Special Area Resources by Marion Van Engelen

World Scholar’s Cup

SPECIAL AREA

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PW AA -TA ST IC

MODERN METROPOLIS

A World Transformed

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ED I TO R S

Tania Asnes Daniel Berdichevsky

the World Scholar’s Cup® ®

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SPECIAL AREA RESOURCE THE MODERN METROPOLIS

Table of Contents Preface ..............................................................................................................................................3 I. The Rise of the City.......................................................................................................................5 Objectives ..................................................................................................................................... 5 What is a city? ............................................................................................................................... 5 The Origin of Cities ...................................................................................................................... 6 Theories of Societal Development ................................................................................................. 6 Civilization 2.0: The Early City-State............................................................................................ 7 Case Study: Ancient Greece ....................................................................................................... 8 Looking West: Cities of the Mayan Empire................................................................................ 9 The Industrial Revolution & the Birth of the Really Big City ....................................................... 9 Case Study: London ................................................................................................................. 10 The New Megacities ................................................................................................................... 12 Case Study: Lagos, Nigeria ....................................................................................................... 12 The City, Risen ........................................................................................................................... 14 II. The Shape of the City.................................................................................................................15 Objectives ................................................................................................................................... 15 City Planning .............................................................................................................................. 15 Case Study: Paris ...................................................................................................................... 16 Suburbs: Enter the Bedroom Communities................................................................................. 18 Case Study: Levittown, New York ............................................................................................ 18 Urban Sprawl .............................................................................................................................. 19 Case Study: S達o Paulo, Brazil ................................................................................................... 19 Transportation and the City ........................................................................................................ 20 Case Study: Shanghai ............................................................................................................... 22 The Impact of Cars on Modern Cities......................................................................................... 23 Case Study: Mexico City .......................................................................................................... 23 Housing Prices in the Modern Metropolis .................................................................................. 24 III. Life in the City ..........................................................................................................................26 Objectives ................................................................................................................................... 26 What is Urbanity? ....................................................................................................................... 26 Key Aspects of Urban Culture ..................................................................................................... 27 Case Study: Tokyo ................................................................................................................... 29 Living in Unlivable Places ........................................................................................................... 30 Case Study: Dubai ................................................................................................................... 30 Urban Culture and Imaginary Cities ........................................................................................... 32 Gotham City ............................................................................................................................ 33 From City-State to City-Planet ................................................................................................ 34

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IV. Transforming the Modern Metropolis ......................................................................................36 Objectives ................................................................................................................................... 36 Cities Transformed by Politics .................................................................................................... 36 Case Study: Berlin .................................................................................................................... 37 Cities Transformed by Environmental Concerns......................................................................... 39 Case Study: Copenhagen.......................................................................................................... 39 Back to the Farm ...................................................................................................................... 40 Cities Transformed by Imitation: Keeping up with the Jonesopolis ............................................. 41 Case Study: Singapore, Johor Bahru, and Citraland ................................................................. 42 Cities Transformed by the Internet ............................................................................................. 43 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................44 Works Consulted ............................................................................................................................45 About the Author ............................................................................................................................46 About the Editors ............................................................................................................................46 by

edited by

Alejandra O’Leary

Daniel Berdichevsky

Yale University ‘04

Harvard University M.P.P. ‘05 Stanford University M.A. & B.A. ‘02

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Preface Cities 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 desires. They transform the world we live in—and they transform us when we live in them. People have always taken advantage of the Earth’s natural ‘‘What is the city but the people?’’ features when building cities. Many of the very first cities William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 1608 emerged near major bodies of water. Peek at 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 the early kingdoms of 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 manmade islands in the shape of the world.3 Brand new cities are being designed with giant airports, wide streets, and fast subway systems, and even older cities continue to be transformed 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 years for the first cities of more than 100,000 people to take shape. Athens, in Greece, was probably the first. Even in 1800 4, only 3% of the world’s population lived in cities. Today, more than three billion people do—over half the people in the world. No wonder we associate cities with everything busy, big, modern, shiny, and new. Think about how many movies and television series are set in cities. There’s no such show as CSI: Farmville, and Batman doesn’t live in Gotham Village. Cities are portrayed as more exciting, as the places where things happen. Cities are full of extremes: glittering skyscrapers rise above scenes of poverty, danger, and alienation. Some people love cities; others hate them. Even people who live in big cities may have mixed opinions about urbanity (the many qualities associated with cities) and 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 JeanJacques Rousseau. 5 “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”. 6 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’s next to a river. Not that people bathed all that much. Early civilization was probably quite stinky. 3 Hello, Dubai. 4 Just a little bit before your teachers were born. 5 Rousseau thought we should live like the Navi in Avatar. But less blue. 2

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Whatever their feelings about traffic and tall buildings, today most people want or need to live among them—or at least nearby. This trend towards urban life has been underway worldwide for decades. The percentage of the world’s population living in cities surged from just 3 percent in 1800 to 14 percent by 1900—then to 30 percent by 1950. Today, more than half of us live in urban areas. All these cities had to come from somewhere. In Watch it On YouTube this resource, we will examine the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions as key steps on the way to This song from the Disney film Oliver and Company speaks an urban world. We will also spend time on the to the myth of the city as a place full of both loneliness and hope: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6YTXjOwSL8 rapid growth of cities in the 20th and 21st centuries—which we can think of as the Urban Revolution. 7 These transformations build upon each other. Their effects have been deep and long-lasting: you can see their influence anytime 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 bananas don’t grow anywhere near New York City. 8 Because of trade, you can get just about any kind of food or service in any of the world’s major cities. 9 Trade, agricultural development, 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. I find the best way to explore the theory and history of cities is to “pound the pavement”—digging into real, chaotic, living, breathing examples. From transportation to nightlife, from London to Lagos, from Mexico City to Dubai, we’ll explore what it means to be urban in a world transformed and transformative—and how we became urban in the first place. I encourage you to read the articles and watch the videos ‘‘We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now to which the resource points you. You’ll feel like you’re we’re gonna live on the Internet!’’ taking a trip around the world, not just preparing for a Justin Timberlake, portraying Napster founder tournament. Then, when you do travel around the world Sean Parker in The Social Network for a tournament, you’ll see Kuala Lumpur, Haifa, Dubai, or whatever your destination—with newly critical eyes. I hope you enjoy the journey. Alejandra O’Leary

Watch it here. It won’t be tested, but it’s great study music. One thing to keep in mind when reading about revolutions: they don’t always happen overnight. They are often gradual, but still deeply transformative. 8 If you buy peanuts, you’re almost certainly buying them from a chain of nut stands run by a man from Santiago, Chile. 9 Though I still get nervous eating sushi when I’m a thousand miles from the ocean. 7

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I. The Rise of the City Perhaps you’ve heard of SimCity. If your parents play computer games, they probably have. 10 It made you the mayor 11 of a city you had to build from scratch. As mayor, you had many duties— from watching the traffic to paying for firemen. Most of all, you had to tempt people to live in your city. And you had to keep them safe and happy. You started by setting up farms to feed your growing population. You built commercial areas to attract businesses and shoppers. You added neighborhoods where shoppers could live when they weren’t shopping. 12 And you had to make sure you connected all these areas with roads and power lines. You could take your city down an industrial path, building row after row of smoke-spewing factories. You could try to achieve an ecological utopia, with pedestrians humming along on bicycles and monorails. You could build universities to attract a more educated population—or airports to generate tax revenue. You could also destroy it all—with air pollution, with traffic congestion, with natural disasters, or even by attracting a mob of giant robots. It may have been a game, but SimCity was based on processes that city planners, historians, anthropologists, economists, and real estate developers have studied for centuries. 13

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?

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Why is the world becoming so urban in the twenty-first century?

What is a city? If you had to explain what cities were to a group of (hopefully peaceful) aliens14, what would come to mind first? Skyscrapers—subways—how to find the nearest Starbucks? In the 1940s, urban studies professor Louis Wirth defined a city as an area whose population has size, density, and diversity. According to Wirth, the presence of a lot of people from lots of different places, packed in a very small space, makes a city.

It was one of the first games not about winning or losing: you could play on and on—like Farmville, but friendlessly. They call you the mayor, but, really, you’re more a combination urban planner and god. 12 I sometimes think my sister lives at the mall. 13 Except for the robots. 14 We assume these aliens live on farms—or spaceships. 11

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The theory sounds good…in theory. But it may be too simple today. No one would deny San Francisco (population: 800,000) and Shanghai (population: 19 million) are both cities, but are they the same sort of city?15 Perhaps, by studying cities from prehistory to the present (and into the future), we can find better ways to describe and understand the full range of cities in the world today.

The Origin of Cities In SimCity 16, you began by building your city around farms. Today, we take farmers for granted. But farming was not always the basis for our economies and societies. Farming was once an exciting new invention 17. Until about 10,000 years ago, humans organized life around hunting and gathering. They favored gathering: about 80% of their food came from wild edible plants. Humans were always in search of food. Changes in climate or the extinction of certain animals18 could lead groups to starve. Hunting and gathering may have been a golden age of human freedom 19, but free humans starved and froze to death a lot. Life, as philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously put it, was “nasty, brutish, and short.”

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

With the Neolithic Revolution, people began to settle and harvest land, to select seeds for crops, and to domesticate animals.20 The Neolithic Revolution happened at different times in different places.21 It allowed people to stay in one place rather than roaming the Earth in search of food. It led to the establishment of villages and towns around farms. Over time, these societies grew in size and density. 22 For the first time, people not family or part of the same tribe began to live near each other. 23 The steady food supply enabled by agriculture, food storage, and animal domestication allowed people to think about and pursue activities other than finding something to eat. 24 When there was a surplus of food (more than the people in any one village needed to survive), a village could trade some of it to other villages for new goods and materials. Written language and specialized jobs emerged. 25 Art, religion, and politics became possible. People could stop focusing on their stomachs and begin cultivating their hearts and their minds.

Theories of Societal Development Historians and archaeologists still debate what made people stop wandering and settle down. Some think it happened through uneven development; others take a more social evolutionary view. 15

They do both have delicious Chinese food. Thank you for indulging me. Perhaps this resource could be titled “Computer Games of the 1990s”. 17 Like the iPad, but edible. 18 Oh, wooly mammoth, we miss you so. 19 At least that’s what some hippies seem to believe. 20 The films Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Hotel for Dogs are direct results of the Neolithic Revolution. 21 A lot of older people experience their own Neolithic Revolutions when they retire and start vegetable gardens. 22 Who can’t relate to the life philosophy of “go where the food is”? 23 The experience of living around strangers is, of course, a hallmark of life in modern cities—and college dormitories. 24 That was never my favorite activity, either. 25 We’re not talking computer programmers quite yet. More like tomb decorators. 16

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Believers in uneven development observe that small farms and towns popped up in different places around the Middle East and India, and eventually elsewhere, in a disconnected way.26 They also note that these societies were not all based on agriculture. Some, such as Catal Hayuk (in present-day Turkey), were based more on producing and trading simple goods, like clay pots.

Neolithic Breakthroughs The Neolithic Revolution gave rise to many aspects of civilization we take for granted today: • Permanent dwellings • Labor specialization • Baking and bread • Class-based societies • Personal property • Domesticated animals (puppies!) • Non-farming jobs • Trade and barter systems • Official marriage

Other scholars take a more social evolutionary view. They believe it no accident that the first towns emerged within the same 5,000 years or so 27—mostly between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago. There had to be some connection and influence among these settlements, perhaps through travel and trade.28 Or perhaps something about the climate during this time contributed to the rise of farms. When archeologists discover artifacts from one settlement in another site far away, they take it as evidence that the world of the Neolithic Revolution was an interconnected one. This view of development sometimes makes claims about human nature—for example, that farming, domesticating animals, and settling down were all activities that humans “were meant” to do. No matter who’s 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 been living a long while in towns based on farming and trade. They’ve gotten pretty good at it: they have a reliable surplus of food, they’ve traded some of their food (and other goods) with nearby towns, and they’ve even developed rivalries. 29

English Words that Come from Polis

Politics Policy Police Polity Metropolis Anything else ending in –polis!

The origin of the first large trading cities is another source of dispute among historians. Some believe it resulted from the disintegration of tribal culture. Tribal origins still mattered, but they no longer decided where one lived or with whom. Without tribal barriers in the way, more people could live closer together. Where you lived took the place of who your grandfather was. Whatever the cause, people gravitated towards these new trade-and-commerce-based cities. Reliable access to food was attractive 30, and new forms of culture and politics took root. On the downside, roaming bands of bandits31 were attracted to cities because they held so much wealth. To keep them out, many cities placed their most important buildings on high hills and built

It wasn’t like Neolithic people could jump on Facebook and tell the world: “This farming thing is great! I think we’ll stay put and raise cows.” 27 Surprising fact of the day: two things that happen about two thousand years apart are really pretty much simultaneous. Why, just the other day in Bethlehem… 28 Probably not by telephone or Internet. 29 Congratulations, prehistoric people of the Earth. You have invented war. 30 If you sent a well-stocked McDonald’s back in time, people would probably form a city around it. 31 Yes, that’s why they’re called bandits.

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forbidding walls around their perimeters. If you lived beyond the walls, you were in trouble when the barbarians came. The earliest big cities have been difficult to categorize. At the height of their power, they were not thought of as cities as we think of them today—as parts of a nation. They were the nation. The government of a city was the government. These city-states (as they became known in the 19th century) were the undisputed centers of political, economic, and cultural life in their regions. Case Study: Ancient Greece The word “city-state” is often used as a translation of the Ancient Greece word polis. Although this translation is not perfect, it is probably as good an approximation of the idea of the Greek polis as we can manage. The polis was an idea that changed its meaning as ancient Greek cities grew in size, power, and wealth. Cities in Greece (and everywhere else) grew significantly during the Bronze Age. The Bronze Age was a period, around five thousand years ago, when people first mixed tin and copper to make bronze 32, a stronger metal that made for better tools and weapons. Better tools meant better farming, more food, greater food surpluses, more trading, and bigger cities. At first, a Greek polis was just a collection of nearby towns and villages. It was a “city” in that many people were living near one another. Over time these villages were organized into a more efficient network 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 intense pride in their cities, and your polis was thought to have a significant influence on your personality and character. 33 Ancient Greek civilization during the Classical Era (510‘‘Athens is sexy.’’ 322 B.C.E.) was a collection of independent poli. Each 34 Aristophanes, Greek playwright, 425 B.C. had its own culture, language, and traditions. The two most famous were Sparta and Athens. They had very different structures: Sparta was more a network of towns and Athens was more centralized, with surrounding “suburbs” and small towns. As Greece’s largest trading center, Athens also became a model of the highest ideals of the Greek city-state.35 Like many other 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” for citizens of

You could, in theory, do this with World Scholar’s Cup 4th and 5th place medals, and tell people you won 3rd place. Similar stereotypes still exist today. For example, many of my friends from China have told me that “Shanghainese people” are louder than those from Beijing. Are there examples of similar generalizations in your own country? 34 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 countries participating in the World Scholar’s Cup. 35 Sparta mostly became famous for being good at the war thing. 33

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the polis. Citizens gathered there to hear political and military news—and, of course, to eat and shop. In English, people afraid of going into large public spaces are still said to suffer from agoraphobia. In Aristotle’s Politics, the Greek philosopher used the Discuss with your team: What is the nearest city-state of Athens to draw conclusions about the nature equivalent to an agora in your own city? of man. Only by participating in city life, h observed, could man 36 fulfill 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 Empire Because the Greek city-state greatly influenced modern historians and city planners, you will often come across Greek words in studies of other cities. For example, in discussions of the Mayan cities of ancient America, you will hear about the “royal acropolis” in each of their cities. Needless to say, the Maya never called it an acropolis. In the Americas, just as in Europe and Asia, former hunter-gatherers began to settle down and grow crops about 4,000 years ago. As the Mayans developed new farming approaches, including crop rotation, fertilizers, and terraced fields, their settlements burst into large cities. These cities reached their height of power and influence 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.37 Although the Spanish invaders in the 1500s destroyed many Mayan artifacts, the ruins that survived 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 very orderly. Most used their highest points as sites for their most holy buildings. Entire cities and roads were built around temples, which had to be aligned properly with the heavens. Raised stone roads called causeways connected city centers with other plazas and with ball-courts, where important public rituals took place.38 Some cities were laid out symbolically: a building in the south might represent the underworld, while a northern building might represent the sky. The city-states of the Maya were some of the best examples of city planning in the ancient world.

The Industrial Revolution & the Birth of the Really Big City By the beginning of the 19th century, some parts of the world were centered on cities while others were still decidedly rural. “Uneven urbanization” still takes place today—with some regions more city-oriented than others. But a massive change was underway in the 19th century that captures the concept of “a world 36

Marx: Not Keen on Fish and Chips Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in London and reflected (gingerly) on 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.” 39

And yes, he meant man. Greeks were not much into women’s rights: only males were allowed to be citizens. These days, the annual consumer electronics show does the same thing to Las Vegas. 38 This would be like crowning the next English king at Old Trafford Stadium. 39 It is a good thing that Karl Marx was not applying for a job with London’s PR Department. 37

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transformed” better than just about any other world phenomenon. Many historians consider this Industrial Revolution the most significant event since…you guessed it…the invention of agriculture. Case Study: London By the middle of the 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 once been much smaller and village-based. All over England, these cottage industries were overtaken by giant factories. London became the center of a fabulously large and rich new empire. During the 19th century, its population exploded from one to six million.40 Immigrants poured in from all over the world. 41 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.” The people were especially packed together in London’s East End. Smoke from the city’s many factories blew eastward, and none of London’s upper class wanted to live there. Tens of thousands of the working poor, many just arrived from small towns, crammed into unhealthy and downright disgusting conditions in the East End. 42 London lacked the housing and public health infrastructure to accommodate so many newcomers. A cholera epidemic spread through the East End’s extensive slums in 1832, and again in 1848. People who had come to work in the city’s factories were wasting away in their own (and the city’s) filth. The song “No Place Like London” from the musical Sweeney Todd captures this sad reality very well: “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.” 43 The fear of cholera motivated London’s elites to improve conditions for the working class. In 1842, reformer Edwin Chadwick published a report, The Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population, drawing a clear link between diseases and overcrowded living conditions. He advocated draining all of London’s human waste into the River Thames—the city’s main source of drinking water. 44 Sewage control was becoming a major issue for bursting-at-the-seams 19th century metropolises. London continued to grow despite all the filth, air and water 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 weeks. In the aftermath, the engineer Joseph Bazalgette put on nose plugs and 40

“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

Imagine if the population of your hometown (or of your home) suddenly multiplied by a factor of six. London’s Chinatown is still the largest in Europe. 42 Following London, many European cities built “poor sections” to the east and wealthy neighborhoods to the west. 43 We wanted to feature this song in our music selections, but it has R-rated language. Keep rhyming and you’ll get there. 44 Fail. He must have missed another important link, between disease and drinking sewage. 41

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designed an underground sewer system that would 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 from 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." London’s wealthy and its banks became even Debate it wealthier by investing in new industrial projects. Cultural activities for the rich, including theater, Resolved: That inequality is necessary for cities to prosper. opera, and classical music, were well-funded, and the arts flourished. At the same time, though, the immense gap between the urban rich and urban poor was unprecedented. The German writer Friedrich Engels visited London in 1844 and was both 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 bitter state to which Industrial-era London reduced its inhabitants. “The more that Londoners are packed into a tiny space,” he wrote, “the more repulsive and disgraceful becomes 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 completely 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. Many people benefited from London’s industrial boom. Thousands of new jobs were created for civil servants, engineers, teachers, and others who were not working class, but not quite elite either. It also led to the creation of spectacles of modernity and technological progress. 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”, in which the Queen’s husband, Prince Albert, talked grandly about uniting the world through industry and technology. Belief in the potential of humanity, embodied in progress and machines, was at an all-time high. A series of modern developments followed the Great Exhibition. The first “underground railway” debuted in 186245, and museums, public gardens, and department stores cropped up everywhere. Perhaps David Copperfield, a character by 19th-century London novelist Charles Dickens, best summed up the conflicts and contradictions of the modern city. Seeing London from a distance, the young Copperfield notes, “I vaguely made it out in my own mind to be fuller of wonders and 45

The London Underground is still the world’s second largest underground railway network, after Shanghai’s.

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wickedness than all the cities of the earth.” Later, speaking for himself in his article “A December Vision”, Dickens wrote more about the wickedness than the 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 noted an approaching Directed Research Area: Ten New Megacities milestone in our urbanizing world. “Sometime in the Read about ten emerging megacities: next year or two,” he wrote, “a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee http://tinyurl.com/newmegacities his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, What do many of these cities have in common? or a farmer will move his impoverished family to one Which city was already once a global power? of Lima’s innumerable [slums]. The exact event is unimportant. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in history… for the first time, the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural.” This small but significant event has already happened. Over half the people in the world now live in cities. And that 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 this vast increase in population, many cities have expanded far beyond their centers. This urban sprawl makes it harder to calculate the exact population of a city—it is unclear where the city ends and the surrounding countryside begins. People who live in a metropolitan area may not live within a city’s exact borders, but they orient their lives around it. If someone tells you that he is from Los Angeles, he might actually be from Torrance, Orange, Riverside, Long Beach, or any of dozens of other “cities” that have their own mayors but blend directly into Los Angeles. This surplus of mayors speaks to another major issue: Debate It governance. Cities once under the direct control of a single government are now spread across many areas Resolved: That cities ought to provide housing for all with their own governments. Sometimes, cities even who live in them. sprawl past regional and national boundaries: Kansas City is largely in Missouri, and Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez is more tightly linked to El Paso in the United States—just across a narrow river—than to its own capital. Making matters even more complex, more and more of these metropolitan areas have become what scholars term megacities—in which the population exceeds 10 million people and is growing rapidly. Especially in the developing worlds, 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 (sadly) excellent case study for the many that are. The city is built on a group of islands on the edge of the massive Lagos lagoon. 46 Beginning in the 16th century, it was a key trading port between Europe and Africa. The port was taken over by the British in 1861, and all Nigeria soon came under British rule, with

Somewhere, there is probably a city named Mountos next to a mountain and a city named Valle in a valley.

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Lagos as its capital. Nigeria won independence from Britain in 1960, and Lagos became the new nation’s capital. It grew rapidly in the 1960s and through the oil boom of the 1970s, and today remains the most populated city in Africa’s most populated country—one in every five Africans is Nigerian, and about one in ten Nigerians lives in Lagos. Because of urban sprawl and the general chaos of the Discuss with your Team city, estimates for the population of Lagos range widely, from eight to over fifteen million. Whatever In 1991, Nigeria’s government relocated to the newly planned city of Abuja. In many countries, including the actual number, it is clear that the city’s runaway Brazil and the United States, the government is not growth has overwhelmed its infrastructure. “It is an based in the largest city. Why do you think this is? explosion of raised expressways hanging over mobbed Should the largest city in a country be its capital? streets of people and traffic,” writes expert 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 still arrive in Lagos weekly looking for work. There are not enough jobs for so many newcomers. This shortage has helped give rise to a vast informal economy. People take advantage of epic 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 enormous amounts of trash, looking for plastics and metals they can sell for a few pennies. 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 the government’s “slum-clearance” campaigns. Slums also suffer from high crime rates and from vulnerability to natural disasters, toxic waste, and disease.

China’s Approach As early as the 1950s, the new communist government of China recognized that, left uncontrolled, cities would, like Lagos, grow too rapidly—outstripping the available food supply. It implemented the so-called hukou system 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 was very valuable—and the government could even punish groups of people by revoking their rights to live in a city and banishing them to the countryside. The system has been gradually 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.

One billion people in the world live in slums today, many very 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 added: “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.”

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The City, Risen People have come a long way since the days of hunter-gatherers struggling to survive in the wilderness. From the original Greek city-states to the modern high-rises of Shanghai, the results of urbanization have been as uneven and unequal as they have been astonishing and beneficial.

Mini-Directed Research Area: Skyscrapers The construction of high-rise buildings has helped shape the modern vertical city. Visit www.skyscraperpage.com to learn about the world’s five tallest skyscrapers and about the five tallest skyscrapers under construction. Which is meant to be a hotel? Should the construction of skyscrapers be scaled back, or celebrated?

The majority of those moving into the world’s cities today arrive to poverty and struggle to survive—yet few return to the countryside. They stay, and they 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 places of promise. Most of the world’s leading companies and universities are based in cities; for those seeking the best possible jobs or the most prestigious possible education, there is no better place to be. Across the world, cities continue to represent an escape from the more limited possibilities of traditional towns and villages—and a chance at a new and better life.

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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 Prague and Cambridge still feel medieval, or evoke a world before automobiles—with new air-conditioned buildings and highways situated awkwardly among narrow walls and crooked streets. Others, like San Francisco, may not be as old, but the demands of their hills, rivers, and valleys still make them seem disorderly and organic to the first-time visitor: roads running into one another at strange angles, and whole neighborhoods sandwiched into odd nooks and crannies. 47 Newer cities tend to be built along grids: streets that run mostly north and south, east and west. They may be ringed by highways—as in Beijing or Houston—that try to keep traffic flowing outside of their centers. Nearly all cities in Latin America feature large pedestrian plazas at their centers—not unlike the Greek agoras. The master-planned cities of the Soviet Union were often criticized as dreary, but included parks, subway systems, and gathering places missing from many of their capitalist 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 in the first Amazing Industrial Growth Spurts section, the Mayans laid out their buildings in a Many cities experienced population booms coordinated way, and the ancient Greeks and Romans during the Industrial Revolution. Chicago grew often drew up streets in a very regular pattern, with right from a tiny speck to become America’s angles that would feel familiar to a resident of modern second-largest city by 1890. Between 1850 Manhattan. 48 Most cities, however, have evolved and 1890, Paris’s population doubled, and organically, in fits and starts. In medieval Europe, they Berlin’s quadrupled. 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

Like Harry Potter’s bedroom. Cities aren’t always planned in grids; sometimes they might follow the curve of a lake, or symbolize special beliefs.

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monuments.49 In nearly all cities, new arrivals made do with whatever affordable living space they found—meaning even well-planned centers gave way to messier surroundings. As cities grew during the Industrial Revolution, the shortcomings of unstructured city layouts became painfully clear. Manufactured goods were difficult to transport down narrow streets, and swelling populations built homes wherever they could—often leaving no room for schools and public services, let alone wide streets. Trains promised a newly interconnected world, but often there was room to lay down neither train tracks in a city nor a train station near its center—not without displacing thousands of people, which some cities did. What we think of as modern city planning to address these issues began during this period, with Paris in the 1850s. Case Study: Paris Paris is the ultimate 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. If you visit Paris today, it may seem as if it dropped fully formed out of the sky. Its major boulevards form a perfect 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, 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 that the city would change, with or without direction from above. From 1800 and 1850, its population had doubled to a million. The Industrial Revolution brought new technologies and new jobs, including railways linking Paris to the countryside. Just as in London, many rural laborers flocked to the city to find work in 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. Working people lived in slums and often rioted. Paris, again like London, was unprepared to deal with so many people. The lack of a sewer system to process all that human waste was a deadly problem. Cholera raged through Paris’s overcrowded neighborhoods. Many Parisians in the early 19th century viewed the city as distasteful, unhealthy, chaotic, and dirty. Visiting Paris, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: “I saw only small, dirty and stinking streets, ugly black houses, an air of filth, poverty, beggars…” 50 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. 49 50

Even today, most medinas are closed to automobile traffic—and, in any case, they wouldn’t fit in most medina streets. He’s the same guy who called cities the pit of all human misery.

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Napoleon III appointed lawyer Georges-Eugene Haussmann to mastermind a total overhaul of the city. Haussmann faced a colossal task: essentially building a new city where an existing 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 tore apart old, narrow streets in favor of grand new boulevards. Entire residential areas were wiped out. Many of the city’s poorest tenants were ejected. Thousands of buildings, including some stunning examples of medieval architecture, were destroyed. French writers and artists of the time lambasted Haussmann for wiping out so much of the older, quirkier Paris they loved.

‘‘Haussmannization’’ A term invented in 19th-century Paris meaning “drastic, centralized, violent urban renewal”. Mini-Directed Research Area: The Haussmannization of Beijing China prepared for the 2008 Olympics by redesigning Beijing as a modern megacity— building an expensive new airport terminal (the second largest in the world), new hotels, new subway lines, and more. The government even ran campaigns against public spitting 51—once common in Chinese cities—and took dramatic steps to reduce pollution, including limiting the number of cars on the streets. But the makeover, like Paris’s, was not without its critics. One focus of criticism: the loss of Beijing’s hutongs. Why were so many destroyed? Was it worth it? Watch this video to learn more about them: www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=2868888n

Haussmann invented a new visual style: the “street-wall”. He imagined buildings not as separate entities, but as a wall of structures, built at precise angles, that would give streets a sense of order and cleanliness. He created wide avenues perfect for promenading in public and for stores to display products to wealthy consumers. He also made use of a new technology—gas lights—to illuminate Paris’s streets at night. The project had an important political purpose, too: to make it harder for potential rioters and revolutionaries to block streets with barricades 52, and to make it easier for the French army to clamp down on them when they tried.53 Haussmann’s work produced some undeniably Debate it! positive results. The rate of infectious disease Resolved: That Haussmann’s redesign improved Paris. dropped and Paris’s new sewer system 54 was praised as one of the wonders of the civilized world. Traffic circulation improved and many of Haussmann’s new buildings proved more functional than the structures they replaced. Robert Moses, the 20th-century urban planner responsible for many of New York City’s highways, bridges, public beaches, and power stations, declared himself a great admirer of Haussmann. 55 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 urban theorists are still critical of Haussmann’s transformation of Paris. They argue that his changes imposed the desires and cold rationality of 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. Napoleon III hoped this move would increase his own approval ratings. People were complaining that Haussmann’s project was costing too much.

Gaston would approve. Hearing the people sing, singing the song of angry men, was never much fun for the French government. 53 One of Harvard’s dormitories was built with similar principles in mind. Really. I had the misfortune to live there. 54 If there is a unifying theme to this Resource, it is: “It’s all about the sewers.” 55 Like Haussmann, Robert Moses became a highly controversial figure. You’ll research him later in the guide. 52

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Suburbs: Enter 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.

Directed Research Area: Suburbs of Tomorrow Explore National Geographic’s vision of the suburbs of the future: http://tinyurl.com/newsuburb. Do these suburbs make owning a car more or less important? Where do they locate their public transport? Discuss with your team: are such suburbs realistic, and would you choose to live in them?

During the Industrial Revolution, when cities such as London and Manchester56 were covered in an almost permanent cloud of black smoke, many people decided to take advantage of new rail transportation options to live as far from the city as possible. As early as 1841, Calvert Holland, on a visit to the British steelproducing city of Sheffield, noted that most who could afford it lived far from their workplaces. Innovations in transportation made possible this new routine of daily “commuting” into cities for work purposes. In the United States, for example, the arrival of railways in the 1830s allowed businessmen to live in smaller towns outside the city and commute into their city offices by train. As automobile culture spread in the United States, suburbs became popular residential options for upper-middle-class commuters. Many new suburban communities were built from the ground up— each house equipped with a special bedroom for the newest member of the American family, the car. Case Study: Levittown, New York Perhaps the most famous and influential American The original Levittown was oriented around suburb was Levittown, constructed on Long Island just New York City, yet it represented everything outside New York City.57 The original Levittown was the that New York City was not. brainchild of builder William Leavitt, who had intended to call his community “Island Trees”. This original name for America’s original suburb conjured a vision of a peaceful natural setting—everything New York City was not. 58 Although Levittown was New York City-oriented, and built for families headed by men who worked in the city, in the 1940s and 1950s it was a low-density, low-population, and no-diversity kind of place. It was the anti-city. The original Levittown was a community of single-family homes built quickly and efficiently (up to 30 Levittown houses could be constructed in a single day) and intended 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 were allowed to live in Levittown, and the community was only accessible by automobile.59 The Levittown model of mass-produced suburban communities (quickly imitated by other developers) would prove very influential. As the century rolled on, more and more Americans began to idealize single-family homes and suburban living as a fulfillment of the American dream.

Manchester, in northern England, was nicknamed “Cottonopolis” during the 19th-century. Can you guess why? 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 City. Some historians suggest the American feminist movement was sparked by these house-trapped suburban women. 57

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Although Levittown looks different today—it is now longer an all-white community, and residents have altered the original structures of the 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.

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.

Today, with cities growing so rapidly, urban sprawl—the haphazard expansion of cities in all directions—is becoming harder to control. The effects on cities, rural areas, and the environment have been massive. In certain areas, such as Southern California and Shanghai, urban and suburban neighborhoods stretch essentially unbroken 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.”

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

São Paulo was founded in 1554 by Portuguese missionaries. During the coffee boom of the late 19th century, the village grew into a city and became a hub for railroads and trade. By 1895, over half its 130,000 residents were immigrants, many from countries as distant 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 long after Volkswagen discontinued them elsewhere. This ongoing car manufacturing boom brought 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 industry, 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 Pompeu 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 in a way that admiration becomes fear.”

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The original city of São Paulo is now lost in a vast metropolitan region: a post-industrial polycentric metropolis, with an already sizable population growing four to five percent every year. All over São Paulo new centers and hubs have sprouted up, independent of the old definition of the city’s 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 rapidly since the 1980s. In this way, it is similar to Lagos and nearly every other megacity in the developing world. Unsurprisingly, a 2007 quality of life survey found that neighborhoods around the city center had a higher quality of life than those on the fringes. A worldwide trend can be seen in São Paulo: older suburbs, once realms of the welloff, are overrun and impoverished, while the center has become an expensive and 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.

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.

Measures meant to address sprawl and pollution have proven largely unsuccessful. Luiza Erundina, mayor from 1989 to 1991, proposed a policy of free bus transport for all citizens. It was defeated, perhaps because of doubts over how it would be funded: more taxes. Erundina’s successor focused on making São Paulo more car-friendly, approving expensive new traffic tunnels and highway expansions to ease overcrowded streets. The irony of building new highways, tunnels, and Urban planners often try to address traffic bridges is that, often, these projects—meant to reduce congestion by building more highways, which traffic jams—may end up encouraging more traffic. unfortunately become just as quickly congested According to Brazilian observer Norman Gall, “the as the original highways. 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.” Some 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 struggle to keep up with the city’s growth. Until the 1990s the subways were known for passengers crowding onto the roofs and in the doorways 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.

Transportation and the City Urban sprawl of the kind seen in São Paulo has many sources, including rapid economic growth, inadequate 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. 60

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

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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 routes of transportation. As the world’s first large industrial city, London was also the first to address the problem of moving people around the metropolis. In the early days of the industrial city, 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 successfully copied a French invention: the omnibus. Omnibuses were larger horsedrawn 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.

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

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 cities and towns vastly increased the flow of goods and people into the city. London’s streets were an ever-worsening mess. To address the problem, London’s Directed Research Area: The Ten Weirdest Ways Metropolitan Board of Works built London may have had the first subway, but Istanbul trams—omnibuses with metal wheels wasn’t far behind with the second. It is included in that rode along metal tracks. Trams this list of ten weird modes of transportation. Check carried more people than omnibuses them out—it’s an entertaining read—and be ready to (two horses could pull 50 people on a identify them in the Scholar’s Bowl: tram), ran more often, and charged lower http://travel.ca.msn.com/international/rdfares. They did much to expand the city, gallery.aspx?cp-documentid=26843571&page=1 allowing working people to move out of 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.

Many of these neighborhoods, such as Brixton, are no longer considered suburbs; they are now part of London.

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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, steampowered underground trains were more expensive than the trams and omnibuses, and slower, too. The Underground’s transition from steam to No Ordinary Smog electric power in the 1890s changed everything. Electric trains were more In 1952, a lethal combination of fog, smoke, and pollution (called the “Great Smog”) killed 4,000 people in London. comfortable and could compete better in speed with the trams overhead. The price to ride them fell, and they even reached London’s posh West End, which had not been connected to public transportation. The electric train signaled the end of the age of the horse, and, for London, the beginning of an era of vast residential suburbs of lower-middle-class workers. 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 the Shanghai Metro first opened in 1995, Shanghai was only the third city in China with a rapid transit system. Today, its 12 lines are connected to over 1,000 bus lines and a famous Maglev (“magnetic levitation”) train that takes passengers from downtown (sort of) to the airport at a breathtaking 431 kilometers per hour. The system continues to grow; according to the Los Angeles Times, by 2020 Shanghai will have more kilometers of subway track than the entire country of Japan. Shanghai built its subway beginning in the Discuss with your Team 1990s, to accommodate a fast-growing urban Why is China better able to undertake public transportation population. China is the fastest-urbanizing projects than more developed countries such as the United country in the world, and its city planners have States? Read about the latest United States initiatives at tried to stay ahead of the curve and limit air www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2039897,00.html pollution and traffic congestion. Their hope is to follow in the footsteps of prosperous cities such as New York City, Berlin, and London, in which mass transit systems have made owning and driving cars much less important: even well-off New Yorkers take subways to work. By contrast, in cities such as Jakarta and Los Angeles that lack good public transport systems, the upper classes expect to drive (or be driven) wherever they need to go. Other Chinese cities are following the same model. Eleven already have mass transit systems, and nineteen more have them under construction. The Chinese government is investing over $150 62

It takes an iPhone app to navigate it all.

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billion dollars annually into these projects. By contrast, the United States government spends about $2 billion a year on public transport, and has taken over 20 years to build fewer than 60 kilometers of actual subway line in the city of Los Angeles. Despite careful city planning and massive investments in its metro system, 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 in recent years. 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 booming construction industry. All over Shanghai, cranes hover above new high-rise apartments. A city full of construction sites does not make traffic move any faster. Of course, the building boom in China extends far beyond Shanghai; it has completely 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 Modern Cities One of the first ways people noticed cars transforming cities, around the 1920s, was that children could no longer play safely in the street. Nearly 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 contributes to traffic and pollution.63 In the developed world, those who pay the most taxes are generally those who least need—or want to help fund—public transportation. Case Study: Mexico City Mexico City is the very model of a Mini-Directed Research Area: Congestion Pricing sprawling modern metropolis. It has Some cities, such as London, charge people a hefty fee spread from its historic center up the to drive their vehicles into the city center or at peak surrounding hillsides and mountains, times of day. Where has the plan been successful? Why expanding from nine square kilometers do you think it might be controversial? Begin your research here: www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=6241 at the start of the 20th century to over 1,500 square kilometers today. Its population has grown from 3 to 19 million in just the last 50 years. In part because of the city’s high altitude, at which fuel burns less efficiently and the blazing sun quickly converts fuel particles into smog, pollution in the city often reaches 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 often grew so bad that “birds fell dead in mid-flight, and children used brown crayons to draw the sky.” Faced with too many polluting cars crowding the streets, 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 encourage drivers to purchase cleaner hybrid cars—perhaps by giving them tax credits—or they might charge drivers more for entering certain parts of the city, as in London. In 1989 Mexico City took a more direct approach, hoping for immediate results: it outlawed one-fifth of all cars from being driven on any given day of the workweek.

As one particularly ingenious billboard put it: “You’re not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.”

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The program was called Hoy No Circula (referred to in English as “One Day Without a Car”). It quickly spawned imitators in São Paulo, Bogotá, and other cities. The system was based on a car’s license plate number. If a number 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—great for the automobile industry, but not especially helpful for reducing traffic and preserving the environment.

Housing Prices in the Modern Metropolis As anyone moving to a booming city quickly discovers, finding affordable housing can be stressful. Cities are expensive: the price for a place to live can be many times greater than in rural areas. 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 expensive it is. The closer it is to undesirable areas, such as a noisy airport or a crime-ridden neighborhood, the more affordable it is.

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.

In San Diego, one of the most beautiful cities in California, homes are incredibly expensive all the way up and down its coastline—except in the neighborhood of Ocean Beach, just a few kilometers from the center of the city. This one area, says the community’s 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.” Then it admits why it is so much cheaper than the rest of San Diego: “Sunny days are punctuated with the occasional jet roaring overhead.” Occasionally is an understatement. Ocean Beach is directly below the path of airplanes landing all day at San Diego International Airport. Space concerns also play a part in determining prices. The more people who want to squeeze into a small urban space, such as Manhattan or Tokyo, the more expensive housing grows. Cities on islands have a harder time finding more space than cities in the middle of the desert; if you need a cheaper place to live in Dubai, you just travel further out from the city center, but if you need a cheaper place to live in Singapore, you have nowhere to go—except off the island. Unsurprisingly, many island cities construct new land in the ocean itself. Inflated housing prices have the most impact on Directed Research Area: Robert Moses the working poor. Since the Industrial Robert Moses is one of the most famous— Revolution, cities have depended on low-cost and most controversial—city planners of labor to man factories, staff restaurants and the 20th century. Who was he, what was shops, and drive the economy. Less well-off his philosophy, and with what city is he people looking to make a better life for their most associated? What are some of his families have, in turn, depended on cities to most famous projects in that city? provide opportunities. But, as we saw in Lagos and São Paulo, modern cities rarely provide enough housing for the urban poor. Gentrification, in which upper-class residents (“the gentry”) move into urban neighborhoods and buildings that were once occupied by lower-class residents, pushing them out in the process, has become widespread in cities in the United States and Europe. Nowhere is this more evident than in New York City, where high rents in Manhattan have driven would-be residents to less desirable

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surrounding areas. 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: by 2008, the average price for new apartments in Harlem (mostly along its southern border) had hit $900,000, while the area’s 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 even the first Starbucks has arrived. Members of the community have tried to boycott it, but to no avail. When a neighborhood begins to gentrify, it is a hard process to stop—and many residents who own property may find they can benefit by reselling it.

Directed Research Area: China’s ‘‘Empty’’ City The brand new Chinese city of Ordos has the second higher per capita income in China—and almost no residents, though it was meant to house a million people. Read more about the city of Ordos here and here, and watch a brief video about it here (you can start at 1:11.) What are some of the reasons so few people live in Ordos? If you were the government, what would you and your team do to change that?

In Mumbai, India, slum-clearance has become more common as the land on which slum-dwellers live has grown more valuable. Many slum-dwellers have been forced 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 (especially around events such as the Olympics) have also tended to push the poor further from city centers. Investors refurbish old factories 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 in value a reality. Tomorrow’s city is not only different than today’s city, but, likely as not, more expensive too.

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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. My friend Dave 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—let alone as many fun things to do at night. 64 Beyond the music, we both just loved walking down the ‘‘New York, like London, seems to be a [toilet streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Seeing all sorts of filled with] all the depravities of human nature.’’ different people and meeting other artists—including all Thomas Jefferson the desperate screenplay writers at Starbucks—was 3rd President of the United States 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 window were a Dominican church 65 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 that food surpluses and toilets play in modernity, but there is more to modern life than food 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 urban culture.

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 business and the proliferation of American brands everywhere, cities around the world will always have their own identities. Shanghai will always be Shanghai, and Dubai will always be Dubai. Geographical differences, unique histories, and cultural traditions make cities different from one another. As history professor Anthony King writes, “To be described as urban supposedly gives some insight into a subject’s lifestyle…living in a city, bearing the identity of 64 65

Like partying in my broom closet. No, not a Dominion church. Those haven’t been invented yet.

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an Angelino, Berliner, New Yorker, or Dehli-wallah, confers the added value of the attributes of a particular city.” In the book, “Who’s Your City?” economist Richard ‘‘New York is a different country. Maybe it Florida writes that “the city” is a concept that needs ought to have a separate government’’ constant updating. Florida proposes the “megaregion” as Henry Ford the new standard unit of cities for the 21st century. You can think of a mega-region as a large area of continuous urbanization, including at least a couple of urban “nodes”. Florida uses the “Rio-Paulo” region, which encompasses the area between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, as an example of a megaregion. We will tend to refer to megacities in this guide, but they are not too different from Florida’s megaregions. Florida believes megaregions can be very similar even ‘‘Cities force growth, and make men talkative from one continent to the next. “The more two and entertaining, but they make them artificial.’’ megaregions have in common financially,” he writes, Ralph Waldo Emerson “the more likely they are to develop similar social mores, cultural tastes, and even political leanings.” Florida proposes that any two megaregions—say, Shanghai and Sydney, or London and New York—have more in common than a megaregion and a small town, even in the same country. Whether you shop at Uniqlo in Dubai or in Singapore, or eat fresh sushi in Astana or Adelaide, you are participating in an ever more global metropolitan culture.

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 city feature. Walkability is making a comeback even in sprawling megacities as parking spots fill up and people tire of depending on their cars. More planners are incorporating walkable “downtowns” into their designs even for new suburban areas. “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,” wrote a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute in the United States. Florida emphasizes the importance of “talent-clustering” At the Ritz Carlton hotel in Tokyo, business in big cities. “When people—especially talented and travellers and Japanese big spenders can order creative ones—cluster together, ideas flow more a Diamonds Are Forever martini-----poured over freely…the end result amounts to much more than the a one-carat diamond-----for a modest 1.8 million sum of the parts,” he writes. Cities are a little nerdy, and yen (about $22,000). a little artsy. 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 city rent prices are so high in desirable city areas. Anonymity—the ability to walk around town without anyone knowing or caring who you are—is a 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 dark side—alienation—a feeling of 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

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the 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—more famous for his recent 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 Tokyo’s Ginza district, 10,000 luxury shops are crammed into just eight blocks. As translator Lea Jacobson put it, “During rush hour, some two million human beings regularly 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 has suggested that people who live in cities make mental adjustments to help them cope with their crowdedness and fast pace. Because they are so overstimulated, they cultivate what Simmel calls a “blasé attitude”—the ability to ignore and not care about most of what happens around them. One can see evidence of this attitude on buses, on sidewalks, and even in elevators, where strangers are pushed much closer together than in any normal human circumstances, but act as if nothing unusual is happening—and do their best to avoid eye contact. 66 This ability to ignore strangers literally breathing down one’s neck implies another characteristic of city living: tolerance. Cities are more diverse than suburbs: an Indian businessman in New York might eat an Israeli falafel in the park next to a homeless white woman and a Chinese gay couple with an adopted child from Africa. Frequent exposure to such diversity appears to build a tolerance of different people and beliefs. Such tolerance may help explain why cities tend to be politically progressive—in the United States, liberal Democrats nearly always win over voters in cities, while conservative Republicans sweep most of the countryside.

These days, they tend to stare at their cell phones.

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Because of the rise of megacities with many centers, and suburbs with more walkable downtown areas, the line between urban and suburban lifestyles and attitudes is blurring—but, in general, the more crowded an area, the more tolerant of strangers and of difference people will become. Cities are twenty-four hour institutions. Picture any landmark of “urban” life—perhaps Times Square in New York on New Year’s Eve or the glittering Bund in Shanghai every night of the year. They all share the quality of electric light. That light allows life to go on after dark. In the words of their residents, 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 countryside, but it was the invention and popularization of electricity that truly made them hubs of all-night activity. Once lamps existed, “urban social activities were able to transcend nature,” writes historian Marshall Berman. Just like a city’s daytime shopping areas, illuminated urban areas built for nightlife are also built for socializing and consumption. The presence of work and leisure activities continuing through the night gives urban areas an atmosphere lacking in areas more tied to the rhythms of the sun—where the only place to go at night 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 Tokyo neighborhood of Shinjuku that surrounds the world’s busiest commuter train station exposes visitors to more square feet of constant advertising (most of it illuminated) than any other place in the world. Tokyo’s nightlife scene is so vast that it has no single center. The most famous nightlife neighborhoods 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 known for drawing people from all over the world, while Ginza is infamous for its upscale bars. Shinjuku is more central and spreads out for miles with late-night shops, restaurants, and clubs. In all these neighborhoods, bars and clubs are known to open at three each 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, ‘‘If you think you’ve been on a crowded bus, or hectic, formal workplace by day and just as busy, hectic, in a jam-packed rock concert, you have never and informal a playground by night. One travel guide seen anything quite like Japan Railways in the describes the difference between daytime and nighttime morning; staff are actually hired to be Tokyo as a total metamorphosis: “By day, Tokyo is ‘pushers’-----people whose sole purpose is to push people into trains…’’ arguably one of the least attractive cities in the world. Come dusk, the drabness fades and the city blossoms Turner Wright, Matador Network 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 scenes, they can blend into long sleepless stretches of work and play.

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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. It would be no exaggeration to say that the introduction of domestic air conditioning (in 1924) and the ability to transport electricity, food and water over long distances changed all that. Existing cities, such as Los Angeles, gave birth to suburbs in more distant, far less hospitable inland valleys, where temperatures could soar over 45 C in the summer. Entire cities, like the gambling, retirement, and quick marriage mecca of Las Vegas 67, took shape in the desert. Case Study: Dubai Most historical transformations do not happen overnight. Even the Internet took a few years to catch on. 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, ostensibly under British control. The discovery of oil changed everything. The British left in 1971, and today Dubai is one of the fastest-growing, most extravagantly-developed 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 instead 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. In the next few years, Dubai will open the largest airport in the world—Al Maktoum International Airport—with a capacity of up to 160 million passengers per year. Some of those passengers will be coming to visit Dubai, but many will be transiting to other destinations. 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 United States 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 development taking place as Shanghai—a city with over a dozen times its population. Since 2008, 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 once again.

‘‘Dubai is a mind-bogglingly massive, multibillion-dollar experiment in city-building, and nobody can predict with certainty the outcome of this experiment.’’ Mean Green Cougar Red Blog

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

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To construct Dubai’s 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 a matter of decades, Dubai has transformed itself from a string of tiny desert towns into a towering global city. Dubai’s rapid 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. The consumption of water in the United Arab Emirates is particularly striking: the average resident consumes 145 gallons of water per day. This is the highest rate of water consumption in the world, and much of that consumption takes place in Dubai and its many suburbs. The country relies on desalinization for 98% of its water—an expensive, energy-consuming process that converts seawater into over four billion bottles of drinkable water per day. This process burns carbon-based fuels and dumps the salty brine separated from the water back into the sea, making the sea even saltier than it was. 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 time outside isn’t really an option. A third of cars in Dubai are sport utility vehicles (SUVs), notorious for 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 spends over an hour on the road daily. 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—in particular outside of the shopping districts of the old town, Bur Dubai. 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. 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 have dredged up around 33 million cubic meters of sand and shell from the seabed of the Gulf. This process has 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. Massive numbers of fuel-consuming ships, planes, and trucks are required to keep the population fed, clothed, and entertained. There seems to be little alternative: living in the middle of the desert is not that different than living on an island.

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Many groups are working on making Dubai more sustainable—and the government of the United Arab Emirates seems to take the problem seriously—but given the city’s location, enormous 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 fascinated writers and filmmakers for decades. It is fitting that electricity, the invention that gave rise to modern nightlife, also helped give rise to cinema, and to its depictions of night in the city—including a classic 1950 film noir68 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). 69 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 city skylines, and industrial warehouses. You might say their themes represented the opposite of the sunny suburban ideals of Levittown—which was built around the same time these classic films were made. Perhaps those fleeing to the suburbs were in fact fleeing the kind of city life imagined 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, and which we considered for this year’s World Scholar’s Cup before deciding on Forrest Gump. 70 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 specific issues of modern cities that were becoming 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 living conditions of the poor. Interestingly, and unlike most of the films it influenced, Metropolis has a happy ending: the two classes agree to reunite and reform their city.

Film noir is a fancy French term for “dark films”, or films of the night. And before the street begins. 70 Metropolis fits the theme perfectly—there’s no denying that. But we were worried it might put teams to sleep. 69

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Gotham City You have probably heard of another imaginary city influenced by Metropolis, German Expressionism, and film noirs: Gotham City, home of Batman and his trusty sidekick Robin. The 1989 Batman movie, directed by Tim Burton, opens with a shot of Gotham City from afar. The dark, swirling soundtrack and the illuminated city give us a clue about why Batman is called “The Dark Knight”: we only ever see Gotham City at night, when both criminals and crime fighters go to work. Batman’s origin story—he dedicated himself to fighting crime after witnessing his parents murder at the hands of a mugger—reflects popular fears about the city. It is a place that needs saving by a superhero, in which crime and corruption are everywhere. It is also a place in which identities are fluid, especially after sundown. By day, Batman is mild-mannered businessman Bruce Wayne, but at night he becomes someone else entirely. Gotham 71 is a place in which all kinds of people—from heroes like Batman to villains like the Joker—operate outside the norms of society 72, do their work at night, and come to understand each other as outsiders, no matter how different their aims and values. 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 and rob them. Gotham is rough and dangerous, but is also magnificent Discuss it enough to be the backdrop to Batman’s heroic feats. Because Batman watches the city from atop a What do fictional cities tell us about the worlds in which they were imagined? 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 crimefighting—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 City would be complete ‘‘[Superman’s] Metropolis is New York in the without a mention to Metropolis, home of Superman. 73 daytime, Gotham City is New York at night.’’ Metropolis, too, is an imaginary city, dating back to its George Miller, Comic Book Artist first mention in a 1939 comic book. Like Gotham City, its location and history have shifted over the years, as different writers, artists, and filmmakers have added to the Superman universe. Often, Metropolis is, like Chicago, in the Midwest of the United States, as it is in the television series Smallville. Other times, it is just New York City with a different name. Almost always, it is more prosperous than Gotham—a realization of the urban dream of the 1940s, with majestic architecture, broad avenues, and even a bustling free press. But it also transforms at night, and its sunny surface hides villains and injustice that only Superman can fight.74

“Gotham” actually means “place where goats are kept”. 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. 73 If you ever want to hold a debate at a comic book convention, try asking whether Batman or Superman is more heroic. 74 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. 72

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From City-State to City-Planet The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, whose short stories you’ve explored in the literature subject, also 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, now 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.”

Meet the Jetsons

The Jetsons was a popular 1960s cartoon (revived briefly in the 1980s) about a family of the future— sort of the space age equivalent of the 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-fnsmWR4 Flying cars are the iconic image of the Jetsons. For many people in the mid-20th century, it made a lot of 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 airplanes were ferrying passengers around the world. Just as trains and then omnibuses had led to private cars, surely passenger planes would one day lead to private flying machines in every garage. Unsurprisingly, the 1980s version of the Jetsons spent much more time on computers. But there was no mention of the Internet: George Jetson never sent an email.

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. 75 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 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 levels 76. In another set of stories and novels—the Foundation series—Asimov imagines a planet, Trantor, which rules the entire Galactic Empire. Trantor is different from every other planet in the galaxy: it is one giant city, with over 45 billion inhabitants.

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, at least as originally described, had any automobiles. At a time when many science fiction writers were prophesizing flying cars and highways in the sky, Asimov was picturing giant indoor spaces full of efficient people movers—like the moving walkways at airports—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 easily without one. Had he grown up in Los Angeles, his future cities might have had cars, and traffic jams. Some critics believe he may have been 75

People have essentially all moved into college dormitories. 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. Slums, maybe. But not slummy caves.

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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. Perhaps tellingly, when Asimov returned to write new Discuss with your Team novels set on Trantor late in his career, he introduced Why might Asimov’s vision of Trantor have some completely new elements. Cars (albeit not the changed so much in only 40 years? flying sort) made their first appearance. 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.

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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 suggests Chicago’s secondary position to New York in the hierarchy 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 it was destroyed by a massive fire in 1871. Today’s Chicago is the second Chicago: “The Second City.” Cities transform and are transformed all the time. Sometimes, as in the Great Chicago Fire or the devastation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the changes are imposed by nature and massive in scale. Sometimes the transformations 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 Caracas and Mumbai more sustainable with the addition of urban farms. Almost always, the true 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?

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What is the environmental impact of city living?

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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 even run for office promising to stop (or start) development of certain projects. In Santiago, the capital of Chile, community groups were recently able to stop the construction of a new highway, demanding it be built underground to limit its effect on their neighborhoods. By contrast, community groups in Beijing were unable to stop the Chinese government from destroying entire historic neighborhoods before the 2008 Olympics. In general, the more democratic a country, the greater the role its citizens can play in city planning. The result of democracy in city planning can be positive, but it can also be paralyzing—as in the case of Los Angeles, where the government has been unable to select a site or decide on a strategy for a badly-needed new international airport because so many different groups have protested so many different plans for so many years. By contrast, Dubai was able to lay the groundwork for the world’s largest airport in a matter of months and will finish building it within a few years.

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Governments can also use tax incentives to encourage growth in certain areas and to discourage growth in others—for example, 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 isolated from international trade. In many countries, such as China and Korea, certain cities are designated as special economic zones and allowed to trade more openly with other countries. They can also, of course, invest directly in cities: constructing roads, highways, buildings, and more. And the political inclination of a government affects where and in what it makes these investments. For example, China has recently invested in growing new cities in its interior, hoping to balance economic growth which until now has focused on its coastal regions. The recent “economic stimulus bill” in the United States has funded the modernization of highways in cities all around 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 underwrite the construction of the tallest building in the world in part as a political symbol of its economic success. 77 Political systems and ideologies can have dramatic consequences on cities and on how governments manage them. For example, 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. Broadly speaking, the more socialist a country’s government, the greater its role in managing its cities—and their future development. Case Study: Berlin In 1945, at the end of World War II, Germany’s capital city, Berlin, was, like Germany itself, 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 zones to form a new communist country, the German Democratic Republic (the GDR, or “East Germany”). An awkward situation resulted: Berlin was located well within the borders of East Germany, essentially a satellite state of the Soviet Union, but the Western half of Berlin was still controlled by the United States, Britain, and France. East German Directed Research Area: efforts to take over West Berlin by blocking it from Communist Urban Infrastructure its allies (essentially starving it out) failed 78, and the Moscow is Europe’s second-largest city. two halves of the city were forced to coexist sideAlthough the city is no longer communist, by-side. much of its Soviet infrastructure is still in place. Read about its public heating pipes In 1961, East Germany began construction of the and metro system. What has happened as Berlin Wall—cutting West Berlin off from East Moscow’s heating pipes have decayed? How would you describe its Soviet-era Berlin and East Germany. The East German metro stations? Skim this article on the government called the wall a protective barrier tragic impacts of a recent heat wave in against Western “fascist” influences, but in reality Moscow. How did the city’s design worsen it was trying to stop its own citizens from fleeing. the effects of the heat wave? 77 78

For many, it was more a symbol of Dubai’s excess. Last year’s participants might remember the Berlin Airlift.

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It had been losing 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”—because anyone caught crossing was shot dead by armed guards. Between 1961 and 1989, more than 150 people died trying to cross it. Over 300 watchtowers kept a stern eye on activities near the wall. Life in either half of the divided city was strange, to say the least. Those in the West were stranded in a walled city in the middle of a hostile country. Those in East Berlin were connected to the rest of East Germany—but forbidden from crossing to the capitalist West just down the street. Some West Berliners resented their situation: they felt trapped in a place that, though more comfortable than East Berlin, was not truly secure. Meanwhile, many East Berliners resented all the prosperity just on the other side of a wall they could not cross. Each half of Berlin developed a very different culture. Historian David Clay Large writes, with some exaggeration for dramatic effect: “[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 products 79 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, largescale, practical, and cheap to construct—but prone to decay. As one traveler put it: “West Berlin is gaudy and gay. East Berlin is tawdry and gray.” East Berlin’s artists and musicians were closely monitored by the state—and by fellow citizens— for signs of capitalist corruption. (East Germany was notorious for the number of its citizens who “informed” for the government.) For a long time, rock music was banned because it was seen as a Western creation. Meanwhile, artists from abroad often traveled to West Berlin for inspiration; American and British rockers such as Iggy Pop and David Bowie came in the 1970s to experience life in the walled city. In part because the West German government exempted residents of West Berlin from military service, many young Germans moved there—bringing with them the energy and nightlife of youth.

Directed Research Area: 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?

In 1989, during a period in which the Soviet Union was becoming more open to the West, the East German government made an unexpected announcement. It had decided, quite vaguely, to allow “private trips abroad”. In East Berlin, a mob of citizens, on cars and on foot, ran for the Wall. The checkpoint guards were unprepared for the crowds; some had not even heard the news, and no one knew the details of the new policies. Overwhelmed, they eventually let them 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 apart gripped the world. The two Germanys officially reunited on October 3, 1990, with a single Berlin as its capital. 79

Including delicious chocolates that were much prized by residents of East Berlin.

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Even today, differences linger between the two halves of Berlin and of Germany: their western halves are younger and more prosperous. West and East Berlin provide a superb demonstration of what can happen when two similar cities are developed by governments with very different political 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.

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.

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 that surround then. Because cities are Mini-Directed Research Area: Ten Sustainable Cities high-density, with people living closer together Check out this gallery of some of the in apartment buildings instead of in single-family world’s most sustainable cities, beginning homes, the urban residential lifestyle is more with Copenhagen—which you’ll also read efficient—requiring less energy per person. In about in the case study below. cities with good public transportation options, it www.themarknews.com/articles/3077-thecan be easier to walk than to depend on a world-s-10-greenest-cities pollution-spewing car. What special efforts are these cities making to earn this distinction? Discuss with your But even densely-populated cities are surrounded team: which approaches would you want by less dense areas. A recent Yale University your own city to adopt, if any? 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. Cities need a “green” makeover just as much as the suburbs need to be remade to be more like cities. Case Study: Copenhagen Cities around the world are taking different approaches to making their cities sustainable. The compact Danish capital city of Copenhagen has provided one intriguing 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 special bicycle paths with their own traffic signals. The government even provides bicycles that anyone can borrow. Users pay just a small deposit to use them, which they get back when they return them at the end of the day—like luggage carts at many airports. To make bicycle use even more attractive, the city is constructing new interconnected bike paths called greenways to permit safe,

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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. 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 need to create more space for pedestrians, bikers, and public transportation. Gehl believes even cities ten times the size of Copenhagen can incorporate these ideas and become healthier, more pleasant places to live. 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 on (no pun intended) in cities around the world, particularly in those that have faced water shortages. The government expects that, within fifteen years, Debate it! Copenhagen will become carbon-neutral. This would Resolved: That any city can “Copenhagenize” make Copenhagen the first carbon-neutral capital in the itself. 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 and sustaining a city. 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-

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grown food reasonable. And urban farms could provide much-needed jobs and green spaces in crowded megacities. Critics, however, believe that 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 carjammed city. In Mumbai, India, one of the most densely-populated cities in the world, no space goes unused: urban farmers grow food on rooftop terraces and 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.

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 options (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

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: Keeping up with the Jonesopolis Just as cities cause the growth of suburbs around them, 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 Rome 80, and the imperial palace in Seoul looked a lot like the Forbidden City in Beijing—just smaller. Visit colonial Mexico City and you will see echoes of Madrid.

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.

More recent imitative cities have been less about looking back to a colonial power, and more about duplicating an established city’s economic success. One of the most successful such initiatives has been the Chinese city of Shenzhen—one of the fastest-growing cities in the world for the last 30 years. In 1979, the Chinese government decided to make 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-controlled economic powerhouse, with over 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.81 The city is a vast spread of skyscrapers, manufacturing centers, and new residents. With Hong Kong back in Chinese hands but still autonomous, with its own border and legal system, the governments of both 80 81

But with a lot more cats. It also manufactures World Scholar’s Cup medals. And serves delicious frog dishes.

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cities are looking toward a future in which they will merge into a single metropolis. Immigration checkpoints and separate public transport systems will no longer stand in the way of growth. 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. 82 With a diverse population of about five million, efficient public 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. 83 Like Dubai, it is one of the world’s leading financial centers. Singapore’s cultural power and influence are perhaps best on display across the Straits of Jodhor on its northern border. Across a one kilometer bridge is an entirely 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, even though it only gained official city status in 1994. 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 about two million. About fifty thousand of its residents commute to Singapore daily for work, including many Singaporeans who choose to live in Johor Bahru. Housing (and nearly everything else) costs much less there than in Singapore. In the last five years, the Malaysian government has invested more money into downtown clean-up, economic development, and tourism initiatives in Johor Bahru to encourage even more people and businesses to relocate and visit there. 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.

This measure may be a bit unfair, as there are very few countries that are nearly 100% urban. Singapore does not crack the list of the world’s 50 densest cities. 83 It has also been nicknamed the “air conditioned city” because its residents depend on air conditioning—which consumes tremendous amounts of electricity—to live comfortably in the sweltering Singaporean climate.

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Cities Transformed by the Internet The 21st century metropolis is a connected one. People walk down the street (or drive their cars) 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 high speed 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 even existed. Today, in the developed world, high-speed Internet ranks alongside electricity and television 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 into their designs. The long-term impact of so much connectivity on cities 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. 84 Urban planners refer to cities filled with smart technologies and Internet connectivity as ubiquitous 85 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. 86

Directed Research Area: 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?

But, before you get swept away with visions of smart refrigerators and virtual holiday dinners, remember that, for many who live in modern megacities, Internet access is still a far-off luxury—it is hunger and poverty that are ubiquitous, not broadband.

At one MIT dormitory, students can use the Internet to check whether the toilets in the bathrooms are being used. The word “ubiquitous” means found everywhere. 86 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. 85

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Conclusion In the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, the last survivors of humanity—the rest have been massacred by angry robots—find a new planet to settle: Earth itself, long ago, full of sprawling forests and delicious wild animals. 87 The survivors spend a little while bird-watching, and then gather 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 studying this guide: ever since the Neolithic Revolution, the steady march of human history has been toward more and larger cities. But then something unexpected 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 world.88 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—even if it means they might starve and freeze to death. 89

‘‘Commercialism. Decadence. Technology run amok.’’ Description of New York City in the Battlestar Galactica series finale

The survivors agree 90 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:

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Does farming necessarily lead to cities?

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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?

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More broadly, are cities—and megacities—an unavoidable feature of modern civilization? Is there an alternate way to be modern—and sustainable?

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Is there such a thing as an ideal modern metropolis?

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What do you think the future city will look like?

Presumably, there are also alpacas, but they must be off camera. I feel for the poor chaps who ended up in the Sahara, or in the middle of the Outback. 89 He is also concerned that cities might lead to more of the angry robots. 90 Apparently unanimously. Maybe they were all drugged. 88

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Works Consulted Aaron, Brad. “Jan Gehl: Gridlocked Streets are ‘Not a Law of Nature’.” [weblog entry] Streetsblog.org. November 7, 2007. www.streetsblog.org/2007/11/07/its-not-a-law-of-nature/. Aristotle. Politics. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Bennett Clark, Jane. “Seven Cool Cities” in Kiplinger. October 2005. Berman, Marshall. On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square. (New York: Random House, 2006). Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York: The Modern Library, 1954). Coldicott, Nicholas, editor. Time Out Tokyo. (London: Ebury Publishing, 2010). Dahl, Richard. “Car Culture Accelerates” in Environmental Health Perspectives. Vol. 113, No. 4. (April 2005). Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006). Dion, Karen. “Tokyo’s Nightlife.” [weblog entry] Matadornetwork.com. January 29, 2010. matadornetwork.com/nights/tokyo-nightlife-3-killer-clubsfor-when-roppongis-charm-wears-thin/ Earle, Dominic, editor. Time Out Paris.(London: Ebury Publishing, 2009). Ebert, Roger. “A Guide to Film Noir Genre.” [weblog entry] www. Rogerebert.com. January 30, 1995. rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19950130/COMMENTARY/11010314/1023 Elsen, James. “What’s a Sustainable City, Anyway?” [weblog entry] Sustainlane.com. www.sustainlane.com/us-city-rankings/articles/what's-asustainable-city-anyway/FBAYC8UA4QLVUA9AP2CWYO4F13QB Fleischer, Peter. “I Like the Anonymity of Big Cities.” [weblog entry] Peter Fleischer: Privacy...? October 16, 2007. http://peterfleischer.blogspot.com/2007/10/i-like-anonymity-of-big-city.html Forbes, Andrew. National Geographic Traveler: Shanghai.(Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2007). Gall, Norman. “Brazil’s Impossible City” in The Wilson Quarterly. Vol. 31, No. 3 (Summer 2007). Hamilton, William L. “A Global Look at Urban Planning” in The New York Times. January 12, 2006. Harvey, David. Social Justice and the City (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008). Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Havley, Joe. “Shanghai: China’s Business Engine” at CNN.com. April 29, 2005. http://articles.cnn.com/2005-0418/world/eyeonchina.shanghai_1_shanghai-accounts-decadent-city-zhejiang/3?_s=PM:WORLD Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987). Huyssen, Andreas, editor. Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). Inwood, Stephen. A History of London. (New York: Carrol & Graf Publishers, Inc.: 1998). Florida, Richard. Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy is Making Where to live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (New York: Basic Books, 2008). Gottdiener, Mark and Budd, Leslie. Key Concepts in Urban Studies (London: Sage Publications Ltd., 2006). Jacobson, Lea. Bar Flower: My Decadently Destructive Days and Nights as a Tokyo Nightclub Hostess. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008). Jordan, David P. Transforming Paris: The Lives and Labors of Baron Haussmann. (New York: The Free Press, 1995). Katsnelson, Anna, editor. Time Out São Paulo. (London: Random House UK, 2009). Kerr-Jarrett, Andrew. Daily Life in the Victorian Age (New York: The Reader’s Digest Association Limited, 1993). Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. (New York: Penguin Books, 1976.) Krane, Jim. City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009. Lapham, Lewis. Lapham’s Quarterly: The City. Fall 2010 Issue. Large, David Clay. Berlin. (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Leavitt, David. Florence, A Delicate Case (New York: Bloomsbury, 2002). Lintner, Valerio. A Traveller’s History of Italy (New York: Interlink Books, 2004). Moore, Charles. “This Place is Our Place” in Albany Times-Union. December 19, 2010. Onishi, Norimitsu. “For City Dwellers, a Taste of the Orderly Life” in The New York Times. Nov. 28, 2010. Packer, George. “A Reporter at Large: The Megacity” in The New Yorker. November 13, 2006. Saunders, George. The Braindead Megaphone. (New York, Riverhead Books, 2007). Schumpeter, Joseph A. Can Capitalism Survive?: Creative Destruction and the Future of the Global Economy. (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). Simmel, Georg. On Individuality and Social Forms. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971). Unsigned, “Copenhagen: Cities can run on wind energy.” Sustainablecities.dk. sustainablecities.dk/en/city-projects/cases/copenhagen-cities-can-runon-wind-energy Unsigned, “Is Dubai’s Development Model Sustainable?”in Mean Green Couger Red. March 8, 2007. http://indotav.blogspot.com/2007/03/is-dubaisdevelopment-model.html Unsigned, “The Berlin Wall” in Berlin-Life.com http://www.berlin-life.com/berlin/wall Unsigned. “The World Goes to Town” in The Economist. May 3, 2007. Wright, Turner. “Insider’s Guide to Tokyo.” [weblog entry]. Matadornetwork.com. August 26, 2008. http://matadornetwork.com/trips/10-thingsabout-tokyo-that-will-blow-your-mind

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About the Author Alejandra O’Leary is a musician, writer, and fan of cities and superlatives. 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.

About the Editors 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 approximately 50% longer than the time allotted to them, including the release of resource guides for the World Scholar’s Cup. 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.

•

How long it took Daniel to learn to tie his shoes.

Daniel is pictured here at a shaved ice shop named Guppy House, celebrating a Clippers victory in the days before the arrival of franchise savior Blake Griffin. Daniel has had the opportunity to visit many modern metropolises 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 60 seconds—and Chengdu—because you can find delicious dan dan mien on every street corner. His least favorite (so far) include Jakarta and Delhi, but only because they have very bad traffic and difficult airports. Email Daniel at dan@scholarscup.org or find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/dan.berd.