Category Archives: City Futures

Community Futures (2005)

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Sohail Inayatullah
Professor, Tamkang University, Queensland University of Technology, Sunshine Coast University and Transcend Peace University. www.metafuture.org

PREFACE

This short article explore the futures of community in Australia. It does so using futures methods. Futures methods seek to understand the future seeing the future not as an empty space to be filled but as a space already seeded by current images and drivers. Futures methods are concerned as much with the future out there (external political, technological, economic variable) as well as the future in here (the myths and meanings each individual and collectivity brings)

For this exercise, we will use four futures methods – the futures triangle, emerging issues analysis, causal layered analysis and scenarios.

First we map the futures using the Futures Triangle The futures triangle has three dimensions – alternative images, drivers and weights.

Second we explore trends and emerging issues, using emerging issues analysis. Emerging issues analysis patterns current known problems, uncertain trends and improbable but of potential high impact emerging issues.

Third we unpack the future, using the method Causal layered Analysis. CLA moves beyond official statements of the problem to underlying systemic causes, worldviews that give meaning to these systems (provide cognitive maps which create shared understanding) and then articulates underlying myths.

Finally we conclude with alternative futures of community in Australia.

CONTEXT

Community, while appearing to have one meaning, can be seen to have multiple meanings and contexts.

First, it is understood in opposition to the market (jungle, economic relations, dog eat dog) and the state (power, party politics).

Second, Community as a site of shared identity, whether that of a neighborhood, a community of scholars, medical professionals, or indeed, sex workers.

Third, recent understanding have moved community to being part of the nation’s (or global) social capital. As necessary for economic growth and for resilience in the face of hardship.

Fourth, have been definitions around health and community. Social inclusion has been identified as a protector against various illnesses. [1]

FUTURES TRIANGLE

(1. THE IMAGES OR PULLS OF THE FUTURE, 2. THE PUSHES OR DRIVERS , and 3. THE WEIGHTS OR BARRIERS)

What are the competing images of community?

1. First is the image of  the white picket fence in the safe suburb. The community is homogeneous, the economy is booming, personal relations are important. Conflicts are handled by community leaders, generally elected representatives. Entrance is difficult in this image.
The push for this image was the transition from agricultural to industrial and then the emergence of the postindustrial economy.
A secondary push were individuals leaving the city because of their higher income for more affluent lifestyles.

The weight has been the environmental impact of suburbs, the health impact (the plaza, the car as primary transport mechanism) and the anomie that has resulted – the disconnect of the suburb with the rest of the world.

2. The global community (of nations, of human). This image is focused on humanistic notions of community instead of political (might will win) or economic (wealth will win) but on rational reasonable “men” negotiating peace and goodwill.

The push to this image was the ravages of war, the need for mechanisms that could ensure peace for future generations. Another push was developments in psychology where the id could be tamed through reason.

The weight has been the military-industrial complex and the centre-periphery nature of the world community (security council, for example, dominating the United Nations).

Governance thus is limited in its participation, eligibility of entry is crucial.

3. The hybrid, emergent image is that of the fluid community. Individuals move in and out of identity. Entrance into the community is based on interest. Exit means a new interest. Movement is easy.

The push in this image has been globalization (rapid movement of capital and now labour, as well as cultural products). A recent push has been digitalization with the creation of new communities. The departure from the suburbs to intentional communities in the last few decades was a precursor to the more rapid global and cyber community creation.

4. The last image is that of active communities. Communities not as site of passivity, of receiving declarations from globalization, nations, developers but as a site of agency. Communities, whatever they may be, visioning their desired futures. Active, healthy, vibrant engaged communities. Empowered by their capacity to vision where they want to go (instead of where they came from), by their capacity to deal with difference, and mediate conflict between the “strangers and dangers” within the community.

The push has been the loss of agency felt by a rapidly changing world (globalization, geneticization, urbanization, terrorism).

The weight is the balance of power between community and national and global interests. As communities strengthen, as globalization strengthens, what of the nation and the state.

We thus have four contending images of the future

White picket fence
Community of nations
Fluid Communities
Active communities

As well as multiple drivers and weights.

EMERGING ISSUES ANALYSIS

These maps are based on current understandings of communities, exits and entries and levels of participation. However, the future may change. Through emerging issues analysis, we chart out what trends and particularly what emerging issues are likely to change this map.

While current problems are around issues of:

1. local communities and national interest (can one be both muslim and Australia)
2. the breakdown of communities (increasing perception of crime, divorce rates, high housing prices leading to demographic shifts, often dramatic). [2]
3. the survival of local economies in a globalized era (the Maleny versus woolworths battle, for example).

Trends are more focused on issues where quantitative information is emerging, for example, 1. the development of cyber intentional communities that are giving new meanings to individuals and communities that are part of them. The rise of citizen visioning among communities.

Emerging issues are further out. Some of these may be:

1. The geneticization of communities. As gene therapy, germ line intervention continue to evolve and play a far more major role in how we create the human population, we may see communities along the lines of who is natural, who is not.
2. Cyber democracy. Currently there are experiments in cyber democracy but focused mostly on reality tv. Cyber democracy may plan a dramatic role in enhancing community participation. A whole range of new forms of political, economic and social participation are possible. This is especially true with dot.com children, ie the digital natives who equate digitalization with flatter organizational structures, malleable associations, and cooperative learning environments.
3. Schools as learning and community centres. As communities seek to find ways to develop collective understanding of a changing world, the notion of schools as centres of learning for the entire community is a possibility that could revitalize the community and create a new hub (previously held by the church).
4. New entrants into the community – how might artificial intelligence systems impact communities. Will pet dogs eventually become a central feature? Will the rise in household robots play a role in how we life, love and learn? Will this lead to increased time for humans? Will ai systems create smart houses, smart transport systems and eventually totally networked and adaptive smart communities?
5. Can communities become alive in the collective sense, ie if we fuse gaian thinking (James Lovelock, The gaia hypothesis)[3] with nano-technology, can the community become as living as its individual members. Will communities of the 21st century be foundationally different to those of previous centuries.
6. What will role will developments in meditation as an IQ enhancing technology play in creating learning communities, that is, if Sheldrake and other transpersonal evolutionary biologists are correct, new memes and learning fields may create a collective intelligence. Will meditation be the strange attractor, the driver for a jump in collective intelligence? Will this jump lead to the creation of more peaceful, prosperous communities?
7. Finally, what will be the future indicators of communities? Will most communities adopt the triple bottom line – economic wealth, social inclusion and environmental sustainability? And is spirituality the fourth bottom line, that which creates the deeper cohesion for all communities.[4]

While these emerging issues may be improbable, especially in the short run, their development in the long run is far more plausible, and promises to change the context of communities.

What should then stay the same? In a world where it is not just the increasing rate of change (which is now a banal statement) but the heterogeneity of change (fast time with slow time; globalization with localization; patriarchy with gender cooperation; clash and cooperation between civilizations) and the loss of agency that make mapping the future crucial, but the complexity of change (how bird flu outbreaks and mutation in Vietnam could dramatically impact communities in Australia).

CAUSAL LAYERED ANALYSIS

CLA attempts to unpack the future, focusing on multiple levels of causality. All levels are equally important and qualitatively different.

Level 1, the litany, is focused on the official description of the problem, how regional newspapers, for example, define problems.

Level 2, the systemic, is focused on the interrelationship of problems, solutions and the systems that support them.

Level 3, the worldview, the cognitive and emotive maps we use to make sense of the world, is focused on divergence, of stakeholders can have dramatically different takes on a subject.

Level 4, is the myth and metaphor level, this is the story. Level 4 is the hub of the spoke on the wheel, hardest to change, but leads to the deepest change.

If a current issue is the fragmentation of community, then at that level what is the solution. This is often creating government programs to fund those under risk. It is also church programs and speeches by clergy for more morality, for taking care of others.

A level 2 analysis shows how the fragmentation of the community is created by multiple factors – globalization and economic movement, labour shifting to different areas of the market. Second is the search for a better life, movement toward the Beach. Third, is the work requirements of a postindustrial economy (two incomes, quick time) and the resultant loss of leisure (except as packaged leisure) and loss of family. Fourth is the rise of the women’s movement, desire for a fair go, fair wages, and the resultant loss of the hub of the community (the women’s circle of sharing information, data and gossip, all foundational and evolutionary necessities in creating the communities of today. As time speeds up, as work increases, then the individual family and then the community all are put under pressure. Strategies focus on labour saving devices, new entertainment centre (to escape work and create the tele-community), hiring casual workers to engage in the household economy. The creation of urban villages has been a dramatic strategy, a return to the city but in a village context, thus moving away from the ravages of the suburb.
Level 2 solutions require whole of government but as well whole of society strategies. They are complex with intervention in one site changing the entire landscape.

A level 3 analysis asks: what the are the dominant worldviews around community? What are the main stakeholders.

First is the economic worldview, where community was essentially about potential consumers. Technology has enhanced this by opening up the home as a site of shopping. The plaza has become the postmodern cathedral. “I shop therefore I am” creates community meaning.

Second is the green worldview. Community is the site of agency, of creating environmental, economic and cultural sustainability. Community need to be both socially inclusive (dialogue of religions, civilizations) and are central to creating the good society. Community is the real polis, where differences are understood and the good society create.

Third is the national. Community is an important part of governance, even if the lowest. Federal to state to local. It is at the community where neighbors can ensure that no terrorists are operating; it is at the local where policies can succeed, where elections are won and lost. It is at the local that the myths are generated (the aussie battler, for example). Communities are required for the running of a healthy nation – they ensure that traditional values of family, One god, one people, values (respect for elders) continue. Community is where we feel safe and at home. Community at heart is about security, and comfort.

Fourth is the globalist – Community is what defines us, we become who we are through the social. Communities must be porous, allowing new ideas, capital and labour through. They are quick, they adapt, they provide the glue that allows a world community to emerge. Communities thus are layered moving from the small to the grand.

At this level, the key is to understand that individuals hold different worldview and often cannot understand the perspective of others. Policies fail because the worldview map does not allow individuals to make sense of others.

The myth level is the deepest. It is here that true and long lasting social change can occur. By understanding current myths and creating new myths, community can change, become far more participatory if need be.

What are some of these myths – as mentioned earlier, the white picket fence is one notion of community – home sweet home.

Another myth is that of community as a journey, as a caravan moving in a direction – this is the myth of frontier, of inclusion and expansion. There is a utopian, even spiritual dimension.

A third myth is that of the divided community – the community at war, deep conflict. These are often economic but disguised as religious. Who gets what, who has access to power. This story is about breakdown, about loss.

The last story is about the community and resilience. The community gives us health, we live longer being part of a community. We are healthier. We may struggle in a community but it gives to us as much as we give to it. The community is living, part of an adaptive learning culture. It is organic and we are its cells.

While the previous methods map the future, this final method, scenario visioning articulates the differences. These can be used to understand plausible futures and to give direction from the present to alternative futures.

ALTERNATIVE FUTURES

These scenarios are developed from the methodological context of the futures triangle, emerging and cla. In addition, two variables are crucial:

  1. Integration to fragmentation
  2. Inventive to tradition

1. Communities in Disintegration. Divided by religion, by the inequity from globalization, from the hyper time of postindustrial knowledge economy, from increased demands and rights from the state. Communities are in increased risk. Australia travels the slow but sure path to a divided nation. The gains from its historic “fair go” history are lost as globalization creates a two class society. The rich, the mobile, the learned and the poor, single parent familes. The latter seek to join the world community, the latter seek to return to 1950s Australia. They want their picket fence and are enraged that world is no longer possible. Other divisions are between the aged and the young, each with different urban planning needs. The future for many does not look good. Political leaders however point to the GNP, which continues to grow and astound. Participatory democracy continues however, it is focused on trivial matters – beauty kinds and queens, virtual game shows, and the new “throw out one community member a year.” Gated communities thrive and many now think of the swiss model of citizenship, where the community decides who become Australian. The “fair go” is just a memory. “Give me mine” is more current.

2. Community in Flex. Globalization, technologization, intentionality, postmodernism (choosing based on preference not on tradition, ending the father to son model of religion and land rights). There are multiple communities. Australians are leaders in creating intentional communities. Social learning, social innovation has created institutional rules so that communities are safe, adaptive, learning. Communities are layered, both local, regional and global, even beyond global. Some even imagine space communities, however, most live in multiple communities – of professions, of virtualities, of genetic, of spiritual, of …Communities are constantly invented. Participation is fluid, certainly widespread. But is it deep? Commentators argue that endless choice has not given the health safeguard. Fluid communities do not provide the social protection against heart disease and cancer. Some flourish in this environment. Other are confused, and miss the safety and security of the picket fence, even if they could never be part of it.

3. Communities enclosed. In response to the breakdown of community and the simultaneous trend of the community in fluid movement, most individuals opt for enclosed communities. There is safety in likeness. Federal institutional roles ensure that there is little discrimination, however, generally once one enters a community, there is no desire for exit. Participation remains through electoral democracy. However, there remains tension between those who are fluid and those who prefer gates communities and even gated cities. Entry and exit barriers are high.

4. Communities in sustainability. The experiments of triple bottom line of twenty years ago were successful. Communities enhance inclusion and social capital by focusing on the triple bottom line. The fourth bottom line of spirituality (with the thousands of studies showing the relationship between spirituality and enhanced immune systems, IQ, longevity) is just beginning as well. Communities are open to globalization but insist on regulating speed, slowing it down when necessary. Political participation is deep with the recreation of town hall meetings. Cyber technology plus face to face lead to learning communities. The crisis of global warming and other changing patterns mean that communities are outposts for foresight, ensuring that their sustainability leads to global sustainability.

CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS

First, business as usual will likely lead to the divided community future. Merely leaving issues of community to market forces or even to federal intervention is unlikely to be effective. Finding ways to encourage, seed, community, to empower, as with the Grameen bank experience is likely to be far more productive. Government can set rules of engagement to ensure innovation and equity, however.

Second, communities should be seen as dynamic. While there are always calls to return to images of the past, communities do have resilience. This assume that the lenses we use to see communities should not be industrial (community as a cog in the wheel of democracy) but biological – communities as living dynamic ecological systems.

Third, there is choice in the matter. Communities, as suggested in the scenarios, can enhance their agency through collective self-reflection, through visioning their desired futures.

 

[1] Eckersley, R. 2001, Culture, health and well-being, in Eckersley, R., Dixon, J. & Douglas, B. (Eds), The Social Origins of Health and Well-being, pp. 51-70, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. See Clement Bezold, Will heart disease be eliminated in your lifetime? The best of health futures, Futures Research Quarterly (Summer 1995), 38. See Sohail Inayatullah, Scanning for City Futures. Report to the Asia-Pacific cities Summit 2003. See as well. Eliot Hurwitz, “Communities as Early Warning,” Futures Research Quarterly (Summer 1999), 75-93.Hurwitz points out two critical studies. 1. A 1992 study published in the American Journal of Public Health contrasted the two of Roseta, PA with two neighborning towns served by the same community hospital. Study investigated Roseto’s significantly lower incidence of heart attacks despite nearly identical risk factors, including smoking, high-fat diet and diabetes. The one difference was that Roseto was composed of  a very tightly knit Italian immigrant community with many three-generation households in active extended social networks. Other studies as well confirm that socially isolated people had up to five times the risk of premature death from all causes when compared to those who had a strong sense of connection and community.Dean Ornish as well in his book, Love and Survival – The Scientific Bases for the Healing Power of Intimacy (Harper Collins, 1997), cites dozens of studies, including a Swedish study of 131 women which found that availability of deep emotional relationships was associated with less coronary artery blockage independent of age, hypertension, smoking, diabetes, cholesterol, educational level and menopausal status.

See as well, Jennifer Bartlett and Sohail Inayatullah, Healthy Cities Reader. Brisbane City Council, March 2004.

[2] “Housing affordability hits 16 year low,” the couriermail, 24, March 2005, page 3. Housing affordability has plunged to a 16 year low in Queensland. Often this means that communities break down as renter have to move away from their neighbors.

[3] For more on this, see Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah, Macrohistory and Macrohistorians. Wesport, Praeger, 1997. Also see, Phillip Daffara, Macrohistory and the City. Phd thesis, in progress. University of the Sunshine Coast.

[4] For more on spirituality and health, see http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,375016315,00.html?

Alternative Futures of Dubrovnik (2003)

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Written by students of the American College of Management, Dubrovnik and Sohail Inayatullah 

Hotels, traffic systems, buses, airports all digitally connected allowing the seamless and energy efficient movement of tourists and goods, ensuring that tourism in Dubrovnik stays clean, green and respectful of its historical splendour.

An independent city – once again – with a valuable local currency, a thriving economy structured around local cooperatives – an example to the rest of the world how money can stay in the community, leading to prosperity for residents.

Drugs, sex, AIDS, Mcdonaldization and even Wal-Marts – the destruction of traditional values that citizens of Dubrovnik hold dear. Mass tourism leading to the breakdown of the infrastructure – pollution, traffic jams and a loss of identity. Dubrovnik becomes just another declining tourism destination.

Citizens develop foresight, a 2020 commission is set up in the City council, and best practices and visioning chart Dubrovnik on a new course. Green spaces are enlarged so that mass tourism development does not destroy what is unique about the city. Ecological design of systems ensures that building use energy efficiently. Dubrovnik focuses on two markets – elite as well as student tourists, both necessary for the future of the city.

These four scenarios were developed by students of the American College of Management and Technology. They grew out of the New Wave: Vision of Youth Conference organized by the young people of Dubrovnik (in association with many nongovernmental organizations and governmental organizations).  They were the outcome of a lecture given by former unesco professor (Trier, Germany, 1999) and currently professor of futures studies in Taiwan and social sciences in Australia, Sohail Inayatullah.

Inayatullah explained that there is not one future, but alternative futures. To minimize risk and uncertainty it is wise to develop scenarios of the future. Of course, gaining clarity on the desired vision of the future is crucial. We are always, consciously or unconsciously, living someone’s vision of the future. By developing our own, for our city, nation, civilization, organization, we can decolonize the future and move in the direction we wish.

As well, the vision of the future helps us move out of the jungle. The jungle approach to planning and business is focused on surviving, on being the fastest. From there we can move to the strategic, planning ahead. But further are the mountain tops, the scenarios. These give us the big picture. And high above is the star, the ideal. We may not reach there, but the star gives us a direction for movement. This is especially important as day-to-day we have many crisis. Each crisis overwhelms us. We forget to think strategically, or to search for alternatives, and to stay with our vision. Thus, by developing a landscape of the future, we have a higher probability of realizing our goals.

As argued by researchers on the most successful corporations – those with vision have done the best in terms of longevity and indeed profit.

But along with the vision, is the push of the future. These are trends that are changing the structure of the future. Aging, for example, will have dramatic impacts throughout Europe. Who will pay for the pension if the worker-retiree ratio moves from the current 3-1 to 1.5 to 1? What will happen to city design as we age as a society? Will young people become a highly valued resource? Or will there be generational wars?

But there are also weights to the future? Along with the pull, the vision and the push, the trends, there is the weight. These are forces and structures difficult to change; for example, patriarchy or male ways of running cities and business, or old traumas from centuries of conflict and war. The weights make it difficult to create our desired future, but they also give us wisdom, knowing what is a fad, and what can truly change society.

Finally, Inayatullah suggested that we need to anticipate the future, to look for emerging issues, that is issues that have still yet to ripen. These can help us avoid future problems as well as gain new opportunities. What are the emerging issues in Dubrovnik, he asked? How might, for example, digitalization change the nature of city governance. This is more than having a nice webpage, but using the internet for more efficient city services, and even for e-governance. How would an e-council change local politics?

Based on his work with the Asia-Pacific Cities Summit (a meeting of hundreds of mayors and deputy mayors), Inayatullah offered, along with aging and digitalization, the following important themes for cities.

These were:

1.      Transforming urban sprawl. American cities lose up to 76 billion US$ a year because of sprawl, that is, waiting in traffic, health costs related to car pollution. A well, recent research shows that there is a direct link between sprawl – suburbanization – and obesity. The changing nature of the city has led to the rise of King Car, such that, instead of walking, cars become the way of movement. This tyranny of distance is one of the causes of obesity and thus cancer and heart attacks in the Western world.  700,000 deaths in developing countries annually could be prevented if three pollutants – carbon monoxide, suspended particulate matter, and lead – were brought down to safe levels.

How can Dubrovnik ensure that traffic jams do not spoil the tourist experience, especially as Croatia moves up the world economy?

2.      The greening of the city. This means more than simply more green spaces, but ensuring that all design is based on ecological principles and has a productive after-life.  Energy efficiency in buses, in cars, is changing the nature of the city, and creating a new industry. Australia, for example, has a new system to rate all housing, giving stars for the following; (1) biodiversity, (2) embodied energy, (3) energy consumption, (4) water consumption, (5) indoor air quality, (6) resource efficiency, (7) location and transport, (8) waste management and (9) food production

How can Dubrovnik become a greener city? What architectural practices, city planning, needs to be rethought:? What from the past should continue?

3.       The healthy city has inner and outer dimensions. The inner dimension is based on perceptions of citizens on the quality of their life. Is it improving?. Externally, it is based on longevity, being free of diseases, reduced infant mortality. 500, 000 Europeans die annually from tobacco related illnesses – all which can be easily prevented. However, the foundations of a healthy city include many variables : environment, social justice, participation, basic needs, connection, urban design, and access to health benefits.

Finally, and most importantly, enhanced health is partly determined by level of social connection in city. Social inclusion leads to better health. Related is the notion of place. This has become more important for individuals and community health as globalization makes place less important for business.

How can Dubrovnik become an even healthier city? Can health become part of its future focus, not just in terms of spas, but in terms of the real social, economic, community and individual indicators?

4.      The global-local city. As globalization makes nations more porous and capital freer, it as well opens up space for cities to create the futures they desire. Changes at macro levels are not so easy, but cities, by being attentive to their local citizens and needs, as well as to the larger global environment (pollution, capital flows, tourists, diseases) can in fact dramatically influence the future.

What is Dubrovnik’s vision of the future? And who should it align with to create that? Which other cities have similar pasts, presents and desired futures?

The session concluded with the development of interactive scenarios – digital outlier, back to the past, worst case and best case.

What next then for Dubrovnik?

Cities Create Their Futures (2003)

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Sohail Inayatullah[1]

“Cities to play a major role in global governance, in a reformed United Nations”

“Digitalization, aging, globalization, global warming, new viruses, as well as expanded expectations, all point to dramatic changes in the nature of Mayoral Responsibilities”

“Nothing will change in my role as Mayor in twenty years – just more of the same.”

These were some of the perspectives articulated by 96 Mayors from around the Asia-Pacific Region at the October 20-22 Asia-Pacific Cities Summit 2003. Held in Brisbane, Queensland, Mayors and civic leaders embarked on a foresight process to anticipate future problems, develop scenarios of the future city, and articulate a preferred vision of the “Future of the City”.

Along with plenary sessions with world renowned speakers such as green architect Ken Yeang, Time Magazine hero of the planet Vandana Shiva, “Alternative Nobel” Right Livelihood winner Johan Galtung, Feminist Futurist Ivana Milojevic, City Planner Steven Ames, Chairman of the Future 500 and former CEO of Mitsubishi Electric America Tachi Kiuchi, Mayors met in a series of sessions to chart out the direction of the future city. The sessions were facilitated by political scientist and professor of futures studies and social sciences, Sohail Inayatullah.

Familiar Ground

The first session was familiar ground for Mayors as they identified current issues (solving problems is why they were elected to their positions in the first place). Some of these issues included population drift (rural to city, small to large cities), traffic congestion, growth occurring faster than infrastructure development, lack of partnership between city and business, loss of cultural heritage, long term water supply, lack of skills of the workforce, lack of support of central government to local government and lack of employment opportunities. The main overall categories of current problems were: sustainability and the challenges of increased growth; infrastructure decline and affordability; governance, environmental protection and resource scarcity, and community capacity.

Mayors, of course, spoke from their personal experiences. Taipei Deputy Mayor Chin-Der Ou challenged Mayors to think not only of SARS but of future viruses.  Mayors from Fijian cities (Gani from Nadi, Simmons from Labasa, Goundar from Lautoka) spoke of the challenges of a central government that was not sympathetic to local issues. Mayor Sirajuddin Haji Salleh  of Ipoh commented that globalization – in the form of increased travel and heightened information – had raised the expectation of Ipoh citizens. They expected Ipoh to have the same levels of “development” (services, for example) as an American or European city, New York or London, for example.

From current issues, Mayors moved to identifying future problems. To do so, Mayors were asked to identify drivers that were pushing us into the future. The drivers selected included the usual suspects:  Population growth, Economic and Cultural Globalization, and Environmental Changes.

Based on these drivers, Mayors then focused on emerging issues. The purpose of this was so that they could better anticipate the future and thus better meet the changing needs of citizens (and new stakeholders – global corporations, global non-governmental organizations, global institutions). These issues included what could go wrong but also opportunities for greater prosperity and democratization.

Along with the expected issue of the increased income gap between the haves and have nots being created by globalization, Mayors saw that the future would make their roles  more complex. They would have to address issues such as the ethics associated with medical and technological advancements, e-governance, as well as the broader issue of the role of the civic leader in a digitalized e-city. And along with a squeeze from the Central Government – in terms of less funds but more responsibilities – Mayors would be caught in a squeeze from nature, with extensive competition for water and other natural resources. Aging as well would change the nature of the city, leading some cities to becoming increasingly dysfunctional and others far becoming retirement centers. Along with the demographic shift of aging, immigration, especially the new wave of  global knowledge workers (and refugees), would change the face of the city.

But through all the changes, the Mayors were clear that their role would be to ensure that communities stayed connected. It was creating strong and healthy communities that was central, focusing on relationship building. This was a central point made by Caboolture, Mayor Joy Leishman. Without a leadership role – developing a vision of the future and creating structures and processes that could deliver that the future – cities would find themselves swamped by a rapidly transforming global, regional and local worlds.

Scenarios

From these issues, four scenarios emerged.

The first was a warning of what could go wrong if technocratism overwhelmed governance. This was High-Tech Anomie, with technologization leading not to greater community building but to further alienation. In this future, the internet would become a site of fragmentation and crime, drug shopping, for example. Improvements in genetics would only benefit the rich, creating cities divided by class.

The second was a future where Mayors were unable to meet the changing expectations of citizens. Democratization, globalization, a highly educated, technology savvy population demanding instant response from cities would lead to a condition of permanent crisis. Leadership would succumb to these pressures and citizens would resort to undemocratic expressions to get their needs met.

The third future was one where Mayors spent most of their time and resources on disaster management. Whether it was SARS (and future diseases from genetic errors) or HIV or the global water crisis, cities should expect a difficult and bleak future, where survival was of primary importance.

The fourth future was far more hopeful. Mayors argued that with a highly educated and informed populace, their jobs would become that of the facilitator. Their role would be focused on the capacity building of city employees and citizens. Creating learning organizations and communities would become the vehicle wherein citizens took far more responsibility for of the future of their city.  Part of being a learning community was to embed in the city, processes of conflict resolution – mediation and arbitration – within their communities,  so that the rights of individuals and groups and the pressure of social advancement could be negotiated.

The first three scenarios required leadership to ensure that the trends were managed or that they did not occur, while the last was focused on what could be done to anticipate and accommodate any future.

Fishbowl scenarios

The next session was a plenary fishbowl wherein these scenarios were tested.. Along with speakers Johan Galtung, Vandana Shiva, and Tachi Kiuchi, were Mayors Tim Quinn of Brisbane, Mayor Sirajuddin Haji Salleh  of Ipoh, Mayor Ho Pin Teo of North West District of Singapore, and of Mayor Robert Bell of Gosford. In an interactive session, led by Inayatullah, these futures were refined.

Galtung evoked the rainforest to imagine the future of the city. As Ken Yeang had argued earlier, the built environment should be, and could be, integrated into the natural environment. Not only would cost savings results – energy bills, health costs,  – but the beauty of the city would be restored.[2] Green could become gold. Vandana Shiva reminded participants that for cities to create the futures they wanted they had to challenge the strategies and tactics of large private corporations, particularly in the areas of water management.[3] Water, she asserted, must remain a public resource, and, as much as possible, cities needed to ensure that globalization did not erode democratic decision-making processes. Tachi  Kiuchi, as well, focused on the Rainforest as the guiding image of the future. City design and planning had to be based on different principles – cooperative evolution between nature and city, technology and community, for example. Mayor Ho Pin Teo brought out practical examples of how Singapore was becoming more green and healthy while retaining its business focus

However, not all in the audience were impressed. The city as international and , prosperous, focused on economic development, attracting large projects (theme parks, for example) – , that this the Big International City outlook was brought up as a counter image – indeed, as the only realistic future. The Mayor of Cairns, Kevin Byrne, in particular, argued that the Rainforest as guiding metaphor for the city was inappropriate. Mayor Wang Hong Ju of Chongqing, as well, saw prosperity and internationalization as primary.

However, fish bowl participants saw that the Big City scenario only as only a continuation of the present. Current trends would lead to expected outcomes:.

1.      A divided city, with a number of fault lines: between (A1) the winners and losers of globalization, (B) the young and old, (C) local residents and new migrants, and (D) the on-line and the off-line.

2.      Urban sprawl would exacerbate loss of green areas, destroy livable communities by continuing the car-highway-oil paradigm of the future.

3.      As well, in the current model, pollution and, traffic jams would just worsen, building more development would only lead to more buildings, and not only increased costs (The World Bank estimates that the cost to the world ofis $500[4] billion a year is lost on deaths and injuries plus congestion, sprawl, noise loss of forests and farms, and carbon emissions)[5] but cities would miss the financial, social and cultural benefits of creating green and healthy cities.

4.      Furthermore, the current model would reduce democratization, reduce the capacity of local people to save community and public spaces and make decisions as to their own futures.

5.      Finally the Big City model was being discarded by most Western cities, as they searched for new visions to lead them forward. Copying a used-future was unlikely to lead to prosperity, rather the same old mistakes would be committed again.[6]

The debate was not resolved, however, with some considering these costs as externalities, part of the price for progress.

What is clear that the future should not be seen in simplistic terms. Rather, creating a clean, healthy, urban village, public and community space focused city, where people (social, environmental, and cultural capital was foundational) were the true landmarks, and not the tallest buildings, would lead to increased prosperity for all.  It was not the single bottom line of the developer or the radical green activist that was being called for but the triple bottom line of prosperity, social justice and environmentalism.

Not polluting – and ensuring that this did not happen via persuasion, fines and incentives – would enhance the desirability of the city.  Traditional notions of desirability were about size, grandness – the modern city – however, new notions are focused on individual health, community capacity building, well being and quality of life.  Case studies on the steps required to realize this future were presented by Prasit Pongbhaesat , the Deputy-Director General of Policy and Planning for Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (the healthy cities project) and by Deputy Mayor Chin-Der Oh of Taipei (the cities acclaimed recycling project)

VISION

The final session was focused on the preferred future. What type of city did Mayors desire? And how could cities work together to create a shared future? As expected there was not full agreement. Representatives were from a variety of cities, some with populations in the millions, others in the thousands, some the economic size of nations, others without a true middle class, however, general points were agreed upon.

1.      The city needs to be clean and green.

2.      The city must focus on creativity and innovation, instead of traditional models and knowledge structures. This was the best way to become prosperous.

3.      The city must be an inclusive place of opportunity, offering equity of access to citizens.

4.      The city must balance the immediacy of growth with protection of the environment, of people’s culture and traditions in the wake of globalisation.

5.      The city of the future needs to be a city where opportunities are available to all its citizens, meaningful work, education, empowerment and self worth – that is survival, well-being, identity and freedom needs must be met.

6.      Cities must remain people friendly – true communities – and ensure that their decisions today did not foreclose the options of future generations.

While there was general agreement, the debate between the large international city and the green clean and healthy image was not resolved.

However, clear steps were formulated so that cities could create their desired futures.

Vision 2020 / Summit City Commitments

A.     Enhance city relationship

1.      In the short term, foster information sharing between local governments through a range of expanded exchange programs.

2.      In the medium term, strengthen the role and outcomes of Sister City relationships, to include technology, resource exchanges and capacity development.

3.      In the long run, creating a global association of local governments, to move towards cities as central to Global Governance, making the first steps towards a House of Cities.

B.       Enhance the green city

4.   Focus on environmental education for young people, with a view to protecting the environment of the future.

5.      Building consensus between all levels of government on key issues of environmental protection and the health of cities.

C.       Enhance capacity

6.      Actively engage young people in the Summit process, with delegates bringing one young person from their city to the next meeting, to ensure that their views are heard and acted upon, especially as their experiences are being formed by different drivers for change.

7.      Enhance volunteer participation in community capacity building in cities, in particular through local government workforces.

8.      Investigate new ways to use technology to encourage participation of all citizens in local government decision making.  For example, chat rooms, SMS messaging on the future vision for cities, e-democracy and so on.

D.  Ensure Future-Orientation

9.      Evaluate these issues on an ongoing basis at future Ssummits, in particular the Summit of 2023, seeing visioning the future as an ongoing process.

10.  Continue to measure the performance and outcomes of Asia Pacific Summits, to determine the most viable model for future city interactions.

Finally, a conclusion of the Summit was that a full record of the proceedings of the Summit and the outcomes agreed by Mayors should be placed in a time capsule, to be opened and presented to the Asia Pacific Summit of 2023, to determine progress on the Summit City Vision.

As a city planner of sorts, Lao-Tsu once said: “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step”.

[1] Sohail Inayatullah, Professor, Tamkang University, Taiwan, Sunshine Coast University, Australia and visiting academic, Queensland University of Technology. www.metafuture.orgs.inayatullah@qut.edu.au

[2] Recent studies assert that urban sprawl is directly related to obesity. City design thus correlated with health indicators. Reid Ewing et al, “Relationship between urban sprawl and physical activity, obesity and morbidity,” The Science of Health Promotion (September/October, Vol 18, No. 1), 2003. Given the direct correlation between obesity and a variety of illnesses (heart disease, cancer, to begin with) city planners have a lot to answer for.

[3] Urban sprawl is also directly related to water issues. For example, we now know that suburban sprawl – strip malls, office buildings and other paved areas – have worsened the drought covering half the United States by blocking billions of gallons of rainwater from seeping through the soil to replenish ground water.   Tom Dogget, “Suburban Sprawl Blocks Water, Worsens U.S. Drought,” Science – Reuters. 28/8/2003

[4] Choosing the Future of Transportation, Molly O’Meara Sheehan (Research Associate, Worldwatch Institute), The Futurist, 35:4, July-Aug 2001, 50-56.

[5] More than one million people a year are killed on the world’s roads, and ten times as many become disabled. By 2020, road traffic injuries will be the third largest cause of “disease” in the world, according to
a research team led by epidemiologist Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. http://www.cochrane.org/cochrane/revabstr/AB003734

[6] Exemplary is a recent issue of Newsweek (October-December 2003). Andres Duany, “The Best of the West,” 55, argues that “the urban landscape is changing fast. But if Asia doesn’t change course, its cities will be dark and dismal.” Instead of symbolic power – the largest city – it is quality of life that has become more important. While hard to measure, some questions are key. Writes Duany: “ Is the city a pleasant place to be? Is there free time, or is it consumed by commuting? Is the air clean? Do people have enough income to buy good housing or is it tied up in purchasing automobiles, which are necessary to get around?” Duany offers the following choices: Asian cities can be like “Dallas and Los Angeles: stuffed with high-rises and surrounded by jammed highways, shopping centers that sprawl across what was once countryside. Or they can be like Portland or Boston: cities of compact, mixed-use neighborhood with a variety of housing: pleasant, walkable streets lined with shops, and a well-run public transit system.” Of course, the key is not to purchase any used future, but to vision the preferred future within Asia’s own historical terms and alternative futures.

Asia Pacific Cities Summit International Keynote Panel (2003)

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BEYOND ROADS, RATES, AND RUBBISH: THE ALTERNATIVE FUTURES OF THE CITY

Opening comments by Sohail Inayatullah

2003 Asia Pacific Cities Summit International Keynote Panel. 20 October 2003. Brisbane.

We are to explore the alternative futures of the city.]

 

These futures are based on the consequences of current trends as well as the anticipation of emerging issues that will likely alter the current trajectory of the city, in all its meanings.

The themes that were developed were based on an environmental scan of the futures of the city, a sorting out of hundreds of articles, books and speeches. They were not mean to reproduce current knowledge but to move toward emergent ideas.

What has resulted are five broad themes:

  1. The transformation of urban sprawl
  2. the greening of the city, going far beyond recycling
  3. the healthy city
  4. the global and local city
  5. and alternative futures

These are not your typical concerns, normally, city politics is mired deep in local politics, in issues of what is called here in Australia, roads, rates and rubbish.

However, cities were never, and especially now are not immune from the forces of globalization, digitalization, multiculturalism, global warming, and other factors that transform the nature of risk.

Cities as well are becoming the site of social change  – UN conferences are referred to by their respective city hosts, Rio 92, for example. Nation-states are hard to maneuver, like grand oil tankers, towns do not have the budget or populations to make a difference, but cities do, they become the nexus between globalization and localization, creating glo-calization. This means ensuring that local people are not lost in the drive for the movement of capital but ensuring that they benefit from internationalization.

City futures is essentially about city design, city policymaking and city planning. Why is this crucial. A recent study reports that that there is a direct relationship between city design, in this case suburbanization, and obesity. We know as well that there is a direct correlation between obesity and cancer and heart attack rates. Thus, what seem as isolated phenomena are in fact directly link. How we design cities in fact dramatically can alter the quality of life of its citizens. Destroy communities for the sake of modernity and what will result is increased crime, anomie, suicide an depression. Build endless suburbs and the benefits of tradition – walking, talking, connecting – will disappear. The healthy city is thus about design.

And it is about money. Have city policies that balk at green issues and the cost of business will go up far more than the cost of  business of following green regulation. Urban and suburban  sprawl, traffic jams, car and bus pollution should not be seen as externalities to be dealt with by individuals and the federal health system but rather they are intrinsic to the city.  Water for example is seen as an externality but as water becomes a crucial issue research is showing that the drought is linked to urban planning patterns. For example, we now know that suburban sprawl – strip malls, office buildings and other paved areas – have worsened the drought covering half the United States by blocking billions of gallons of rainwater from seeping through the soil to replenish ground water.

Thus, Business costs go up, individuals and companies move to other cities, a vicious cycle starts, and soon, what is left is a highly populated, and poor city, caught in a cycle of corruption and waiting. At this stage, neither moral individual actions or inspired leadership is enough, since the structure has taken over.

But by looking at future problems, anticipating them before they become too big to solve, individuals and leaders can do a great deal.

Thus, issues of recycling, clean energy public buses, transparency, walking and bicycle lanes may seem unrelated but they are all directly related to creating a better city.

Digitalization is not separate from creating a better city, indeed, technology must be embedded into all our future themes – digitalization can create a seamless city, with information on tourist arrivals and departures all linked so that costs are held to a minimum. Technology can be used so that more is created with less, technology can help create a healthier city, mapping health providers, making it easier to have access, monitoring our habits via health-bots. Technology, however, is not the solution, we know we will have more of it. The key is its appropriate use, and more ever, it is in innovation in social and organizational know ware as well as in transforming the worldviews that govern how we create the future city that is far more important, and pivotal.

City design and policy planning can thus influence individual behaviors but more importantly is that it transforms systems. We know that better driver training is not the solution of traffic fatalities but rethinking the transportation system. Underneath this system is the worldview of the fast and big city. City design is also then searching for new paradigms and visions of the city. It is understanding the relationship between events, structures, paradigms and images.

I know that for many of you that word comes out at election time and then disappears when the endless politics of budgets takes over. Thus, it is a long term issue, and not meant to solve today’s issues but to ensure that 1. your visions and not colonized by others 2. your visions are the most effective and for the good of all.

It is these visions and alternative scenarios that we will focus on in the mayoral forums and the fish bowls. Research from the sunshine coast suggests that the view of the city as business as usual, while certainly raising housing prices and thus benefiting owners, is not the desired future by most, indeed, only 5% favored this. Most favored three other images. These were 1. electronically linked urban villages, that is, instead of big cities, many linked villages. 2. the triple bottom line sustainable city – prosperity, plus social justice plus environmental concerns. And 3 – the living gaian city, that is, the city that literally becomes alive become of digitalization and spiritualization.

What this means is that spiritual and ethical behaviour is not seen as divorced from local city politics. Normally we segment – and rightly so – the church and city hall (or the temple and city hall) but this emerging vision calls for the integration, reconciliation, of the two. Thus politics is not just seen as what happens at election time, and meditation is not just seen as a personal practice but a new integration of the personal and the political, creating a new imagination of the city.

Certainly we are unlikely to see this type of ethical evolution (here moving far away from Darwinian evolution) for 40-50 years, but in some form, I believe, it is likely to come.

The issue for you as leaders and policy makers is that 1. do you want to resist this image, 2 or create a new vision.

This meeting is your chance to do so, to explore the futures of the city. My hope is that by the end of our three days, we will be able to create not only new memes for the city future, but to say, that at Brisbane, many of the world’s cities charted out a new course for themselves, fundamentally changing city politics and economics.

World as City: City as Future (2000)

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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.

Home Alone and Stuck in the Office (1999)

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SOHAIL INAYATULLAH (Australian Financial Review, October 1, 1999).

Far from being fun, working from home may increase domestic pressures and social isolation, writes Sohail Inayatullah.

John Worthington works from home. He saves on petrol and gets to spend more time with his children and his wife. He drives to his inner-city office once or twice a week for meetings with colleagues. A win-win story? Perhaps, perhaps not.

The internet, while making it possible to telecommute, is still much slower at home than at most offices. However, in a decade or so, with information piped through cable (this is ATT’s big gamble) it will become lightning quick.

Also, although individuals like John Worthington no longer spend long lunches with office friends, they do have their new virtual communities: friends from various email groups they are part of. And in the next 10 years, they will not only be able to read their emails, they will be able to see and hear them with v-net (visual net).

And yet all is not quite well. There is no one to help keep the house tidy. At work, any mess was cleaned up overnight. In the morning, the office was immaculate. At home, there is a constant battle between the children’s toys, the partner’s work and your own work.

Endless filing cabinets cannot solve the problem. While working from home offers a great deal of flexibility if the children become sick, work is always staring you in the face.

Moreover, life has become more anonymous. Working from the suburbs often means that the only community is the net. Office friendships, chance lunches with colleagues, and even the office will
disappear.

It will be a lonely life. Yes, the screen no longer flickers, but virtual reality is still virtual.

Digital gurus such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Professor Nicholas Negroponte have forgotten, in their rosy forecasts of digital nirvana, that technological change without real institutional change only makes life worse for most.

As author Marshall McLuhan warned two decades ago: “Excessive speed of change isolates already fragmented individuals.” The technology is not the issue: community and relationship is.

For Sharon Jones, the “pros” outweigh the “cons”. She too spends more time with her kids. But she wishes that they had an extended family. The net has allowed the return to the home, but the home is no longer what it used to be.

The neighborhood community does not exist. Mum and Dad are not there to help, they keep on getting sicker, and now are in an old folks home. She wishes she could get them to live with her, but she can barely manage her kids, and her husband does not make things easier insisting on working from home, but doing nothing to help around the house, as that is still a woman’s job

Just as neighbourhood shops disappeared a few years back, malls have now started to go bankrupt.

Internet shopping has reduced their traffic, and now there is nowhere to take the kids (in any case, they prefer their virtual friends). And the email grocer delivery person keeps on changing.
John and Sharon, two only slightly fictitious examples, are our present and future. Yes, we will work from home. Technological advances will let us do so. Globalism will ensure we do so, as it will save government, university and corporations on office space and other infrastructure costs.

Tenure and life-time jobs will disappear and we will be mostly contract workers. In the long term, few of us will actually work.

But the dream of telecommuting will not solve all our problems, largely because home has changed so much.

For men, home was the safe, secure space to retreat to after a hard day’s work. The kids were already in bed, and all that was left to do was eat, wash a few dishes, watch television and try and have sex with one’s wife.

But with working from home, responsibilities will begin to shift. Women will expect and demand that men help with the housework, with parenting. Not just their fair share but equal responsibility. Men will not be able to escape to the office.

While men will only have to upgrade themselves, women will continue to face a difficult and uncertain future.

Michelle Wallace, head of the School of Workplace and Development at Southern Cross University, says: “Women who try and combine work with family are considered by management as not serious about their jobs.

“Studies show that women work the `double shift’ and that men with working wives often do not share half of the domestic/family responsibilities.”

Does this mean that the more things change, the more they stay the same? Technology rearranges some of our work practices, but it does not change deeper-held beliefs of productivity, hard work and “blokism”. Without fundamental change, it only amplifies oppressive practices.

Worse, says Wallace: “The whole move to family-friendly policies [by governments in Europe, for example, especially Sweden] and increasing interface between public and private can also be seen as increasing surveillance of workers’ lives.”

The power of management over the worker expands from the office to the home. While there is a definite shift from blue collar to white collar, and in the next 10 years to no-collar workers, management may soon desire to know what you are wearing underneath that no-collar.

But are there any bright futures in all this?

First, there is an age generation gap. Older managers will try to control workers who begin to telecommute. Productivity will not be enough for them; hours worked remains their measure.
The bonding or teamwork necessary through face-to-face meetings the endless boring office meetings everyone loves to hate will also be an issue for older managers.

But younger people raised on the net might see things differently. Networking relationships less hierarchical, and more based on productivity, excellence and quadrupling the bottom line might matter more.

Generation Xers writes Rosemary Herceg, author of Seven Myths and Realities of Generation X (www.Futurists.net.au) are far more sensitive to issues of gender, environment, social justice and future generations, and the impact of our current politics on the long term.

They are also more comfortable with multi-tasking. This is not just the ability to go from one Windows application to another, but to go from editing and writing to changing nappies; to go from web designing or net commerce, to a lovely afternoon spent with one’s partner while the kids are at daycare (or busy on their own screens, since they will have become screenagers).

This new generation might also begin to rethink the home. This means homes designed not for a 19th century office, with the old teak desk, the single book case, and the quill or Parker pen, but high-tech smart homes and offices, with plenty of space for filing (electronic and paper).

This also means homes that bring the ageing and aged back in. With Australia and other OECD nations rapidly ageing one out of every four will be over 65 in a few decades and the average age will move from the historical 20 to 40, or 50 finding meaningful lives for the aged will be crucial.

Ending the world view that life ends at 40, 50 or 60 will be the first step. Ending the view that one works for 40 years and then mindlessly slips into death, or plays endless golf, will be the next step.

This means that the grand divisions we have had for centuries of the male public sphere and female private sphere will be challenged. The separation of inner city and suburbs will be next. The separation of work and play will follow soon.

An information-based post-industrial cyber era does not only mean that there will be tons more data, or that we will remove ourselves further from the farm; rather it could mean that the divisions of the industrial era are about to collapse.

A high-tech world, where work will intermingle with play, where kids and the aged will play together and communities will once again flourish once tele-decentralisation goes into full swing is quite possible. Once men move back home, they will make sure that there is money for daycare, for creating community at home.

And what of the fancy offices of inner cities? They will become like the steel mills of the industrial era. Tourism relics. Just as the foreman has disappeared from our vocabulary, the office manager, or the university professor or anyone else who needs a captive physical audience to exist will slowly disappear.

Alternatively, the digital era could reinforce managerial power, surveillance and male domination. In response, we will return to a feudal digital era, where the house becomes the man’s digital castle.
In either scenario, real changes are ahead. Welcome to the Wired World.

The Urban Imagination (1996)

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By Sohail Inayatullah
May 1996
“The Urban Imagination,” Edges (Vol. 3, No. 4, 1991); expanded and reprinted in New Renaissance (Vol. 2, No, 3, 1991).

CONSTRUCTING THE CITY

The city is constructed in numerous ways. In the modern view, a city is defined by its civic culture; urban planners focus on the architecture and infrastructure of a city. Others believe a city must have an economic exchange system and a system of authority and governance to be called a city. Modern American cities are largely defined by energy systems and by consumption patterns: the car and the shopping mall. From the geographical view, cites emerge as the number of individuals on a given territory increase. They must find ways to negotiate food, power, wealth, and personal and impersonal relationships. How the city comes to be organized is based on these negotiations. Moreover, cities reflect and are constituted by the cultures and worldviews that create them. For example, American culture defines the city as a place one transports to for work or pleasure but one does not live there. American cities also exhibit expansion and decline unlike Asian cities which continue to expand and European cities which because of high energy costs have found ways to retain the old ancient city and new development. American cities emerged as part of America’s colonization of the frontier while Asian cities have historically been the foci of polity, economy and culture. In recent US history the construction of the city has gone through various stages, from the City Beautiful (designed around large government buildings), to the City Efficient (concern with sewage systems, water and other basic needs) to the City Radical (the city and its social and human consequences).

Another way to understand the city is by its relationship to its opposite, the rural. Historically the city is the center, the rural the periphery (the city consumes the rural produces). History is the history of the city for that is what remains, that is what archeologists find, moreover, history shows the future the grandness of past human efforts. But this grandness is based on finding ways to appropriate wealth from those that produce goods and grow food. This is done either through tributary coercive systems in military states, by ideological systems when power is concentrated in priests or through exchange systems such as capitalism. In either case, the city exists because of the rural and because of the ability of those in the city to appropriate this wealth from workers and peasants.

POSTMODERN VIEWS

In the emerging postmodern view, important not only is how the city appropriates wealth but also how the city obfuscates its location in our technocratic discourses. In this view the city is not constructed as a place that creates policy rather the city is in itself a policy, in itself a way of organizing the world, indeed of knowing the world. The city then more than anything is a space, a configurement of power, values and more importantly ways constructing the world. However, most often we see the city as a fixed place that produces politics (in places like city hall, in ghettos) instead of a place that is politics. The city then is a practice: a changing set of values, ways of organizing, and structures that emerge and disappear. For us this is difficult to see for we rarely see the city, its boundaries are wholly present to us and thus unable for analysis. Only when we distance ourselves from the city can we see our categories, our city spaces. We can do this by tracing the history of cities: to see how a particular city developed in one way rather than another (because of geographical factors, because of sackings from invaders, because of the local and regional economy or because of the religious culture). We can also do this be examining the structure of a city: what functions does it serve?

Honolulu, for example, is divided into recreation spaces (beaches and parks), an industrial zone that produces wealth (Waikiki), shopping consumer zones, a range of living zones broken down by affordability or class, government and business areas (downtown), natural reserves, and garbage spaces. One’s situation within the political economy of wealth is based on living either on the hills or on the beach (in a house not as a homeless beach person). Alternatively in a religious culture, the city is defined not by tourism (physical beauty and leisure activities) but by other places of congregation: shrines, temples and mosques. Again, in the emerging postmodern view of cities, the effort is not to see these categories as natural but to show how they have emerged, to ask how the categories we use to talk about the city have historically changed, and how cities are reflections of civilizational worldviews. For example, in medieval times, the emerging mercantilists existed outside the city–they were the traders–it is only later when capital accumulation took center stage that they moved inside the city. With the traders now inside, the military was forced outside of the city, as a kind of a modern day wall. Historically, security and sovereignty too have changed.

Once a city was defined by its wall, protecting against trade and ideas: the modern city no longer has these walls (electronic technology and the car have made this idea remote). Indeed the modern city is abstract: created by economic and media forces. By virtue of this abstraction, the modern city searches for an identity (the “I love New York” buttons or “I love Islamabad” t-shirts, and marketing slogans such as “the Gateway between North and South America” the “Crossroads of the Pacific” and “Most Liveable City”) is an attempt to regain community, a collective “we”. However, the reality is that there is no such community; indeed, the trend across large cities irrespective or culture is the remedievalization of the city with community defined by security systems, with private security agencies guarding plush areas and other areas identified through the color of the gangs that roam them. Security not abstract identity once again has become central in defining the city.

KHALDUN AND SPENGLER: THE MORAL DISCOURSE

But this is what the ancients predicted would happen with the city. For them the way to undertand the city is not by the political or the economic or the social ways of seeing the world but by the moral discourse. For Islamic philosopher Ibn Khaldun, there are two types of culture that are at near opposites; the nomadic and the city. One has values of bravery, morality, unity, strong kinship ties, and respect for parental authority, while the other has cowardice, fragmentation, economic ties and individuality. But once the nomadic gains power and wealth, once the size of the tribe increases then new relationships emerge; the values of the rural breakdown. Old loyalities disappear, there is fighting within the dyansty, and with each new crises, the legitimacy of the body that governs the city weakens and the nomadic spirit that created the city disintegrates. The culture then declines and the invaders march in.

For Oswald Spengler, in the beginning there is culture but as cities become megalopolises culture degenerates into “civilization”. Culture begins not with nomadic struggle but with the awakening of a great soul. As cities develop, power becomes concentrated into the hands of two classes the nobility and the priests. Eventually however a capitalist class emerges and urban values replace agricultural ones. Money emerges victorious over traditional values and landed property. In culture, democracy is controlled by the intellect, in the megalopolis, in “civilization”, it is money that buys votes. It is the money spirit that forces the civilization to expand, for cities to become bigger cities. Eventually the mass develops. At this stage, Spengler, who follows the classic model of birth, adolescence, adulthood, senility and death, concludes that death is but near, the culture has lost its conviviality and creativity its spirituality. Instead of folk, there is but mob. Power now becomes concentrated in rude force: the city is in its final days, only a few can remember the brilliance of the past, the city but now provides panems and circuses.

William Irwin Thompson finds these two visions of space as part of an unchanging historical pattern. “When one believes in an alternative
vision of history … he is stepping outside the city to see a pastoral vision in which the office building and the universities do not obscure the archaic stars … Those left behind in the city define themselves as responsible and sane and see the wanderer as a madman. The wanderer defines himself as the only sane person in a city of the insane and walks out in search of other possibilities. All history seems to pulse in this rhythm of urban view and pastoral visions.” (Thompson, 152-153, 1971)

If these visions of the city appear obvious to us now, it is because they have inflitrated our gazes making them folk wisdom. Moreover, they capture traditional dichotomies. They also point to the structurual difficultes in creating alternative futures for the city. While green activitists and efforts by Richard Register in Ecocity: Berkeley argue for creative cities where the communal and the spiritual is possible in the city properly designed, Leopold Kohr taking the structural view reminds us that it is size that engenders the problems of urbanization. Others such as Mark Satin, speaking for the American counter cultural movement, have based their entire theory of New Age Politics on this variable arguing against what he calls the “big city outlook” (patriarchy, centralization, bureaucratization, corporatization).

THE IMAGINED MODERN ASIAN CITY

But cities do attract people. In rural Asian villages, cities are places of necessity, once debt forces the selling of land or bad harvests force migration. They are also the places of imagination. Anything is possible in the city: wealth, sex, power; new relationships. The city person goes to the village in search of solace, in search of a past, of community, of an old rhythm. But those in the village yearn for the luxury of paved roads, of freedom from the oppressive family structure, of links with the global and release from the confines of the eyes of the neighbor.

For these in the megacity the community and stability of the village attracts, while those in the village long for the freedom of the city. For those in the village, the city represents wealth, bureaucracy and the official discourse of power. In the village morality is easier to control: one does not need police or laws, mere ostracism is enough. However, villages can become fiefdoms where there are no checks and balances for power: landlords have executive, legislative and judicial powers. In the city, this power stranglehold does breakdown with the emergence of the government bureaucracy and the entrepreneurial classes. At the same time, those in the village know that the city represents the breakdown of the natural order of “man” and environment; thus even as the city attracts it repulses.

Nonetheless, having a magnificent city is among the prerequisites of modernity. In the linear theory of social evolution, a city must have a sports stadium (to show that humans as producers of games have been transformed into consumers of sports, that is money is now involved and victory over other nation-states near and far is possible) fine roads (preferably without cow dung lining them), a university (where universal and hegemonic knowledge displaces shamanistic folk wisdom), and grand shopping centers (replacing the unmediated marketplace of sellers and buyers to the mediated shopping malls wherein city space becomes merchandizing space representing affluence and “choice”). The city is then the official tribute to the dominant materialist way of understanding the world: through exchange and capital at present, in other epochs through religion and priests, and through expansion and military power. However in all eras the city represents humans and their efforts to conquer and dominate the environment.

The city is a category in the march of time and in the city, time itself, changes. Cities speed up time; indeed they are designed so as to catch up with those who are ahead in time. Village time is slow time, seasonal time, mythological time and ancestral time (where ancestors are still alive, guiding our movements as with the Maori and Australian Aboriginal). Village time is also future generational time in that land is scarce and the livelihood of future generations must be planned for, thought about. Of course, the traditional plan has been to move to the city to a place where time is faster, where there are not only more people but more activities, where more wealth generation is possible. City time is also electric time, where the mythological power of the moon is reversed, and city lights enthrall our senses.

In the city, time is planned time, it is organized time; seasonal time, mythological time and generational time have less currency. To mobilize and organize and to laborize (the work day and the work hour) large amounts of people there must be agreement as to time, thus the clock not the moon or the sun or the leaves falling off the tree.

The city then is an apt metaphor for linear economic development. Just as in modernity the village must be transformed into the city (but parts of it miniaturized either in the museum, or in the fables of writers), Third World nations must be transformed into modern nations (and their exotic or primitive culture miniaturized for display).

Each Third World country aspires for this vision. Pakistan created Islamabad to be its modern city. Islamabad with the aid of the interventionists of history, the Ford Foundation and other liberal escort agencies, was entirely planned. There was a residental area, a university area, a diplomatic area, a bureaucratic area, and a retail area. However, no place was planned for the poorer classes, for they would not be needed in this technocratic enterprise: instead of sweepers (a central job in Pakistan’s hierarchy) there would be vacuum cleaners. But the enormous size of Islamabad’s houses, the dust that is Pakistan, and the cost of vaccum cleaners, added with inexpensive labor led to a high demand for sweepers. But with no place to live, sweepers built their own houses with dirt and mud. But these katchi abadis (soft residences) were an eyesore to city planners so remembering the medieval days of the fort, a pucka abadis (hard wall) was built around the sweepers. Even Islamabad which attempts to escape the poverty of Pakistan finds that the other as sweeper, its past, returns within its center.

Islamabad is also interesting for another reason. It has no culture, no history, no sense of place. There are no bazaars or Moghul architecture like in Lahore; there are no places to consume high art and fashion as in Karachi; there is no feeling of identity. And yet how can it have culture: created by technocrats, and midwifed by bureaucrats who desire to escape, to but reinscribe their walls of bureaucracy on to the city. But culture can be thought of as other then history or place or community; culture is also as Ashis Nandy writes: resistence. The village sweepers in this example are that resistence, the hidden culture that cannot be extinquished, the counter culture to the official culture of diplomats and bureaucrats. And yet, as the rest of Pakistan disintegrates from ethnic and geo political battles, it is Islamabad that remains secure and safe. For now. It is disconnected in time and place, thus the attraction to Islamabad and naturally the repulsion one might feel when there.

Singapore, too, is a city which has managed to claim entrance into the modern world, largely through its Pacific Rim generated wealth. Under the leadership of the stern father Lee Kwan Yew , it too has managed to domesticate culture, it too has managed to create a replica of the scrubbed clean house, one where diversity and wildness all but disappear. But this is too harsh. After a few weeks in South Asia where the wildness of warring ethnic groups, of water shortages of electric brownouts, of traffic anarchy, of roads not numbered sequentially, and of a life by bribery consume one’s rationality, Singapore appears like a modern haven. Confucian culture with its respect of authority and hierarchical relations are indeed welcome when compared to the democratic anarchy that is South Asia. South Asian cities have more freedom (driving on any side of the road is optional for while there are laws, there is no way to enforce them) but Singapore is more efficient.

Contrast this with rapidly developing Third World cities: Los Angeles or New York or London. Reversing traditional patterns, these cities have the core as low-wage labor intensive and the outskirts as high-finance intensive. These latter day cities remind us that cities like civilizations do decay and disaggregate; that history is not linear but full of reversals and betrayals, cycles and seasons; the linear model of modernity cannot explain the decline of the city except by blaming it as an infestation from the outside, from the barbaric. But cities can have many ethnicities and be rich, as Singapore shows us; and while race is a predictor of poverty it is not a cause of poverty or decline, rather these factors must be placed on the hierarchical structure of capitalism itself (real estate speculation and trickle down theories, for example). It is not immigrants that cause the decline of a city but rather the association of certain spaces with low-wage labor and the inability of government to provide these sites with necessary infrastructure. Part of this inability can be explained by the actual poverty cycle in these low-income areas (where community breaks down) and partly by their mental construction by city leaders as places of and for the poor.
But this decline of the city was not the vision of the modernists.

The 1964 World’s Fair did not imagine multicultural cities rather the city was the site of efficiency and technology. The American television series The Jetsons best exemplifies this vision. This is the high-tech/one culture model. The Fred Flinstone vision is remarkably similar although set in prehistoric times. Contrast this with Blade Runner (or more recently Strange Days) which extrapolates present Los Angeles and ends up with a unruly city, with multiple cultures (human and android) and high-technology. This vision is far more likely then the vision of the future as the electronic cottage, the electronic village; rather the future will more likely be the electronic city, the Los Angelization of the world.

THE SPIRITUAL/ECOLOGICAL CITY

Alternatively, there is the ecological vision. Here the city is designed for low energy use, the car is made problematic as it damages the enviornment. In addition, size and distance are critical. Ivan Illich, for example, has argued that after a certain velocity in transportation systems, social justice and equity decrease. Eco-cities are thus designed to create possibilities for closeness, wherein the group (kin or work) is the prime unit of identification. In terms of recent exemplary designs, there is Ananda Nagar, the abode of Endless Bliss. This city is designed by the late P.R. Sarkar on ancient sacred site wherein individuals gained enlightenment. Sarkar takes the ancient Tantric worldview (as modernized by his social movements Ananda Marga and PROUTist Universal) and constructs city spaces to reflect the values of spirituality, global/local community, economic democracy, and multi-culturalism.

Ananda Nagar is an ecological city intended to regenerate the rural economy. As other intended communities it is meant to be self-sufficient (through and interlinking of education and soft energy economic wealth creation projects). It also has sancutaries for animals and rare plants. Instead of a huge dams there are shallow ponds which restore the environment, thus anticipating the global water crisis. Streets are named after scientists and philosophers: Einstein, Gandhi, Tagore, Shakespeare to mention a few. This is an example of a city that is culture: it represents global spiritual culture. It is different from cities developed by other social movements in that is meant to revitalize an impoverished area by creating self-reliance and self-sufficiency, solving the problems of water and poverty as opposed to finding a home for a monoculture of those with a similar worldview (although certainly the city is a monument to its founder, Sarkar). Moreover, this city is connected to history even as it creates an alternative vision of the future for India and other peripherialized places.

Central to this rethinking of the city is the resituation of land from individual and state owndership to cooperative means. Historically Indian village were ecological sound as the local village government controlled the environment (community management), when this responsibility was transferred to the British, to government, the bureaucracy developed centralized rules to control the common areas taking away power from the community and granting it to those far away. The example of Ananda Nagar is among the strategies to recover the rural and to develop methods of community development management and is translatable to Detroit, Amsterdam or Calcutta. Critical is the development of a community spirit, of local pride, of one’s surroundings. For example, voted the best in the world, Calcutta’s subway system–in a city where nothing else runs–can but be explained, if at all, by the pride and the sense of collective ownership citizens have of it.

GLOBAL AND LOCAL CITY SPACES

While efforts to create new cities built on history and based on community self-reliance are laudable the city still exists in a larger cultural and political economy. When localized, capitalism might be protected against, but the juggernaut of modernity is difficult to vanquish until the city itself become an alternative policy and becomes part of a larger civilization. This, of course, is Sarkar’s project: the creation of a new civilizational ethos with an alternative spiritual–around pillars of economic democracy, inclusion of the Other, better use of our physical, intellectual and creative resources, and dynamic balance between technology and nature.
Placing the city in the global is the classic tension between globalism and localism. Localism creates community but also ossifies narrow and dogmatic practices. Globalism opens up to the Other but currently it is only capital that is truly global, labor and ideas still are resisted at national borders.

Cities, however, manifest this tension and have the possibility of creating a new space wherein they are locally managed within a context of a global design. But we should not forget that this was Pol Pot’s brutal design as well. The history of creating intended cities as a response from modernity or as an attempt to transcend modernity are ripe with failures as well. While necessary, planning and design often place the “city” in the policy arena of technocracy and bureaucracy (like land zoning planners) not in the hands of culture or spiritual consciousness.
Finally, even as part of our selves might wish for cities like Islamabad–clean and efficient–they are only possible with the removal of certain classes. For one can not escape history and one can not escape those that the city displaces: the other classes and more importantly the spiritual and ethical discourse that the city attempts to remove from our creations and understandings of the world. While we all want the City Efficient, the social and economic consequences of city design force us to remember the City Ecological and the City Spiritual. The city might attempt to wall what the dominant culture fears but in its creation of physical and intellectual security, it robs itself of the Other; an Other that eventually finds some way of reentering the minds of those in the City, often through various forms of cultural resistance.

But the City Ecological and Spiritual, community managed and ecological sound, are faced with the larger forces of modern capitalism and with the lure of city lights. The new form that contests all these city images, is the cyber city: the node of networks and relationships created through the internet. However, at on level these but continue the Los Angelization of the planet; they create community without face-to-face meetings, they allow individual expression without responsibility to the Other. At another level, however, the continue the process of the creation of a planetary culture, albeit a materialistic one. But once the the idea of the planet supercedes other identities then the spiritual unity that is humanity can hopefully not be too far behind.

Cities then are representations of various theories (theories of modernity, or Tantra, e.g.) and they themselves are the creators of theories. City do not create culture or public policy rather they are culture and policy. City spaces are but the concrete manifestations of our paradigms or our imaginations of the real. We need to imagine alternatives spaces for the city and create cities that help transform us.

REFERENCES

Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity (Harper and Row, 1974)
Karl Kim and Kem Lowry, “Honolulu,” Cities (November 1990)
Leopold Kohr, Overdeveloped Nations: The Diseconomies of Scale (Schocken
Books, 1978)
Ray Lenzi, “Ananda Nagar: Building a Sustainable Society,” Prout
Journal, (Vol. 5, No. 1, 1989)
Nikos Papastergiadis, “Ashis Nandy: Dialogue and the Diaspora–A
Conversation,” Third Text (Summer 1990).
Kevin Robins and Mark Hepworth, “Electronic Spaces: new technologies and
the future of cities,” Futures (April 1988)
Richard Register, Ecocity: Berkeley (North Atlantic Books 1987)
Mark Satin, editor, New Options. Box 19324. Wash. D.C. 20036
Strategies (No. 3, 1990). Special Issue: In the City
Michael Shapiro and Deane Neubauer, “Spatiality and Policy Discourse:
Reading the Global City.” Alternatives (July 1989)
William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History (Harper and Row 1971)
________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Sohail Inayatullah is a political scientist/futurist and judicial planner. Phil McNally provided useful comments to an earlier draft.