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Journalism of Courage
As humanity migrates citywards,is there a third way?
Book: Cities Are Good For You: The genius of the metropolis
Author: Leo Hollis
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Price: Rs 650
416 pages
Leo Holliss book is a good romp through the current delights and dilemmas of life in cities. It takes its intellectual cue from the far-sighted Jane Jacobs and her notion of the ballet of the streets described in the Death and Life of Great American Cities,written in response to the notorious Robert Moses,New Yorks chief planner from the 1940s to 1960s. His desire to rip through her Greenwich Village neighbourhood in the early 1960s brought on a titanic community battle that had to be won. Jacobs was the first to highlight how urban renewal geared to the car destroys more than it creates,since the city,at its core,is a complex amalgam of strong and weak links that in their totality create the fine grain of community.
Greenwich Village was the classic multi-faceted neighbourhood with its network of streets and subtle ecology of relationships and services built up slowly through time. Here,the ordinary became extraordinary as the pleasures and pain of the day-to-day built social capital and community. It is what we now call a resilient place and those take time to create. They are under threat everywhere. The urban engineering paradigm with its focus on physical infrastructure and its hardware-driven approach is the problem.
This approach prefers the ordered to the messy,the sanitised and simplified to the complex,the bland to the locally distinctive,the big comprehensive development to the small and discriminating from which you build the city in parts. It undermines the capacity of its people to build the city from below,to unleash their creative capacity and to co-create solutions together. To use computer language,the best places are those where the hardware,software and orgware mesh well.
These are deep dilemmas that Indian cities face today. Do we allow the construction industry and corporate interests to define what Indian cities feel and look like or do we allow the Walmart approach? Indian urbanists need to ask if there is another way. The solutions will only come if there is more integrated thinking,planning and acting and this involves breaking down silos within the public sector as well as those between the public and private sectors and the community. Only then can a joint sense of purpose,new insights and coherence emerge and the top-down and bottom-up approaches blend well. This requires a listening approach,where everyone learns to give some ground so that local,national and global requirements are balanced.
Hollis prefers to see the glass half-full and he falls into an evolving tradition of books see Edward Glaesers Triumph of the City,which look at a citys potential rather than its dark side. True,cities are accelerators of opportunity,they force feed transaction and exchange; they are the laboratories for solving the problems they create and are engines of innovation.
But the book describes rather than analyses. Thus,it fails to unscramble the dynamics,power and politics that shape our global urban landscape and how they unfold. Some questions need answering: When we know so many of the solutions to make urban life better,why are they not taken up? When behaviour change lies at the core of making more resilient cities,why do we continue to focus on technological fixes rather than addressing the radical individualism which is corroding the civic fabric? Why are so many people unhappy in cities?
Remember,cities face an escalating crisis that cannot be solved by a business-as-usual approach. We are experiencing the biggest mass movement to cities in history. So many people are after the same resources: space,housing,facilities,opportunity. Collectively,they pose potentially explosive political,cultural and managerial challenges,on a scale we have not witnessed before.
Cities are good for you,but only up to a point. They face intense vulnerabilities and systemic threats driven by resource security issues focused on food,water and energy. All affect climate change which cities cannot manage. The nation-state and cities need to talk to take the necessary decisions for cities to survive well. The dilemma is that nation-states have the authority,yet increasingly lack the legitimacy.
City leaders are closer to their citizens. With vision,they have a greater capacity than national governments to build a consensus around common purposes and a collective response to shared problems. They have more legitimacy to speak for their people,but little authority. The nation-state is still essential in an interconnected world to negotiate the global rules systems and national frameworks within which cities operate.
Triggered by a common purpose derived from civic engagement,cities can demand from national governments that they act upon the nexus of risks. This will help governments to regain sufficient legitimate authority,yet it also implies a shift in power to cities.
Charles Landry is the author of The Creative City: A toolkit for urban innovators.
