By Sohail Inayatullah
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 Sarajevo 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.