What does it mean that half the world’s people now live in cities - and that two billion more will join them over the next 25 years? How does this change the way the world works?
The following five ideas summarize how the Urban Revolution is changing the world.
- It’s not about “megacities” - it’s a new global system. Traditional concepts of cities no longer serve us. For more than 50 years, cities small and large have been connecting through infrastructure, migration, trade, and social networks into a single worldwide urban system. The growth of inter-city networks drives the further evolution of urban infrastructure, products, commerce, lifestyles and cultures, which together increase the consolidation of the urban system. “Globalization” is an abstract term for this very material and ongoing process of re-engineering the world into a global City.
- The City’s growth cannot be stopped. Most anti-immigration and anti-migrant campaigns reflect a parochial misunderstanding of the Urban Revolution. Urban growth and migration is the product of an undeniable urban-economic logic. Drawn by the inherent economic advantages of urban settlement, the world’s most entrepreneurial families, ethnic groups, companies, and social and political movements are competing for positions and territorial control across networks of cities. Their diverse strategies to gain advantage through urban location and networking will fuel an increase of world urban populations by two billion more people over the next 25 years. How we govern these city-building populations—whether we empower and enfranchise them, or disempower and isolate them—will define the social and political dynamics of the 21st century.
- The world isn’t “flat.” The City is made up of myriad nested local city systems at the regional, metropolitan, district, and neighborhood levels. Even as the growing City subjects small city districts to global pressures, it also amplifies very local conditions into world events. Through the City, events of very local origin constantly interrupt the old world order. Epidemics (SARS), political upheavals (Venezuela, Kenya), supply chain breakdowns (New Orleans), and transnational criminal organizations all arise from specific local urban conditions. The current global financial crisis (2007-2009) arose from a perverse new approach to city building in the United States. Managing global affairs during the next phase of the Urban Revolution requires redoubled attention to the details of localities and location.
- At a time of rising dependency on cities, we have forgotten the basics of urbanism. The current economic crisis is ultimately traceable to the rise of a relatively new approach to city building: the industrial batch production of standardized urban “product” for anonymous, increasingly transient consumer groups. We have been witnessing more extreme “busts” at the peaks of urban growth cycles as industrial batch cityscapes have become the dominant transnational development approach. These busts—as in the 1997-8 Asian financial crisis—reflect a growing disconnect between the profit-and-loss equations of developers, banks, and governments and the total economics of emerging urban regions. In the United States, the rising cost structure of new cityscapes (measured on a full-cost basis) has exceeded real increases in income, setting the stage for defaults in both conventional and subprime mortgages. Simultaneously, industrial batch production is being taken to its logical conclusion: growing numbers of large and small investors have participated in the commodification of the city, producing, purchasing, and flipping generic units (i.e., square feet) of “city” for speculative purposes.To prevent future crises as we build the City for two billion more people, we must re-establish our capacity to create the kinds of robust city districts only achievable through real urbanisms. Urbanisms are ways that user-communities creatively and intricately adapt urban design, infrastructure, building methods, policy, and governance to create places of unique value and advantage in the world. Middle Eastern bazaars, university districts, central business districts, industrial neighborhoods, Chinese hutongs, and Southeast Asian kampungs reflect forms of urbanism that align competing interests to co-create efficient, productive, resilient ways of living and producing value.
- There are clear reasons why some cities succeed in their ambitious plans - and why so many others underachieve. The success of “Strategic Cities” like Barcelona, Chicago, or Curitiba has nothing to do with hosting the Olympic Games or being a top-ranked business location. The source of their successes is found in their ability to renew or create new urbanisms to address the particular challenges of their historic legacies, populations, industries, and times. The ways that Strategic Cities develop new urbanisms—explored in the book as their practices of “urban strategy”—also offer strategies to address the City’s biggest challenges: poverty, social exclusion, climate change, resource scarcity, criminality, and insecurity.
