand nation. “It was Haussmann’s task,” writes historian David Jordan, “to assert, in stone, the power and permanence of Paris, to show the world that it was the seat of an empire of mythic proportions.

Napoleon III appointed lawyer Georges-Eugene Haussmann to mastermind a total overhaul of the city. Haussmann faced a colossal task: to build a new city where a city already stood. Undaunted, in the 1850s and 1860s, he extended the boundaries of Paris to include nearby villages, erected bridges over the Seine River, built sewers, arranged for two new parks and a grand opera house, and ripped out narrow old streets in favor of grand new boulevards.

‘‘Haussmannization’’

A term popularized in 19th-century Paris, meaning “drastic, centralized, violent urban renewal”.

SPECIAL AREA | 15

Entire residential areas were wiped out. Many of the city’s poorest tenants were ejected. Thousands of buildings, including stunning examples of medieval architecture, were destroyed. French writers and artists lambasted Haussmann for wiping out so much of the old, quirky Paris they loved.

Haussmann devised a new architectural style: the “street-wall”. He imagined buildings not as separate, but as a wall of structures, built at precise angles, that would give streets a sense of order. He created wide avenues perfect for walking, shopping, and promenading. He also made use of a new technology, gas lights, to illuminate Paris’s streets at night.

The project also had a political purpose: to make it harder for rioters and revolutionaries to block streets with barricades49, and to make it easier for the army to clamp down on them when they tried.50

Haussmann’s work led to some undeniably positive results. The rate of infectious disease dropped and Paris’s new sewer system54 was praised as a wonder of the civilized world. Traffic circulation improved and many of Haussmann’s new buildings proved more functional than those they replaced. Robert Moses, the 20th-century urban planner responsible for many of New York City’s highways, bridges, and power stations, declared himself a great admirer of Haussmann. Before Haussmann’s remake of Paris, no one had ever built a city on such a giant scale before, or with such clear goals.

Working sewers or not, some critics remain glum about Haussmann’s transformation of Paris. They argue that his changes imposed the desires and cold rationality of modern capitalism on an entire city. Some say it made Paris less “real”—transforming it into a haven for the elite, but breaking its spirit.

For his part, Napoleon III fired Haussmann in 1870. He hoped the move would improve his public standing. Parisians were unhappy that Haussmann’s project was costing too much.

Suburbs: Making the Bedroom Communities

Haussmann made central Paris safe and clean for upper-class residents. Perhaps he was trying to keep them from fleeing to literally greener pastures.

49 Hearing the people sing, singing the song of angry men, was never much fun for the French government. 50 One of Harvard’s dormitories was built with similar principles in mind. Really. I had the misfortune to live there. 51 To spearhead it, you might say. 52 A lot of us would probably never have been born, though, making it hard for us to do much referring. 53 Or inspeeration? 54 If there is a unifying theme to this Resource, it is: “It’s all about the sewers.”

Designing Germania

Perhaps Adolf Hitler envied the Haussmanization of Paris. Early in his regime, Hitler wanted Berlin redesigned as a new city, to be called Germania, grand enough to serve as the capital of a Nazi world. He asked a top German

architect, Albert Speer, to lead the effort51. The resulting plan included a German version of the French Arc De

Triomphe—only so much larger, over one hundred meters tall, that the entire Arc de Triomphe would have

fit inside its opening. The whole city was to be rearranged around a five kilometer grand central

boulevard, “the Avenue of Splendours”—with cars driving in a tunnel below it, so that the street could be used for

parades. With an eye toward massive rallies, Hitler requested a stadium large enough to hold 400,000

people. Very few of these plans ever came to anything, as Hitler’s attention turned to World War II—but, if they had

succeeded, perhaps we would refer52 to the modernization of cities as SSppeeeerriizzaattiioonn53.

SPECIAL AREA | 16

With industrializing cities such as London and Manchester55 covered in a perpetual haze of black smoke, many people decided to take advantage of new rail options to live outside the city proper. As early as 1841, Calvert Holland, on a visit to the British steel-producing city of Sheffield, observed that most who could afford it lived far from their workplaces.

Innovations in transportation made possible this new routine of “commuting” into cities for work. In the United States, the arrival of railways in the 1830s first allowed businessmen to live in nearby small towns and head to their city offices by train. As automobile culture spread, suburbs became popular options for upper-middle-class commuters. In many suburban communities, each house came equipped with a special bedroom—“the garage”—for the newest member of the family, the car.

Case Study: Levittown, New York

The most influential of the early American suburbs was Levittown, on Long Island just outside New York City.57 The original Levittown was the brainchild of builder William Leavitt, who had intended to call his community “Island Trees”. The name was meant to evoke a peaceful natural setting—everything New York City was not.58 It was a low-density, low-population, and no-diversity kind of place.

It was the anti-city.

The original Levittown, opened in 1948, consisted of single-family homes built quickly and efficiently (up to 30 Levittown houses in a single day) to serve the families of World War II veterans. The houses all looked the same and were built on the same model. Only white people could live in Levittown, and the community was only accessible by automobile.59

The Levittown model of mass-produced suburban communities (soon widely imitated) would prove very influential. As the century rolled on, more and more Americans came to idealize single-family homes and suburban living as a fulfillment of the American dream.

55 Manchester, in northern England, was nicknamed “Cottonopolis” during the 19th-century. Can you guess why? 56 Even gum-chewing, undead-staking Buffy the Vampire Slayer was from the Valley. 57 See pictures of Levittown’s construction and some of its original residents here. 58 The practice continues today: I am editing this guide in a Dubai suburb called, simply, the Green Community. 59 Levittown’s isolation left many women stranded in their homes while their husbands took the car to work in New York.

Directed Research: The Most Famous SuburbLevittown may be the world's original modern suburb, but its most famous is the San Fernando Valley, an inland area just north of Los Angeles. It has a population of nearly 2 million and a land area greater than San Francisco, Boston, and Washington, D.C. combined. Author Stephen Randall described the Valley as “Lesser Los Angeles”—but, in many ways, it has been more influential. More suburbs around the world look like the Valley than cities look like Los Angeles. It is the Valley featured in a hundred Hollywood films, a sea of tract housing and mini-malls, where people drive their cars from the supermarket to the mall next door. It is also the home of the original valley girl56. In 2002, a citywide election was held to decide if the Valley should become its own city. As historian Kevin Roderick put it, “Most [residents] are formally citizens of Los Angeles, but they are separated by geography, climate and tradition from the metropolis over the hill. Mostly they like it that way.” Look online to find out the outcome of the election. Then, discuss with your team: if a suburb has its own cultural identity, should it be its own city? Also, investigate online whether the Valley is really one or many communities. And, for fun, check out the list of films and shows set in the Valley and see if you recognize any: http://bit.ly/uV3eof

SPECIAL AREA | 17

Although Levittown looks different today—it is no longer an all-white community, and residents have gradually altered the original mass-produced homes—it remains an American icon.

Urban Sprawl

Cities influence suburbs, and suburbs influence cities right back. In the years after the creation of Levittown in the 1940s, New York City—like other cities around the world—built roads, highways, tunnels, and bridges to make it easier for commuters to drive from home to work in the morning and back again at night.

Today, with cities growing so rapidly, urban sprawl—the haphazard growth of cities in all directions—is hard to control. The impacts on cities, rural areas, and the environment have been massive. Urban and suburban neighborhoods can sprawl outward for hundreds of kilometers.

Case Study: São Paulo, Brazil

Brazil is famous for its beaches, but its cities are just as spectacular—at least in scale. Its largest city, São Paulo, has a population of over 12 million, and covers a massive urbanized area described by one writer as “an oceanic sprawl.”

Portuguese missionaries founded São Paulo in 1554. During the coffee boom of the late 19th century, the village grew into an urban hub for railroads and trade. By 1895, over half its 130,000 residents were immigrants, many from as far away as Japan, Italy, and the Ukraine. Money in São Paulo flowed from the city’s wealthy residents (mostly coffee barons) into civic and cultural institutions. The arts flourished.

In the 1950s, the city became a home for the Brazilian car industry—over one million Volkswagen Beetles, usually associated with Europe and the United States, were actually born in São Paulo, where they continued to be built for years after Volkswagen discontinued them elsewhere. The car manufacturing boom drew many new job-seekers from the countryside.

Today, São Paulo is the center of South America’s engineering, financial services, publishing, design, and advertising industries. It is also the face of Brazilian agribusiness, which exports millions of tons of soybeans and soy products around the world each year.

São Paulo has skyscrapers and highways in all directions. Writer Robert de Toledo described it as a giant sea animal: “tentacular.” He continued: “São Paulo does not inspire admiration in a benign or gentle way. It provokes amazement; admiration becomes fear.”

Exuberant about the Exurbs

“Exurbs” (short for “extra-urban”) are suburban-type planned communities that are either far from an urban area—beyond the traditional suburbs—or not oriented

around an urban area at all. They are usually inhabited by middle class and upper middle class families, many of

them drawn by shiny new schools, lower housing costs, and the idea of raising children in quieter neighborhoods.

In the United States, exurbs tend to be whiter, more politically conservative, and faster-growing than their

suburban and urban neighbors.

Directed Research Area: Brasilia

Unlike Sao Paulo, Brasilia is a super-planned city. Begin reading about it here and here. � Who was Brasilia’s planner? � How would you describe its architectural style? � When did the city become Brazil’s capital? � What is the general layout of the city? � Is the city a success today?

SPECIAL AREA | 18

The original São Paulo is now lost in a vast metropolitan region: a post-industrial polycentric (many-centered) metropolis, with its sizable population growing another five percent every year. All over São Paulo new centers and hubs have sprouted up, far from the old urban core.

Many of these new hubs have emerged on the city’s edge, in poorer areas where some residents make their homes along raw sewage canals. The percentage of the city’s residents living in shantytowns—called favelas—has risen sharply since the 1980s. In this way, it is similar to Lagos and nearly every other megacity in the developing world. A 2007 quality of life survey found that neighborhoods around the city center had a much higher quality of life than those on the fringes. A worldwide trend can be seen in São Paulo: older suburbs, once realms of the well-off, are overrun and impoverished, while the center has become an expensive, exclusive place to live.

The decentralization of São Paulo has also been driven by upper class residents; many choose to live in gated communities far from the city center. These fortified communities highlight the stark segregation between rich and poor in Brazil, a country in which 10% of the population controls 50% of the wealth and more than a third of the population lives in poverty.

A number of measures meant to address sprawl and pollution have proven unsuccessful. Luiza Erundina, mayor from 1989 to 1991, proposed a policy of free buses for all citizens. It was rejected, perhaps because of doubts over how it would be funded: more taxes.

Erundina’s successor focused on making São Paulo more car-friendly, approving costly new traffic tunnels and highways to ease overcrowded streets. Unfortunately, the irony of new highways, tunnels, and bridges is that these projects—meant to reduce traffic jams—often end up spawning more traffic. According to observer Norman Gall, “the frantic paving of streets, the opening of new traffic arteries, and the continuous addition of tunnels cannot keep up with the proliferation of motor vehicles.” Over 20,000 new cars, trucks, motorcycles, and buses are licensed monthly in São Paulo.

Like most major cities, São Paulo has extensive bus and subway systems, but they have struggled to keep up with the city’s growth. Until the 1990s the subways were known for passengers crowding onto the roofs of aging cars. Recent upgrades have made the system more comfortable—and one of the world’s most modern—but it does not reach nearly all of the metropolitan area.

60 The original green monster had something to do with baseball. I don’t really understand baseball, so I’ll leave it at that.

Urban planners often try to address traffic congestion by building more highways,

which unfortunately become just as quickly congested as the original highways.

Boston’s Big Dig

Like many other older cities, Boston, in the United States, was not originally designed for

automobiles—and its downtown area was filled with slow-moving traffic by the 1960s. The main

highway through the city was notoriously inefficient—and painted a shade of green that gave it the nickname of “Boston’s Other Green Monster.”60 For years, city planners discussed replacing it with an underground tunnel; they

finally obtained approval in the early 1990s. The so-called Big Dig took over ten years to

construct, and cost over 22 billion dollars—about 10 times what had been estimated. As a result of

its cost and all the disruption it caused, the project has had many critics. It does seem to

have significantly reduced travel time within the city of Boston—but some studies suggest it has only increased travel time outside of Boston—

pushing traffic into new areas.

Sprawl in Europe

Bruce Stutz, of the Guardian Environment Network, reports that urban sprawl has reached Europe—which had, for a long time, resisted it. He writes: “Most European cities had, even late

into the 20th century, remained far more compact than their American counterparts. They

were still places where people walked or took public transportation to local shops, restaurants or theaters. [Now] cities from Luxembourg to

Prague, from Madrid to Istanbul, are experiencing accelerating sprawl and its

increased automobile traffic, CO2 emissions, energy consumption, land fragmentation, natural

resource degradation, watershed damage, farmland decline, and social polarization.”

SPECIAL AREA | 19

Transportation and the City

Urban sprawl of the sort seen in São Paulo has many sources, including rapid economic growth, poor city planning and large-scale human migration. Transportation options—and the lack thereof—also play a significant role. They help decide the shape a city takes.

Cities are fast-moving places. Traveling in them means figuring out how to get from A to B amid a whirlwind of people all going somewhere fast. Effective urban planning means putting together smooth transportation routes.

As the world’s first large industrial city, London was the first to address the problem of moving people around. Early in the industrial era, well-off Londoners travelled by stagecoach, a horse-drawn carriage that was an ancestor of the modern taxi. To wealthy Londoners, the advantages of stagecoaches were clear: they took you to your destination faster than your feet while also keeping you above the city’s grime. But the disadvantages were also clear: stage-coaches were slow, expensive, and inefficient.

By 1845, London had copied a French invention: the omnibus. Omnibuses were larger horse-drawn carriages that could hold as many people as could squeeze inside and even on top of them. The ride was uncomfortable, but omnibus travel offered a fast, reliable, and affordable way to move through the big city.

Omnibuses often came in groups, one right behind the other, and picked up riders on busy routes between a city’s central districts and its residential areas. In spite of the hassle, jostling, bouncing, and people-crushing that went on inside, omnibuses remained popular throughout the 19th century. Between 1839 and 1850, the number of omnibuses on London’s streets more than doubled, from 620 to 1,300, and by the early 1860s they were carrying over 40 million passengers per year. Traffic in London grew worse as the streets jammed up with omnibuses, wagons, carriages, and pedestrians.

To complicate matters, new railways connecting industrial London to distant towns vastly increased the flow of goods and people into the city. London’s streets were a worsening mess.

To address the problem, London’s Metropolitan Board of Works built trams—omnibuses with metal wheels that rode along metal tracks. Trams carried more people than omnibuses (two horses could pull 50 people on a tram), ran more often, and charged lower fares. They did much to expand the city, allowing working people to move out of

Directed Research: Subway’s Weird Uncles

London may have had the first subway, but Istanbul wasn’t far behind with the second. It is included in this list of ten weird modes of transportation. Be ready to identify them in the Scholar’s Bowl: http://on-msn.com/z4665W

Transportation as Shelter

When London was blitzed by Nazi bombs during World War II, the Underground was used as a city-wide bomb shelter.

No Ordinary Smog

In 1952, a lethal combination of fog, smoke, and pollution (called the “Great Smog”) killed 12,000 people in London.

Today, 600,000 people in China die annually of lung cancer; Beijing has seen lung cancer rates increase 60% since 2000, even though smoking rates have remained steady. Experts at

the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences blame Beijing’s infamous smog—which is often so thick it can even cause

flight delays.

SPECIAL AREA | 20

overcrowded slums into suburban neighborhoods from which they could commute to work.61

London’s tram network also brought more people into the city. By the end of the 19th century, the number of omnibuses in London had once again doubled, and Londoners took about 300 million omnibus and 280 million tram journeys yearly.

London’s underground train debuted in 1862. The first underground train system in the world, the Underground (like the tram) was developed in part because of arguments that the working-class population needed a way to live further from their workplaces. Unfortunately, the early, steam-powered underground trains were more expensive than the trams and omnibuses, and slower, too.

The Underground’s shift from steam to electric power in the 1890s changed everything. Electric trains were more comfortable and faster than the trams overhead. The price to ride them fell, and they even reached London’s posh West End, which had resisted access to public transportation. The electric train signaled the end of the age of the horse, and, for London, the start of an era of vast lower-middle-class suburbs.

Other cities—including, famously, New York—would look to London as a model for their own subways. Today, nearly every major metropolis has some form of mass transportation system, and London’s is no longer the largest or most modern.

Case Study: Shanghai

Shanghai, with a population of over 20 million, recently passed Singapore to become the world’s busiest port. It is home to the world’s third-tallest building, the Shanghai World Financial Center, at 492 meters the tallest building in China. It also has the largest subway system in the world—with 12 lines, over 250 stations, and more than 420 kilometers of track.62 Everything about Shanghai is on a grand scale: even many of the shopping malls have ten stories.

Yet, like London in the 19th century, Shanghai is still figuring out how to deal with so much growth and prosperity in so little time.

When its metro opened in 1995, Shanghai was only the third Chinese city with a rapid transit system. Today, its 12 lines are connected to over 1,000 bus routes and a famous Maglev (“magnetic levitation”) train that takes passengers to the airport at a breathtaking 431 kilometers per hour. The system continues to grow; by 2020 Shanghai is expected to have more kilometers of subway track than all of Japan.

Shanghai built its subway in the 1990s, to meet the needs of a fast-growing urban population. China is the fastest-urbanizing country in the world, and its city planners have tried to stay ahead of the curve. Their plan is to model after prosperous cities such as New York City, Berlin, and London, in which mass transit systems have made owning and driving cars less necessary. Even well-off New Yorkers take subways to work, while in cities such as Jakarta and Los Angeles that lack good public transportation, the middle and upper classes expect to drive (or be driven).

Other Chinese cities are following suit. Eleven already have mass transit systems, and nineteen more have them under construction. The Chinese government is investing over $150 billion dollars a year

61 Many of these neighborhoods, such as Brixton, are no longer considered suburbs; they are now part of London. 62 It takes an iPhone app to navigate it all.

Discuss with your Team

Why is China better able to undertake public transportation projects than developed countries such as the United States? Read about the latest American plans at http://ti.me/dkfiAw

SPECIAL AREA | 21

into these projects. By contrast, the United States spends about $2 billion a year on public transport; in Los Angeles it has taken over 20 years to build fewer than 60 kilometers of subway line.

Despite careful city planning and massive investments in its metro, Shanghai still suffers from some of the world’s worst gridlock. New highways continue to be built, and power shortages and even internet capacity problems have challenged the city. Whether these prove mere growing pains or signs of worse to come is yet to be determined.

The increasing demand for housing is also driving a boom in construction. All over Shanghai, cranes hover above new high-rise apartments. A city full of construction sites does not speed up traffic. China’s building frenzy extends far beyond Shanghai; it has utterly changed the landscape of the nation. Villages have transformed into metropolises of millions, spangled with shiny skyscrapers, highways, and power plants. The transformation of China into a country of megacities, and the planning and investment needed to make this transformation happen almost overnight, has dwarfed Haussmann’s transformation of 19th-century Paris.

The Impact of Cars on the City

One of the first ways people noticed cars transforming cities, around the 1920s, was that children could no longer play safely in the street. A hundred years later, the degree to which cities should accommodate cars still divides people. Those who can afford cars rarely want to give them up, even though driving them adds to traffic and pollution.64 Those who pay the most taxes are generally those who least need the public transportation those taxes could help to fund.

Case Study: Mexico City

Mexico City is the very model of a sprawling modern metropolis. It has spread from its historic center up surrounding hillsides and mountains, expanding from nine square kilometers at the start of the 20th

century to over 1,500 square kilometers today. Its population has shot up from 3 to 19 million in just the last fifty years.

In part because of the city’s high altitude, at which fuel burns inefficiently and the blazing sun converts fuel particles into smog, pollution in the city can reach grave levels. Mexico City’s infamous traffic congestion also contributes: cars emit more pollutants in traffic jams than at normal speeds. Not long ago, writes one reporter, the air would grow so bad that “birds fell dead in mid-flight, and children used brown crayons to draw the sky.”

Faced with too many polluting cars, governments have a number of choices. Over the long term, they can invest in public transportation, as in Shanghai, or in more roads and highways. They might use tax credits to encourage drivers to purchase cleaner hybrid cars, or, as in London, they might charge drivers more for entering certain areas of the city. In 1989 Mexico City took a more direct approach: it made it illegal to drive one-fifth of all cars on each day of the workweek.

63 Please do not attempt to verify this. 64 As one ingenious billboard put it: “You’re not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.”

The Bubble Bursts

During the 1980s, Tokyo experienced an “economic bubble” in which real estate prices

soared. In the upscale Ginza district, apartments in 1989 could fetch $1 million per square meter. By 2004, prices in the Ginza district had fallen to less than 1% of their peak value. Yet Tokyo

remains one of the world’s most expensive places to live: the average cost of a movie ticket is $23.80, and a beer at a bar costs over $1063.

SPECIAL AREA | 22

The program was called Hoy No Circula (“Today the Car Does Not Drive”). It quickly spawned imitators in São Paulo, Bogotá, and other cities. The system was based on a car’s license plate number. If it ended in a 1 or 2, it might be illegal to drive it on Mondays; if it ended in 3 or 4, on Tuesdays, etc. Supporters believe the program reduced congestion and smog; critics note that many families just bought more cars to get around the restriction—which was great for the automobile industry, but not especially helpful for reducing traffic and preserving the environment.

Some cities, such as London and Milan, charge people a hefty fee to drive their vehicles into the city center or at peak times of day. This kind of system, meant to minimize traffic in the urban center, is known as congestion pricing. Exceptions are often made for environmentally-friendly vehicles, such as electric cars.

Modern Ethnic Enclaves

Drive long enough on the roads and highways of Los Angeles (population: 10 million) and you’ll pass a number of signs like these:

“Next exit: Thai Town” “Welcome to Little Ethiopia”

“Entering Koreatown”

Even in diverse global cities, people of different ethnic backgrounds still live apart in different enclaves—neighborhoods dominated by certain groups.

Many of the oldest ethnic enclaves, some of which persist today, resulted from discrimination. In Durban, South Africa, until the end of apartheid black Africans could only live in certain neighborhoods, Indian immigrants in others. Native American “reservations” in the United States were (and remain) examples of government-imposed enclaves, as were Jewish quarters and ghettoes in many European and Middle Eastern cities.

Many of today’s ethnic enclaves—such as the majority Arab neighborhoods of Paris—have resulted less from outright racist policies and more from economic and sociocultural factors. New waves of immigrants would gather in less expensive communities where they could afford to live—or where they could find work—and where they could preserve their traditions with familiar neighbors. Many of the original American Chinatowns and Italian neighborhoods first resulted from this immigration pattern. Those communities might migrate

65 Today, it remains one of the best places in America for dumplings and bubble tea.

Monterey Park

In Los Angeles, the suburban community of Monterey Park became known as “the first suburban Chinatown” in the 1970s as more

Asian-Americans moved into the region. Because many were immigrants from Taiwan,

the area was also nicknamed Little Taipei65.

Directed Reading: Ethnic Enclaves Did you know the largest Japanese ethnic enclave in the world is in Brazil? Learn this and more at http://bit.ly/vChjCo. Take note of how Cyrildene, in South Africa, changed from being one sort of ethnic enclave to another. Ethnic enclaves are not static over time. Even within Boston’s historic Chinatown, the population has been shifting from Cantonese-speaking to Mandarin-speaking. You can learn more about Boston’s Chinatown here: http://bit.ly/ywoZjB. Discuss with your team: would you ever choose to live in an ethnic enclave?

SPECIAL AREA | 23

outward to new areas over time (as they did in early 20th century Chicago) or, even more often, stay put, forcing the next wave of immigrants to make their homes elsewhere.

Today, nearly every global city has its thriving ethnic enclaves, from Little India in Singapore to Little Uzbekistan in New York City. A few are geared for tourists, but many are genuine communities.

Housing Prices in the Modern City

As anyone moving to a booming city soon discovers, it can be hard to find an affordable place to live.

Before the Industrial Revolution, the value of a piece of land depended mostly on factors such as its size, farming potential, and access to water. Today, as the saying goes, it’s all about location, location, location. The closer a property to the best features of a city, such as public transportation, shopping, and good schools, the more it costs. The closer it is to undesirable areas, such as a noisy airport or a crime-ridden neighborhood, the less it costs.

In San Diego, one of California’s most beautiful cities, homes are very expensive all the way up and down its coastline—except in Ocean Beach, a neighborhood just a few kilometers from the city center. This one area, says its own website, “is about as unpretentious as San Diego beach living gets. There's a lot to be said for this funky little beach town.” But, before you start picking out a house, read the next paragraph: “Sunny days are punctuated with the occasional jet roaring overhead.”

Occasional is an understatement. Ocean Beach is directly below the path of airplanes landing all day long at San Diego International Airport.

Space concerns also play a part in prices. The more people who want to squeeze into a small space, such as Manhattan or Tokyo, the more expensive it becomes. There is another old saying in real estate: “They’re not making any more land.”66 Island cities have a harder time growing than those in the desert. If you want a cheaper place to live in Dubai, you just travel further out from the center; if you want a cheaper place in Singapore, you have nowhere to go except across a bridge to Malaysia.

Inflated housing prices have the most impact on the working poor. Since the Industrial Revolution, cities have depended on low-cost labor to man factories, staff restaurants and shops, and drive the economy. Less well-off people looking to make a better life for their families have, in turn, depended on cities to provide opportunities. But, as we saw in Lagos and São Paulo, modern cities rarely provide enough housing for the urban poor.

The process of gentrification, in which upper-class residents67 move into urban neighborhoods once occupied by lower-class residents, pushing them out in the process, has grown widespread in

66 This is no longer quite true, but making land is expensive, so it might as well be. Plus, rising oceans are also erasing land, as you’ll read about later in this guide. 67 Otherwise known as the “gentry”.

Directed Research: Pricy Housing Markets Real estate prices almost always go up for the same reason: demand overwhelming supply. But people demand different cities for different reasons. Explore these ten cases in the United States, from Honolulu to San Francisco:

http://cnnmon.ie/lCDN3bThen, look at what $1.5 million US will buy you in a range of expensive cities around the world:

http://bit.ly/AxZ0H6In which of these cities is housing more expensive because it is more costly to build? In which is it more expensive because of limited space? What other reasons can you find for the high prices in these urban areas?

SPECIAL AREA | 24

American and European cities. Nowhere is it more evident than in New York City, where high rents in Manhattan have driven aspiring residents to surrounding areas, or boroughs. Harlem, just north of New York’s Central Park, is about as close to the action as possible—but was traditionally a lower-class neighborhood infamous for its crime and poverty. Now it is caught in a tense battle between culture, supply, and demand: in 2008, the average price for new apartments in Harlem hit $900,000, while its average household income remained below $25,000.

Even Ocean Beach is gentrifying: real estate prices have soared, people have installed thicker windows to block the sounds of jet engines, and the first Starbucks has arrived. Members of the community have tried to boycott it, but to no avail. When a neighborhood gentrifies, it is a hard process to stop—and any of its residents who own property may be tempted to sell it.

In Mumbai, India, slum-clearance has become more common as the land on which slum-dwellers live has grown more valuable. Eager developers have forced many slum-dwellers out of their homes to make room for new buildings.

In cities around the world, the poor are forced to live further and further from their places of work, from green spaces, and from wealthier residents. In recent years, “urban renewal” efforts have also tended to push the poor further from city centers. Investors refurbish old factories and schools into stylish new apartments; trendy restaurants and overpriced cafes replace local eateries. Up-and-coming homeowners gamble on which areas will be the next to increase in value—and, by buying homes in those areas, they make that increase happen. Tomorrow’s city will not only be different than today’s city, but likely more expensive too.

SPECIAL AREA | 25

III. Life in the City After college, when I moved to New York City, I paid $950 a

month to live in what looked like a broom closet. One of my friends lived in an actual closet, and paid $700 a month for the privilege. For

both of us, the high prices and discomfort were worth it. We were musicians, and we felt there was nowhere else in the country with as

intense a music scene—or with as many fun things to do at night.

Beyond the music, we both just loved walking down the

streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Seeing all sorts of different people and meeting other artists was worth the price of admission. I decided to think of the high rent as a “surcharge” for the pleasures and stimulation of living in an amazing city. When I looked out my window, I could see towering bridges over the East River. Out my other window69 were a Dominican church and an Eastern European synagogue. From outside my door, I could just make out the skyscrapers of Times Square and the lights of Broadway.

A recent article in Kiplinger’s described New York, San Francisco and Boston as hubs of “bright lights and high rents” and named them “meccas for twentysomethings”. When you tell someone you live in one of these cities, you are telling them something about your lifestyle and your personality.

More than ever before, big cities are home to people who share lifestyles, interests, and ambitions. They have been called the landscape of capitalism and of modernity. We’ve already discussed the role food surpluses and toilets play in modernity, but there is more to modern life than eating and flushing. There is something unique about the culture of cities that sets them apart from non-urban places. It’s not just size, density, and diversity that define cities—it’s urbanity.

Objectives

By the time you complete this chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions.

� What are some key aspects of urban culture?

� What are some theories about the psychological effects of living in modern cities?

� What aspects of urban culture have artists and thinkers used in creating imaginary cities?

What Is Urbanity?

Despite the rapid advance of global businesses and brand names—from Tesco to Starbucks—cities around the world will always have their own identities. Their individual histories, geographies, and cultural traditions make each one at least a little bit unique. As history professor Anthony King writes, “To be described as urban supposedly gives some insight into a subject’s lifestyle … bearing the identity of an Angelino, Berliner, New Yorker, or Dehli-wallah, confers the value of the attributes of a particular city.”

68 I assume New Yorkers were not his core constituency. 69 See, it could have been worse. I had two windows.

‘‘New York, like London, seems to be a [toilet filled with] all the depravities of human

nature.’’ Thomas Jefferson

Third President of the United States68

‘‘New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government’’

Henry Ford

SPECIAL AREA | 26

Economist Richard Florida writes that “the city” is a concept that needs updating. He proposes the “megaregion” as the new standard unit of cities for the 21st century. You can think of a mega-region as a large area of nonstop urbanization, with at least a couple of urban “nodes”. As an example, Florida refers to the “Rio-Paulo” region between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil. Florida believes megaregions can be very similar even from one continent to the next. “The more two megaregions have in common financially,” he writes, “the more likely they are to develop similar social mores, cultural tastes, and even political leanings.” Florida proposes that any two megaregions have more in common than any megaregion and small town in the same country. Whether you shop at Giordano’s in Shanghai or in Sydney, you are participating in a global metropolitan culture.

Others have coined the term global city to refer to cities such as New York and London that, in the words of Foreign Policy magazine, “provide ideas and value that impact the rest of the world”. Most global cities are also characterized by large financial centers, top universities, cultural diversity, major corporate headquarters, and great importance to global trade.

Key Aspects of Urban Culture

The culture shared by cities is difficult to pin down, but you can feel it as you walk around them. The ability to walk is itself a notable feature. Walkability is making a comeback even in sprawling megacities as parking spots fill up and people tire of depending on cars. More planners are adding walkable “downtowns” into their designs, even for suburbs. “People who want an urban lifestyle but don’t want to live in a big city or cannot afford to will look to live in the many suburban town centers that have been emerging,” suggests a study by the Urban Land Institute in the United States.

Florida emphasizes the role of “talent-clustering” in big cities. “When people—especially talented and creative ones—cluster, ideas flow more freely … the end result amounts to much more than the sum of the parts,” he writes. Cities are a little nerdy, and a little artsy, in different combinations70. Opportunities to see music, art, dance, and cinema are unmatched outside of cities, no matter how urbanized the suburbs may become.

Urban culture is also big-money culture. The presence of the wealthy helps explain why rent prices are so high in desirable city areas. In the most desirable cities, the wealthy may even own a second home for the occasional visit.

Anonymity—the ability to walk around town without anyone knowing or caring who you are—is another classic feature of cities. A lawyer for Google once compared the liberating anonymity of cities to that of the Internet: “In the city, you can mingle with bankers or toddlers by day, to play rugby or poker by night … maybe you’re happy to use your real name with your colleagues, but delight in the anonymity of a large nightclub. Cities [let] us create the identities we choose.”

Many people find anonymity liberating. But anonymity has a flipside: alienation, disconnectedness, and loneliness. The German philosopher Georg Simmel has proposed that this alienation may stem from the commercial origins of modern cities. The city, he suggests, is all about the

70 Boston is more nerdy than New York; Shanghai is less nerdy than Tokyo. 71 Except for the growth part, cities sound a little like alcohol.

‘‘Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make

them artificial71.’’ Ralph Waldo Emerson

SPECIAL AREA | 27

exchange of money, products, and services between individuals who have never met. Such exchanges don’t exactly give you a warm, fuzzy feeling of caring or community. “One never feels as lonely and deserted as in this metropolitan crush of persons,” he concludes.

The songwriter Stephen Schwartz—famous for writing the musical Wicked—offers his own take on the loneliness of the big city in his song “Crowded Island”:

Eight million people in twenty-two square miles And there’s never anyone to meet We’re like guests at a banquet With nothing to eat So we hunger for the waiter Or crave the operator on the telephone Just trying not to be alone On this crowded island

Cities are also famous for being hectic. People don’t move to cities for peace and quiet. A guidebook describes Tokyo’s busiest neighborhoods as “a solid mass of humanity … rammed, noisy, and lurid.” In the Ginza district, 10,000 luxury shops are crammed into eight blocks. As translator Lea Jacobson puts it, “During rush hour, some two million humans crawl through Shinjuku. Meeting someone is impossible without using a cell phone to call someone who may be just five feet in front of you.”

In his novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac expressed the busy flavor of modern New York living—and this was nearly 50 years ago. “I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush-hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness … of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck … the mad dream—grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying.”

Simmel suggests city residents make mental adjustments to cope with the crowdedness, fast pace, and overstimulation. They cultivate a “blasé attitude”—the ability to ignore most of what happens around them. One sees evidence of it on buses, on sidewalks, and in elevators, where strangers are pushed uncomfortably close together but act as if nothing unusual is happening—and do their best to avoid eye contact while staring at their cell phones.

This ability to ignore strangers breathing down one’s neck implies another characteristic of city living: tolerance. Cities are more diverse than suburbs and rural areas: an Indian businessman in downtown Chicago might eat a Mexican taco in a park next to a homeless white woman and a Korean gay couple with an adopted child from Kenya. Exposure to diversity appears to build a tolerance of other people. Such tolerance may explain why cities tend to be politically progressive—in the United States, Democrats win over most urban voters, while conservative Republicans sweep the suburbs. Because of the rise of new suburbs with walkable downtowns, the line between urban and suburban lifestyles and attitudes is blurring—but, in general, the more crowded an area, the more tolerant its people.

Cities are twenty-four hour institutions. Picture any landmark of “urban” life—say, Times Square in New York or the glittering Bund in Shanghai. They share the quality of electric light. That light allows life to go on after dark. Many of these areas only “come to life” when the sun goes down.

Nightlife is still a way in which cities differentiate themselves from suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas—and a reason they attract so many young people. Cities were always more exciting than the

SPECIAL AREA | 28

countryside, but it was electricity that made them true hubs of all-night activity. Once lamps existed, “urban social activities were able to transcend nature,” writes historian Marshall Berman.

Illuminated urban areas built for nightlife are also built for around-the-clock socializing and consumption. In a typical suburb, the only place to go at 3 am might be the local McDonald’s.

Case Study: Tokyo

The spectacle of Tokyo nightlife has been described as “Times Square squared”. Picture that famous extravaganza of illuminated skyscrapers and then multiply it by dozens of city blocks in all directions. The neighborhood of Shinjuku that surrounds the world’s busiest commuter train station exposes visitors to more square feet of illuminated advertising than any other place in the world.

Tokyo’s nightlife scene is so vast it has no single center. The most famous nightlife areas are Roppongi, Shinjuku, and Ginza, but others thrive all over the city, taking turns as the trendiest place to while away the night. Roppongi is famous for drawing people from all over the world, Ginza for its upscale bars. Shinjuku is more central and spreads for miles with late-night shops, eateries, and clubs. In all these areas, bars and clubs are known to open at three in the afternoon and close at ten the next morning. Live music—performed by bands and by ordinary people singing karaoke—is everywhere. Some people in Tokyo go straight from nightclubs to work the next morning. Nightclubs and karaoke parlors can be a home away from home.

To many observers, Tokyo has two identities: a busy, hectic, formal workplace by day and just as busy, hectic, and informal a playground by night. One guide describes the difference as a total metamorphosis: “By day, Tokyo is arguably one of the least attractive cities in the world. Come dusk, the drabness fades and the city blossoms into a profusion of giant neon lights and paper lanterns, and its streets fill with millions of overworked people out to have a good time.” Though day and night may be sharply different, they blend into long sleepless stretches of work and play.

Living in Unlivable Places

Traditionally, cities thrived in places that lent themselves to large, well-off populations: along rivers and seas and in fertile valleys with comfortable climates. If you were a settler looking for a place to live, you looked for a place with easy access to food and water, and with a climate that, even if it grew cold in the winter or warm in the summer, was unlikely to kill you if you slept outside.

The introduction of home air conditioning (in 1924) and the ability to transport electricity, food, and water over long distances changed all that. Great new cities, such as the gambling, retirement, and marriage mecca of Las Vegas72, could now surface in the desert.

72 As the city’s tourism board likes to remind visitors, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

SPECIAL AREA | 29

Case Study: Dubai

Most historical transformations do not happen overnight. Even the Internet took a few years to catch on73. But the modern city-state of Dubai, one of the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates, is an exception to that rule. It makes the explosive growth of Las Vegas in the 20th century look like it took place in slow motion.

In the 1950s, Dubai was a collection of mud huts and Bedouin tents, technically under British control. The discovery of oil changed everything. The British left in 1971, and Dubai is now one of the most extravagantly-developed—and developing—cities in the world.

Though built with money generated by the oil industry, Dubai lacks any long-term oil supply—most of the country’s oil belongs to the neighboring emirate of Abu Dhabi. The city’s economy is centered on real estate, financial services, and, increasingly, travel and tourism. It is perpetually under construction; cranes dominate the skyline, and new malls and hotels open seemingly every week. Dubai is also opening the largest airport in the world—Al Maktoum International Airport—with a capacity of up to 160 million passengers per year. Some will be coming to visit Dubai, but most will be in transit. Dubai is conveniently located between Asia, Europe, Africa, and Australia, and the national airline of Dubai, Emirates, is ready to take advantage of its location with a vast and growing fleet of jumbo aircraft.

Dubai’s new tourist attractions include some that are as outlandish as they are daring—such as Ski Dubai, an indoor ski resort completed in 2005, and the World, an artificial cluster of private islands still under construction and that has already cost more than 14 billion U.S. dollars. Even a refrigerated beach is under development. Its neighbor, Abu Dhabi, has licensed the rights to build local versions of some of the world’s leading museums, including the Getty and the Guggenheim.

In 2008, Dubai had as much construction taking place as Shanghai—a city with over a dozen times its population. The global recession has hit Dubai hard (many well-off workers fled the country, literally leaving over 3,000 cars abandoned at the airport) but development is now accelerating again.

To construct its bright skyscrapers, the city has recruited an immigrant labor force that makes up over half its population. Many are from South Asia and the Philippines, and put in long hours working in the desert heat. The fruits of their labor are undeniable: in just decades, Dubai has transformed itself from a string of tiny desert towns into a towering global city.

73 After Al Gore invented it.

‘‘Dubai is a mind-bogglingly massive, multi-billion-dollar experiment in city-building, and nobody can predict with

certainty the outcome of this experiment.’’

Directed Research: Dubai vs. Abu Dhabi “Abu Dhabi,” says travel writer Amy Carr, “is positioning itself to be the new-and-improved Dubai.” Only a two hour drive from Dubai, Abu Dhabi is the capital of the largest and wealthiest of the United Arab Emirates. Learn more about Abu Dhabi and how it compares to Dubai. You may want to begin your reading here: http://cnnmon.ie/VcjyB. Then, discuss with your team: what triggered Abu Dhabi’s transformation? Why did Dubai develop first, if Abu Dhabi is wealthier? And—is Abu Dhabi truly a new-and-improved Dubai?

SPECIAL AREA | 30

Dubai’s rise is impressive, but its environmental impact has been severe. A 2008 Living Planet report credited the United Arab Emirates with the highest per capita ecological footprint in the world. A country’s ecological footprint is its overall impact on the world’s natural environment. Measurements of ecological footprint take special account of a country’s carbon emissions, because these emissions contribute to global climate change.

Water consumption in the United Arab Emirates is particularly striking: the average resident uses 145 gallons of water per day, the highest rate in the world. Much of that consumption takes place in Dubai and its many suburbs. The country depends on desalinization, an expensive process that converts seawater into drinkable water, for 95% of its water needs, or over four billion bottles a day. The process burns carbon-based fuels and dumps salty brine back into the sea, leaving the sea saltier.

In other words, building a megalopolis in the middle of a scorching hot desert has its downsides. “Dubai’s new wealth has transformed the city … it’s also trashed the environment,” writes Dubai historian Jim Krane. “Every aspect of Dubai’s development is … based on cheap energy.” Because the government keeps electricity prices low, people have little incentive to turn down their air conditioning—especially during hot months, when going outside is not really an option.

A third of cars in Dubai are sport utility vehicles (SUVs), notorious for their inefficient fuel consumption. Dubai’s streets are among the most congested in the Middle East because so many people depend on cars: the average commuter drives over an hour a day. Cars are popular not only because of the heat outside, but because the city is not designed for walking or biking. Until recently, few streets even had sidewalks. The new elevated “subway” system, the Dubai Metro, shows promise, but is up against formidable obstacles: the city’s suburbs are spreading in all directions, making it difficult for the Metro to connect commuters and destinations, and the intense heat means that, once people exit the Metro, they are unlikely to want to walk very far. Bus stops are among the only ones in the world to be enclosed and air-conditioned.

Some of Dubai’s world-class tourist attractions are having a world-class impact on the environment. Just to build the artificial islands of the World, developers dredged up around 33 million cubic meters of sand and shell from the seabed of the Gulf. This process damaged coral reefs vital to sustaining ocean life. According to Krane, such projects have “left the sea a silty fog” and “altered the Gulf’s offshore currents, probably forever.” Already, many of Dubai’s beaches cannot replenish the sand carried out by currents; they must be supplied with new sand by dump truck.

Another factor contributing to Dubai’s carbon footprint is its reliance on imports. Nearly everything on shelves and on restaurant menus has to be delivered from outside Dubai. Waves of fuel-consuming ships, planes, and trucks are required to keep the population fed, clothed, and entertained. There is little alternative: living in the middle of the desert is not that different than living on an island.

Many groups are working on making Dubai more sustainable—and the government of the United Arab Emirates recognizes the problem—but given the city’s location, size, and dependence on cars and air conditioning, it could be a long road ahead.

Urban Culture and Imaginary Cities

Nightlife is an aspect of city life that has always fascinated writers and filmmakers. It is fitting that electricity, the invention that gave rise to modern nightlife, also helped give rise to cinema, and to its

SPECIAL AREA | 31

depictions of night in the city—including a classic 1950 film noir74 literally titled Night and the City. Other famous films of this era—which make the genre’s connection to the modern metropolis very clear—include Naked City (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950).

Film noir is a genre in which plots unfold in dark city settings. As critic Roger Ebert put it, they are full of “locations that reek of the night, of shadows, of alleys, of the back doors of fancy places, of apartment buildings with a high turnover rate, of taxi drivers and bartenders who have seen it all.” Perhaps reflecting the reality of city life, their characters live in crowded places but live lonely lives.

Film noirs portrayed an urban landscape of ruthless individualism, dark shadows, and no sense of lasting love or home. They told stories of crime and broken relationships, unfolding against a backdrop of gambling dens, bright skylines, and grim industrial warehouses. You might say their themes represented the opposite of the sunny suburban ideals of Levittown, built around the same time these classic films were made. Perhaps those fleeing to the suburbs were in fact fleeing the vision of city life captured in film noirs.

American film noirs borrowed their style from German filmmakers of the 1920s and 1930s. German expressionist filmmakers such as Fritz Lang used monumental visuals and became famous for visual exaggeration: shooting sets and people to make them look bigger, scarier, and more dramatic. These techniques were on full display in Fritz Lang’s landmark 1927 film Metropolis—which forecast the future of the modern city.

Metropolis is set a hundred years in the future, in the year 2026, in a divided world in which workers toil in an underground city and rich people live above them in playgrounds of their own creation. The wealthy in Lang’s film are as magnificent as they are vain and cruel, and largely ignorant of the fate of the workers below ground. The film addresses issues of modern cities that were growing clear to Lang and other observers—such as housing segregation by class. The metaphor was a good one for the city then and the megacity now: the wealthy can live in almost total ignorance of the conditions of the poor. Unlike most of the films it influenced, Metropolis has a happy ending: the two classes agree to reunite and reform their city.

Gotham City

You have probably heard of another imaginary city influenced by Metropolis, German Expressionism, and film noir: Gotham City, home of Batman and his trusty sidekick Robin. Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie opens with a shot of Gotham City from afar. The dark, swirling soundtrack and illuminated city give us a clue why Batman is called “The Dark Knight”: we only ever see Gotham at night, when both criminals and crime fighters go to work.

Batman’s origin story—he turned to fighting crime after witnessing a mugger murder his parents—reflects common fears about the city. It is a place that needs saving, in which

74 Film noir is a fancy French term for “dark films”, or films of the night.

SPECIAL AREA | 32

crime and corruption are everywhere. It is also a place in which identities can shift, especially after sundown. By day, Batman is mild-mannered businessman Bruce Wayne, but at night he becomes someone else.

Gotham75 is a place in which all kinds of people—from heroes like Batman to villains like the Joker—operate outside the norms of society76, work at night, and come to understand each other as outsiders, no matter how different their aims. Both Batman and the Joker could only belong in a big city.

In both the comic books and films, Gotham is dark, foreboding, and gritty. The opening scenes of the original movie show a young boy and his parents befuddled by the chaotic streets of Gotham at night—the homeless people, the prostitutes, the garbage-strewn dark alleys, the steam rising from manholes, and, of course, the criminals who assault them. Yet Gotham is also magnificent enough to be the backdrop to Batman’s heroic feats. Because Batman watches the city from atop a skyscraper, he misses nothing. No one can escape his justice. Gotham may be full of filth and evil, but its epic scale is what makes Batman’s crime-fighting—and his dual identity—possible. The city plays a role as visually striking and as important to the story as any of the series’ colorful characters.

No discussion of Gotham would be complete without a nod to Metropolis, home of Superman.77 Metropolis, too, is an imaginary city, first mentioned in a 1939 comic book. Like Gotham, its location and history have evolved over time, as different writers, artists, and filmmakers have added to the Superman universe. Often, it is in the American Midwest, a superhero-hungry Chicago. Other times, it is clearly meant to be New York City. Almost always, it is more prosperous than Gotham—a realization of the urban dream of the 1940s, with majestic architecture, broad avenues, and a bustling free press. But it also transforms at night, and its sunny surface hides villains and injustice that only Superman can fight.78

From City-State to City-Planet

“Nightfall” may be his most famous work, but science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote famous and influential stories set in imaginary cities. His 1954 novel The Caves of Steel takes place in a distant future in which nearly all people on Earth now live in underground and dome-covered cities—including a much-enlarged New York City, one spanning multiple states. It is, Asimov tells us, a very different metropolis than the one we know today:

“To be sure, something had existed in the same geographic area before then that had been called New York City. That primitive gathering of population had existed for three thousand years, not three hundred, but it hadn't been a City.”

People in this future are so used to living indoors that they are scared of even going outside. The novel’s title refers to the cities themselves. People live in assigned housing, eat in communal kitchens, and do bathroomy things in shared bathrooms.79 These policies may seem more typical of planned economies—such as in the communist Soviet Union—than of the capitalist United States. But bear in mind that Asimov lived through the aftermath of the Great Depression, when the government

75 “Gotham” actually means “place where goats are kept”. 76 When I was growing up, I used to watch the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who ran their crime-fighting operation from deep in the New York City sewers. They, too, operated outside the norms of society. 77 If you ever want to hold a debate at a comic book convention, try asking whether Batman or Superman is more heroic. 78 The small town of Metropolis, Illinois, has taken advantage of its name—it tells tourists it is the home of Superman. This would be like a town in California that happened to be called Hogwarts declaring itself the home of Harry Potter. 79 People have essentially all moved into college dormitories.

‘‘[Superman’s] Metropolis is New York in the daytime, Gotham City is New York at night.’’

George Miller, Comic Book Artist

Discuss it

What do fictional cities tell us about the worlds in which they were imagined?

SPECIAL AREA | 33

actively intervened in the economy—creating jobs, distributing food, and mobilizing for war. Perhaps, to Asimov, there was no reason to doubt the government would always remain deeply involved in city life, especially as populations reached dangerously high levels80.

In another set of stories and novels—the Foundation series—Asimov imagines a planet, Trantor, which rules the entire Galactic Empire. Unlike every other planet in the galaxy, Trantor is (until its fall) one giant city, with over 45 billion inhabitants crammed underground.

When he first conceived it, in the 1940s and 1950s, Trantor was a lot like New York City in The Caves of Steel—just much larger. People rarely went outside. Neither city, as originally described, had any automobiles. At a time when many science fiction writers were prophesizing flying cars, Asimov was picturing giant indoor spaces full of moving walkways and smart elevators.

Perhaps he was projecting based on the world in which he lived: New York City, while not free of cars, was a place where he could get along without one. Had he grown up in Los Angeles, his future cities might have had traffic jams. Some critics believe he may have been unconsciously expressing his own preference for indoor spaces; Asimov was known for enjoying staying indoors to write—which he did nearly all of the time—and refusing to fly.

Tellingly, when Asimov returned to write new novels set on Trantor late in his career, he introduced some new elements, including (non-flying) cars. Where the Trantor of the 1940s had no real ethnic or cultural divisions—everyone seemed to be of mixed ancestry and essentially alike—the Trantor of the late 1980s and 1990s was divided into different cultural zones, almost like separate countries within the city. Some were poor, some rich. Some were clearly descended from certain planets or even from certain regions of the Earth, like Africa and China. And some were rivals, on the brink of war. Even Asimov’s imaginary city had transformed.

80 Asimov imagined the world in a population crisis—with about 8 billion inhabitants. Today, the Earth’s population is nearing 7 billion, and the odds are good we will hit 8 billion without too many of us relocating into caves.

Discuss with your Team

Why might Asimov’s vision of Trantor have changed so much in only 40 years?

SPECIAL AREA | 34

IV. Transforming the Modern Metropolis

A common misunderstanding about the American city of Chicago has to do with the origins of its nickname: “The Second City”. Many assume it

refers to Chicago’s secondary position to New York in the pecking order of American cities. But it actually refers to a tragic episode in Chicago’s

history. The city had to be built twice: once at its founding, and again after it was destroyed by a massive fire in 1871. Today’s Chicago is the second

Chicago: “The Second City.”

Cities change all the time. Sometimes, as in the devastation of New Orleans b Hurricane Katrina, the changes are imposed by nature and massive in scale. Sometimes they are imposed by man, as in the reinvention of Beijing for the 2008 Olympics or the remodeling of modern-day Copenhagen into a paradise for bicyclists. Sometimes transformations are far smaller and more subtle, such as recent efforts to make cities like Mumbai more sustainable with the addition of urban farms. Almost always, the full extent and impact of a city’s transformation cannot be understood until decades later.

Objectives

By the time you complete this chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions.

� How do governments transform city life?

� What is the environmental impact of city living?

� How can cities be made more environmentally-friendly?

Cities Transformed by Politics

Governments have great (though not unlimited) control over the development of their cities.

They often use regulations to require people and businesses to live and set up shop in certain areas—and to leave other areas undeveloped. In democratic societies, developers must seek approval from city councils or other leaders. Candidates might run for office promising to stop (or start) development of certain projects. In Santiago, Chile, community groups were able to stop the construction of a new highway through their neighborhoods, demanding it be built underground instead.

In general, the more democratic a country, the greater the role its citizens can play in city planning. Democracy in city planning can be positive, but it can also be paralyzing—as in Los Angeles, where the government has been unable to select a site for a badly-needed new airport because so many different groups have protested so many different plans for so many years. The more authoritarian government of Dubai was able to lay the groundwork for the world’s largest airport in months and will finish building it within a few years.

Governments can also use tax incentives to encourage growth in certain areas and to discourage growth in others. Businesses that set up shop in central St. Louis pay lower taxes than businesses that set up in the suburbs. The idea is to drive growth in downtown St. Louis.

Governments can impose different trading policies to control how much a given city interacts with the outside world. Pyongyang, North Korea, would probably look a lot more like Seoul if it were less

SPECIAL AREA | 35

isolated from international trade. In many countries, such as China, certain cities are designated as special economic zones and encouraged to trade more openly with other countries.

Governments can also invest directly in cities: constructing roads, highways, buildings, and more. And the political inclination of a government affects how and where it makes these investments. Singapore, worried about an economic slowdown, has invested in developing new tourist attractions, especially casinos. China has recently invested in growing new cities in its interior, hoping to spread the benefits of economic growth which until now has focused on its coastal regions. The recent “economic stimulus bill” in the United States funded the improvement of highways in cities across the country; signs on these highways remind drivers that the stimulus bill is to thank (or blame) for all the construction. Dubai’s government helped finance the tallest building in the world as a political symbol of its economic success; for many, it was more a symbol of Dubai’s excess.

Political systems and ideologies can have dramatic consequences on cities and on their management. Many people have credited Singapore’s rapid but orderly development since its independence in 1965 to its pragmatic mix of central economic planning and a free market. Others blame the chaos and sprawl of Indian cities on their ineffective government bureaucracies.

Case Study: Berlin

In 1945, at the end of World War II, Germany’s capital city, Berlin, was, like Germany, divided into four zones, each controlled by one of the victorious Allied powers: Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union. Soviet leader Josef Stalin arranged for the Soviet zone to form a new communist country, the German Democratic Republic (the GDR, or “East Germany”).

The result was an awkward situation: Berlin was located well within the borders of East Germany, a satellite state of the Soviet Union, but half of the city was still controlled by the United States, Britain, and France. Soviet-backed efforts to take over West Berlin by blocking it from its allies (basically, starving it out) failed, and the two halves of the city were forced to coexist.

In 1961, East Germany began construction of the Berlin Wall—cutting the city in half. The East German government called the wall a barrier against Western “fascist” influences, but in reality it was trying to stop its own citizens from fleeing. It had been losing far too many, especially the young and the educated, to the West.

The original Berlin Wall was made of barbed wire. When it proved easy to cross, the government constructed a second, sturdier wall fifty meters away. The space between them became known as a “death strip”— anyone caught crossing it was shot dead by armed guards. More than 150 would-be crossers were killed between 1961 and 1989. Over 300 watchtowers kept a stern eye on the wall81.

Life in the divided city was strange, to say the least. Those in the West were stranded in a walled enclave in the middle of a hostile country. Those in East Berlin were connected to the rest of East

81 You know nothing, Jon Snow.

Directed Research Area: Communist Urban Infrastructure Moscow is Europe’s second-largest city. Although the city is no longer communist, much of its Soviet infrastructure is still in place. Read about its public heating pipesand metro system. What has happened as Moscow’s heating pipes have decayed? How would you describe its Soviet-era metro stations? Skim this article on the tragic impacts of a recent heat wave in Moscow. How did the city’s design worsen the effects of the heat wave?

SPECIAL AREA | 36

Germany—but forbidden from crossing to the capitalist West just down the street. Some West Berliners felt trapped in a place that, though more comfortable than East Berlin, was never secure. Meanwhile, many East Berliners resented the prosperity just on the other side of the wall.

Each half of Berlin developed a very different culture. Historian David Clay Large writes, with some exaggeration: “[T]he wall ensured that the dual cities were more distant from each other than if they had been separated by a continent.” East Berlin could only import goods, such as cars and food, from other Communist countries, while West Berlin received products82 from the rest of West Germany and Western allies. Citizens in East Berlin were assigned public housing in which to live; citizens in West Berlin rented and bought their own homes. West Berlin’s buildings reflected the architectural variety of the West; the East stuck mostly with Stalinist urban architecture, large-scale, practical, and cheap to construct—but gray in color and prone to decay.

East Berlin’s artists and musicians were closely monitored by the state for signs of capitalist corruption. (East Germany was notorious for the number of its citizens who spied for the government.) For a long time, rock music was banned because it was seen as a Western creation. Meanwhile, performers from abroad often traveled to West Berlin for inspiration, including one you are studying this year, David Bowie. In part because the West German government exempted West Berlin residents from military service, many young Germans moved there—bringing the energy and nightlife of youth.

In 1989, during a period in which the Soviet Union was becoming more open to the West, the East German government made a surprise announcement. It had decided, vaguely, to allow “private trips abroad”. A mob of East Berlin citizens on cars and on foot dashed for the Wall. The checkpoint guards were unprepared; most had not even heard the news, and no one knew the details. Overwhelmed, they eventually let everyone through.

West Berliners greeted their long-separated neighbors with flowers and wine. In subsequent weeks, images of ordinary citizens dancing on top of the wall and tearing it down gripped the world. The two Germanys officially reunited on October 3, 1990, with a single Berlin as its capital.

Even today, differences linger between the two halves of Berlin. The West is more prosperous, with a younger, more educated population—though many lower-cost areas of East Berlin became hip neighborhoods for young artists83. West and East Berlin are a superb demonstration of what can happen when similar cities are developed by governments with very different ideologies.

Cities Transformed by Environmental Concerns

Cities have always altered their environments, but the consequences are better known and steeper today. The potential for climate change and the exhaustion of natural resources poses a serious threat to human wellbeing.

82 Including delicious chocolates that were much prized by residents of East Berlin. 83 Today, these areas are gentrifying.

Directed Research: El Paso and Ciudad Juarez Not unlike the two halves of Berlin before 1989, El Paso and Ciudad Juarez are two cities separated only by a fortified border. Though people can cross between them (to a degree), the cities are very separate. With your team, investigate them. How are they similar, and how are they most different? To what extent do you think differences between them might be due to government policy? What other cities in the world exist that are split across national borders?

Ultra-dense Manhattan has been called ‘‘a utopian environmentalist community’’ by writer David Owen

because it is so much more energy efficient than the rest of the United States.

SPECIAL AREA | 37

As we saw with 19th-century London, cities can be dirty and smelly places. But in the 21st century, densely-populated cities do have a surprising advantage: they might be able to offer a more sustainable way of life than the more spread-out suburbs surrounding then. Because cities are high-density, with people living closer together in apartments instead of in single-family homes, the urban residential lifestyle requires less energy per person. In cities with good public transportation options, it can be easier to walk than to depend on a car.

But even densely-populated cities are surrounded by less dense areas. A recent Yale University report warned that the United States, for example, is quickly losing open space and farmland to the rapid growth of suburbs and exurbs. Between 2007 and 2030, the United States will have developed more than 200 billion square feet of new homes, retail facilities, office buildings and other structures. Much of this construction will contribute to traffic congestion, air pollution, and sprawl.

Urban planners in many countries are trying to limit sprawl by making high-density city living more attractive. But even high-density cities are not truly sustainable: they still pollute, use tremendous amounts of energy, and depend on outlying areas (and cars) to bring in food, goods, and workers. Many urban planners believe cities need a “green” makeover just as much as the suburbs need to be remade to be more like cities. We will return to this topic in the final section of this guide.

Case Study: Copenhagen

Cities around the world are taking different approaches to making their cities sustainable. The compact Danish capital of Copenhagen has provided one model. Over a third of Copenhagen’s two million residents ride to work by bicycle each day. The layout of the city includes a “carless downtown” and bicycle paths with special traffic signals. The government even provides bicycles that anyone can use for free—paying a small deposit given back to them when they return the bike.

To make bicycle use more attractive, the city is constructing new interconnected bike paths called greenways to permit safe, quick bike journeys from one end of the city to the other, and keep bike commuters far from car traffic. When the network is complete, it will cover over 100 kilometers. More bicycle riding means more exercise, and thus is also likely to benefit public health.

Until the 1970s, Copenhagen was just as car-jammed as any other city, but it has now become famous among urban planners interested in achieving sustainability, minimizing pollution, and promoting quality of life. The term “copenhagenize” has become a catchphrase in the sustainable planning community, meaning the process of making a city more bike-and-pedestrian friendly.

Danish urban designer and architect Jan Gehl has become a leading advocate for the benefits of cities designed for people and bikes rather than for automobiles. Since championing Copenhagen’s own bike-powered transformation, he has consulted with world cities such as New York City, London, Toronto, and Melbourne about how to make their cities greener and more bike-friendly.

Mini-Directed Research Area: Ten Sustainable Cities Check out this gallery of some of the world’s most sustainable cities, beginning with Copenhagen. http://bit.ly/c9tT8UWhat special efforts are these cities making to earn this distinction? Discuss with your team: which approaches would you want your own city to adopt, if any?

SPECIAL AREA | 38

Urban streets jammed with traffic, Gehl said at a recent talk in New York City, are not “a law of nature.” Gehl has also spoken out against the button pedestrians need to press in some cities in order to cross the street. Gehl believes pedestrians should always have priority over cars. All around the world, Gehl argues that, if governments want sustainable cities, they must create more space for pedestrians, bikers, and public transportation. Gehl believes even cities ten times the size of Copenhagen can incorporate these ideas.

Copenhagen’s transformation has inspired its government to take more steps toward sustainability. By 2015, it wants to ensure that all residents can walk to a park or green space in under 15 minutes. It is constructing a number of small “pocket parks” around the city and planting more than 3,000 trees.

Although the city itself does not have much room for wind energy farms, a wind farm off Copenhagen’s shore currently supplies 4% of its energy. The city is planning to build at least 14 more wind farms before 2025. In the summer, solar panels provide many homes and buildings with natural energy. The city also features many buildings that employ rain catchment to trap rainwater on rooftops and reuse it. Rain catchment is a water conservation method that is catching on84 in cities around the world, particularly in those that have faced water shortages.

The government expects that, within fifteen years, Copenhagen will become carbon-neutral. This would make Copenhagen the first carbon-neutral capital in the world. Carbon neutrality means Copenhagen will remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as it puts into it. Already, the average Dane emits only 9.9 tons of carbon dioxide per year, compared to the average American at 19 tons.

Back to the Farm

The world’s first cities were all about agriculture. Farming and producing a food surplus were vital to generating wealth. A controversial new development in the movement toward sustainable cities takes us back to this past: urban farming. Urban farming brings farms into cities—wherever they fit. Instead of a park with flowers and trees, why not a park with stalks of corn and strawberry bushes? Supporters argue that every meal grown inside a city cuts down on the fuel needed to bring in outside food. The savings on transportation could help keep prices on urban-grown food reasonable. And urban farms could provide much-needed jobs and green spaces in crowded megacities.

Critics, however, believe urban farming is at best a small part of the solution and that urban farmers have good intentions but could never grow enough—or cheap enough—food to feed the masses. They worry that sustainable farming generates better press coverage than it does solutions.

The government of Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, has sided with the believers. It recently opened several urban garden-farms in the heart of the car-jammed city. In Mumbai, India, one of the world’s most densely-populated cities, no space goes unused: urban farmers grow food on rooftop terraces and

84 No pun intended.

Debate it!

Resolved: That any city can “Copenhagenize” itself.

Defining the Sustainable City

The website SustainLane lists some important aspects of urban sustainability:

1. Clean, uncontaminated air 2. Multiple public transportation options 3. Sustainable energy (wind, solar) 4. Clean water from a renewable source 5. Green real estate construction 6. Low traffic congestion 7. Access to parks 8. Limits on growth 9. Long-term planning

SPECIAL AREA | 39

in abandoned spaces such as old train stations. One larger urban farm opened on the terrace of the Mumbai Port Trust, a government building that controls Mumbai’s large port. The building serves meals to 3,000 people every day, and uses the organic waste from these meals to fertilize its garden.

Whether it can contribute a little or a lot to sustainability, urban farming does at least reintroduce fresh-grown food to some city residents who may have lost touch with where their meals comes from.

Cities Transformed by Imitation

Just as cities spark the growth of suburbs, sometimes they inspire competing and copycat cities. The idea is as old as history: take something that works and imitate it, be it your friend’s outfit, a rival tribe’s bow and arrow, or the local burger stand. Cities have done this for centuries. The original Constantinople was modeled closely after Rome85, and the imperial palace in Seoul looks a lot like the Forbidden City in Beijing—just smaller. Visit colonial Mexico City and you will see echoes of Madrid.

More recent imitative cities have been less about looking back to a colonial power and more about duplicating another city’s success. One of the most successful initiatives has been the Chinese city of Shenzhen—one of the world’s fastest-growing for over 30 years. In 1980, China made Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong, its first “Special Economic Zone”—with relaxed rules meant to attract foreign investors. At the time, Hong Kong was a British-ruled economic powerhouse, with five million bustling citizens—and Shenzhen was a fishing village. Today, Shenzhen’s population of nine million has shot past Hong Kong’s. It has become a global trading and financial center in its own right.86 The city is a vast spread of skyscrapers, manufacturing centers, and new residents.

Ironically, just as Shenzhen was a copy of Hong Kong, now the world is full of cities trying to imitate Shenzhen. Later in this guide, you will see how China’s own city of Kashgar is trying to be the next Shenzhen; so are new Special Economic Zones in Malaysia, Kazakhstan, India, and elsewhere.

More recently, Doha and other Middle Eastern cities have looked to imitate Dubai. Like Dubai, Doha has even named its various urban development projects “cities” and linked each to a specific goal or idea. Dubai has Media City, Internet City, and Sports City; Doha has Education City, Energy City, and its own Sports City—among many others. Where Dubai advertises its own superlatives, such as the world’s tallest building and the only indoor ski slope, Doha has the world’s largest sports dome and, the only place in the Gulf where it snows indoors 365 days a year.

Case Study: Singapore, Johor Bahru, and Citraland

The Republic of Singapore, an island nation and a modern city-state, has long been one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Until it was surpassed by Shanghai in 2011, Singapore housed the world’s busiest trading port. It is the second-most densely populated country in the world.87

With a diverse population of about five million, efficient public

85 But with a lot more cats. 86 It also manufactures World Scholar’s Cup medals. And serves delicious frog dishes. 87 This measure may be a bit unfair, as there are very few countries that are nearly 100% urban.

Food Deserts

Not to be mistaken for the food called desserts, food deserts are long-suffering areas of major cities where

residents can no longer find supermarkets or other sources of fresh, healthy things to eat. In many urban areas of the United States, supermarkets have fled,

citing poor sales and high crime rates. Those residents left behind might be forced to do all their grocery

shopping at overpriced convenience stores—and to eat unhealthy meals at fast food restaurants.

SPECIAL AREA | 40

transportation (including buses, subways, and light rail), vibrant nightlife, clusters of skyscrapers, four official languages, and some of the world’s leading banks and businesses, Singapore exemplifies the global city of the 21st century. Like Dubai, it is one of the world’s leading financial centers. It is also a testament to the power of state-managed capitalism; Singapore’s development has been methodically orchestrated by its government over the last 40 years.

Singapore’s cultural power and influence are perhaps best on display across the Straits of Jodhor on its northern border. Across a short bridge is a different country—Malaysia—and another city, Johor Bahru (which means “new jewel” in Malay). Johor Bahru has been an industrial and manufacturing hotspot on the Malaysian peninsula for many years. Today, largely because of its proximity to Singapore, Johor Bahru (or, as the locals call it, “JB”) is Malaysia’s second-largest and fastest growing city, with a population of over two million. About fifty thousand of its residents commute to Singapore daily for work, including many Singaporeans who choose to live in Johor Bahru because of its lower-cost housing.

In the last five years, the Malaysian government has invested more money into downtown clean-up, economic development, and tourism initiatives in Johor Bahru. Johor Bahru can be thought of as both its own city and as a suburb, or satellite, of Singapore—despite its being in a different country. Malaysia’s Ministry of Tourism recently signaled it also wishes to develop Johor Bahru as an international honeymoon destination—similar, it says, to Hawaii, Bali, and, of course, Singapore.

Fourteen hundred kilometers south of Singapore and Johor Bahru, on the island of Java, planners in the city of Surabaya are even more explicitly constructing a new—much more private—Singapore. A 5,000-acre private development called CitraLand bills itself as the “Singapore of Surabaya”. When complete it is expected to house up to 8,000 families. It features copies of some of Singapore’s most famous landmarks. Security guards inside CitraLand enforce anti-littering rules and other policies modeled after Singapore’s famously strict local laws. CitraLand exists on the border between city and suburb—literally but also metaphorically an island community separated from everything around it.

Urban development never lacks for irony. Even as Singapore is inspiring copycats, Singapore is concerned it might be losing its edge as a financial and trading hub compared to up-and-coming cities like Shenzhen. Its solution has been to borrow from Macau and Las Vegas and transform itself into a world-class gambling and tourism destination. Singapore opened its first casino, Resort World Sentosa, in 2010. It also featured the first Universal Studios in Southeast Asia. Within a year, the “integrated resort” had earned a billion dollars in revenue. Singapore’s gross domestic product, which had shrunk 1.3% in 2009, grew 14.7% in 2010, and the country drew a record number of tourists—over 11.5 million. It is now the second largest gambling spot in the world.

None of Singapore’s clones are following its lead and opening their own casinos—yet.

Cities Transformed by the Internet

The 21st century metropolis is a connected one. People walk down the street yakking into cell phones that bounce signals off antennas tucked between high-rise buildings—and sit at home shopping online and posting on Facebook over speedy Internet connections.

Only 15 years ago, most people who accessed the Internet from home dialed in by telephone, using devices called modems. It would have taken them hours to stream a YouTube video—if YouTube had existed. Today, in the developed world, high-speed Internet ranks alongside electricity and television

SPECIAL AREA | 41

on the list of services most commonly activated when people move into new homes. Nearly all new housing government and commercial developments integrate always-on, always-fast Internet.

The long-term impact of so much connectivity is hard to predict. Perhaps more people will work from home, reducing the number of cars on crowded roads. Perhaps residents will be able to vote on community issues from their sofas—or to track the energy usage of their neighbors. Perhaps a retiree’s toilet will be able to take his temperature and relay it to his doctor.88

Urban planners refer to cities filled with smart technologies and Internet connectivity as ubiquitous89 cities, or U-cities. The new master-planned city of Songdo, currently under construction in Korea, is set to become what may be the world’s first true ubiquitous city. Many more are bound to follow—both new cities built from scratch and old cities overhauled with the latest technologies.90

But, before you get swept away with visions of smart refrigerators and virtual holiday dinners, remember that, for many who live in megacities, Internet access is still a far-off luxury. Hunger and poverty remain far more ubiquitous than broadband.

88 At one MIT dormitory, students can use the Internet to check whether the toilets in the bathrooms are being used. 89 The word “ubiquitous” means found everywhere. 90 Just as it was difficult to build streets and highways suitable for car traffic in cities that predated the invention of the car, it will probably be easier to build ubiquitous Internet into entirely new cities than to squeeze it into existing cities.

Directed Research: Songdo, Korea’s New Ubiquitous City Thirty minutes from Seoul via a high speed subway, Korea is building an entirely new city—on water, no less—and to make it as green and connected as possible. Read this article to learn more about Songdo—and take a tour of its future in this YouTube video. What are some of Songdo’s “green” features—and how do you think its ubiquitous connectivity will affect the lives of those who live there?

SPECIAL AREA | 42

IV. The Future of the City In January 2012, American presidential candidate Newt Gingrich

announced that the United States should build a colony on the moon. His opponents, and many voters, ridiculed him. Yet the idea of building a city

on the moon was not always seen as crazy. As recently as the 1950s, politicians in the United States feared that the Soviet Union would do it

first. And, in the 1960s, the manned missions to the moon were seen as a prelude to the inevitable: permanent settlements on the moon, and later

Mars.

No one expected that those settlements in outer space would be farms91 or migrant camps. They would be cities: the cities of the future. In this section, we will explore what we can actually expect of those future cities—and at what people used to dream they might become.

Larger than Ever

The government of China has never been shy about its agenda for future. In 2011 it announced a sweeping new mandate to merge nine of its fastest-growing cities into a single super-city, one spanning sixteen thousand square milesand containing over 42 million people.

The plan, titled “Turn the Pearl River Delta into One92”, does more than just declare the nine cities part of a single entity. China will invest nearly $200 billion in 29 new high-speed rail lines to bind them together—making journeys between them easy and convenient. Residents will be able to commute from one end of the region to the other in less than an hour.

The area of the region dwarfs that of all the world’s existing cities and even some of its countries. One British journalist wryly notes that “the new megacity will eat Wales”. In fact, it will be twice the size of Wales, and over twenty-five times larger than London.

Jonathan Woetzel, a director of the prestigious McKinsey consulting firm in Shanghai, has voiced support for China’s new strategy. He adds that these new megacities should focus on growing upward, with buildings at least twice as high as they are today. “Vertical development,” he writes, “would take pressure off the land, ensure that investments were closer to the market, and be significantly more resource-efficient.”

91 Except on Tatooine. 92 It defeated the alternate title “You Will Be Assimilated” on the second ballot.

Directed Research: The Fastest-Growing Cities of Tomorrow

The world’s largest cities are not always its fastest-growing. Explore the ten cities selected by Time as the fastest-growing cities of tomorrow: http://ti.me/sMnzcQ. Are there any cities you were surprised to see on this list? Are any cities you were expecting to see on it missing? What do you think are the challenges these cities will face in the next twenty years?

SPECIAL AREA | 43

As ambitious as it may seem, this new project may only be a smaller model of what the Chinese government has in mind for the so-called Bohai Economic Rim. Centered on Beijing and Tianjin, which are already linked by a high speed rail line, such a megacity would contain over 260 million people—3% of the world’s population.

In other words, this project would eat the United Kingdom.

Building Down

Jonathan Woetzel may favor building upward, but a number of architects and scientists are looking toward a future in which humans build down—under the sea and land.

One design firm recently earned a distinction at a global architecture competition for proposing underwater skyscrapers—“water-scrapers”—that could take full advantage of their location in the sea. They would harness renewable wave, wind, and solar energy, and could raise underwater crops and fish for food. “Approximately 71% of the Earth’s surface is ocean, even more if climate change has its way,” says the project’s lead architect, Sarly Bin Sarkum. “It is only the natural progression that we will populate the seas someday.”

Bin Sarkum is not alone. Other architects have proposed floating skyscraper farms, and one Japanese company, Shimuzu Corporation, is promoting its new design for self-sufficient floating cities, which it calls “Green Floats”. Each Green Float would house 40,000, and would come equipped with countermeasures against tsunamis93.

Other architects have been confronting the future of cities in the desert. Matthew Fromboluti of Washington University in St. Louis has proposed upside-down skyscrapers digging three hundred meters into the dry desert soil94. Daylight would stream in through rooftop windows, and hot air would flow back up a central cylinder—like a heat ejector straw. Greenhouses and terraces toward the top could grow enough food to feed everyone in the building. Most of each skyscraper would be shielded by tons of rock from the desert heat, allowing a more comfortable indoor climate at a lower cost in air conditioning.

While these notions may seem fanciful, some real-world cities have already been going underground. Montreal is perhaps the most famous, with over thirty kilometers of walkable tunnels that link 80% of its offices. The tunnels connect to eight metro stations and feature over two thousand shops, forty movie theaters, and even one of Canada’s oldest hotels.

93 A good thing, or “Green Float” might end up remembered mostly as the name of a very long James Cameron movie. 94 He calls them “Above Belows”. Someone really needs to help these architects with naming their projects.

Directed Research: Green Float Learn more about Shimuzu’s proposed floating city at the company’s own website: http://bit.ly/b6CCDR. Then, discuss with your team: is this concept at all realistic? If not, why not? Would you live in such a city?

SPECIAL AREA | 44

Across the Atlantic, Amsterdam is investing 14 billion dollars to build its own vast network of tunnels under its famous canals. It plans to offer water-weary tourists the chance to sleep, shop, and eat belowground by the year 2018.

Building to Bid

Doha, the capital of Qatar, was recently awarded the right to host the 2022 World Cup. The idea of outdoor soccer in scorching desert conditions, often well above 50° degrees Celsius, seemed ludicrous to many critics—but the Qatari government promised to build innovative air-conditioned stadiums to keep fans and players comfortable95. The proposed stadiums will even be environmentally-friendly, covered with solar power cells that will help sustainably power the city when games are not being played.

In addition to the stadiums, experts predict that private companies will invest over $100 billion to open at least 120 hotels all around Doha, from inexpensive inns to high-end resorts. The economic benefits of hosting the World Cup or the Olympics can include a massive spike in local employment and in tourism and business travel.

Yet the costs of attracting such an event can be steep, and they are only increasing. As emerging cities compete for global recognition, they are forced to one-up one another’s bids. Los Angeles’s effort to draw the 2016 Olympic Games, based on the notion that it could reuse existing venues and meant to win praise for austerity in the midst of a global economic crisis, was quickly dismissed as insufficiently bold.

By contrast, China prepared for the 2008 Olympics by redesigning Beijing as a modern megacity. It built the world’s second largest airport terminal, new hotels, new subway lines, and more. “On every street corner in Beijing there is some form of demolition or construction taking place,” observed journalist Sean Gallagher. The government even taught taxi drivers English and ran campaigns against public spitting, once a common practice on city streets. It also took dramatic steps to reduce pollution, including limiting the number of cars allowed on the road.

The makeover, like Paris’s in the mid-1800s, was not universally embraced. One focus of criticism: the loss of Beijing’s hutong neighborhoods. Over 580,000 people were relocated from their traditional homes, many of them to newer apartment buildings on the outskirts of the city.

95 And alive.

Discuss It

Many Westerners criticized the government of China for replacing so many of the Beijing hutongs with

modern new developments before the Olympic Games. Was this criticism justified? When is it right to

modernize a neighborhood, and when is it preferable to let more historic but impoverished living conditions

endure?

SPECIAL AREA | 45

Beijing’s hosting of the Olympics is both a story of extravagant success and a reminder that an all-out sprint for the future can require sacrificing a measure of the past.

New Ways to Get Around

Flying cars are so yesteryear. The next frontier in driving might be to eliminate drivers in the first place.

The American state of Nevada recently became the first to legalize driverless automobiles. Experimental cars will be marked by red license plates, privately-owned ones by green plates. For now, either kind will still need to have a licensed driver behind the wheel, just in case97.

Google has already tested its prototype driverless cars on over 250,000 kilometers of roads, including downtown streets on which they have had to coexist with normal cars. So far, there has been only one accident—and it occurred when a human was driving the test car.

The driverless car is the latest version of an old idea—that of personal rapid transit (PRT). At a PRT station, passengers would request a specific destination and then board a vehicle that would take them there directly98. The idea was to create a form of public transportation able to compete with the flexibility of the car. Unfortunately, the technology proved difficult and costly to implement; one famous attempt, the ARAMIS project in France, cost over 300 million dollars over twenty years before its death in 1987. To date, only two PRTs have been successfully installed, in the London Heathrow Airport and in the United Arab Emirates’ new eco-development, Masdar City.

Driverless cars differ from PRTs in that they are not government-planned, centralized systems. They are designed to be individually-owned and independently-operated—though, almost certainly, they will be able to communicate their locations with one another over the Internet.

University of Chicago urban planning professor Robert Bruegmann notes that, in sprawling modern cities, public transportation is not always more fuel-efficient than private automobiles. It can also take passengers much longer to reach their destinations, particularly if a journey requires connecting between two or more buses or subway lines. “The driverless car could combine characteristics of automobiles and public transportation and allow people more choice in the way they live,” he says.

In theory, self-driving cars could make roads safer and more efficient, allowing tomorrow’s cities to

96 The 1980s Jetsons spent more time on computers. But there was no Internet: George Jetson never sent an email. 97 In other words, you won’t be able to pack your kids in the car and send them to visit Grandma and Grandpa. 98 Smart elevators offer similar functionality in some newer buildings.

Meet the Jetsons

The Jetsons was a popular 1960s cartoon (revived briefly in the 1980s96) about a family of

the future—the space age equivalent of the more famous Flintstones. The Jetsons lived in Orbit

City—a future metropolis with flying cars, robot maids, and buildings lifted high into the air.

Watch this original introduction to the Jetsons for a quick glimpse of life in their futuristic city:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjy-fnsmWR4Flying cars are the iconic image of the Jetsons.

For many people in the mid-20th century, it made sense to imagine them as the inevitable next

step in human life. Some had grown up in a world without any cars at all, walking to school or even

riding horse-drawn carriages; now cars were everywhere, and the first jet planes were ferrying passengers around the world. Just as trains and omnibuses had led to private cars, surely planes would lead to flying machines in every garage.

SPECIAL AREA | 46

Confronting a Changing World

One hot morning in August 2007, a raging thunderstorm shut down all of New York City—including the entire subway system. Unexpected flash floods dropped over 7,000 kilograms of debris into tunnels, blocking the tracks. Cleanup crews mobilized at once, but there was only so much they could until the storm ended. Subways that normally carry over 4,000,000 riders a day were disabled for hours. It was their first time out of operation since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Scientists expect these sorts of extreme climate events to grow more common as global climate change accelerates. Those planning future cities must contend not just with population growth, but with changes in the world their cities inhabit.

In New York City, a government-backed panel on regional climate change predicts a 5 to 10 percent increase in the city’s annual rainfall by 2080, mostly packed each year into a few powerful storms. Average temperatures are predicted to go up 2 to 4 degrees C. "If we are going to have hotter weather, you need more vents to get hot air out of the subway system," says Adam Freed, director of the city’s Office of Long-Term Planning. The problem: more vents mean more flooding.

New York, like many other cities faced with climate change, finds itself in an awkward position: it can do very little to impact global climate trends on its own. If every single New Yorker stopped driving a car, it would make little difference to the world at large. Still, there are some measures the city can take to better cope with increasing temperatures99. Better-insulated buildings could help keep people cooler during warm summers. Covering black tar rooftops with solar cells—an approach the government is currently testing in downtown Brooklyn—could help fight the urban heat island.

New York is also one of many coastal cities grappling with another looming consequence of global climate change: rising sea levels. A University of Arizona study forecasts that over 180 American cities could be threatened, with Miami and New Orleans losing as much as 10% of their land by the end of the century. Across the world, over 60 million people live within one meter of sea level, most of them in cities—and that number is expected to rise to over 130 million over the next eight years.

“The nexus between urbanization and climate change is real and potentially deadly,” warned U.N. Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon in late 2011. “Major coastal cities, such as Cairo, New York, Karachi, Calcutta, Belem, New Orleans, Shanghai, Tokyo, Lagos, Miami and Amsterdam, could face serious threats.” Experts predict a 60 cm rise in sea levels could displace over five million people in Bangladesh alone. Many of them would be drawn to cities, including its flood-prone capital, Dhaka.

99 Like most cold medications, this means treating the symptoms, not the disease.

Wither Global Warming?

Though some skeptics maintain that global warming is a liberal conspiracy, even most

scientists agree that the phrase “global warming” is misleading. They increasingly favor

“global climate change”—because, while average temperatures appear to be increasing around the

Earth, so is climate vvoollaattiilliittyy. Winters might become colder, rain might come at new times of year, and some areas might even benefit—such

as the farmlands of northern Canada.

Directed Research: New Eco-Cities Both China and the United Arab Emirates have launched ambitious plans to develop entirely new “green” communities. Explore China’s new Tianjin Eco-City at http://huff.to/iduqEg and then compare it to Masdar City in Abu Dhabi at http://huff.to/ygpGO6. (Be sure to watch the video about Masdar City.) Which do you think is a better model for future urban development?

SPECIAL AREA | 47

Floods, like those that menaced Bangkok in 2011, will continue to become more common throughout the world, including in many regions that lack the resources to deal with them.

UCLA economics professor Matthew Kahn suggests cities will need to build more high-rise, high-density residential neighborhoods to house those displaced by rising water. Some cities are also looking to construct new dikes, or coastal barriers, to prevent coastal flooding. For countries such as the Netherlands (two-thirds of the Netherlands is under sea level) the threat is especially dire. A 2008 Dutch commission estimated it would cost over $2 billion per year to protect its population from rising sea levels. One island nation, Kiribati, is considering moving its entire population of about 100,000 to a floating city—one resembling an oil platform.

Urban Heat Islands

Cities are almost always warmer than the countryside that surrounds them, often by as much as 10 degrees Celsius. In the winter, that can mean the difference between losing toes to frostbite in Siberia and taking a chilly walk through Moscow’s Red Square. In the summer, that can mean the difference between enjoying a picnic on a sunny day and dying of heat stroke in your apartment100. This phenomenon is known as the uurrbbaann hheeaatt iissllaanndd. It has two main causes.

� First, cities are darker than the countryside they replace, and darker objects reflect less sunlight and absorb more. (They have low aallbbeeddoo.) Black urban surfaces are typically up to 20 degrees Celsius hotter than white surfaces101.

� Second, building cities usually means sacrificing plant life. Plants draw water through their roots, then expel it back into the air as water vapor. Because they absorb heat from the air to do this, the evaporation process cools the air, just as the evaporation of sweat cools the human body. Fewer plants mean less of this evaporative cooling.

� Lesser contributors include air conditioners and refrigerators, both of which pump warm air into the environment.

New Urban Frontiers

Smaller countries—and none more than Singapore—have no choice but modernize their current cities. Larger countries have a second option: to develop entirely new ones.

In China, the government recognizes that the benefits of the economic boom since 1977 have been concentrated in its coastal cities, from Tianjin to Guangzhou. Millions of inland Chinese have migrated to these cities looking for work, many illegally. Now, the government is looking to urbanize the country’s vast interior spaces: bringing cities to its farmers instead of farmers to its cities.

As one Chinese migrant worker put it: "People used to build big houses in the village when they earned enough money working outside, but things are different now. Villagers want to buy apartments in cities. There are better schools, bigger hospitals and shopping malls.”

100 In the United States, more people die of heat exposure each year than in tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods combined. 101 Drivers of cars with black leather seats are well aware of their special butt-cooking features.

Directed Viewing: Empty Chinese Cities Check out this gallery featuring a number of China’s new, barely inhabited inland cities: http://bit.ly/hAoYPA . If you were the government, would you work to make sure people moved into these cities? If so, how?

SPECIAL AREA | 48

Several of China’s new inland cities have fallen into a troubling pattern: the government builds wide roads, modern housing, new schools, and industrial areas, and then waits for people to move in—only almost no one does. Property costs are high, and employment opportunities few. The hope is that, over time, more people move in, and the local economy begins to boom—but, at current rates, it might be a while before that happens.

China has had much more success developing its existing inland cities. Chengdu, in the Sichuan province, is thriving even in the aftermath of a 2008 earthquake, and will soon open up its first direct passenger flights to the United States. Kashgar, a dusty, largely Muslim city in the far western desert, six hours from Beijing by plane, is being positioned as the next Shenzhen—in other words, the next Chinese boomtown. It is even drawing hopeful comparisons to an American city just as far from its own capital. “If Beijing has its way,” writes former Newsweek journalist Isaac Stone Fish, “Kashgar will resemble China’s Los Angeles—a regional economic hub in a far western hotbed of ethnic diversity.”

With that goal in mind, the government has designated Kashgar its latest Special Economic Zone, only the sixth in China. Shenzhen was the first, contributing to its explosive growth; all six SEZs feature favorable tax policies and openness to global trade and tourism. The government is also requiring that wealthier cities send billions of dollars to Kashgar in development aid each year. In 2009 alone, the government spent $7.4 billion on development projects; nearly $500 million of that went into tearing down old homes and moving people (some unwillingly) into new government housing. The city’s economy responded: it grew at a quick 17.4% annual rate, and the government predicts it will soon generate up to 600,000 new jobs.

Across one of China’s many land borders, the government of India is facing similar urban development challenges. Every minute, 30 Indians migrate from the countryside to one of its existing large cities. From Mumbai to Calcutta, they suffer from overcrowding, inadequate infrastructure, and world-renowned bureaucratic inefficiency. “Building even a single highway can be achingly slow in India,” observe journalists Matthias Williams and Lyndee Prickitt.

As a result, for many Indian leaders and private developers looking toward the future, the choice is clear: build entirely new cities to take pressure off the old ones and to take advantage of modern urban planning. “It is better to have newer cities than to expand,” says Utpal Sharma, dean of India’s Center for Environmental Planning and Technology.

The Indian central government has dedicated US $90 billion to building 24 new industrial cities along a 1400 km stretch of land from New Delhi to Mumbai. The first, Dholera, will be woven from

‘‘In the east there is Shenzhen, in the west there is Kashgar.’’

Chinese Communist Party slogan promoting the urban development of Kashgar

Directed Research: Kashgar Many people outside of China are fascinated by Kashgar when they first learn of it: a Chinese frontier city closer to Pakistan than to Beijing, in the midst of a great western desert, populated more by Muslim Uighurs than by the Han Chinese who dominate most of China. Explore the history and culture of Kashgar online. How is Kashgar today different from Shenzhen when it began to develop in the 1970s? Then, discuss with your team: will China’s plan to turn Kashgar into an economic powerhouse succeed?

A Very Big Plan

India already has the largest planned city in the world, although it is still not quite finished: Navi

Mumbai, a satellite city to the east of the original Mumbai. Its population is over 2.5 million.

Directed Research: Lavasa Some have fallen in love with Lavasa, India’s “first planned hill city”. Others view it as inauthentic—and far too small to make a difference, given India’s giant and fast-growing population. For a sense of the developer’s ambitious plans, check out the project website at http://bit.ly/72lu2J. You may also want to read this article, which notes how non-Indian Lavasa feels: http://bit.ly/kYVK8O. Then, discuss with your team: how important will new cities like Lavasa be to India’s urban future?

SPECIAL AREA | 49

a group of small traditional villages into a city of two million by 2040—and will even have its own international airport. “I am eagerly awaiting the day that a plane lands in our village," jokes one villager.

Critics worry that India’s history of slow development and failed infrastructure plans will doom the massive new project—or at least greatly delay it.

Cities in Decline

Not all cities of the future will be prosperous realizations of the urban dream. Some cities have shrinking economies tied to industries in decline; others are literally shrinking, as deserts approach or their inhabitants leave to find more opportunity elsewhere.

Detroit is the classic case of a modern city in decline. This Midwestern American city peaked in the 1950s, when it was the center of the thriving American automobile industry. It had over two million inhabitants, making it the fourth largest city in the United States. Today, its population is down nearly two-thirds, to seven hundred thousand, and vast stretches of its 360 square kilometers are abandoned. Much of Detroit’s decline came hand in hand102 with the decline of the American automobile industry, as Japanese and European cars grew to dominate the market. Fewer workers were needed to man Detroit’s once-bustling factories. As the city and its economy shrank, many of those with the means to leave—including much of the middle class—did so. Their departure contributed to a downward spiral of urban decline.

Any city too dependent on a single industry risks its future if that industry should fail. Earlier, we saw how Singapore has taken active measures to transition from a manufacturing and financial center to a gambling and tourism hub, to avoid just this sort of fate.

Long-term environmental trends and sudden catastrophes can also threaten a city’s future, as when the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005103. A more gradual problem—failing water supplies—is just as grave a threat to the future of many cities.

North Africa once held over six hundred cities and towns; today their ruins dot the Sahara Desert. The Chinese trading city of Yinpan, not too far from Kashgar, was lost to its own desert around 1500 years ago, when the river supplying it with water dried up and trade routes moved elsewhere. Today, the United Nations estimates over a billion people are threatened by desertification—many in cities.

102 Or tire in tire. 103 Nearly seven years later, the population of New Orleans hasn’t recovered—down to about 350,00 from over 500,000—and entire neighborhoods of the city remain uninhabitable.

Directed Research: Cracks in Shanghai’s Future Sometimes, the Earth does not want to cooperate with urban growth. In 1999, for instance, the city of Los Angeles discovered that its new Century Freeway was sinking into the ground—requiring billions of dollars to repair. Now, evidence is emerging that Shanghai’s army of new skyscrapers may be too heavy for the ground beneath them to support. Read more about this problem at http://bit.ly/zqTmSl. Then, discuss with your team: should China stop developing Shanghai?

SPECIAL AREA | 50

In the United States, a single underground aquifer, called the Ogallala, supplies much of the water to cities and farms in eight states, from Kansas to Texas; the aquifer is being used up faster than rain can refill it. Every single city that depends on it faces the very real prospect of chronic water shortages; it would not be a long journey from urban thirst to urban decay.

Hotbeds of Innovation

Around the world, governments are investing in their own “Silicon Valleys”: urban centers meant to attract and generate innovative new companies.

You can find China’s Silicon Valley in a western district of Beijing called Zhongguancun. Surrounded by a dozen leading universities, it earned a special government designation as a “Scientific and Technological Garden” in 1999. It now houses over 8,000 high-tech firms, and is where Lenovo—perhaps China’s most famous global tech company—was originally founded. The average age of the 360,000 employees in the area is only 30; over half have bachelor’s degrees and many have doctorates.

Russia, too, would like to have its own Silicon Valley, or at least its own Zhongguancun. In 2010, its president, Dmitry Medvedev, announced the formation of a new center for research and development in the village of Skolkovo, not far from Moscow. The region will focus on innovation in energy, information technology, telecommunications, biomedicine and nuclear science. A leading business school will be built nearby, presumably to take advantage of any marketable new ideas.

Skolkovo has lofty aspirations: in Russian it is known as the “City of the Future.” Like many other up-and-coming Silicon Valleys, it has its skeptics. “It would be unrealistic to suggest that any location has a chance of replicating the startup ecosystem in northern California—at least for a few generations,” writes Martin Bryant, editor of The Next Web—though he concludes some of the new Silicon Valleys are bound to succeed eventually104. Other critics are harsher, focusing on the Russian government’s heavy-handed approach. Innovation, they argue, cannot be dictated from above.

Russia and China are just two of many countries setting up would-be Silicon Valleys. One unsurprisingly ambitious example: the government of Dubai is developing its own, in a community it calls Silicon Oasis. Kip Knight, a vice president at eBay, approves. “There is an aura surrounding Silicon Valley that it is the seat of innovation,” he says. “But there is nothing stopping Dubai from having that same success.”

At this rate, the Earth may soon be a silicon planet.

104 He notes that Silicon Valley itself isn’t perfect: it has a nice climate, but it is boring and suburban compared to nearby San Francisco and Berkeley, where several newer Web companies have located themselves in order to attract young talent.

‘‘Merely creating a new university would not be enough to start a Silicon Valley. The university is just the seed. It has to be planted in the right soil, or it won't germinate. Plant it in the wrong

place, and you just create Carnegie-Mellon.’’ Investor Paul Graham, in his 2006 speech,

‘‘How to Be Silicon Valley’’. Be sure to explore the rest of the speech at

www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

Directed Research: Other Silicon Valleys Even Guatemala, not known for technology sector, is catching the Silicon Valley bug. For now, its Silicon Valley is more a Silicon Building—but it has high aspirations. Read about its growth and potential at http://nyti.ms/ukOXCF. What does its founder describe as the defining characteristic of life in Silicon Valley? Do you agree? Then, search online for other aspiring Silicon Valleys. Are there any that seem especially promising? Pay special attention to would-be Silicon Valleys in Malaysia, Israel, and Korea.

‘‘A government that asks ‘How can we build a Silicon Valley?’ has probably ensured failure by

the way they framed the question. You don't build a Silicon Valley; you let one grow. ‘‘

Paul Graham

SPECIAL AREA | 51

Conclusion: A City AbandonedIn the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, the last survivors of

humanity—the rest have been massacred by angry robots105—find a new planet to settle: Earth itself, long ago, teeming with sprawling forests and delicious wild animals.106 The stunned survivors spend some time bird-watching before gathering to discuss their plans for

the future of humankind.

“We can build our city here,” says their leader, pointing at a spot on a map.

For him, building a modern city is the obvious first step in settling this new world and restarting civilization. This should come as no surprise to you after reading this guide: ever since the Neolithic Revolution, the steady march of human history has been toward more and larger cities.

But then something happens. Another survivor interrupts. “I don’t think so,” he says, more or less. “Let’s leave behind all our technology, send our space ships into the sun, and spread out in little groups all around the planet.107 Lots of us will die, but some of us will survive and become really good farmers.”

His idea: that to break the cycle of human history and create a more sustainable civilization will require avoiding cities and trying something else from scratch.108 The survivors quickly agree109 that abandoning all of modern technology, including air conditioning and antibiotics, is a splendid idea. There will be no city after all.

Except there will. The episode flashes forward 150,000 years—to Times Square in modern-day New York. Enough of the colonists apparently managed to survive to reboot civilization, and, ultimately, many generations later, to recreate the very sort of city they had tried to abandon.

Some final questions to consider with your team:

� Does farming necessarily lead to cities?

� Would the best way for the survivors of Battlestar Galactica to have prevented the formation of cities have been to become not farmers, but hunter-gatherers?

� More broadly, are cities—and megacities—an unavoidable feature of modern civilization?

� Is there such a thing as an ideal modern metropolis?

� How do you envision the cities of the future? Will they be similar to today’s cities?

105 SimCity must have been on to something. 106 Presumably, there are also alpacas, but they must be off camera. 107 I feel for the chaps who ended up in the Sahara, or in the middle of the Outback. 108 He is concerned that cities might someday lead to more angry robots. 109 Apparently unanimously. Can you say groupthink?

‘‘Commercialism. Decadence. Technology run amok.’’ Description of New York City

in the Battlestar Galactica series finale

SPECIAL AREA | 52

About the Writing Team Alejandra O’Leary is a musician, writer, and fan of cities and superlatives110. She was born in the biggest city in Maine, one of the smallest states in the United States. She then moved to the biggest city in Chile, the longest country in the world. She moved back to the biggest city in the United States for a few years, and then moved away again to a small college town with only two movie theaters. She now fantasizes about living in the following cities: Curitiba, Kobe, Perth, and Glasgow. She graduated from Yale with an English degree in 2004. Alejandra tweets loves reading history books and talking about politics, culture, art, and animal rescue. Her rescued chihuahua, Cocoa, likes to sleep on the couch.

Tania Asnes is a writer, editor, and archivist based in New York who, like Alejandra, has lived in and dealt with crazy rental prices in a number of other cities, most recently one that was Haussmanized and serves tasty croissants. Her primary interests include sustainable development, spirituality, preventive medicine, and desserts involving almond paste. Tania has been a member of the World Alpaca’s Cup since 2008 and couldn’t think of a cooler audience for whom to write and edit. She hopes that, next year, she will get an office outside of the alpaca pen at the New York City Zoo.

Daniel Berdichevsky believes that all tasks expand to take up 50% longer than the time allotted to them, including the release of World Scholar’s Cup guides. Also see:

� The number of years Daniel took to graduate from Stanford and Harvard Universities.

� The length of the Scholar’s Bowl at the 2010 World Finals in Shanghai.

� How many minutes Daniel needs to beat an egg.

Daniel has had the opportunity to visit many modern cities in his travels for the World Scholar’s Cup. His favorites include Istanbul, where he likes to see how many cats he can photograph in a minute, and Chengdu, where he can find delicious dan dan mien on every street corner.

Email Daniel at dan@scholarscup.org or find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/dan.berd.

110 Which means she is probably a fan of Dubai.