5 RULES
FOR TOMORROW’S CITIES DESIGN IN AN AGE OF URBAN MIGRATION, DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE, AND A DISAPPEARING MIDDLE CLASS
PATRICK M. CONDON
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Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities
Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities
Design in an Age of Urban Migration, Demographic Change, and a Disappearing Middle Class
Patrick M. Condon
Washington | Covelo | London
Copyright Š 2019 Patrick M. Condon All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, Suite 650, 2000 M Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036. ISLAND PRESS is a trademark of the Center for Resource Economics. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019948329 All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Keywords: adaptability, affordable housing, birth rate, favela, formal city, fractals, green infrastructure, housing, immigration, inequality, informal city, migration, Missing Middle Housing, population, resilience, slum, street grid, sustainability indicators, systems thinking, urban acupuncture, urban district, wage gap
Contents Author’s Note
ix
Acknowledgments x Introduction
1
Chapter 1: The Three Waves That Are Changing Cities Forever
9
Chapter 2: Urban Design Responses to the Three Great Waves
37
Chapter 3: Rule One: See the City as a System
57
Chapter 4: Rule Two: Recognize Patterns in Urban Environments
77
Chapter 5: Rule Three: Apply Lighter, Greener, Smarter Infrastructure
101
Chapter 6: Rule Four: Strengthen Social Resilience through Affordable Housing Design
121
Chapter 7: Rule Five: Adapt to Shifts in Jobs, Retail, and Wages
157
Conclusion
187
Notes 191 Index 215
Author’s Note This book is written by the listed author, Patrick M. Condon. However, in this book the pronoun used most often throughout is “we” rather than “I” or “me,” because hundreds of people have participated with me in the scores of urban design projects that inform this book. At this stage it’s very hard to distinguish which thoughts are mine and which thoughts are theirs. And in the end it doesn’t matter. Good urban design is collaborative urban design, where different minds make different contributions in a process where the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. This is as it should be. For a central theme of this book is that cities are a system, where the interaction of all of its parts creates something larger. And for urban designers that something larger is a sustainable and, insofar as it is possible, an equitable city. I trust that I have captured the consensus of our thinking, and I apologize if I have strayed too far afield. Many but not all of these people are listed in the Acknowledgments. It would be impossible to list them all because any good urban design comes through the agency of deep and extensive collaboration with many stakeholders. Literally, there have been many hundreds. My apologies to those I missed, but I hope you might recognize some of your thinking in these pages and recall the times when they were voiced or illustrated.
ix
Acknowledgments As will be clear from the text, the insights presented here emerged from collaborations over the years with many people. Sadly, there are too many to mention in a comprehensive way. Still, honor requires me to call out at least a few, all in the sequence that they spring to mind rather than any rank order of their importance or the depth of our friendships. I start with Robert Lane of RPA New York, with whom I have enjoyed many adventures, many of them including Bob Yaro, former head of RPA, and Armando Carbonelle, senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Closer to home and partners in many more local adventures, I acknowledge Daniel Roehr, Ron Walkey, Susan Milly, Sheryl Webster, Sara Muir, Kari Dow, Sara Barron, and Ron Kellett—all of the University of British Columbia, in various past and present capacities— for their part in many charrette exploits. Also a collaborator over many years now is David Beers, founding editor of The Tyee. Next, I thank my children, Alanna, Ryan, Kate, and William, and my grandchildren, Toby, Reese, Jasper, Emery, and Harriet, all of whom are on my mind when I’m writing a book like this one, which tries to look into the future and imagine a path to a better world. In no particular order but included because they have inspired me in ways they may not realize, I thank Doug Kelbaugh, Harrison Fraker, Bob Worden, Warren Byrd, Leslie Van Duzer, Michael Van Valkenburgh, Julius Fabos, Paul Procopio, Colin Cathcart (aka “The Franchise”), Michael Mehaffy, James Meyer, Dean Cardasis, Hal Moser, Larry Cashin, Madeline O’Reilly, Mary Herbowie, Ann O’Sullivan, Neda Roonia, Bob Sykes, Andres Duany, Douglas Duany, James O’Connor, Josh Posner, and Paul Saba. Last but not least, I thank my editor at Island Press, Heather Boyer, who many years ago encouraged me to write books for students and practitioners. This book is my third for and with her. I deeply hope that it is worthy of her creative efforts. This book is dedicated to all students of urban design—past, present, and future. You have such important work to do. xv
Introduction
T
he purpose of this book is to answer one big question: How can designers of this generation first assimilate and then incorporate ongoing cultural, economic, and ecological changes—interconnected changes occurring worldwide—into their city building work? In this book, when we use the term urban designers we include anyone involved in the act of city building. This of course includes architects, landscape architects, planners, developers, and public officials. But it also includes the young, who are struggling to understand their fast- changing and increasingly inequitable world, and concerned citizens who want to make a difference in their own communities. We perceive a real lack of focus in our design field on three cresting cultural waves, waves that are overlapping in ways that are already transforming the city: the worldwide rural-to-urban migration, the collapse of global fertility rates, and the disappearance of the middle class. All three major waves are crossing and combining in intricate ways and will leave a different city in their wake. In fact, the impact of these three waves is already patently clear. These are big questions. Too big, perhaps. We need useful answers. Answers in a form that can be immediately applied in design. To that 1
2 Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities
end, in this book we ask and answer, How can existing districts built during the sprawling postwar baby boom be adapted for extended immigrant families? How can we sustainably grow the exploding cities of the developing world in a way that aligns with local financial, social, ecological, and demographic realities? How can we future-proof our cities in time for the looming slow growth/no growth era, an era already commencing in Japan and Italy and soon to spread to cities around the world? How can we build cities and districts that can accommodate an explosion of older adults, along with a steep decline in school-age children? How can we economically adapt cities to the continued and dramatic shift to an economy based on services? Finally, how can we build decent and attractive communities for a middle class that is increasingly priced out of the housing market? All of these phenomena are not entirely in the future; they are apparent now. This book provides case study examples for each of these issues, and how to design for them, in the form of extended “rules” (or principles, if you prefer) for design. We hope that this book will be an essential resource for designers of future cities and for anyone concerned about creating great and equitable places for their children and grandchildren. Equally important, we hope this book will equip future designers with a different way of thinking about cities, even to the point of literally changing how you see them—and thus how you might change them. This too is crucial, we think. Four Crucial Decades of City Building This book is framed around four assumptions. First, students who are just entering the design field are beginning what will probably be about four decades of professional practice. This four-decade career span is hugely significant. Why? First, according to the signatories of the Paris Agreement, it is during these same four decades we must stop spilling excessive greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Failing that, it will be too late to hold our global temperature increase below the critical 2°C threshold imperative as certified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Because about 80 percent of greenhouse gases come from cities (or the demands that cities exert on the countryside), it follows that in the design of cities lies the fate of the world.
Introduction 3
In this book we do not take up the specifics of how city design affects climate change except insofar as it relates to the three waves mentioned above. Designing low-carbon cities is the topic taken up in an earlier book by this author, Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities. This book supplements that effort by examining how these three global waves interact with one another against the background of the ongoing climate crisis. Second, during these four decades the people of the world will first experience, then complete, a massive rural-to-urban migration. By 2060 more than 80 percent of humanity will be crowded into a tiny fraction of the earth’s surface, in cities. Adding complexity, these new inhabitants will arrive from all corners of the globe, as the rural-to- urban migration wave does not respect national borders. Urban designers must learn how cities can best accommodate this culturally complex human tsunami.
Figure 0-1 Street scene Kathmandu, Nepal. By 2060 approximately 80 percent of all people on Earth will live in cities. Shortly thereafter, most cities on the planet will stop growing, perhaps forever. (Photo: Pavel Novak, November 5, 2005, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic License)
4 Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities
Third, given declining fertility rates (and assuming they are not interrupted by dramatic reversals), within four decades most cities, possibly excepting those in Sub-Saharan Africa, will stop growing, potentially forever. This third factor reminds us that the city we build during these challenging decades must also be suitable for the decades, indeed the centuries, that follow. Thus, urban designers (and developers, officials, architects, engineers, landscape architects, and many others) who have the honor of working on this problem during these four decades will participate in an unprecedented historical transformation and will leave a very long-lasting legacy. But there is a fourth thing to consider. Unless we see a major political upheaval (and that is of course possible, if not probable) we must, during this same four-decade span, somehow build cities to accommodate a middle class that shrinks and possibly even becomes unrecognizable in the form we have come to know. If wealth distribution trends continue on their current trajectory, very soon, we will have to reacquaint ourselves with an economic condition that used to be the norm but that we had thought long gone, a world in which there are the rich and then everyone else. Much like the trend lines for urban migration, climate change, and global birth rates, the evidence of this trend is stunningly clear. Yet this most fundamental trend is almost completely unacknowledged in our field. Consider this: All of us in advanced, developed societies have participated, to one extent or another, in the creation of an unprecedented city form: the city of the middle class. Urban sprawl is the most obvious manifestation of the flow of financial resources toward the wage earning–class, a short-lived phenomenon confined largely to the period between 1950 and 1980. The result? The suburbanization of North America and a world moved by car. The neighborhoods many of us grew up in, neighborhoods of the baby boom period, are already neighborhoods where the elderly are sequestered, while their children and grandchildren struggle to find affordable homes in distant and expensive global city centers. What, then, will the city of 2060 look like when the transfer of wealth away from wage earners to investors is largely complete? Where will the children grow, play, go to school? What will it look like when we have a city not by and for the middle class but a city divided into two categories:
Introduction 5
wage earners, who are struggling to obtain decent family housing, and the rich, who are increasingly cut off, both culturally and physically, from the rest of their fellow citizens? Young designers should not be sanguine about these trends. Designers are still being trained as if the middle class is not vanishing, as if cities will grow forever, as if demographic changes were not already reshaping cities around the burgeoning population of the aged and the decline of school-age kids, and as if Millennials will have the resources to buy the same kind of homes their parents did, when this is demonstrably not the case. Designers will have to recalibrate their basic assumptions about what is “normal” in this newly constrained economic regimen. Here is just one example: In our most expensive global cities, the appearance of microsuites is just the first and most obvious manifestation of this economic trend, an event that has already set off strident debates about what constitutes the minimum acceptable apartment size in many cities. Designing habitable buildings and districts that embrace reduced and altered standards for residential buildings is an early example of how just one of these waves will change our cities and change the work of design professionals. The Good News Lest readers throw up their hands in dismay at these seemingly depressing prospects, let us also say this: It is our belief that the emerging world may be a world with much to delight us. Let’s say these trends persist. A world with a stable population may not be crushed under the weight of too many human mouths to feed. Another positive trend to consider: A world where our work economy is almost entirely devoted to service jobs, even if not fabulously lucrative, is one that both reduces our seemingly insatiable demands for resources to satisfy our consumer desires and increases access to the many human contributions people make to city life. And finally, a city where our homes are, perhaps entirely by necessity, much cheaper, smaller, and denser means that their containing districts can be more human scale, more human made, more walkable, and thus more energy and resource efficient.
6 Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities
This city might just be better than the very wasteful one we now support—a more experientially rich city, a more affordable city. The good news is that these three interrelated trends may organically induce the widespread growth of the truly sustainable cities we have been struggling to create. And what might make the difference between a future urban dystopia and this sustainable and livable city? Urban design. Simple Design Rules for Complex Times But this all raises the question, What are the practical consequences of these trends for the project of city design? What are the applicable principles, call them “rules” if you will, for urban design that emerge from these trends? Can we agree on appropriate design rules for building this new urban world? We believe we can, but we also believe that these rules need to be grounded in the world as it is, informed by the powerful forces already transforming the world’s rapidly changing cities. Our old assumptions about cities are increasingly untenable; the city they mirror is vanishing fast. We need new rules that reflect the challenges of this new city and that, when correctly applied, help grow resilient and livable urban places. Conclusion In the next four decades, designers of cities will have three linked challenges to confront. First is the great migration from the countryside to the city, already far advanced. Second is the simultaneous collapse of birth rates that is largely masked by this same worldwide rural-to-urban migration. Third is the also simultaneous shrinking of the middle class as we know it. All three of these waves are taking place against the background of the climate change crisis. For designers who have the courage to accept these challenges, the opportunity is to conceptualize and see built a city that can adjust to this transition. These waves are very compatible with the creation of a new form of sustainable city: a city with a more intimate scale, more opportunities for locally made dwellings and districts, and myriad entrepreneurial options; a city that becomes more and more respectful of resources
Introduction 7
and human labor, a more walkable and mixed-use city; a city with the more balanced and stable demographic that is historically associated with the world’s most beautiful and experientially rich cities. The irony, it seems, is that the very things that constrain us—migration, financial stress, population change—could actually catalyze the emergence of a sustainable, low–greenhouse gas (GHG), and resource-efficient city. This end is to be celebrated and worked toward, but this end can’t be effectively worked toward if we are blinded by an ignorance of the “real.” Common contemporary visions for “smart” cities all seem dominated by the utopian fantasies of the 20th century, updated with green-skinned tower blocks and streets crushed under the weight of self-driving cars. These visions, grounded in persistent but failed precedents, will fail us yet again. An alternative view is needed. This book provides one such alternative. This book provides real, existing, grounded, and financially feasible design examples for tomorrow’s sustainable cities and the design rule tools needed to see them built.
Chapter 1
The Three Waves That Are Changing Cities Forever
T
hree major trends are affecting the development of tomorrow’s cities. These three waves will crash with different effects in cities of the developed and developing world. But in the end both types of cities seem destined to develop dramatic similarities in future decades. Wave One: The Worldwide Rural-to-Urban Migration We are in the midst of the largest human migration in history. The scale of the current migration dwarfs the 19th-century rural-to-urban migration, which saw millions move from the European countryside to European cities or to the growing cities of North America. Now we are talking of a migration that affects billions and is global in scale. We are experiencing a tsunami of migration that includes moves from rural areas to urban areas within the same country and from rural areas in one country to urban areas in other countries entirely; in the end, it’s all about movements to the city. Rural-to-urban migrations have gone on since the birth of cities, which means for about ten to fifteen thousand years. It was then that 9
10 Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities
agriculture emerged, and with it the need for communal practices in fixed locations with a rudimentary division of labor. Theorists have speculated that these agricultural practices emerged consequent to the radical and rapid climate changes brought on by the recession of the most recent ice age. Humans at that time, facing a Middle Eastern landscape that was rapidly becoming warmer and drier, realized that carbohydrate-rich grains could be cultivated rather than just gathered and that crude mechanical means of preparing these grains (threshing, grinding) would make otherwise unpalatable seeds digestible.1 Cities that emerged at this time were organically suited to the scale of the agricultural enterprise: Urban villages were numerous but small, ordered in conformance to an area’s agricultural capacity and limited by the physical constraint of how far village residents could walk between home, workshops, and fields. This rational ordering of the agricultural landscape is still echoed in night pictures of the American corn belt, where small towns are evenly spaced. The Industrial Revolution spurred the growth of ever larger cities. Whereas agrarian landscapes necessarily disperse a decentralized population across the land, machine-based industrial cities seem to perform better economically the larger they grow. (Chinese cities may be testing this hypothesis. We shall soon see.) By now the process of urbanization in the United States has slowed to a steady rate of 2 percent per decade, whereas South America, somewhat surprisingly, has essentially caught up with the United States. Asian nations, especially China and Bangladesh, are seeing tremendously rapid urban growth, whereas Africa, starting later and with more diversity from country to country in its rate of urbanization, leaves the final percentage of its future urban population more open to question.2 This African trend is enormously important, given the fact that if current population trends continue, Africa will soon supplant Asia as the most populous continent on the planet. The role that cities can and should play in Africa, and the significance of this shift for Africa and for the rest of the planet, will be returned to later in this text. For many parts of the world, India and Pakistan notably, rural-tourban migrants often skip their own country and land in major cities around the world. Nearly seven million Indians leave their rural settings each decade for big cities in other countries, largely in the United States
The Three Waves That Are Changing Cities Forever   11
Figure 1-1  Population in most of the world is trending toward roughly 70 percent urbanization by 2060. The biggest question is what will happen in Sub-Saharan Africa. (Source: World Bank)
and Great Britain. There are well-established communities of South Asians in those two countries, as there are in the United Arab Emirates, where they are needed as workers.3 Altogether there are about a quarter billion people on the planet who have moved from one country to another, and most of these people moved from rural areas where opportunities were few to large cities where opportunities were more numerous.4 More than 60 percent of these global migrants who left their home countries landed in developed countries, and nearly all found a home in cities. For example, foreign-born residents make up 2.3 percent of the population in U.S. rural counties, compared with nearly 15 percent of urban counties.5 This migration trend is accelerating, with a doubling in the rate of global migration between 2000 and 2010. According to the UN Department of Social and Economic Affairs, more than six billion people will live in cities by 2050, just about twice
12    Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities
the current number, or approximately two thirds of all people on Earth at that time.6 If the trend lines continue without interruption, by 2100 there will be as many as nine billion people living in cities worldwide, and no more than three billion rural dwellers. At that time approximately 80 percent of global population will probably live in cities. These numbers are of course uncertain, as history has a way of changing trend lines in various ways. But the trend toward cities, no matter the rate, seems unalterable.7,8 When we consider the economic motivations for increasing global levels of immigration, we often focus on the supply side, that is, the number of immigrants who want to leave their own less developed country for life in a more developed one. This is a reasonable focus, but it obscures the other side of the coin: Developed countries need immigrants more than immigrants need developed countries, as without immigration their economies will slow or fail. They will slow or fail because women in developed countries are having far fewer babies than they used to, creating a shortage of working-age citizens to fill the many job slots of a modern economy.9 In his excellent book titled Arrival Cities, Doug Saunders shares a key insight that a connection usually endures between migrants to the city and the rural village from which they came.10 Often migrants maintain and even expand homes in their home village and can sometimes provide significant economic support for their home community. He cites an example of a proprietor of a sub shop whose existence in Toronto is modest, but with the profits he makes from his family business he maintains a large house in Pakistan where he employs a number of people in the village just to maintain his home while he is away. This is an interesting insight, as it helps show that rural life is increasingly connected to what goes on in our cities and that to consider rural areas as distinct and separate from urban areas is not accurate. The network of relationships between the city and the countryside is stronger than ever, he says, and even residents of rural zones are rapidly separating themselves from their traditional agrarian pursuits. Given declining fertility rates, the populations of developed countries would soon be (or in a few cases already are) in decline, were it not for immigration. Declining fertility rates may not seem to be a cause
The Three Waves That Are Changing Cities Forever 13
for concern until you consider the fact that as birth rates decline, the proportionate share of older adults in comparison to other age groups must necessarily increase. Absent immigration, many developed countries would soon lack enough workers in their most productive ages to keep an economy afloat, and, not insignificantly, to take care of all these older citizens who would then need labor-intensive health care. The current populist revolt against immigration in the United States and the inability of the U.S. Congress to agree on a sane immigration policy is already creating imbalances of this type, imbalances that are likely to get much worse. Doug Saunders shows that the motivations for these migrations were remarkably similar. Migrants were motivated to move by the constrained opportunities in their home rural areas and by expanded possibilities in national or extranational urban areas. He maintains that rural-to-urban migrants, no matter what country they come from, have more in common than not. They have a narrow focus on improving their lives via a “dotted line,” which carries them first to “arrival cities” and then to a life that, as much as possible, satisfies their life goals. Effective urban design for immigration, as we shall see in later chapters, is design that creates space for immigrants to first arrive, then to gain a foothold in which to work and serve the needs of other citizens and immigrants, and in the process support their family members both near and far. Wave Two: Collapsing Birth Rates Given current trends, by 2060 the cities of the world will stop growing, on average, and many will begin to shrink. With the possible exception of cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, which may continue their growth beyond that date, declining birth rates make this inevitable. Shocked? Doubtful? The evidence provided below will back this up, but for now hold back doubts and just imagine. All of us, without exception, have grown up in a world where we naturally assume that population will keep growing with no end, and our cities with it. Knowing this we were inevitably sifted into one of two camps: the pessimists and the optimists. The pessimist camp includes those who think that unending
14 Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities
population increase will eventually crush the planet’s capacity to produce food, leading to worldwide famine and ecological Armageddon.11 The second camp takes the opposite position, suggesting that those in the first camp are making the same mistake Thomas Malthus made in the 18th century. It was he who first predicted mass starvations consequent to overpopulation.12 These starvations never came, at least not in the way Malthus imagined.13 New farming methods and global trade overcame those obstacles. The optimists believe that no matter the constraints, humanity will eventually find the technological means to overcome them; as it was in the past, so will it be in the future. This “techno-enthusiast” camp even suggests that other planets are ripe for colonization when and if Earth becomes too crowded or when and if its resources are exhausted.14 However, that conversation has recently changed. There is now growing evidence that the seemingly parabolic rise of global population has slowed and may, during the working lives of those just starting their professional career, stabilize and perhaps even begin to decline. The cause of this slowing of global population growth is attributable to one thing. It is not starvation, it is not war, it is not disease, and it is not poverty. It is simply that women around the world are choosing to have fewer children—so many fewer children that global population may even, within 40 or 50 years, start to decline. The cause of this decline? It appears to correlate with the rise of cities more than with any other factor. If true, we clearly need to change our way of thinking about cities. The implications of this emerging trend are enormous. Combined with rural-to-urban migration, we can expect cities to grow very rapidly in the near term—both from migration and from the long lag time before current fertility rate15 declines seriously reduce global population numbers. These changes will occur during the same decades that other dramatic economic and technological disruptions are affecting cities (think of the rise of Uber and Lyft, the switch to electric cars, roads filled with self-driving vehicles, the automation of service industries, continued wage stagnation, artificial intelligence, ever greater inequality, on and on). But is this really true? Will cities really stop growing? Can global population actually decline and city populations with it? That soon? The reader deserves more evidence before deciding.
The Three Waves That Are Changing Cities Forever    15
When Did the Birth Rate Decline Start? Fertility rates have been declining in the developed world for over two hundred years. In 1810 the U.S. fertility rate was approximately 7.0 births per woman. At that time more than 80 percent of all Americans were rural farmers. By 1850, only 50 years later, fertility rates had dropped dramatically to 4.5 births per woman. At that time farm employment had dropped to the point where only 50 percent of all Americans worked on farms.16,17 By then, the U.S. shift to a majority urban population and declining fertility rates was well under way. This is an early example of the phenomenon but a typical one. The correlation between increased urbanization and decreased fertility is very strong no matter where you are in the world. A notable exception, and a temporary one, was the post–World War II baby boom, when U.S. fertility rates jumped from 2.2 per woman in the 1930s to 3.8 per woman in the early 1960s (the very peak of the baby boom). This coincided with the rapid expansion of U.S. metropolitan areas, typically spreading across former farm fields in the form of auto-oriented sprawl.18 The boom was short lived, however, with U.S. fertility rates returning to their longer-term decline, in line with continued urbanization, by the seventies. In 1975 the U.S. fertility rate went below the replacement rate of 2.1 live births per woman for the first time, where it has stayed since.19,20 It was in this same decade that urbanization rates in the United States approached 80 percent. Currently the U.S. birth rate is 1.84 live births per woman, a historic low and well below the replacement rate,21 and the rate of urbanization is 82 percent. In Canada, where more than 80 percent of its citizens live in cities, fertility rates are even lower at 1.6 live births per woman. Absent immigration, the populations of both countries would soon decline. Each Continent Is Different: Europe The fertility rate is declining at different rates in different countries, typically in parallel with increases in urbanization. Europe, much like the United States, had a very high fertility rate in 1800s, ranging from a high of 7 births per woman in the Ukraine to a low of 4.5 in France.22 By 2015, when Europe was 77 percent urbanized, the fertility rate had
16 Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities
Figures 1-2 a, b, c Radical changes in the world demographic pyramid are already under way and will result in a population “pyramid” no longer suited to the name. By 2100, unless current trends change, the elderly population will be larger than the population under age 20, for the first time in history. (Data source: PopulationPyramid.net from United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision. Graphic, Hamza Farooqui)
A
B
C
The Three Waves That Are Changing Cities Forever 17
dropped to a low of 1.36 births per woman in Poland and to a “high” of 1.91 in Sweden.23 As mentioned previously with reference to the United States and Canada, with such low birth rates, were it not for immigration many European countries would experience population declines. This is notably the case in Italy, where an aversion to accepting immigrants, combined with a higher than typical aversion on the part of Italian women to wed and rear, caused Italy’s population to drop in 2016, modestly, for first time in the modern era.24 North Africa and the Middle East Fertility rates in North Africa and the Middle East fell more recently but also more rapidly. From an average fertility rate of 7 per woman in 1960, fertility rates are now much lower at 2.8 live births per woman. That rate is still above the replacement rate, and thus North Africa and the Middle East are still growing more populous, but slowly. Iran is a particularly interesting example of the temporary swings possible in the context of a longer-term fertility rate decline. Iran’s fertility rate was 7 per woman in 1960 when it started to fall. At that time only 33 percent of Iranians lived in cities. However, after the 1978 Islamic Revolution the fertility rate briefly shot back up to almost 7 again. This boost was short lived, however, dropping precipitously in only twenty years to its current very low rate of 1.68 births per woman, while its rate of urbanization rose to 74 percent. That fertility rate is no misprint. In only one generation Iranian fertility fell by more than 400 percent.25 Asia Asia is the most populous part of the world, in part because China and India have ancient organized cultures that avoided, in relative terms, the number of population-crashing catastrophes that habitually befell post–Roman Empire Europe (the fall of empires, plagues, wars, up to and including the recent population-crashing catastrophe of World War II).26 In the year 1000, both China and India had populations greater than 50 million, and they generated more than half of all the wealth on the planet.27,28 Asian fertility rates, historically more than 5 births per
18 Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities
woman, combined with very low levels of urbanization, continued to push population higher and higher until, by the modern era, more than one of every three people on Earth was East or South Asian. The obvious threats of unrestrained population growth led China to institute its 1979 one-child-per-family policy, averting (according to government sources) more than 400 million otherwise likely births.29 The one-child policy forced a rapid drop in fertility rates after 1979, moving Chinese female fertility from its post-revolution high of nearly 6 births per woman to its nadir in 1998 of 1.5 births per woman (it is slightly higher now).30,31 The one-child policy had traumatic effects, including an overabundance of boys and men in the current population cohort, a function of aborting girls, who were culturally less favored than boys.32 It also means that the current generation of “only children” are in many cases burdened with the care of two parents and four grandparents.33 In a culture with weak government-run programs to care for the aged (nothing like Social Security or Medicaid in the United States, for example), this is a heavy burden indeed. Ironically, China may not have needed to impose a one-child policy at all. Perhaps it needed only to urbanize. During the decades of the onechild policy China also launched an ambitious program to transform itself from an agrarian culture organized around villages to an industrial culture organized around big cities. After the failure of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1976, China’s new chairman, Deng Xiaoping, led an initiative to modernize and urbanize the Chinese economy. When he began this project, only 17 percent of China’s more than 900 million people lived in cities. By 2015 more than 57 percent of China’s 1.3 billion people were urban dwellers—an amazing transformation in only forty years. Urbanization at that rate correlates with very rapid declines in fertility rates. So it’s possible that the current fertility rate of 1.8 might have been achieved without such a draconian policy. A comparison with South America, discussed next, is instructive. There, in dozens of different countries, uncoordinated by any public policy whatsoever, the inherent dynamics of urbanization seemed to have produced drops in fertility rates very similar to those experienced in China, without any of the direct coercion.
The Three Waves That Are Changing Cities Forever 19
In this respect, India too is instructive. India has exerted much weaker control over population and urban development than China. As you might expect, absent anything like China’s one-child policies, India’s fertility rate stayed higher longer than China’s. Consequently, India’s population is projected to soon surpass that of China, sometime around 2030.34 But there is another part to this story. In 1960 India and China both had fertility rates of 6 live births per woman. By 1980 China’s fertility rate had plunged dramatically to 2.6. India’s fertility rate was much higher; but it had also dropped, to 4.8 per woman. Current fertility rates in the two countries are not that far apart, with China’s below the replacement rate at 1.8 while India’s is just above (or at)35 replacement at 2.3.36 Although birth rates in India’s populous rural areas have indeed declined, apparently because of largely noncoercive policy supports such as government-supported education and free birth control, the fertility rates in rural areas are still much higher than in urban areas. Although the average fertility rate in all of India is now 2.3 births per woman, the rate in cities is much lower (lower than Sweden even) at 1.8 births per woman.37 Even though India’s fertility rate is at or close to replacement rate, India’s population is not expected to stabilize (according to the UN) until 2060. This is because there is a very long lag time before a gradually declining fertility rate is reflected in population reductions. Remember that even low birth rates add to the population rather than subtract. Low birth rates have to be more than balanced by high death rates. As developing countries modernize and urbanize, mortality rates tend to decline. Eventually people living longer lives do die. We all do. But until this now longer-living cohort of elderly die, they won’t be subtracted from population counts. Thus, it can take decades for sub–replacement rate births to result in total population declines. South America South America presents perhaps the most dramatic example of how urbanization correlates with declining birth rates. In 1960 the average fertility rate in all of South America was nearly 6 births per woman. By 2015 it had fallen to just under replacement rate at 2.08 births per
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woman. During that period Latin America’s average level of urbanization rose from 49 percent to just over 80 percent, equivalent to urbanization levels in the United States. Here again, high rates of urbanization correlate with low fertility rates, with the most urbanized Latin countries such as Chile, at 90 percent urbanized, having a fertility rate of 1.8 births per woman—well below replacement. At the other end of the spectrum, and confirming the hypothesis, is Guatemala, with a relatively low 52 percent urbanized rate and a higher-than-average fertility rate of 3.1 births per woman.38–40 Africa, the Odd (Wo)man Out Now for the last and most important continent of them all, or, specifically, the most important part of the most important continent: Sub- Saharan Africa. This division of Africa into two parts might seem odd, but it’s a standard way of looking at the continent, because of the way that the inhospitable Sahara desert divides the continent and its populations so completely. To the north are the largely Islamic cultures discussed earlier, strung along the Mediterranean coast. To the south are the much more complex cultures containing the bulk of Africa’s population. Discussions of Africa are burdened with a larger-than-average weight of unfortunate history, a history that must be acknowledged. We should start by saying that Sub-Saharan Africa’s population now makes up 13 percent of the global total, the same share Africa had in 1750. In 1750 the slave trade was raging globally, forcibly removing millions of Africans from their homes. The centuries of the slave trade were followed by a century of colonialism, which seems to have further impeded Sub-Saharan African population growth, both by dramatically disrupting community bonds and by increasing mortality rates associated with colonialist extractive industries.41 According to UN estimates, the population of Sub-Saharan Africa grew very slowly, if at all between 1750 and 1900, causing its share of global population to fall to 8 percent of the total by then.42 Now Africa has a population over one billion, or about 15 percent of all people on Earth. At this time, and for the foreseeable future, Sub-Saharan Africa is the only part of the world where fertility rates remain, in relative terms, very high. Thus, the proportion
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of the world’s people living in Africa will continue to rise, constituting approximately 25 percent (2.4 billion) of all people on Earth by 2050. Unless things change by 2100, there will be 4.4 billion Africans, 40 percent of everyone on Earth. The UN projects that by 2100 Africa will be the only part of Earth where population is still growing. All other parts of Earth will see population declines.43 Urbanization rates may influence this trend. Currently the UN does not correlate fertility rate projections with rates of urbanization. If they did, their projections for the African population at 2100 would be much lower. Uncertainty in Projecting the Future of Population on Earth Although we have shown that there is nearly exact correlation between high urbanization rates and low fertility rates, as much as we might like to, we cannot claim causation. To say that cities “cause” women to have fewer children, though almost self-evident perhaps, is a hypothesis that can’t be proven. Indeed, in poring over the research on this topic, as we have done, it is surprising how infrequently urbanization is identified as the main driver for lower fertility rates. More typically researchers and policy experts ascribe the drop in fertility rates to advances in education, technology, birth control, health care, opportunities for women, and the like—things that intuitively we might expect to be features more available in urban areas than rural. Yet the direct relationship between urbanization and fertility per se is seldom mentioned. This reluctance to acknowledge what appears, at least to us, to be obvious extends to the United Nations as well—the source for the most widely used projections of future global population growth. Absent a consensus on how urbanization affects fertility, demographers can’t directly predict fertility rates by charting them against what are, in most cases, very clear rates of urban migration. Consequently, demographers are not able to comfortably predict future population except within broad ranges. The United Nations frequently updates their projections of future global population, most recently in 2017. The earliest population projections produced by the UN were disturbing. For example, in 1990 the UN produced a range of possible planetary populations for the year 2150; the high estimate was (wait for it) 649 billion!44 In more recent decades
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the range has narrowed, thankfully. The most recent, the 2017 estimate, projects out to 2100 with three scenarios: high, medium, and low. They project possible populations of 17, 11, and 7 billion, respectively, with the low projection indicating a steep decline in global population after 2060. But that is still an incredible range. Why so broad? It’s because they are uncertain about the future trends for global fertility and have become increasingly uncertain in just the last decade. In a sense this wide range of possible futures is the result of admitting they are not able to project fertility rates, supporting their caution by stating that European fertility rates have trickled up slightly in a few developed countries such as Sweden, but, of even greater concern, they are no longer as convinced that African birth rates will continue to trend down. Some bumps in the fertility rate decline for Nigeria, soon to be one of the four most populous countries on Earth, were especially concerning. Given these uncertainties, UN demographers considered it prudent to do three scenarios, one where global birth rates actually increase by 0.5 births per woman, the second where they stay the same, and the last where they decline by 0.5 births per woman.45 This is akin to throwing up your hands and admitting you don’t have a clue. There is no science behind such an assumption, just an acknowledgment that you are fearful that current trends might not persist. If average global fertility rates do continue their trend decline, it is the third scenario we can expect, the one predicting that world population will begin to decline by 2060. But the point here is that the UN is not yet able, or willing, to base their projections on clear trends toward reduced fertility consequent to continuing drops in average fertility rates and continued migration to cities. We understand their reticence. We can agree that the research on Nigeria is not conclusive, in part because of cultural issues that may be peculiar to Nigeria and that undercut the influence of urbanization on birth rates for this one country. The lack of accurate data is also a problem. However, UNICEF projects that Nigeria will be 75 percent urban in only 30 years, up from its current 48 percent.46 This must surely matter. A suggestive data point from Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, indicates that average family sizes have dropped from 6.3 people per household in 1970 to 4.3 in 2004 to 3.8 in 2008.47 Also, though still quite high, the Lagos area fertility rate is less than half the fertility rate in the rural
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province of Zamfara.48 Finally, at least one continent-wide study has shown that urbanization has a role in declining fertility rates, concluding that educated African women in urban areas have far fewer children than educated Sub-Saharan African women in rural areas, effectively isolating the influence of urbanization against at least this one variable.49 Although one should not understate the importance of Nigeria in the future of Africa, there are many other Sub-Saharan African countries to consider. In all cases increases in urbanization correlate with decreases in fertility. A good example is South Africa, where fertility rates have dropped from 6 per woman in 1960, when urbanization was 46 percent, to its 2017 rate of 2.4 births per woman (just above replacement) with an urbanization rate of 65 percent. At the other end of the scale is Uganda, whose fertility rate was 7 per woman in 1960, when urbanization was 4 percent, dropping marginally to 5.7 in 2015 when urbanization was 16 percent—still a drop, mind you, but a minor one that also correlates with its slow rate of urbanization.50,51 Thankfully we can now wrap up this global fertility tour and can reasonably conclude that cities are likely to be the means for moderating what would otherwise be a perpetual and planet-crushing increase in human mouths to feed. We can acknowledge now that for every part of the globe with the possible exception of Sub-Saharan Africa, population growth will slow to a stop within only 40 years. In city-building terms, forty years is a blink of an eye (it took longer than that to complete just part of the 2nd Avenue subway in New York City, for example). We are close to the end of three centuries of continuous city growth, with only a few decades to prepare for its end. And as for the outlier, Sub-Saharan Africa, yes, Africa presents unique issues for city development. Much debate exists about what kind of carrying capacity Africa has and whether it is at all reasonable to remain sanguine when we imagine an Africa of more than 4 billion souls, or nearly half of the population of the world, to house and feed. It’s beyond the scope of this book to consider the agricultural capacity of that huge continent beyond acknowledging that most researchers admit that Sub-Saharan Africa, though not food self-sufficient, has huge untapped agricultural capacity. The continent, much bigger than North America, has ample rains (over most of it) and a long growing
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Figure 1-3 Typical emerging settlement near Lagos Lake, Lagos, Nigeria, belies common misconceptions. A mix of old and new in a uniquely African form of sprawl. (Source: Google Maps)
Figure 1-4 Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria. Preconceptions about Lagos as a giant “slum” impede appreciation of a much more complex reality. (Source: OpenUpEd, Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria, September 9, 2014, Flickr)
season. On the other hand, African soils are comparatively nutrient poor—unproductive without large inputs of expensive chemical fertilizers.52 Political instability and the lack of an efficient continent-wide
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transportation system also are huge constraints. Indeed, finding enough food to feed four billion new Africans will probably be an ongoing crisis in the next few decades, but for the long-term stability of the continent, urbanization probably provides the most hope. For example, Lagos, Nigeria has attracted worldwide attention for the structure and function of their visually arresting self-built communities floating precariously on flimsy piers above the waters of the Lagos Lagoon.53 But these districts constitute a tiny fraction of the largely informal districts recently springing up in Lagos. More common are informal but substantial structures for the average wage earner and gated communities and protected high rises for the wealthy. The reputation of this city of 20 million has been diminished by successive dictatorships, and it has been dismissed as ungovernable by most Western commentators. Belying our prejudices about Lagos, much of the city is modern, if not formal. And although transportation is difficult in this sprawling city of 20 million, somehow things slowly get better. Very efficient express buses ply dedicated lanes in a system initiated in 2008 (patterned on that of Bogota, Colombia), and a region-wide light rail system is set to open in 2022.54,55 This halting progress in a largely informal city anticipates a later discussion on the advisability of allowing certain aspects of urban development to unfold organically and inserting a lighter infrastructure at a later date. We will explore this idea in later chapters on systems thinking, networks, and green infrastructure. Wave Three: The End of the Middle Class On Saturday, September 17, 2011, a large crowd gathered in Lower Manhattan near Wall Street, the very center of the capitalist world. It was the “Occupy Wall Street” protest, a group of people who gathered to rage against the power and corruption of America’s financial institutions and the elites who ran them. This protest ignited a fire that soon spread around the world. By the end of that fall, more than 951 cities in 38 countries were “occupied” in the same way.56 This largely leaderless movement was motivated by one shared sentiment: the belief that the “1 percent” of the population, those at the very top of the income scale, had gained too much power, were too corrupt, were too greedy, and were
26 Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities
the reason that the other 99 percent were deprived of a decent future. It was within this movement that the phrase “we are the 99 percent” was born. The significance of this discovery, that all people were the same except for the 1 percent at the top, cannot be overemphasized. For the first time, and regardless of country, people were self-identifying not by ethnic group, not by conventional class divisions, not by the politics of the left or right, but by their membership in 99 percent of citizens who were, simply by virtue of having to work for a living, politically and economically disenfranchised. Occupy protesters argued that the global trading system, organized around the economic principles of neoliberalism,57 globalism, and ever more severe government austerity measures, had become a cultural cancer, a cancer that served only the interests of supranational elites and the members of the 1 percent. The Occupy Movement marked the emergence of a widespread consensus: that inequality was bad and getting worse. It also marked the beginning of a cultural tsunami that is currently destabilizing politics throughout the developed world. Populist (anti-globalist, anti-neoliberal, and pro-nationalist) movements have emerged like mushrooms after a rain—in the United States, in Hungary, in the United Kingdom, in Poland, in Turkey, and many places in between. The Brexit movement in Britain, for example, was a clear slap in the face to both the labor and conservative party elites. Both parties fought to defeat Brexit but failed, with a bare majority of voters from both parties wishing a pox on both of their houses and energizing an emerging populist backlash in Britain. Both parties were criticized from both sides of the political spectrum for their mutual support of the “globalist” and “neoliberal” agenda; both parties reaped contempt for leaders who seemed more interested in meeting with global capitalists at Davos than with struggling farmers in Devon or besieged union members in Derby. Throughout the rest of Europe the staid and stodgy post–World War II tradition of center-left and center-right parties trading places every few elections was suddenly undercut. Political parties and leaders on both the far left and far right gained strength, and the centrist consensus supporting the neoliberal world order started to cave in. Meanwhile in the United States, populist discontent on the left fueled the unlikely rise of democratic socialist
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senator Bernie Sanders and, on the right, the infinitely more unlikely victory of Republican president Donald Trump. Both political waves were fueled by similar distrust of elites but directed at different specific targets: youthful rage at the “billionaires who have stolen our country” (the Bernie Sanders line) on the left and an even stronger white nationalist rage at the “globalist elites who give our jobs to illegal aliens” (Trump’s line) on the right. In the midst of such worldwide disorder, oligarchs and their political handmaids in other countries, such as Russia, impose ever more antidemocratic measures to hold and expand their power, until some countries descend into a sort of postindustrial feudalism, where the power of oligarchs is maintained through rampant corruption and the repression of democratic rights. It is impossible to discern what will be the end state when these transformations are complete, but we know for sure that things are dark. And we know for sure that the way things were is not the way things will be again. What has changed? Why are these changes happening, and what do they mean in terms of ordinary day-to-day life in our cities? French economist Thomas Piketty provides at least a partial answer. Thomas Piketty and the Problem of Slow Growth While the Occupy protests were raging, Piketty was hard at work writing his first book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.58 Helped along by computers and suddenly much easier access to Web-based data, Piketty became the first economist to reach more than a hundred years into the past. In this he broke with most post–World War II economists who, dependent as they were on data compiled after World War II, were largely unanimous in their belief that the advance of capitalism meant the advance of all and that over time social inequality went down while social mobility went up. Piketty assembled and digitized three hundred years’ worth of economic data to help him conclude that those with money will continue to own more and more of everything until a few families end up with it all (i.e., capitalism leads naturally to a patrimonial capitalism: most wealth held by a few wealthy families, families who pass that wealth—and political influence—to their heirs via inheritance).
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Like any good economist, Piketty uses math to make his point, but the math in his case is unusually simple and has become famous. His disarmingly simple formula is r > g. In this formula r is the rate of return on capital and g is the rate of growth of gross national product (GNP). If g is greater than r, inequality is reduced because enough new wealth is created to overcome and reverse the natural flow of wealth to wealth. This was the case during the three happy decades after World War II. When r is greater than g, which is now the case both globally and in developed countries,59 you will have increasing inequality, he said. It’s not hard to see why. If you have $100 million, a not impossibly large sum, and it returns 5 percent per year (which is the average real rate of return on rent or investments over the past four hundred years according to Piketty), you get $5 million cash a year. If you don’t take it out as income but rather roll it over into more income-producing investments instead, you don’t lose it to income taxes. If you do this year after year after year, it takes only 16 years to end up with $200 million, and after another 16 years you have $400 million. If you have only one child to leave it to (assuming modest inheritance taxes or a good tax attorney), they can continue the game and double it again in 16 more years. Within a reasonable amount of time you are a billionaire, and all you do with your time is look for more assets to buy, which will themselves return your dependable 5 percent—forever. And when you shop for assets to buy there are really only three main types: stocks, bonds, and real estate (and, at the time of this writing, bitcoin, apparently). That’s pretty much every asset class that matters. It doesn’t take a PhD in economics to see that if you are one of these fortunate few playing the game, eventually you will own everything in the world, or at least you and the 100,000 people on the planet like you will (the 1 percenters or, more accurately, the 0.1 percenters). Piketty presents evidence that in “normal” times, return on investments will be greater than economic growth. In such a state more and more of existing wealth ends up in fewer and fewer hands until a limited number of people own pretty much everything—including your house.60 That’s when a small class of owners, the 1 percent, can become wealthier still by passively collecting “rents” as members of a “rentier class,” in the form of actual rents on real estate, stock dividends, or interest on bonds.
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This sounds apocalyptic, but it’s not unprecedented. This was the way the world worked back when Jane Austen was writing Pride and Prejudice. Anyone in that world who had no capital (in those days capital was mostly in the form of farmland) was only just getting by, living in rented cottages and getting paid a wage sufficient only for meager meals and necessary clothes. The Rise and Fall of the Middle Class What Piketty makes alarmingly clear is that this condition might have endured forever if not for the sequential catastrophes of World War I, the Depression, and World War II. This 30-year period of disruption had the effect of undercutting what would otherwise be the inevitably inequitable distribution of wealth by basically destroying it. It was destroyed by the bombs that fell on factories, by the inflation that made bonds worthless, and by the emergency taxes on wealth that most nations enacted to ensure their survival. All of these catastrophes had the oddly salubrious effect of giving the post–World War II emerging middle class a larger and larger share of a nation’s total wealth, mostly in the form of homeownership. Economists in the post–World War II decades were happy to claim that structural and intergenerational inequality was gradually lessening, and they assumed that an increasingly even distribution of wealth, one based more on individual ability and initiative than on inherited wealth, was a new and fundamental feature of modern capitalism. But sadly this condition persisted only between 1950 and 1980. What they missed but Piketty recognized is that the decline of patrimonial capitalism was temporary. The more recent three-decade decline in the income and capital share flowing to the bottom 90 percent has correlated with a period where the U.S. government, and indeed governments around the world, have decided to give even more money to the rich (ironic because maybe you should give money to the poor and middle class when the rich are already doing great). After the “Reagan/Thatcher revolution” most advanced countries fell under the influence of neoliberal economic theory. Most developed countries adopted “pro-growth” policies that
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accelerated the flow of capital and income to the already rich. The assumption was that the more money they put in the hands of the “job creators,” the more jobs would result. With governments in thrall of this belief, the highest marginal income tax rates have fallen dramatically (in the United States from 90 percent after World War II to 38 percent now), and calls for the elimination of inheritance taxes, our last real tax on perpetual wealth, are gaining more and more traction (inheritance tax was reduced yet again in the 2017 U.S. tax reform bill). Bit by bit, a condition that we all took to be the bedrock of modern liberal democracies, an enduring middle class (as defined by homeownership, the ability to raise a family, an affordable college education for your kids, and a solid net worth as you approach retirement), appears to have been an ephemeral condition brought on by factors we do not want to repeat (wars and economic depression). Inequality and Birth Rates Financial inequality connects to fertility rates in unexpected ways. Piketty explains that during a period of rapid population expansion, there are two tendencies that operate against the inequitable accumulation of wealth. On one hand, large growth in the number of working-age people in a developed country usually correlates with rapid economic expansion, as all those young workers provide the capacity to produce new wealth through their productive labor. This new wealth, g, can accrue at rates greater than the average rate of return on investment, r, and thus can be gathered up, under fair conditions, by those who work for a living. This was certainly true in the United States after World War II, when the large cohort of Americans born in the 1920s came back from war61 and celebrated by rocketing birth rates up to a level not seen in decades, thus ensuring that enough workers were on hand to take their place and to keep growth going. For middle class workers in the United States and Canada, the wealth they gained during the postwar period was largely stored in the home they owned. But when birth rates went down in the United States and the rest of the developed world, the global economy slowed down too (fewer workers to produce, fewer consumers to consume), pushing g, growth, below r, rate of return. The sluggish worldwide
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growth afflicting most developed economies is at least partly caused by declining birth rates, according to Piketty and others.62 The large family sizes of past decades also reduced wealth concentration by diluting fortunes when estates were settled. A $100-million estate left to one child allows that child to continue accruing $5 million a year just in various “rents,” all without lifting a finger. If that $100 million has to be split between six or seven siblings, that wealth is split into numerous smaller and thus less powerful pieces. But the rich, along with everyone else these days, are having fewer children. Thus wealth is now kept more or less whole from generation to generation, especially with the cuts in inheritance taxes over the past four decades.63 Wage Stagnation and the Financial Effect of Housing on Cities This worldwide wealth transfer from wage earners to the rentier class is influencing world cities in two linked ways: wage stagnation and increasing housing prices. For much of the 20th century, real wages increased in lockstep with productivity increases, with owners and hourly workers garnering a roughly equal share of those gains. But according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, after 1980 worker productivity in the United States increased by 240 percent while worker wages stayed flat (adjusted for inflation), meaning that all productivity gains after 1980 fattened the wallets of owners and stockholders while wage earners treaded water.64 Various reasons are cited for this, including the weakening of labor unions and the ways that globalization has pitted higher-wage workers in the developed world against low-wage workers in the developing world.65 However, Piketty suggests a more structural reason for wage stagnation: The historical record suggests that as capital and income migrate to those who already have it, the bargaining and political power of wage earners decreases and the political and economic power of the wealthy increases. He cites examples dating as far back as post-revolutionary France to make his case. He presents evidence that as power migrates to the rich, taxing policy and labor laws reflect the opinions of the wealthy more than those of wage earners or their advocates. The fierce opposition of Republicans in the U.S. Congress to an increase in the minimum wage, and the halfhearted support among Democrats in
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support of same, seems to reinforce Piketty’s view. We have focused on the United States to make these points, but the same dynamic is at work in most developed countries and increasingly in developing countries as well.
Figure 1-5 For decades hourly worker wages rose in lockstep with productivity gains. But since 1980 wages have stayed flat despite a doubling of worker productivity, meaning that this productivity value was captured by owners of capital. (Source: EPI Analysis of Data from Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS] Labor Productivity and Costs Program, BLS Current Employment Statistics Public Data Series, BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, and Bureau of Economic Analysis National Income and Product Accounts [Tables 2.3.4, 6.2, 6.3, 6.9, 6.10, and 6.11])
Rising housing costs are a second influential feature of this new global economy. Around the world, housing costs are increasing faster than wages, sometimes alarmingly so. In the United States the average cost of housing has inflated by 150 percent in inflation-adjusted terms since 1980, even after the severe financial market crash of 2008 is accounted for. This may seem alarming but pales into insignificance in comparison to housing prices in New Zealand, which have increased by 450 percent after adjustment for inflation. Canada finds itself in between these two extremes, with housing prices increasing by 250 percent after adjustment
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for inflation.66 Housing costs are increasing not primarily because supply is not meeting demand but because global assets of all types are increasing in value in a phenomenon called asset inflation. Whereas consumer good inflation has been held close to zero for the past twenty years, goods that have investment value, such as stocks, bonds, precious metals, and real estate, have increased much faster. Why? Because the world’s cash is flowing not into the hands of those who want to spend it on consumer goods but into the hands of those who already have it and who are looking for places to invest. This is the real supply and demand constraint: too much investment money chasing too few capital goods, resulting in asset inflation.67 This would not be so bad if, as the supply side economists are wont to say, a rising tide lifts all boats. If everyone were gaining at least some wealth as assets inflated, it would be more tolerable. But despite what is often said about how Americans are all lifted up when their 401Ks (tax-deferred retirement account mutual funds) gain value, very few Americans in the bottom 90 percent of wage earners own stock either outright or in a mutual fund. The average member of the American middle class has only $4,000 dollars in retirement savings of any type— enough for two months’ rent in Vancouver.68 This is a staggering global transformation that does not gain the attention it deserves. What is going on? Traditionally, market housing was linked to ability to pay. In areas where incomes were low, house prices were low. In areas where incomes were high, house prices were high. The laws of supply and demand seemed to insist on this correlation. But in the last decade, in many parts of the globe, this relationship has been cut. In Canada home prices are 150 percent higher than they should be given average incomes. This situation is far more extreme when you narrow the focus down to individual “global cities” in Canada, such as Vancouver and Toronto. Vancouver, for all its glitter, is burdened with the lowest average income of any of Canada’s major cities but has the highest home costs by far. When average housing costs are charted against average incomes, Vancouver, BC has the world’s second most unaffordable housing, costing more than four times what it “should.”69 In fact, the more successful a city is in terms of its participation in the modern global economy, the more likely it is that housing costs will be
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out of reach for average workers. It’s true in Boston, New York, London, Sydney, Hong Kong, Paris, Rome, Auckland, Shanghai, on and on. In some cases, such as in New York and San Francisco, this increase can be partly rationalized by increases in average wages. Not so in Vancouver, Auckland, or Sydney. Some people are inclined to reflexively blame lack of supply for the increase in house prices, falling back entirely on their faith in the “laws of supply and demand.” But in Vancouver supply has increased at a faster rate than population growth. Logically, prices should be trending down rather than increasing by 400 percent since 1990 in inflation-adjusted terms.70 In the developed world, and especially in North America, this decline in the middle class is hitting the Millennial generation (those born between 1984 and 2004) hard. Millennials are joining the job market when wages have been flat since at least their birth, while the cost of assets, especially housing, have more than doubled. To make matters even worse, the baby boom generation in Britain (to cite only one relevant example) has, on average, higher total wealth than any generation in UK history, mostly because the value of their houses has increased dramatically. That same generation has also seen their disposable income (a number that excludes capital wealth) increase by an amazing 140 percent since 1979, while the disposable income of Millennials has hardly increased at all.71 Intergenerational Inequity and the City What does this mean for the urban design? Lots. Combined with the shifting birth rates, Millennials will continue to suffer with the increased burden of taking care of a growing senior cohort while their economic resources seem inadequate to their own needs. We can expect to see increasing intergenerational tensions as these inequities become more glaring. Already in Vancouver, where the principal author lives and works, the debate on housing affordability is often cast in terms of “old NIMBYs” versus housing-insecure youth. Ageist rhetoric is unabashedly given voice during housing debates. Political parties, all of whom are totally focused on the housing problem, are aligning themselves by age group, not by the usual categories of left, right, or center.72 Urban
The Three Waves That Are Changing Cities Forever 35
designers and their colleagues in architecture and planning will have to be particularly sensitive to the tensions implicit in this wrenching transformation. Although this sounds odious, there is an upside. The constraints on the capacity of Millennials to acquire property are creating a market for more sustainable housing forms and consequently more sustainable cities and districts. For many decades theorists have been calling for more walkable, dense, and resource-efficient housing and cities. Encouraging these changes, absent any financial incentive, has remained halting at best. But if most of the next generation find themselves with inadequate resources to compete for the kind of lifestyles enjoyed by their parents—three cars, a big house, a parcel on a cul-de-sac, a garage stuffed with consumer goods, and so on—then their own fiscal constraints must logically lead to a lifestyle that exerts less of an impact on the planet. This increased financial stress is certainly not something to celebrate. But if trend lines hold, as it seems they will, then urban designers need to find a way to still make great places for most of our citizens. Piketty himself maintains that there seems to be no natural way for trends toward increasing inequality to be reversed, short of major global catastrophes such as world war, global depression, or political revolution. History, he says, suggests that the trend toward increasing inequality is interrupted only by calamity. And we may not want to wish that on ourselves. Thus, if these trends persist we will most certainly see people living in smaller units in denser districts, owning fewer or no cars, and living lives less devoted to acquiring and maintaining stuff. Millennials are already trending in this direction, impelled by the realities we describe. The challenge for urban design, should this trend persist, is to work within the envelope of this economic constraint and create great places. Urban design models calibrated to this new circumstance should have relevance to developing countries as well, given that the demographics and income statistics of developing countries are increasingly aligning with those of developed countries.
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Design in an Age of Urban Migration, Demographic Change, and a Disappearing Middle Class Patrick M. Condon
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s urban designers respond to the critical issue of climate change, they must also address three cresting cultural waves: the worldwide rural-to-urban migration; the collapse
of global fertility rates; and the disappearance of the middle class. In Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities, planning and design expert
Patrick Condon offers five rules to help urban designers assimilate these interconnected changes into their work: (1) See the City as a FACEBOOK.COM/ISLANDPRESS TWITTER.COM/ISLANDPRESS
System; (2) Recognize Patterns in the Urban Environment; (3) Apply Lighter, Greener, Smarter Infrastructure; (4) Strengthen Social and Economic Urban Resilience; and (5) Adapt to Shifts in Jobs, Retail, and Wages.
Patrick Condon
P
atrick Condon has over 30 years of
director of the landscape architecture program,
experience in sustainable urban design:
he became the James Taylor Chair in Landscape
first as a professional city planner and
and Liveable Environments. In that capacity, he
then as a teacher and researcher. Condon started has worked to advance sustainable urban design his academic career in 1985 at the University
in scores of jurisdictions in the US, Canada, and
of Minnesota before moving to the University
Australia. He is the author of Seven Rules for
of British Columbia in 1992. After acting as the
Sustainable Communities.
More books of interest: Resilient Cities, Second Edition Overcoming Fossil Fuel Dependence Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley, and Heather Boyer PAPERBACK: $35.00 (264 PAGES. 2017. 9781610916851)
Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities Design Strategies for the Post Carbon World Patrick Condon PAPERBACK: $30.00 (216 PAGES. 2010. 9781597266659.)
Life After Carbon The Next Global Transormation of Cities Peter Plastrick and John Cleveland PAPERBACK: $35.00 (304 PAGES. 2018. 9781610918497.)
Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities Patrick Condon PAPERBACK: $32.00(192 PAGES. 2007. 9781597260534.)
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