Why Cities Matter — Whole Earth Discipline: City Planet

Stewart Brand’s chapter on urbanisation as an environmental good: in developed countries the migration runs from boring, lonely, hard rural life toward the city, and the city is the more efficient place to put a person.

Part of the New City reading list — the books Kyle worked through while building the The New City thesis. Indexed on that page.

Notes

• By S. Brand
• In developed countries like the US the migration is from boring, lonely, and hard to exciting, busy, and pleasant—toward coasts, sun and densely citified regions called megapolitan areas, such as the one encompassing everything on the eastern seaboard from Boston to Richmond.
• According to some historians, “Civilization is what happens in cities.” Civilatization and city are in the same Latinate word group, along with civil, civics, citizen, etc. I live in California, but I avidly read the New Yorker and New York Times, just as the French read Paris Match and the English read the London newspapers. You can characterize any nation by its largest city, and study the progress of any era by examining the largest cities of its time. Most of the people I know think of the world in terms of London, New York, Paris, Berlin—the great Western metropolises.
• Countries that are highly urbanized have higher incomes, more stable economies, stronger institutions. They are better able to withstand the volatility of the global economy than those with less urbanized populations. So notes the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, which was impelled to its city-boosting position by revelations in the worldwide data it has been gathering since 1978. Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city. Cities have always benefitted from what are called “economies of agglomeration”—density accelerates economic activity—and lately they have gotten a further boost form globalization.
• A new theory is upsetting our idea of what cities are and can become. Through a phenomenon known as Kleiber’s law, organisms become more metabolically efficient as they scale up—from shrew to elephant. Cities do the same. But organisms move more slowly as they increase in size whereas cities speed up as they get bigger. City growth creates problems and then city innovations speeds up to solve them. Not only does the pace of life increase with city size, but so also must the rate at which new major adaptations and innovations need to be intro ducted to sustain the city.
• The purpose of cities has progressed from defense to agriculture, trade and finally to become a home.
• In regards to slums and squatters, the poor (informal economy) class create much of the future of cities. It doesn’t matter whether you give people title deeds or secure tenure, people simply need to know they won’t be evicted. When they know they are secure, they build. They establish a market. They buy and sell. They rent. They create. They develop. Actual control, not legal control, is the key. Give squatters a security and they will develop the cities of tomorrow. The lesson I draw is that any practice that leads to treating houses mainly as property tends to destroy community, and any practice that treats them mainly as homes preserves community. The best plans generally let the slum dwellers themselves make the main decisions in planning their future. You should provide clean seater, toilets, electricity, garbage collection and disposal, and maybe let people build their own houses if they can, using materials that you can provide. These sorts of schemes, known as “slum upgrading” or “sites and services,” have been at the heart of the most successful urban-renewal projects of the past 40 years.