World as City: City
as Future
Imagining the Multicultural Futures of
the City
What will the cities of the future look like?
Is there one clear future for the city or are there a range of alternative
futures?
First the immediate data and most forecasts
point to one overwhelming trend - the urbanization of the planet, Blade Runner writ large. This is a long
term historical trend but now reaching to a point where begin to serious
imagine Earth itself as a city. The data is such that by 2020, half the world’s
population is expected to live in an urban environment.
But why?
First, there are few jobs in the farms, and the jobs there pay
comparative less than jobs in the cities. Farms all over the world are in
trouble with governments having to subsidize farming incomes. This is because
of automation but also because agricultural development does not figure high in
most nations economic plans.
But the economic rationale is not the only
reason. We only have to go back a 100 or so years to search for the mythic roots
- it is of going to London town and find streets paved with gold. While rural
communities are successfully able to provide for basic needs (at least when the
harvest is good, when nature does not play tricks), it has been unable to
provide for wealth creation. Rurality means that one lives according to the
seasons - ups and downs - one doe snot enter the long term linear secular trend
of wealth accumulation. It is in the city where this can happen, riches can be
earned. The city then becomes the dream
fulfiller, where the future can be realized.
And there are lock-ins. Once one family goes
to the city, others follow suit. Once others follow suit, economies of scale
take over - along with the factory worker, one needs the brick layer,
eventually, service industries and financial industries as well. More
population and more wealth.
But this is too simple, cities are also
packed with the poor, who now live in misery, that is, while in the farm they
were poor, still poverty was sustainable - there was a sharing of wealth. But
with the city comes the classic anomie, fragmentation, alienation.
And yet we rarely return to the farm instead
of as imagined places of peace and comfort. My own memory of the village is community, of waking up
together with other villagers, eating parata
(Pakistani deep fried bread), and sitting around gupshupping (gossiping and storytelling). Yet I rarely go back to
the village, instead preferring to find community, not through the straitjacket
of by genetic birthplace, but through intended communities. I prefer to find
community by creating it. It is the city that best accomplishes this. Or does
it?
Interlude: as I write this article at Taipei International Airport, the
model Cindy Crawford walks by - city life is now glamour life, even economy
class passengers can participate in the excitement of stardom.
But return to the village matters little, it
is a fictional memory, it gives us a benchmark. It allows us to see our
progress – we can see how far we have progressed from rurality and at the same
time, in our mind we retain a sense of safety, we can return to the past.
Instead of paratas, village songs and chirping birds, we have chosen Blade Runner or modern day Bangkok/LA. And as the Net spreads its tentacles,
instead of Blade Runner as our guiding image, it is the Matrix that represents the future of the city, having
forgotten the past, we now enter a world in which we no longer can distinguish
what is real and what is illusory. But who will be the redeemer, who like Keanu
Reeves, saves us, showing us the light? So far the redeemers, those who have
called for a return to the village have only brought more death, Pol Pot being
the most famous example.
The
likely future of the city then is an erasure of our million year history,
whether the Sumerians or whomever one desires to claim began the urbanization
process knew it would lead to this is doubtful. But our rural history appears
to have reached its end.
Different
futures
Yet if our aspirations in any way reflect our
possible, if not probable, futures, then the Earth as City may not be
ultimately occur, agency has not been lost.
In dozens of futures visioning workshops
across the world – Taiwan, Germany, New Zealand, Malaysia, Pakistan, the USA –
where participants are asked to in detail describe their preferred futures, two
images are dominant.
The first is the globalist scenario - a jet
plane for all, unrestricted movement of capital and labour as well as ideas and
news - not a utopia but certainly a good society where feudalism, hierarchy,
nationalist power break down and humans function as autonomous fulfilled
beings. The market is primary but a globalized worlds allows endless
associations - nongovernmental organizations, religious affiliations, and other
forms of identity currently unimaginable. With scarcity less of a problem, who
we are and how we express this changing identity become far more crucial. The
city becomes a site of intention. Freedom is realized (insert painting one –
from www.futurefoundation.org).
As dominant as this first future is a second.
This future is far less concerned with movement and more focused on stability.
But the stability does not come from stasis but from connection - relationship
with self, with loved one, with community and with nature. Wealth is no longer the crucial determining
factor of who we are rather it is our capacity to love and be loved, to not
live to transform the world but to live in harmony in the world. Rurality is not tangential to this image -
indeed, while this image does not necessarily mean a return to the farm, it
does mean a move away from industrial modes of production (that is, high fat,
meat based diets and the accompanying waste disposal paradigm) and postmodern
modes of production (genetically modified foods) to an organic, recyclable mode
of eating and living.
Technology should not be seen as a defining
factor. In the former, technologies leads to greater wealth, to multiple selves
(a geneticized self, an internet self, for example), to access to endless
information. In the latter, technologies are important insofar as they lead to
greater communication and greater employment. Technology creating new spaces
for human community is the key for the latter vision of the future.
Historically, the image of the city has gone
from the city beautiful, focused on parklands, clean streets to the city
ecological. But ever since the 1964 New
York World Fair a different image of the city has become dominant. This is the
high-tech city, or what now call the smart-city. The city that senses and
thinks, that can monitor the needs of its citizens - when trees are about to
interfere with power lines, when criminals are about to loot a store. However,
a smart city, a sim city, is also about surveillance.
Brisbane in Australia has over 100 cameras in
its central business district. These both protect yet they also change one's
relationship with power. One is always seen.
But can a smart city liberate us from our fears and allow us to become
in fact more human? A smart city at the beginning consists of smart houses but
as well humans with smart bots, always on wearable computers which amplify our
senses – the wireless revolution that has already begun with teenagers in
Japan.. These bots are likely health
focused, helping us choose the right products that match our values (ecological
products or low-fat foods, or products made by corporations that treat other
cultures well, that are good corporate citizens). But they will also help us
find directions, let us know the sales going on (if indeed, we will still shop
outside the Net), and where our friends out, becoming true knowledge
navigators. While the image of the
American cartoon The Jetsons is
perhaps an apt image, we can ask what is that image missing. Yes, life will be
more efficient - automation, perfect information, however, who will be
excluded? Will our behavior become regimented, that is, with smartness be based
on linear reductionist notions of the world, or more on complexity, that is, on
a paradigm that smartness comes from
difference, from learning about others.
Exclusion if often central to a planned city.
Planned cities are designed cities, rationally created with neat rows of
houses, clear demarcations of industrial areas, prostitution areas, grave sites
and shopping areas. The Pakistani
capital Islamabad is one such planned city. Designed in the 1960's by Ford
Foundation planners, the image that guided them was the American city,
pivotally, the vacuum cleaner. However, with cheap labour vacuum cleaners were
not a necessity. But where to put the sweapers. As it turned out the moved to
Islamabad as well, building kathchi
abadis. These temporary mudbrick
houses became a sore site for planners so they built a wall around them. This becomes the question: what are we
walling?
Geneva has taken a different tack. Once a
classical traditional white Euro city, in the last thirty years, it has
transformed beyond belief. The city looks multicultural with cafes lined with
African, middle-eastern, Italian, Indian and fast food restaurants. Public life
is community life with dozens of cultures mixing. While most swiss consider
Geneva an abheration, others have made peace with multiculturalism by moving to
the other side of the river, the traditional unicultural side.
But ultimately there will be no other side of
the river. The only hope will be a multicultural city. Inclusion.
Thus, along with the smart city as a guiding
image of the futures, comes the multicultural city. But what is the multicultural
city. First it means city spaces are
not segregated by race or gender, one should not be able to identify an ethnic
area, or at least not see in a negative way. Second, citizens should feel they
are part of the city, that they are not discriminated against, especially by
those in authority. The actions of public officials and employees are crucial
here. The Net of course helps greatly by hiding our gender, accent and colour. But a multicultural city is
also about incorporates others ways of knowing, of creating a complex and
chaotic model of space such that the city does not necessarily match the values
of only one culture - mosques with temples with banks. City design not only
done by trained city planners but as well by feng shui experts, searching for
the energy lines, decoding which areas are best for banking, what for play,
what for education - essentially designing and building for beauty that helps
achieve particular functions broadly defined.
Writes Starhawk in her The Fifth Sacred Thing: [1]
The vision of the future is centred in the city; it’s a vision where
people have lots of different religions, cultures and subcultures but they can
all come together and work together. It starts with a woman climbing a hill for
a ritual and visiting all the different shrines of these different religions
and cultures that are up on the sacred mountain. To me that is what I’d like to
see. Culture is like a sacred mountain that’s big enough for many, many
different approaches to spirit.
Interlude: I am now in Pakistan at the Islamabad Club. A western style
golf club complete with swimming pools, fancy waiters and tennis courts. We are
about to have tea when the Ahzan – call to prayer begins. My all the tables is a carpet. Seven people
leave their tea, bend down and begin their prayer. No one is bothered that the
elitest secularism of the Club has been broken with prayer, indeed, they merge
together. After prayer, dinner starts.
Future-Orientation:
A multicultural city is not just concerned about the present but
it is future oriented, concerned with all our tomorrows. City planning meeting
should for example attempt to keep on chair open. This empty chair could
represent future generations, their silent voices represented symbolically.
Each political and administrative decision needs to factor in the impact on
future generations. Most immediately - five to twenty years - for Western
cities, this means the rise of the aged. While the gloss is of happy ageing
people, the data currently is that most elderly will live miserable lives,
healthy enough to live, not sick enough to die. They will search for community,
their children having moved away (unless the Net leads to the return to the
home, the place of birth), for meaning and for ease of movement. A smart city
will do a great deal in creating such a reality. But smartness will have to be
with compassion especially has many of the aged will be mentally ill.
Net living will not make the city any less
important. Indeed, home offices make communities far more important. Every move
towards efficiency accentuates the need for connection. Working from home highlights the need for
social contact outside of the office space. Work has not just been about making
money but about falling in love with office mates, gossiping, going shopping at
lunch, making new friends - about living. Telecommuting, while saving money for
any organization, raises new issues for workers. Their relationship with their
husband or wife changes. Children are no longer far away at school, they are
home in the afternoon. For men, housework cannot be exported to their wives
since now home the pressure to share in house activities increases.
Anticipating the future of the city as well
means asking residents what type of city they want in the future. While most
individuals are content with avoiding big-picture national politics, many do
care about their local environment - pollutants, level of development, types of
parks, quality of schools. However, most city planning exercises are problem
based, asking citizens to list the main problems with politicians running on
platforms that will solve such problems. However, anticipation means helping
residents consider the alternative futures of the city. This means an interactive process wherein
residents suggest visions of the future which then are developed into scenarios
by planners which are then fed back to citizens. These visions must be based on
their preferred futures, their nightmare scenarios and the likely scenario if
nothing is done, if historical trends continue. This process both empowers
citizen and leader alike, it also makes it possible to not such plan the ideal
city but envision the ideal city.
The interactive process must include expert
information on current trends, using mapping technologies to show how the city
is currently divided by income, religion and other factors. These maps are
already available in many OECD nations. These maps can then be projected
outwards with citizens imagining different visualization of the future. Data with
vision with conversation with leadership can create a powerful mix of creating
cities we truly want. While the current
process of benchmarking – choosing best practice cities and discerning how
one’s own city is different from them – is useful and has led to marked
improvement in Asian cities, our imagination of what can be is not unleashed.
City space is of course about access to water, hospital, safe streets,
efficient garbage collection and jobs. But it is also about our imagination of
who we can be.
A future-oriented city is thus a democratic
city in the sense of deep participation about the future. It can be
multicultural in the sense of better representation, of including others'
voices as well as their cultural frameworks. It is smart in the sense of using
technology to measure how well we are doing, to provide benchmarks with
reference to our ideal city.
Interlude: I remember a conversation in Brisbane, Australia a few years
ago with recent refugees arrivals. They said on the drive from the airport,
they thought that either the entire population
had gone to a football match or their had been a neutron bomb.
Eventually after a week they realized that unlike traditional societies or
walkable cities, suburban cities are people-absent after work. Everyone goes
home to create community through the mediation of television. The only people
walking the streets were southern europeans and asians, who walked nightly and
were used to greater populations. In
the drive to modernity, community had been lost. Standardized television
community had been gained. The cost: a lonely, fragmented population.
The great fear in creating the smart city is
that we will become more socially isolated, meaning that we will die of silent
heart attacks in our homes. Of course, the smart house will relay to the smart
hospital that someone has died in house number 4 on Main Street. An ambulance
will be dispatched and the body quickly wisked away. Eventually, this will not be even necessary. The smart house will
take care of the body, disposing it, arranging a cyber burial and finding a
cyberplot. Birth to death will be automated.
But in the background will be our mythic
longing for the village.
Can we create then a global village? So far
we have shown the capacity to create the global city. Perhaps one day the
entire Earth will be a city. It will look stunning from the Moon and Mars. But
McLuhan’s vision will always remains with us. Unrealized. Calling us.
Leadership
and the multicultural challenge
The multicultural image challenges us to
accept difference, to see the entire planet as a global neighborhood. It means
then being responsible for one’s street, virtual or real. The multicultural
city also challenges us to develop our capacities for tolerance, for dealing
with sounds and smells of others. There have been periods in history when
different cultures and civilizations have been in profound contact, where there
has been paradigms of pluralism. And yes marauders and local politicians have
invaded these sacred spaces, creating a politics of exclusion instead of an
ethics of inclusion.
The 20th century will be
remembered for both tendencies – exclusion and inclusion
Interlude: Novi Sad, Serbia - even as serbian refugees from Croatia and Kosovo stream in changing
the demographics of the city and as poverty continues to rise (with no end in
sight of Milosevic or sanctions) - is a livable city, and remains a
multicultural one as well, a beautiful city. Everything is in walkable
distance, plays, street theater continue, and citizens present a noble face
even as their nation dies.
Albanians are still safe even
though the war in Kosovo has strained community relations. In contrast was
Srebrenica a few years ago, where 7500 men and youth bosnian muslims were
murdered by the Bosnian serbs, or Saravejo which was pummeled by serb sniper
fire. I feel sadness for Novi Sad's
citizens seeing their dreams of socialist utopia degenerate into fascist
nationalism. Bridges destroyed. But most of all for their diminished power in
creating the eclectic inclusive future many there desire.
Multiculturalism
has to have a broader context, either a deep internal ethics or a broader
ideology of inclusion. However, the context pivots on leadership. Where
leadership has used difference to rise in local and national power, the visions
and histories of others has been the first causality, and ultimately ignorance
has returned to destroy culture itself, the host and others. Where leadership
has focused not on ethnic differences but empowered individuals to transcend
their petty differences and create a better society for all, civilization has
flourished.
Gene therapy and germ line engineering are
likely to create even more disharmonies between cultures, where access to
genetic advantage will become as important as access to wealth, education and
technology. New forms are species are likely to challenge the limits of our
tolerance, and, if humans become a minority in the artificial future, we are
likely to challenge their tolerance of imperfection. And while bodies can
perhaps be perfected, love and tolerance can only be learned in two ways:
trauma leading to fear leading to collapse leading (and the unending hell of revenge) or through transcendence.
Moving to a higher plane of consciousness.
Without an image of transcendence we die as a civilization. A multicultural
city creates spaces for difference, but for it to unify the polarity of village/city, it will have to transcend
difference, seize upon an image of the future which enables and ennobles us to
go beyond limitations.
[1] Starhawk, Envisioning the future in M.J. Ryan, The fabric of the
Future. Berkely, Conari Press, 1998, 303.