Mega Gradovi i Urbani Koridori

Mega gradovi i urbani koridori - izveštaj UN o bliskoj budućnosti gradova sveta

08.04.2010. | Gradjevinarstvo.rs

Gradovi širom sveta počinju da se spajaju stvarajući naseobine koje su nazvane "mega-regioni" ili "beskrajni gradovi". Oni se mogu prostirati stotinama kilometara i biti dom i za preko 100 miliona ljudi, kaže se u izveštaju Ujedinjenih nacija - Stanje gradova sveta.

Napomena: naslov originala - State of the World’s Cities 2008/2009 - Harmonious Cities, UN-Habitat agency - na linku na kraju teksta možete potpuno besplatno preuzeti ceo izveštaj od 280 stranica, na engleskom jeziku, PDF.

Fenomen beskrajnih gradova bi u budućnosti mogao biti najzastupljeniji oblik ljudskih staništa, i to već u narednih 50 godina. Sada tek preko polovine svetskog stanovništva živi u gradovima, ali do 2050. godine preko 70% ljudi živeće u urbanim sredinama.

- Do tada, samo 14% stanovnika najbogatijih zemalja i 33% u siromašnim zemljama živeće van gradova - kaže Anna Tibaijuka, upravnik UN-Habitat-a - Već sada imamo slučaj da u jednom takvom regionu, koji obuhvata gradove Hong Kong-Shenhzen-Guangzhou u Kini živi oko 120 miliona ljudi.

Izveštaj je podeljen u četiri celine koje su obrađene za svaki kontinent posebno:

Prostorna harmonija (Spatial Harmony) Socijalna harmonija (Social Harmony) Harmonija okruženja (Environmental Harmony) Planiranje harmoničnih gradova (Planning for harmonious Cities)

Prvi svetski mega grad, sa oko 120 miliona stanovnika, u svojoj oblasti u delti Biserne reke u Kini obuhvata gradove Hong Kong, Shenhzen i Guangzhou (Hong Kong, Šenzen i Ganđo);

fotografija: NASA

Izveštaj UN kaže da je urbanizacija sada nezaustavljiva. Razvoj mega regiona smatra se pozitivnom, kaže koautor izveštaja Eduardo Lopez Moreno za londonski list Guardian:

- Mega regioni, pre nego države, sada stvaraju bogatstva. Istraživanja kažu da 40 mega-regiona pokriva samo mali deo površine planete i dom su za manje od 18% svetske populacije. Međutim, u njima se odvija oko 66% ekonomskih aktivnosti i oko 85% tehnoloških i naučnih inovacija – objašnjava Moreno.

- Više od polovine svetskog bogatstva nalazi se u svega 25 gradova sveta, a pet najvećih gradova Indije i Kine stecište su za preko 50% bogatstva tih zemalja. Migracije ka gradovima, dok god to ima ekonomskog smisla, podstiču i ekonomiju ruralnih oblasti. Veći deo dobara u ruralnim područjima danas dolazi upravo iz gradova – kaže Moreno.

Postoje i situacije, kao što je ona u Los Anđelesu, da je grad porastao, po broju stanovnika za 45% u periodu od 1975. do 1990. godine, ali je utrostručio svoju površinu za to isto vreme. Ovaj problem je sada već više nego primetan, naročito u gradovima SAD gde je tržište nekretnina decenijama promovisalo idiličnu sliku predgrađa daleko od gradske vreve.

Ovakvo širenje gradova, po autorima izveštaja, simptom je podeljenog i disfunkcionalnog grada: Ne samo da uništava zemljište već povećava i troškove transporta, potrošnju energije, zahteva više sirovina i uzrokuje smanjenje površina obradivog zemljišta.

- Dodatno, podeljeni grad posebno je osetljiv kao potencijalno je žarište za socijalne i političke tenzije. Uopšte, možemo reći da gradovi koje krasi više jednakosti prati i bolji prosperitet od onih drugih - zaključuje Moreno.

Na fotografiji pored jasno se vidi granica grada: siromašne favele Sao Paola, trećeg najmnogoljudnijeg grada na svetu, oštro su odvojene od bogatih gradskih četvrti sa terenima za tenis, bazenima, vrtnim terasama...

NAJVEĆI GRADOVI SVETA PO BROJU STANOVNIKA

GRAD, DRŽAVA 2000. 2010. 2020. 2025.

Tokio, Japan 34,450 36,094 36.399 36.400

Mumbaj, Indija 16,086 20,072 24.051 26.385

Sao Paolo, Brazil 17.099 19.582 21.124 21.428

Meksiko Siti, Meksiko 18,022 19,485 20.695 21.009

Njujork-Njuark, SAD 17,846 19,441 20.370 20.628

Šangaj, Kina 13,243 15,789 18.466 19.412

Kalkuta, Indija 13,058 15,577 18.707 20.560

Daka, Bangladeš 10,285 14,796 19.422 22.015

Buenos Ajres, Argentina 11,847 13,089 13.653 13.768

Karači, Pakistan 10,019 13,052 16.922 19.095

Los Anđeles-Long Bič-Santa Ana, SAD 11,814 12,773 13.461 13.672

Kairo, Egipat 10,534 12,503 14.451 15.561

Rio de Žaneiro, Brazil 10,803 12,171 13.179 13.413

Peking, Kina 9,782 11,741 13.807 14.545

Manila, Filipini 9,958 11,662 13.892 14.808

Osaka-Kobe, Japan 11,165 11,337 11.368 11.368

Istanbul, Turska 8,744 10,530 11.695 12.102

Moskva, ZND 10,016 10,495 10.526 10.526

Seoul, Južna Koreja 9,917 9,762 9.738 9.738

Džakarta, Indonezija 8,390 9,703 11.689 12.363

Pariz, Francuska 9,692 9,958 10.031 10.036

Guangzhou, Guangdong, Kina 7,388 9,447 11.218 11.835

Čikago, SAD 8,333 9,211 9.756 9.932

London, Velika Britanija 8,225 8,607 8.618 8.618

Teheran, Iran 7,128 8,221 9.404 9.814

Napomene uz tablicu:

Najveći grad Australije je Sidnej, sa "samo" 4.078 miliona u 2000, 4.427 danas, 4.716 do 2020, i 4,826 miliona stanovnika do 2025. godine.

Izvor za podatke: Godišnja stopa rasta gradova sveta po regionima i veličini - 1990-2000. godina (UN-HABITAT Global Urban Observatory, 2008)

Analiza je zasnovana na uzorku 2.695 gradova sa preko 100.000 stanovnika

Najveći mega regioni sveta:

Hong Kong-Shenhzen-Guangzhou, Kina, oko 120 miliona stanovnika Nagoya-Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe, Japan, pretpostavlja se da će dostići 60 miliona do 2015. godine

Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo regija 43 miliona stanovnika.

Urbani koridori - isti trend, samo u još većim razmerama:

Zapadna Afrika: 600km urbanizovanog koridora Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Ghana Indija: od Mumbaja do Delhija Istočna Azija: četiri povezana megalopolisa i 77 odvojenih gradova od po preko 200.000 stanovnika nalazi

se na potezu od Pekinga do Tokija, preko Pjongjanga i Seula.

Linkovi:

Izveštaj Stanje gradova sveta (PDF, 24Mb) - http://www.unhabitat.org/pmss/listItemDetails.aspx?publicationID=2562

Održivi razvoj doslovce - razvoj i perspektive gradova na prelasku dva milenijuma (linkovi)

15.10.2010. | Mladen Bogićević | Build magazin

Uređenje gradova za više od polovine stanovnika na planeti zapravo predstavlja uređenje životne sredine. Odavno smo prešli prag kada su gradovi bili samo tačke koncentracije stanovnika, trgovine, industrije i saobraćaja, iz kojih je lako bilo otići i u koje je lako bilo doći, dopremiti ili otpremiti. Danas je jednostavno nemoguće ispratiti održivi razvoj u milionskim gradovima bez "velikih rezova".

Sve je više onih koji upozoravaju da se situacija u gradovima mora promeniti do te mere da moramo redefinisati i iznova postaviti principe urbanog razvoja. Gradovi se rasprostiru toliko da više nije moguće nadomestiti klimatske uslove drvoredima ili parkovima, već se sve više insistira na gradnji zelenih krovova kao površina koje predstavljaju integraciju urbane sredine i prirodnih staništa, i to, bez ikakvih negativnih uticaja na komfor ili kvalitet gradnje, čak naprotiv. Takođe, mnogi podsećaju na značaj lokalne proizvodnje svega, pa i hrane.

U gradovima koji se prostiru kilometrima u krug ovo znači stvaranje urbanog okruženja koje treba da pomiri "suprotstavljene" funkcije poslovanja, saobraćaja, stanovanja i poljoprivrede. Dovoljno je zamisliti šta treba da se desi, pa da u našim gradovima počnemo da proizvodimo bar deo hrane koju danas uvozimo iz kine, poljske, španije, brazila, pa da bude jasnije koliko smo daleko od ovog scenarija...

Ključ za uspeh pre svega jeste saobraćajna komunikacija – problem sa kojim se borimo sa malo, ili bez ikakvog uspeha. Ne treba sanjati o gigantskim investicijama, ali ne treba se ni držati istih poznatih "rešenja" koja su nas i dovela ovde gde smo danas... Ipak, i drugi gradovi imaju sličnih problema koje rešavaju na uspešan ili manje uspešan način.

U Build magazinu broj 15. (oktobar 2010. godina) kratko smo se pozabavili održivim razvojem u gradovima kroz nekoliko tekstova vezanih za javni transport, revitalizaciju grada i proizvodnju hrane u gradu, i ovo je odlična prilika da vas podsetimo na te, ali i još neke od naslova koje možete pročitati na portalu Gradjevinarstvo.rs a koji se direktno ili indirektno bave razvojem gradova u epohi između dva milenijuma...

Zeleni krovovi - zašto i kako ozeleneti krovove u urbanim sredinama?

Do kraja sedamdesetih godina prošlog veka, pojam zelenih krovova u Evropi odnosio se samo na intenzivne krovne vrtove. Iskustva u gajenju ovih površina u zapadnoj Evropi, tokom poslednjih 15 godina, rezultirala su mnogim otkrićima i saznanjima čija je primena dala velike rezultate u projektovanju zelenih krovova izvanrednog dizajna. Širenje ekstenzivnih krovnih vrtova rezultat je značajne promene u stavovima tokom poslednjih desetak godina. Ekološki aspekti dizajna imaju sve veći uticaj. Zahtev za nižom cenom i popularnost krovova male nosivosti išao je u pravcu ekstenzivnih zelenih krovova manje debljine, specifičnog sastava, jeftinije ugradnje i održavanja.

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Sve uloge zelenih površina – Uticaj zelenih površina na kvalitet vazduha

Zelenilo u gradu i njegovoj okolini ima mnogostruki značaj. Biljke na zelenim površinama, svojim oblikom, građom i životnim osobinama, predstavljaju nezamenljive elemente prirode, koji doprinose melioraciji životne sredine u najširem smislu reči. Zelene površine grada pozitivno utiču na okolinu delovanjem na mikroklimat, tako što smanjuju visoke temperature vazduha, povećavaju stepen vlažnosti, regulišu jačinu vetra, prečišćavaju vazduh, smanjuju i ublažavaju jačinu gradskog šuma...

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C2C - Od kolevke do kolevke - tehnologija kao živi metabolizam - 0% otpada iza nas (video)

Još 2005. godine MBDC radio je projekat za 12 gradova po C2C standardima za Kinu. Ovi gradovi planirani su za izgradnju do 2017. godine i predviđeni su kao dom za 400 miliona ljudi. I upravo na takvim projektima vidi se značaj Credle to credle pristupa - na primer, da bi se napravila opeka za kuća za 200 miliona ljudi potrebno je da Kina uništi 1/4 obradive zemlje koju ima da bi došla do sirovine za izradu opeke, i pritom, da za pečenje potroši polovinu svojih rezervi uglja... Neodrživo... Predlog MBDC bio je podizanje kompletnog gornjeg sloja zemljšta čitavog područja na više kote - krovove budućih zgrada. Tu bi se nastavilo obrađivanje zemlje, prelazilo bi se mostovima sa zgrade na zgradu, zeleni krovovi bi pozitivno uticali na klimu u zgradama i celim gradovima, sva voda bi se sakupljala, prečišćavala i vraćala u sistem, a solarna postrojenja (krovovi industrijske zone na obodu grada) snabdevala bi ceo grad električnom energijom...

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Top 10 najboljih sistema javnog prevoza u gradovima sveta

Javni prevoz je ključ za uspešno rešenje saobraćaja u velikim gradovima. Individualni prevoz automobilima podrazumeva prateću infrastrukturu (auto-puteve, obilaznice, parking mesta, itd), saobraćajne gužve, zagađenje vazduha i zagađenje bukom, probleme sa postojećom putnom i uličnom infrastrukturom da primi veće opterećenje sa porastom broja stanovnika, itd. Beograd se godinama dvoumi da li će sistemu javnog prevoza biti pridodat i laki šinski metro ili istinska podzemna gradska železnica (zagovornici klasičnog metroa u Beogradu laki šinski metro smatraju nekom vrstom tramvaja). Tema javnog prevoza čini okosnicu funkcionalnog grada i zato vam predstavljamo ukupno jedanaest najboljih primera sistema javnog prevoza u svetu po izboru sajta AskMen.

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Kule od peska - CityCenter u Las Vegasu i Burj Khalifa u Dubaiju (linkovi)

Previše godina agonije obično prođe od zamisli do realizacije jedne zgrade. U tom periodu svet može drastično da se promeni. Promene mogu biti ekonomske ali i konceptualne u smislu novih pristupa urbanizmu, projektovanju i samoj gradnji. Upravo to se dogodilo za dva ogromna projekta poslednjih godina - CityCenter u Las Vegasu (foto ispod) i Burj Khalifa u Dubaiju a Architectural Record kroz nekoliko tekstova u avgustu detaljnije se pozabavio elementima ovih zgrada - konstrukcija, opšti prikaz, opremanje...

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Form-based codes - Urbanistički propisi zasnovani na formi a ne funkciji menjaju SAD

Metropole i gradovi u SAD napuštaju stari koncept urbanog zoniranja koji je stvorio velike probleme za funkcionalnost gradova. Strogo razdvajanje poslovnih od stambenih zona, uz previsoko postavljene osnovne standarde slobodnostojećih jednoporodičnih kuća, stvorilo je nepregledna predgrađa, probleme sa transportom (potrošnjom goriva i gužvama na auto-putevima), zagađenjem, i - neraskidivo vezalo čoveka i porodice za automobile.

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Solarni sistemi na parkinzima - senka, zaštita i čista energija

Jednog dana s početka 2004. godine, Robert Noble, arhitekta specijalizovan za održiv dizajn, zapitao se zašto parkinzi u SAD nisu pokriveni solarnim panelima. Nekoliko firmi je imalo ponudu izgradnje solarnih

sistema iznad parking prostora, ali nijedna nije pokušala da prodre sa većim projektima već se zadržavala na individualnim projektima uglavnom u stambenom sektoru

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Mega gradovi i urbani koridori - izveštaj UN o bliskoj budućnosti gradova sveta

Gradovi širom sveta počinju da se spajaju stvarajući naseobine koje su nazvane "mega-regioni" ili "beskrajni gradovi". Oni se mogu prostirati stotinama kilometara i biti dom i za preko 100 miliona ljudi, kaže se u izveštaju Ujedinjenih nacija - Stanje gradova sveta. Fenomen beskrajnih gradova bi u budućnosti mogao biti najzastupljeniji oblik ljudskih staništa, i to već u narednih 50 godina. Sada tek preko polovine svetskog stanovništva živi u gradovima, ali do 2050. godine preko 70% ljudi živeće u urbanim sredinama.

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Revitalizacija grada: Bogota – nekad i sad

Priča o Bogoti jedan je od najsvetlijih svetskih primera revitalizacije grada sa kraja 20. veka, i kao urbanistički fenomen ide rame uz rame sa Barselonom i drugim sličnim primerima. Naravno, grad od šest miliona ljudi u državi u kojoj bukte sukobi sa gerilom i narko-kartelima, ne može izgledati kao katalonski grad na obali Mediterana, ali ono što su dva gradonačelnika uspela da urade za samo nekoliko godina predstavlja pravi podvig o kom se kod nas malo zna.

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Urbana agrokultura - proizvodnja hrane u naseljenim sredinama

Urbana poljoprivreda (urban agriculture) je poljoprivredna grana koja se odnosi na uzgajanje, preradu i distribuciju hrane u, ili u neposrednoj blizini naseljenih mesta. Ona može biti povezana i sa hortikulturom, uzgajanjem životinja, zasadom voćnjaka, akvakulturama, itd. Osnovna karakteristika urbane agrokulture jeste lokalna proizvodnja hrane za lokalnu upotrebu – zatvoren sistem snabdevanja u okviru lokalne zajednice koji pruža mnogo prednosti: rekultivacija neuređenih gradskih površina, zapošljavanje stanovništva, više hrane i zdravija ishrana, povećanje ekonomske moći grada i njegovih stanovnika, jače veze među stanovnicima...

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Kolika je realna cena kvadratnog metra stana u nadrealnoj Srbiji?

Odgovor na pitanje iz naslova je jednostavan - realna cena kvadratnog metra stana, kao i svake druge robe, onolika je koliko kaže vlasnik. Ni viša ni manja. Na kupcu je da pristane na nju ili da traži dalje. Cenu pre svega određuje odnos ponude i potražnje. Kvalitet i druge sitnice dolaze na red tek kada su ponuda i potražnja makar izjednačene. Zato, ako nameravate da kupite stan u Srbiji, možete da se žalite na lokaciju, kvalitet izvedenih radova i ugrađenih materijala, nedostatak parkinga ili odsustvo lifta, itd, ali, na kraju, moraćete da platite onoliko koliko vam traže ukoliko želite svoj stan (zapravo, tržište nekretnina degradirali smo do te mere da nas čini srećnim ako stan uopšte ima nekakve papire, ali to je već druga priča).

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Rezoniranje i izgradnja Njujorka pod gradonačelnikom Blumbergom

Tokom proteklih sedam godina, Majkl Blumberg (Michael R. Bloomberg), gradonačelnik Njujorka progurao je preko stotinu važnih planova za grad u Gradskoj skupštini pretvarajući ih u zakone. Njegova administracija ulila je 16 milijardi dolara u finansiranje podrške izgradnji poslovnih objekata i socijalnih stanova, i stvaranje kvazi-lokalnih organizacija za promociju svojih planova i borbu sa protivljenjem lokalnog stanovništva.

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Crno je zeleno&sexy - izgradnja Bronksa, Njujork

Održivi južni Bronks – SSBx (Sustainable South Bronx - www.ssbx.org), neprofitna organizacija iz Njujorka, osnovana 2001. godine, posvećena je traženju pravednih rešenja za životnu sredinu. Svetska javnost

upoznala se sa ovom organizacijom kada je njen osnivač, Madžora Karter (Majora Carter), predstavila ideje i dostignuća SSBx-a na TED konferenciji, u februaru 2006. godine. Nažalost, paralele Bronksa i Beograda, ili drugih gradova u Srbiji, brojne su...

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Beogradski Unutrašnji magistralni poluprsten (UMP)

Izgradnja Unutrašnjeg magistralnog poluprstena (UMP), dužine 17 km, koji će po obodu grada povezati Novi Beograd sa Pančevačkim mostom, ušla je u prvu fazu, a trenutno su u toku radovi na pilonu novog mosta preko Ade Ciganlije, najvažnijem i najskupljem objekatu UMP-a. Buduća saobraćajnica, čiji se završetak može očekivati u 2020. godini, biće opremljena inteligentim transposrtnim sistemima (Inteligent transfer sistem, ITS) za kontrolu saobraćaja, a tehničku pripremu za njegovo uvođenje radi beogradski Saobraćajni fakultet u saradnji sa Hidroprojektom.

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Barselona – četvrt veka održivog razvoja

Na međunarodnom naučnom skupu Održivi prostorni razvoj gradova, koji je u januaru održan u Beogradu, gostovao je i prof. Josep Acebillo, gradski arhitekta Barselone. U svom temperamentnom izlaganju on je predstavio planove sprovedene od ranih 1980-ih do danas, koji su učinili da ovaj katalonski grad postane turistička prestonica Mediterana.

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Konferencija CTBUH 2009 - mogu li neboderi biti održivi i ima li mesta za njih u budućnosti

Visoke zgrade su imale skoro dve decenije uspona bez presedana - građene su u većem broju, još više i geografski su rasprostranjenije nego ikada ranije... Sada smo u karakterističnom trenutku: globalna recesija daje nam šansu da zastanemo i sagledamo šta su zapravo visoke zgrade danas, i u kom pravcu treba da se kreću u budućnosti. Mogu li ići u susret izazovu globalnih klimatskih promena i stvoriti održive urbane celine? Da li je primereno da visoke zgrade predstavljaju ikone koje svedoče o vitalnosti gradova ili država na svetskoj pozornici nadmetanja ekonomija?

GRAD I BUDUCNOST

Energija simbola i simbološka oskudica

Evropski grad je josš uvek živa, aktivna kulturna forma. Čak i kao fizička stvarnost, kao sistem artefakata, čvrsto je usadjen u svoje, tako da kažem, metaforičko ležište. Tim neobičnim izrazom pokušao bih da objasnim komplikovane sisteme materijalnih i nematerijalnih prenosioca koje dovoljno definišu memoriju grada i obeležavaju razaznatljive okvire njegove ličnosti. Da se samo podsetimo kako se upravo na nemuštem jeziku simbola zasniva svako dublje, intimno opuštanje čoveka i sredine, čoveka i grada, čoveka i čoveka u gradu.

Mnogi savremeni gradovi širom sveta, i pored nepodnošljive poplave vizuelnih informacija, ipak pate od neke, gotovo hronične "simbološke oskudice" i u krajnoj liniji lišeni su dubljih, skrivenih saopštenja. A to je upravo ono dragoceno štivo kroz koje se gradovi dadu pročitati, pročitavati, razumeti i tumačiti. Stilska arhitektura, na primer, nudila je široku skalu samoiskaza, i po sadržaju I po načinu, različitih za razne gradove. A gradovi se, baš kao i ljudi, mogu podvrgavati psihološkim analizama, i sav onaj narod ukrasa i fantastičnih bića, natovarenih na fasade prošlovekovnih zgrada, predstavlja i te kakav materijal za proučavanje kolektivne svesti, pa i kolektivne podsvesti. Neka se današnj arhitekti ne varaju. I njihova će prividno bezornamentalna arhitektura, pre ili posle, izneti na videlo svoju skrivenu psihoornamentiku, podložnu analiziranju i parafrazi, što bih ja, na njhovom mestu, pre shvatao kao kompliment no kao prekor.

Pa kad je već tako, kad prihvatimo inherentno dejstvo simbola u stvarima arhitekture i urbanizma, dajemo pravo simbolu da bude svesno, racionalno-strukturalno, eruditski potpomognut još od početka, dakle, ab ovo!

Svakako da svesno unošenje jedne ezoterične komponente u sve ono što označujemo kao planiranje-urbanizam-arhitektura-dizajn nikako nije niti bi smelo biti proizvoljno i zasnivati se na trenutnim dosetkama. Reč je o jednoj vrsti dublje, dramatične dokumentacije koju svako vreme o sebi i o svojim gradovima ostavlja. Ali to obeležavanje predjenog puta zacelo nije samo posao planera, urbanista i arhitekata. To je posao svih i svako ima tu šta da doda i o čemu da pomogne. i ljudi iz sveta literature, i teatra, i filma. A tek televizija, ta opaka, djavolska izmišljotina - koliko može da doprinese izjednačavanju i brisanju individualnih gradskih kodova i glajhšaltovanju gradova i gradjana, toliko isto, još više, mogla bi pomoći i sasvim drugom, pozitivnom smeru. Podjimo od toga koliko je presudna uloga maloga ekrana u identifikovanju i prezentovanju gradske sredine. Moderan čovek doživljava svoje gradove bar pola-po-pola. U direktnom dodiru, ali i kao mediski obradjen, sažet prostor. Najzad, televizijska kamera prolazi kroz fasade i prodire kroz unutrašnjost kuća, otkriva intimni život grada, izmišljen, dramatizovan, ali i reporterski realno prikazan. Sve su to nove mogućnosti samodefinisanja, ali se u nemarnim ili beskrupuloznim rukama pretvaraju u opako sredstvo depersonalizacije grada I gradskog čoveka...

Grad - metafora metafora`

Nije neophodno podsećati da je savremeni veliki grad krhka konstrukcija i labilan organizam. Dovoljno je preskočiti jednu ili dve tehničke injekcije, pa da se njegov metabolizam pokoleba sve do ivice katastrofe. Isto tako danas nije potrebno naglašavati da je dijalog grad/priroda uveliko već poremećen, ako se prirodam još može nazvati ono što, u užem i širem obimu, okružuje velike gradove. Naporedo s tim, iznutra, socijalna i kulturna raslojenost otežava medjuljudsko sporazumevanje, ponekad sve do doslovnog biblijskog "pometenija jazikov". Pa ipak, grad je grad, najviše i najdragocenije što nam se nudi, i upravo zato je najteža pretnja ono što dovodi u pitanje samu ideju grada, grad-ideju, ideju-slike, sistem metafora i tropa koje se, kao gradske kapije nekad, moraju prekoračiti da bi se u grad stvarno ušlo. Čini se da su ova i ovakva moja razmišljanja upravo podstaknuta boravkom u Beču, gradu zamamljivih arhitektonskih alegorija i skrivenih poruka. Impozantna ličnost ovog grada upravo i počiva na ukrštenim metaforičkim matricama prostora i simetrično - prenosnim matricama ljudske komunikacije. Medjuodnos je složen i bogat, kao i kod korelativnih pojmova misao/jezik ili sasvim svejedno, jezik/misao. Kad izričem ove pohvale gradu Beču, ne mislim samo na tradicionalno gradsko jezgro. Imam u vidu i širu teritoriju grada, koju razumem kao amalgam istoriski nastalih, još uvek lično označenih gradića I bivših prigradskih sela. Portret grada (eto još jedne pomoćne, priručne metafore) kao u nekom sistemu ogledala rastura se u još mnogosmanjenih, raznovrsnih portreta iste ličnosti. Karakterizacije se menjaju sa svakim učinjenim korakom, a ipak ostaju, do u najmanje pojedinosti, verne idealnom uzoru celine... Vidim u toj posebnosti neku vrstu estetskog, preciznije, stilskog demokratizma, ali o tome bih ranije drugom prilikom i opširnije. Čini se, dalje, da je baš Beč pravo duhovno okruženje iz koga bi valjalo podsetiti mako su, i koliko, ličnost i sudbina grada nerazdvojivo povezani. Gradovi zanemarenog, zaturenog, zaboravljenog identiteta, obično su gradovi bez budućnosti ili bar sopstvene budućnosti.

Ubijanje metafore

Na žalost, na prostorima srednjeg Podunavlja i zapadnog Balkana, mnogo je gradova čije su ličnosti namerno ponižavane i poništavane. Ako ratna kuga prestane i ako se ti gradovi budu ponovo uspostavljali, hoće li se moći prepoznati? Ili će se, čak i ako se obnove, preobratiti u nešto što nisu bili, ili još gore - nešto što nisu želeli

da budu. Jer, ubice gradova su, sa nepogrešivom, gotovo zverskom intuicijom, svaki grad gadjali upravo u njegovo vitalno središte; u njegovu memoriju, u talismane samosvesti i identiteta.

Moderni primitivac ima dovoljno mračnih razloga da zazire od grada. Moderni primitivac se ne uklapa u gradski diskurs. On se ne može dobro osećati pred manuskriptima koje ne ume ni da pročita, a kamoli da razume. Takve rukopise on spaljuje; čini to figurativno, simbolično, ali i sasvim realno. Uostalom, dovoljno je setiti se samo sarajevske Narodne biblioteke... Medjutim, ono što važi za ispisanu ili izgovorenu gradsku reč, važi još i više za reč u kamenu - za stilski oblik, za stilske šifre. A baš te stilske šifre, počev od klasičnih do najmodernih, obezbedjuju prostore dosega uspomena, metafizičko polje sopstvenosti.Istini za volju, i izvan zone balkanske strave, izvan vidokruga porušenih i spaljenih gradova i sela, mnogi će gradovi, na širem srednjoevropskom prostoru, ipak imati teškoća sa redefinisanjem identiteta. Preko njih je prošla jedna druga stihija: sovjetski urbanistički modeli, nepodnošljivo tvrdi i jednolični, pretvarali su delove istoriski nastalih i samostalno oblikovanih gradova u pejsaže depresivno praznog i hladnog swedenborgovskog pakla.

Povratak evropskoj paradigmi

Velike političke promene koje su se izdogadjale na jugoistoku Evrope, stvaranje većeg broja malih država, imaće svakako uticaja na dalji razvitak gradova na ovom prostoru. Njihova sudbina u mnogome zavisi od toga kakve će te državice biti - demokratske, civističke, otvorene, oslobodjene etničkih i antikosmopolitskih predrasuda... ili će se, naprotiv, zatvarati u nacionalautizmu, u morbidni romantizam, gubiti se u naopakom parafraziranju prošlosti... Ali ako krenu putem otvaranja i medjusobne predusretljivosti, onda sistem malih država, ne baš preterano tvrdo obzidanih, u principu ne bi morao biti nešta rdjavo. Raščlanjenost teritorija predstavljalabi, ako ništa drugo, fizičku prepreku širenju i stapanju gradova u depersonalizovanje, pseudo urbane sisteme. Štaviše, mogao bi to biti primamljiv uvod u jednu buduću Evropu gradova, umesto Evrope velikodržavnih nacija. To se podrazumeva, ukoliko gradski patriotizmi mogu u dogledno vreme da savladaju danas naizgled nesavladivu stihiju post i neokomunističkog nacionalizma.

Treba se trenutak setiti dobrih strana evropskog urbanološkog modela 18. veka: čak i majušne državice, uz simbolične granice, imale su bogate, kulturno premoćne gradove, mini-metropole. Da tako što doista može dobro funkcionisati na svoj način dokazuju i memoari Giacoma Casanove. Tomovi njegovih uspomena mnogo su više bravijer gradova, zbirka portreta velikih i malih evropskih prestonica no što su antologija sumnjivih avantura. Casanova, rodjeni Venecijanac, francuski pisac, u službi malih nemačkih, poljskih, čeških kneževa, bio je, pored sveg ostalog, još ubedjeni sve-Evropejac, a njegove su uspomene upravo dokaz da je u jednom trenutku Evropa gradova doista postojala i da je, prividno izdeljena desetinama, stotinama simboličkih graničnih prelaza, bila više jedinstvena Evropa no što će možda biti u sledećem stoleću; jedinstvenija u svakom slučaju nego danas...

Gradovi budućnosti

Epitet "pametnih gradova" dobijaju oni koji se bore da stanovništvu obezbede udoban život, kvalitetan prevoz,

zdravstvenu zaštitu, dovoljno posla, zabave i čist vazduh. Ali, ima i onih koji idu korak ispred. Gledaju dalje u

budućnost. Ovakva superpametna naselja počela su da niču na istoku - u Južnoj Koreji i Kini! Na prestižnoj

„Forbsovoj“ listi, kao dva najpametnija grada na planeti odabrani su - Songdo, koji već ima prve stanovnike, i Meiksi

Lejk, koji je na začetku gradnje. Po ugledu na njih, kažu investitori i projektanti, mogle bi da niču futurističke

naseobine širom planete.

I na jedan i na drugi, kako piše u „Forbsovim“ izveštajima, troše su stotine milijardi dolara. Odlikuju ih pametne

zgrade, sinhronizovani sistemi saobraćaja, jedinstveno upravljanje svim infrastrukturama i briga o životnoj sredini i

uštedi energije.

Gradnja Songda, u Južnoj Koreji, počela je da niče iz kaljuge, pre osam godina. Na blatnjavoj ravnici iz godine u

godinu izdižu se građevine sa neverovatnim pogodnostima za stanovništvo, kompjuterskom mrežom, lagodnim

pristupom uslugama i objektima... Veštačko ostrvo, 40 milja jugozapadno od Seula, već je dobilo obrise grada, sa

sazidanih stotinu objekata, uključujući 7.800 privatnih apartmanskih kompleksa, masivan kongresni centar i

"Šeraton" hotel.

Džon B. Hins i zaposleni u njegovoj kompaniji sa sedištem u Njujorku, već su pokrili 40 odsto od ukupno 1.500

jutara zemlje, kolika je teritorija ovog grada. Kraj radova planiran je za 2014. godinu. Koštaće 35 milijardi,

svrstavajući Songdo u vrh liste najvećih privatnih investicija u nekretnine na svetu. Investitori ovog megaprojekta,

među kojima su i kompanije "Gejl", "Morgan Stenli" i "Posko", veruju da bi Songdo mogao da postane trgovinski

centar severoistočne Azije.

On, takođe, služi kao model za novi sličan projekat - Meiksi Lejk, čija gradnja je tek počela u kineskoj Hunan

provinciji. Oba grada biće "pametni, održivi i tehnološki veoma ambiciozni", kaže Stenli Gejl, prvi čovek kompanije

Gejl.

Da bi pratile najviše svetske standarde ekološke gradnje, sve zgrade imaju specijalna prozorska stakla i duple

fasade sa ventilacijom. Prljava voda i kišnica će se skupljati za navodnjavanje i koristiti u tornjevima za hlađenje.

Čvrsti otpad uklanja se mrežom podzemnih cevovoda, smanjujući potrebu za kamionima koji bi odvozili đubre iz

kontejnera.

Sa 40 odsto zelenih površina, uključujući park vredan 220 miliona dolara, njegovi stanovnici disaće vazduh čist kao

stanari Vankuvera. Proračunato je da bi trebalo da ima oko 56.000 stanovnika i još 300.000 onih koji rade u njemu.

Projektom Meiksi Lejk rukovode isti arhitekti - "Kon Peredsen Foks grupacija" i "Arup", sledeći istu filozofiju, ali sa

400 jutara jezera umesto parka.

Mreža "pataka" koju je usavršila kompanija "Sisko", ključ je oba projekta. Ova firma planira da pripremi sistem

zasnovan na novoj kompjuterskoj tehnologiji. Jednistveni softver upravljaće energetskom mrežom grada, kao i

sistemima zdravstvene zaštite, obrazovanja i prevoza. Vim Elfring, šef „Siskove“ kancelarije za globalni razvoj,

najavio je da će 20 servisa na kraju biti povezano u jedan sistem, ali će početi sa šest ili sedam.

Stanovnici će moći da ćaskaju putem Interneta sa učiteljima svoje dece, konsultuju lekara ili zatraže dozvole i druga

dokumenta od gradskih vlasti. Sve to putem monitora u svojim stanovima. Mnoge obaveze obavljaće, dakle, bez

ustajanja iz fotelje. Zgrade će biti toliko pametne da će usmeravati automobile ka slobodnim parking mestima i

pozivati liftove kad im ljudi prilaze. Hoteli će automatski prepoznavati goste da bi, kako uđu u lobi zgrade, podesili

svetlo, temperaturu i sve prateće pogodnosti u njihovim sobama.

Projektanti smatraju da bi ovaj model mogao da se prekopira bilo gde u svetu. "Sisko" namerava da osnuje globalni

centar za inteligentnu urbanizaciju u Songdu, i da paralelno rade na desetak sličnih projekata za zemlje kao što su

Indija i Saudijska Arabija.

Zgrade u najpametnijem i najmlađem gradu na planeti, imaju štedljive liftove i klima-uređaje koji će se rashlađivati

uz pomoć vode, što će obezbediti manju potrošnju energije za 20 odsto.

Ekološki prevoz

Songdo je eksperimentalni poligon za sistem "zelenog" gradskog prevoza. Vodeni taksi već krstari kanalima nalik

onima u Veneciji i Amsterdamu. Uskoro će dobiti pojačanje - sistem za iznajmljivanje bicikala, oranizovan po ugledu

na pariski. Za dve ili tri godine deo gradskog prevoza biće i autobusi na električni pogon.

"Forbsovi" pametni gradovi

Prestižna „Forbsova“ lista pametnih gradova, objavljena za 2009. godinu, prednost je dala gradovima SAD. Među

deset najboljih, mereno uslovima života, ekonomijom, zaštitom životne sredine, našao se samo jedan evropski grad

- Amsterdam.

Singapur je po BDP-u ispred većine evropskih zemalja i zemalja Latinske Amerike. Od nekada polupismene nacije,

ušli su u grupu najobrazovanijih u Aziji. Ovde predstavništva ima 6.000 multinacionalnih kompanija.

Hongkong predstavlja centar svetske ekonomije i nastavlja da pomera važne institucije sa zapada na istok planete.

Prema BDP-u su 15. na svetu.

Kuritiba, napredna metropola na jugu Brazila, poznata je po svom brzom autobuskom prevozu, koji koristi 70 odsto

njegovih stanovnika. Zgrade nalik svetionicima, koje je grad zidao za nasiromašniji sloj stanovništva, postale su

model koji se koristi širom sveta.

Monterej u Meksiku, za poslednjih nekoliko decenija, doživeo je neverovatan razvoj i postao jedan od glavnih

inženjerskih i ekonomskih centara.

Amsterdam, sedište je sedam od 500 najvećih svetskih kompanija. Niski porezi i dosta strane radne snage privlače

poslovni svet sa svih strana.

Sijetl, smešten je na obali Pacifika, pa ima razvijenu trgovinu sa Azijom. Veliki deo električne energije dobijaju iz

hidropotencijala. Prednjače u poljoprivredi i mnogim granama industrije.

Hjuston, usko je povezan sa Karibima, ima naprednu energetiku, industriju, moderan medicinski kompleks...

Njegova ekonomija ocenjuje se kao najzdravija u SAD, a uprava ovog grada mnogo ulaže i u "zelenu" budućnost.

Čarlston postaje jedan od najvažinijih centara vazduhopolovstva, jer se u njemu pravi novi "boing 787", što će

obezbediti 12.000 radnih mesta u regionu.

Hantsvil, ima "pametnu" ekonomiju i važnu ulogu u razvojnim programima NASA. Posebno su razvijene

vazduhoplovna industrija i biotehnologije.

Kalgari je grad sa najiše centrala velikih kompanija u Kanadi. Za poslednje dve decenije taj broj se udvostručio.

Ivana Mićević

Mega gradovi budućnost sveta E. B. | 09. 06. 2010. - 09:02h | Komentara: 0

Gradovi širom sveta počinju da se spajaju stvarajući naseobine koje su nazvane “mega-regioni” ili “beskrajni gradovi”. Oni se mogu prostirati stotinama kilometara i biti dom i za preko 100 miliona ljudi, kaže se u izveštaju Ujedinjenih nacija - Stanje gradova sveta.

Fenomen beskrajnih gradova bi u budućnosti mogao biti najzastupljeniji oblik ljudskih staništa, i to već u narednih 50 godina. Sada tek preko polovine svetskog stanovništva živi u gradovima, ali do 2050. godine preko 70% ljudi živeće u urbanim sredinama.

- Do tada, samo 14% stanovnika najbogatijih zemalja i 33% u siromašnim zemljama živeće van gradova. Već sada imamo slučaj da u jednom takvom regionu, koji obuhvata gradove Hong Kong-Shenhzen-Guangzhou u Kini živi oko 120 miliona ljudi, kaže Anna Tibaijuka, upravnik UN-Habitat-a -Izveštaj je podeljen u četiri celine koje su obrađene za svaki kontinent posebno:- Prostorna harmonija (Spatial Harmony)- Socijalna harmonija (Social Harmony)- Harmonija okruženja (Environmental Harmony)

Planiranje harmoničnih gradova (Planning for harmonious Cities)Izveštaj UN kaže da je urbanizacija sada nezaustavljiva. Razvoj mega regiona smatra se pozitivnom, kaže koautor izveštaja Eduardo Lopez Moreno za londonski list Guardian: - Mega regioni, pre nego države, sada stvaraju bogatstva. Istraživanja kažu da 40 mega-regiona pokriva samo mali deo površine planete i dom su za manje od 18% svetske populacije. Međutim, u njima se odvija oko 66% ekonomskih aktivnosti i oko 85% tehnoloških i naučnih inovacija. Više od polovine svetskog bogatstva nalazi se u svega 25 gradova sveta, a pet najvećih gradova Indije i Kine stecište su za preko 50% bogatstva tih zemalja. Migracije ka gradovima, dok god to ima ekonomskog smisla, podstiču i ekonomiju ruralnih oblasti. Veći deo dobara u ruralnim područjima danas dolazi upravo iz gradova – kaže Moreno.

Mega regioni sveta:Hong Kong-Shenhzen-Guangzhou, Kina, oko 120 miliona stanovnikaNagoya-Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe, Japan, pretpostavlja se da će dostići 60 miliona do 2015. godineRio de Janeiro-São Paulo regija 43 miliona stanovnika.

http://www.blic.rs/Slobodno-vreme/Nekretnine/193096/Mega-gradovi-buducnost--sveta/komentari

Postoje i situacije, kao što je ona u Los Anđelesu, da je grad porastao, po broju stanovnika za 45% u periodu od 1975. do 1990. godine, ali je utrostručio svoju površinu za to isto vreme. Ovaj problem je sada već više nego primetan, naročito u gradovima SAD gde je tržište nekretnina decenijama promovisalo idiličnu sliku predgrađa daleko od gradske vreve.

Ovakvo širenje gradova, po autorima izveštaja, simptom je podeljenog i disfunkcionalnog grada: Ne samo da uništava zemljište već povećava i troškove transporta, potrošnju energije, zahteva više sirovina i uzrokuje smanjenje površina obradivog zemljišta.

- Dodatno, podeljeni grad posebno je osetljiv kao potencijalno je žarište za socijalne i političke tenzije. Uopšte, možemo reći da gradovi koje krasi više jednakosti prati i bolji prosperitet od onih drugih - zaključuje Moreno.

Mega-gradovi budućnostI

Sedmicne zanimljivosti iz svijeta arhitekture.

Forbes je sastavio i listu 10.svjetskih mega gradova po broju stanovnika.

1900. godine najveći grad na svijetu je bio London, koji se tada ne bi ni mogao nazvati mega-gradom,

jer je prag za titulu mega-grada 10 miliona stanovnika, a London je imao tada 6,5 miliona. Svaki grad

na listi prvih 10 tih godina je bio u Evropi ili Americi, sa jednom iznimkom : Tokio, tada 7. po veličini

grad na svijetu sa 1,5 miliona stanovnika. Danas, Tokio sa okolicom je na vrhu liste mega-gradova sa

35,2 miliona stanovnika. Prema UN-ovim projekcijama broja stanovnika, predviđa se da će 2015.

zadržati vodeću poziciju sa 35,5 miliona stanovnika. Međutim, rast Tokia se usporava, a demografska

budućnost pripada gradovima kao Mumbai, Šangaj i Daka.

Urbani koridori Zapadna Afrika: 600km urbanizovanog koridora Nigeria, Benin, Togo and GhanaIndija: od Mumbaja do DelhijaIstočna Azija: četiri povezana megalopolisa i 77 odvojenih gradova od po preko 200.000 stanovnika nalazi se na potezu od Pekinga do Tokija, preko Pjongjanga i Seula.

http://www.blic.rs/data/images/2010-06-09/45718_tabela_origh.jpg?ver=1276067262.jpg

1. Tokio, Japan

Projekcija broja stanovnika 2015: 35,5 miliona

Broj stanovnika 2005: 35,2 miliona

Izvorno se Tokio zvao Edo i nije bio tako velik do 1603. godine, kada je osnovan Tokugawa šogunat.

Nakon 1868., kada prestaje da postoji šogunat, car mijenja ime grada Edo u Tokio. Grad je uništen u

zemljotresu 1923. i u američkom bombardovanju 1945. Uprkos ovim nazadnim periodima, Tokio je

prešao New York u utrci za najveći grad na svijetu i dobio titulu koju će zadržati barem do 2015.

2. Mumbai, Indija

Projekcija broja stanovnika 2015.: 21,9 miliona

Broj stanovnika 2005.: 18,2 miliona

Nekadašnje ime grada Bombaj odbačeno je kao simbol kolonijalizma i grad je preimenovan u Mumbai,

ali i dalje ostaje simbol kolonijalne ere. Zemljište na kojem se prostire dodjeljeno je Portugalu 1534., a

od 1661. je pod upravom britanske Istočnoindijske kompanije. Pod britanskom upravom, Bombaj se

razvija u veliku metropolu. Danas, Mumbai je indijski trgovački i centar zabavne industrije.

3. Mexico City, Meksiko



Glavni grad Meksika je nastao na lokalitetu grada Tenochtitlana, osnovanog 1325. kao glavni grad

Aztečkog carstva, koji 1521. osvaja konkvistador Hernan Cortes. Skorija katastrofa koja je pogodila

ovaj grad bio je zemljotres iz 1985. Meksiko City je metropola u svakom smislu te riječi, političkom,

finansijskom i kulturnom. Izgrađen je nad isušenim jezerom i kako izvlači vodu iz vodonosnika kojima

utaljuje žeđ miliona svojih stanovnika, grad polako tone.

4. Sao Paulo, Brazil



Sao Paolo je mega-grad kojeg je stvorila - kafa. Osnovali su ga 1554. jezuitski misionari,a u 19.

stoljeću je narastao do današnje veličine zahvaljujući svojoj lokaciji ,u srcu kafom najbogatije

brazilske regije. Danas je finansijski centar sa raznolikom populacijom. U Sao Paolu, stanovnici

talijanskog porijekla nadmašili su broj stanovnika portugalskog porijekla, a kozmopolitski miks

uključuje i veliki broj stanovnika koji su potomci imigranata iz Japana, Libanona i Afrike.

5. New York, SAD



Šire područje grada New Yorka je prvi svjetski mega-grad, a brojku od 10 miliona stanovnika prešao je

još 1950. Osnovan je 1620. kao Novi Amsterdam, holandska kolonija koja je uskoro potpada pod

britansku kontrolu. Ključ rasta New Yorka tokom 19. stoljeća je kanal Erie, dovršen 1825.,kroz koji se

slijevala roba iz američke unutrašnjosti na rijeku Hudson. Danas, New York nije više najprometnija

luka na svijetu, ali je ostao glavni američki finansijski i medijski centar.

6. Delhi, Indija


Broj stanovnika 2005.: 15 miliona

Delhi je do 1803. bio glavni grad hindu Maratha Carstva, čija Crvena tvrđava još uvijek dominira

centrom grada. Britanci su ga zauzeli 1857. i sagradili New Delhi (Novi delhi) sa kompleksom vladinih

zgrada ,koji je glavni grad Indije od njene neovisnosti 1947. Mumbai možda ima Bollywood,a

Bangalore je indijska silicijska dolina, ali Delhi je grad koji čuva stari carski sjaj. Kao sjedište moći,

privlačio je imigrante stoljećima, a i danas se doseljavaju.

7. Šangaj, Kina



Šangaj je izašao iz anonimnosti 1842. kada je Kina izgubila Prvi opijumski rat i bila prisiljena da otvori

nekoliko luka za potrebe stranaca . Zahvaljujući dobroj poziciji na delti rijeke Yangtze,Šangaj je

prosperirao u najveći i kozmopolitski grad u Kini,a često su ga nazivali „Pariz istoka“. Stranci se

iseljavaju iz Šangaja 1949. kada su komunisti preuzeli vlast, ali posljednjih godina Šangaj je ponovno

povratio svoj prijašnji status finansijskog i industrijskog centra.

8. Calcutta, Indija

Projekcija broja stanovnika 2015: 17 miliona

Broj stanovnika 2005: 14,3 miliona

Kalkutu je osnovala britanska Istočnoindijska kompanija 1690., a kasnije je prosperirala kao luka iz

koje su Britanci slali opijum u Kinu. Pod Britancima, Kalkuta je bila glavni grad Indije i ujedno njen

najveći grad. Danas, nije ništa od toga. Njen glavni adut za slavu (pored velikog broja stanovnika) je

sklonost biranju komunista na čelu lokalne vlasti, koji nisu uradili ništa za ekonomiju ovog grada kao

što su reformirani komunisti za Šangaj.

9. Daka, Bangladeš

Projekcija broja stanovnika 2015:15,2 miliona


Zajedno sa pet drugih mega gradova (Mumbai, New York, Šangaj, Delhi i Calcutta) na ovoj listi, Daka

je također bila dio Britanskog carstva.Prije Britanaca, Daka je bila dio Mugalskog carstva, a danas je

glavni grad Bangladeša.

10. Jakarta, Indonezija



Jakarta je lučki grad na gusto naseljenom otoku Javi, kojim su tokom proteklih stoljeća vladali Hindu

kraljevi, sultani, holandski kolonijalisti (koji su je zvali Batavia) i japanski generali, koji su je osvojili

tokom 2.Svjetskog rata. Kao i mnogi obalni mega-gradovi, Jakarta je osjetljiva na poplave, ako

globalno zagrijavanje bude podizalo nivo mora u budućnosti.

What will the energy efficient cities of tomorrow look like? I believe the most significant change will come in the form of transportation. For more than 50 years planners have designed cites to move cars, not people; all made possible by cheap oil. As energy prices rise, I believe societies will be force to all but abandon oil slurping cars in favor of efficient, electric mass transit systems. This site attempts to illustrate what American cities will look like after the modern mass transit revolution when monorail, maglev, light and highspeed rail are the prime people movers in American cities.

Cities of the FutureToday’s “Mega-cities” are Overcrowded and Environmentally Stressed

by Divya Abhat, Shauna Dineen, Tamsyn Jones, Jim Motavalli, Rebecca Sanborn, and Kate Slomkowski

We take big cities for granted today, but they are a relatively recent phenomenon. Most of human history concerns rural people making a living from the land. But the world is rapidly urbanizing, and it’s not at all clear that our planet has the resources to cope with this relentless trend. And, unfortunately, most of the growth is occurring in urban centers ill-equipped for the pace of change. You’ve heard of the “birth dearth”? It’s bypassing Dhaka, Mumbai, Mexico City and Lagos, cities that are adding population as many of their western counterparts contract.

The world’s first cities grew up in what is now Iraq, on the plains of Mesopotamia near the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The first city in the world to have more than one million people was Rome at the height of its Empire in 5 A.D. At that time, world population was only 170 million. But Rome was something new in the world. It had developed its own sophisticated sanitation and traffic management systems, as well as aqueducts, multi-story low-income housing and even suburbs, but after it fell in 410 A.D. it would be 17 centuries before any metropolitan area had that many people.

Cairo, Egypt, the world's 13th most populous metro area.

© Brian C. Howard

The first large city in the modern era was Beijing, which surpassed one million population around 1800, followed soon after by New York and London. But at that time city life was the exception; only three percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas in 1800.

The rise of manufacturing spurred relocation to urban centers from the 19th through the early 20th century. The cities had the jobs, and new arrivals from the countryside provided the factories with cheap, plentiful labor. But the cities were also unhealthy places to live because of crowded conditions, poor sanitation and the rapid transmission of infectious disease. As the Population Reference Bureau reports, deaths exceeded births in many large European cities until the middle of the 19th century. Populations grew, then, by continuing waves of migration from the countryside and from abroad.

From First World to Third

In the first half of the 20th century, the fastest urban growth was in western cities. New York, London and other First World capitals were magnets for immigration and job opportunity. In 1950, New York, London, Tokyo and Paris boasted of having the world’s largest metropolitan populations. (Also in the top 10 were Moscow, Chicago and the German city of Essen.) By then, New York had already become the first “mega-city,” with more than 10 million people. It would not hold on to such exclusivity for long.

In the postwar period, many large American cities lost population as manufacturing fled overseas and returning soldiers taking advantage of the GI Bill fueled the process of suburbanization. Crime was also a factor. As an example, riot-torn Detroit lost 800,000 people between 1950 and 1996, and its population declined 33.9 percent between 1970 and 1996. Midwestern cities were particularly hard-hit. St. Louis, for instance, lost more than half its population in the same period, as did Pittsburgh. Cleveland precipitously declined, as did Buffalo, Cincinnati, Minneapolis and many other large cities, emerging as regional players rather than world leaders.

Meanwhile, while many American cities shrank, population around the world was growing dramatically. In the 20th century, world population increased from 1.65 billion to six billion. The highest rate of growth was in the late 1960s, when 80 million people were added every year.

According to the “World Population Data Sheet,” global population will rise 46 percent between now and 2050 to about nine billion. While developed countries are losing population because of falling birth rates and carefully controlled immigration rates (only the U.S. reverses this trend, with 45 percent growth to 422 million predicted by 2050), population is exploding in the developing world.

India’s population will likely grow 52 percent to 1.6 billion by 2050, when it will surpass China as the world’s most populous country. The population in neighboring Pakistan will grow to 349 million, up 134 percent in 2050. Triple-digit growth rates also are forecast for Iraq, Afghanistan and Nepal.

Africa could double in population to 1.9 billion by 2050. These growth rates hold despite the world’s highest rates of AIDS infection, and despite civil wars, famines and other factors. Despite strife in the Congo, it could triple to 181 million by 2050, while Nigeria doubles to 307 million.

Big Cities Get Bigger—and Poorer

According to a 1994 UN report, 1.7 billion of the world’s 2.5 billion urban dwellers were then living in less-developed nations, which were also home to two thirds of the world’s mega-cities. The trend is rapidly accelerating. People and the Planet reports that by 2007, 3.2 billion people—a number larger than the entire global population of 1967—will live in cities. Developing countries will absorb nearly all of the world’s population increases between today and 2030. The estimated urban growth rate of 1.8 percent for the period between 2000 and 2030 will double the number of city dwellers. Meanwhile, rural populations are growing scarcely at all.

Also by 2030, more than half of all Asians and Africans will live in urban areas. Latin America and the Caribbean will at that time be 84 percent urban, a level comparable to the U.S. As urban population grows, rural populations will shrink. Asia is projected to lose 26 million rural dwellers between 2000 and 2030.

For many internal migrants, cities offer more hope of a job and better health care and educational opportunities. In many cases, they are home to an overwhelming percentage of a country’s wealth. (Mexico City, for example, produces about 30 percent of Mexico’s total Gross Domestic Product.) Marina Lupina, a Manila, Philippines resident, told People and the Planet that she and her two children endure the conditions of city living (inhabiting a shack made from discarded wood and cardboard next to a fetid, refuse-choked canal) because she can earn $2 to $3 a day selling recycled cloth, compared to 50 cents as a farm laborer in the rural areas. “My girls will have a better life than I had,” she says. “That’s the main reason I came to Manila. We will stay no matter what.”

Movement like this will lead to rapidly changing population levels in the world’s cities, and emerging giants whose future preeminence can now only be guessed. “By 2050, an estimated two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas, imposing even more pressure on the space infrastructure and resources of cities, leading to social disintegration and horrific urban poverty,” says Werner Fornos, president of the Washington-based Population Institute.

Today, the most populous city is Tokyo (26.5 million people in 2001), followed by Sao Paulo (18.3 million), Mexico City (18.3 million), New York (16.8 million) and Bombay/Mumbai (16.5 million). But by 2015 this list will change, with Tokyo remaining the largest city (then with 27.2 million), followed by Dhaka (Bangladesh), Mumbai, Sao Paulo, New Delhi and Mexico City (each with more than 20 million). New York will have moved down to seventh place, followed by Jakarta, Calcutta, Karachi and Lagos (all with more than 16 million).

The speed by which some mega-cities are growing has slowed. Thirty years ago, for instance, the UN projected Mexico City’s population would grow beyond 30 million by 2000, but the actual figures are much lower. Other cities not growing as much as earlier seen are Rio de Janeiro, Calcutta, Cairo and Seoul, Korea. But against this development is the very rapid growth of many other cities (in some cases, tenfold in 40 years) such as Amman (Jordan), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Lagos and Nairobi.

The rise of mega-cities, comments the Washington Post, “poses formidable challenges in health care and the environment, in both the developed and developing world. The urban poor in developing countries live in squalor unlike anything they left behind… In Caracas, more than half the total housing stock is squatter housing. In Bangkok, the regional economy is 2.1 percent smaller than it otherwise would be because of time lost in traffic jams. The mega-cities of the future pose huge problems for waste management, water use and climate change.”

In Cairo, Egypt, the rooftops of countless buildings are crowded with makeshift tents, shacks and mud shelters. It’s not uncommon to see a family cooking their breakfast over an open fire while businesspeople work in their cubicles below. The city’s housing shortage is so severe that thousands of Egyptians have moved into the massive historic cemetery known as the City of the Dead, where they hang clotheslines between tombs and sleep in mausoleums.

By 2015, there will be 33 mega-cities, 27 of them in the developing world. Although cities themselves occupy only two percent of the world’s land, they have a major environmental impact on a much wider area. London, for example, requires roughly 60 times its own area to supply its nine million inhabitants with food and forest products. Mega-cities are likely to be a drain on the Earth’s dwindling resources, while contributing mightily to environmental degradation themselves.

The Mega-city Environment

Mega-cities suffer from a catalog of environmental ills. A World Health Organization (WHO)/United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) study found that seven of the cities—Mexico City, Beijing, Cairo, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo and Moscow—had three or more pollutants that exceeded the WHO health protection guidelines. All 20 of the cities studied by WHO/UNEP had at least one major pollutant that exceeded established health limits.

According to the World Resources Institute, “Millions of children living in the world’s largest cities, particularly in developing countries, are exposed to life-threatening air pollution two to eight times above the maximum WHO guidelines. Indeed, more than 80 percent of all deaths in developing countries attributable to air pollution-induced lung infections are among children under five.” In the big Asian mega-cities such as New Delhi, Beijing and Jakarta, approximately 20 to 30 percent of all respiratory disease stems from air pollution.

Almost all of the mega-cities face major fresh water challenges. Johannesburg, South Africa is forced to draw water from highlands 370 miles away. In Bangkok, saltwater is making incursions into aquifers. Mexico City has a serious sinking problem because of excessive groundwater withdrawal.

More than a billion people, 20 percent of the world’s population, live without regular access to clean running water. While poor people are forced to pay exorbitant fees for private water, many cities squander their resources through leakages and illegal drainage. “With the population of cities expected to increase to five billion by 2025,” says Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the UNEP, “the urban demand for water is set to increase exponentially. This means that any solution to the water crisis is closely linked to the governance of cities.”

Mega-city residents, crowded into unsanitary slums, are also subject to serious disease outbreaks. Lima, Peru (with population estimated at 9.4 million by 2015) suffered a cholera outbreak in the late 1990s partly because, as the New York Times reported, “Rural people new to Lima…live in houses without running water and use the outhouses that dot the hillsides above.” Consumption of unsafe food and water subjects these people to life-threatening diarrhea and dehydration.

It’s worth looking at some of these emerging mega-cities in detail, because daily life there is likely to be the pattern for a majority of the world’s population. Most are already experiencing severe environmental problems that will only be exacerbated by rapid population increases. Our space-compromised list leaves out the largest European and American cities. These urban centers obviously face different challenges, among them high immigration rates (see companion story):

Jakarta, Indonesia

A Yale University graduate student, who served as a college intern at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, brought back this account: “Directly adjacent to the Embassy’s high-rise office building was a muddy, trash-filled canal that children bathed in every morning. The view from the top floors was unforgettable: a layer of brown sky rising up to meet the blue—a veritable pollution horizon. In the distance the tips of skyscrapers stretched up out of the atmospheric cesspool below, like giant corporate snorkels. Without fresh air to breathe, my days were characterized by nausea and constant low-grade headaches. I went to Indonesia wanting a career in government, and left determined to start a career working with the environment.”

Jakarta is one of the world’s fastest-growing cities. United Nations estimates put the city’s 1995 population at 11.5 million, a dramatic increase from only 530,000 in 1930. Mohammad Dannisworo of the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) says 8.5 million people live within the city’s boundaries at night and an additional 5.5 million migrate via 2.5 million private cars, 3.8 million motorcycles and 255,000 public transportation vehicles

into the city during the day. This daily parade of combustion engines clogs the city streets and thickens the air, making Jakarta the world’s third-most-polluted city after Bangkok and Mexico City.

Rapid growth has become one of the capital city’s greatest challenges, as migrants continue to pour into Jakarta from the surrounding countryside in search of higher-paying jobs. An estimated 200,000 people come to the city looking for employment every year. In the face of such growth, the city has been unable to provide adequate housing, despite repeated attempts to launch urban improvement programs. The Kampung Improvement Program (KIP), established in the 1980s, was initially highly successful in boosting living conditions for more than 3.5 million established migrants, but it has been unable to accommodate the persistent migrant influx. There is an acute housing shortage, with a demand for 200,000 new units a year unfulfilled.

As Encarta describes it, “In the 1970s, efforts failed to control growth by prohibiting the entry of unemployed migrants. The current strategy emphasizes family planning, dispersing the population throughout the greater [metropolitan] region, and promoting transmigration (the voluntary movement of families to Indonesia’s less-populated islands). Jakarta is a magnet for migrants…[During the late 1980s] most were between the ages of 15 and 39 years, many with six years of education or less.”

The UN reports that the city’s drinking water system is ineffective, leading 80 percent of Jakarta inhabitants to use underground water, which has become steadily depleted. In low-lying North Jakarta, groundwater depletion has caused serious land subsidence, making the area more vulnerable to flooding and allowing seawater from the Java Sea to seep into the coastal aquifers. According to Suyono Dikun, Deputy Minister for Infrastructure at the National Development Planning Board, more than 100 million people in Indonesia are living without proper access to clean water.

Jakarta’s environment has been deteriorating rapidly, with serious air pollution and the lack of a waterborne sewer. Jakarta officials have only recently begun to acknowledge the source of over half of the city’s air pollution, and have begun to take action against automobile congestion. The Blue Skies Program, founded in 1996, is dedicated to updating the city’s public and private transportation technology. The project’s successes to date include an increase in the percentage of vehicles meeting pollution standards, a near-complete phasing out of leaded gasoline, and an increase in the number of natural gas-fueled vehicles to 3,000 taxis, 500 passenger cars and 50 public buses.

The Blue Skies Project is pushing Jakarta toward a complete natural gas conversion and is working towards the installation of dedicated filling stations, establishing a fleet of natural gas-fueled passenger busses, supplying conversion kits for gasoline-fueled cars, and creating adequate inspection and maintenance facilities.

Jakarta has acknowledged its traffic problems and undertaken both small and large scale projects to alleviate the stresses of pollution and congestion. The city has launched a “three-in-one” policy to encourage carpooling, demanding that every car on major thruways carry at least three passengers when passing through special zones from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The city has also undertaken the construction of a nearly 17-mile monorail system.

But if Jakarta really wants to alleviate its infrastructure problems, it has to work from within, says Gordon Feller of the California-based Urban Age Institute. “The mayor needs to create a partnership between the three sectors—the government, the local communities and the non-governmental agencies. The job of the mayor is to empower the independent innovators, not to co-opt or block them.”

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Dhaka had only 3.5 million people in 1951; now it has more than 13 million. The city has been gaining population at a rate of nearly seven percent a year since 1975, and it will be the world’s second-largest city (after Tokyo) by 2015. According to a recent Japanese environmental report, “Dhaka city is beset with a number of socio-environmental problems. Traffic congestion, flooding, solid waste disposal, black smoke from

vehicular and industrial emissions, air and noise pollution, and pollution of water bodies by industrial discharge…. Black smoke coming out from the discharge is intolerable to breathe, burning eyes and throats. The city dwellers are being slowly poisoned by lead concentration in the city air 10 times higher than the government safety limit.”

Because of a heavy concentration of cars burning leaded gasoline, Dhaka’s children have one of the highest blood lead levels in the world. Almost 90 percent of primary school children tested had levels high enough to impair their developmental and learning abilities, according to a scientific study.

Water pollution is already rampant. According to the Japanese report, “The river Buriganga flows by the side of the densely populated area of the old city. Dumping of waste to the river by…industries is rather indiscriminate…. The indiscriminate discharge of domestic sewage, industrial effluents and open dumping of solid wastes are becoming a great concern from the point of water-environment degradation.”

Nearly half of all Bangladeshis live below the poverty line, able only to glance at the gleaming new malls built in Dhaka. Urbanization and the pressures of poverty are severely stressing the country’s once-abundant natural resources. According to U.S. Aid for International Development (USAID), “Pressures on Bangladesh’s biological resources are intense and growing.”

They include: · Poor management of aquatic and terrestrial resources; · Population growth; · Overuse of resources; · Unplanned building projects; and · Expansion of agriculture onto less-productive lands, creating erosion and runoff, among other by-products.

Bangladesh’s expanding population destroys critical habitats, reports USAID, causing a decrease in biodiversity. Most of Bangladesh’s tropical forests and almost all of the freshwater floodplains have been negatively affected by human activities.

But despite all the negatives, there is a growing environmental movement in Bangladesh that is working to save Dhaka’s natural resources. The Bangladesh Environmental Network (BEN), for instance, works on reducing the high level of arsenic in Bangladesh’s water supply (more than 500 percent higher than World Health Organization standards), combats the country’s severe flooding problem and tries to defeat India’s River Linking Project, which could divert an estimated 10 to 20 percent of Bangladesh’s water flow. Bangladesh Poribesh Andolon holds demonstrations and international action days to increase citizen awareness of endangered rivers.

International development projects are also addressing some of the country’s environmental woes, including a $44 million arsenic mitigation project launched in 1998 and jointly financed by the World Bank and the Swiss Development and Cooperation Agency. The project is installing deep wells, installing hardware to capture rainwater, building sanitation plants and expanding distribution systems. A $177 million World Bank project works with the government of Bangladesh to improve urban transportation in Dhaka. Private companies from Bangladesh and Pakistan recently announced a joint venture to construct a waste management plant that could handle 3,200 metric tons of solid waste per day, turning it into organic fertilizer.

Mexico City

Mexico City is like an anxious teenager, growing up faster than it probably should. That phenomenon manifests itself in awkward contrasts: Sports cars zipping down crowded streets, choked with air pollution; a Wal-Mart rising against a skyline of the ancient ruins of Teotihuacan; and trendy designer knock-off bags lining the walls of a grungy street stall.

The locale has long been a cultural hub—the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, where Mexico City now stands, was the largest city in the Americas in the 14th century with a population of about 300,000. When the

Spanish razed Tenochtitlán they erected Mexico City in its place, though a smallpox epidemic knocked the population back to 30,000. Mexico City served as the center of Spain’s colonial empire during the 1500s, but the modern-day metropolis only began to materialize in the late 1930s when a combination of rapid economic growth, population growth, and a considerable rural migration filled the city with people.

The larger metropolitan area now engulfs once-distinct villages and population estimates range from 16 million to 30 million, depending on how the city’s boundaries are drawn. Regardless, Mexico City is now widely considered the world’s third-largest city, and still growing; birth rates are high and 1,100 new residents migrate to the capital each day.

With so many people crammed into a closed mountain valley, many environmental and social problems are bound to arise. Mexico City’s air was ranked by WHO as the most contaminated in the world in 1992. By 1998, the Mexican capital had added the distinction of being “the world’s most dangerous city for children.” Twenty percent of the city’s population lives in utter poverty, the Mega-Cities Project reports, 40 percent of the population lives in “informal settlements,” and wealth is concentrated in very few hands.

A combination of population, geography and geology render air pollution one of the city’s greatest problems. WHO studies have reported that it is unhealthy to breathe air with over 120 parts per billion of ozone contaminants more than one day a year, but residents breathe it more than 300 days a year. More than one million of the city’s more than 18 million people suffer from permanent breathing problems.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Exhaust fumes from Mexico City’s approximately three million cars are the main source of air pollutants. Problems resulting from the high levels of exhaust are exacerbated by the fact that Mexico City is situated in a basin. The geography prevents winds from blowing away the pollution, trapping it above the city.”

The International Development Research Center has observed that “despite more than a decade of stringent pollution control measures, a haze hangs over Mexico City most days, obscuring the surrounding snow-capped mountains and endangering the health of its inhabitants. Many factors have contributed to this situation: industrial growth, a population boom and the proliferation of vehicles.” More than 30 percent of the city’s vehicles are more than 20 years old.

Solid waste creates another major problem, and officials estimate that, of the 10,000 tons of waste generated each day, at least one quarter is dumped illegally. The city also lacks an effective sanitation and water distribution system. According to the United Nations, “Urbanization has had a serious negative effect on the ecosystem of Mexico City. Although 80 percent of the population has piped inside plumbing, residents in the peripheral areas cannot access the sewage network and a great percentage of wastewater remains untreated as it passes to the north for use as irrigation water.”

Perhaps three million residents at the edge of the city do not have access to sewers, says the Mega-Cities Project. Untreated waste from these locations is discharged directly into water bodies or into the ground, where it can contaminate ground water. Only 50 percent of residents in squatter settlements have access to plumbing, and these residents are more likely to suffer from health effects linked to inadequate sanitation. Furthermore, Mexico City is now relying on water pumped from lower elevations to quench an ever-deepening thirst; as the city continues to grow, the need for water and the politics surrounding that need are likely only to intensify.

Mexican industry is centered within the city and is primarily responsible for many of the city’s environmental problems as well as for the prosperity that certain areas have achieved. Mexico City houses 80 percent of all the firms in the country, and 2.6 million cars and buses bring people to work and shop in them. Sandwiched in between slums and sewers are glitzy, luxurious neighborhoods and shopping centers, as chic as any in New York or Los Angeles.

The streets of the Zócalo, a central city plaza modeled after Spanish cities, serve as Mexico City’s cultural hub. Unwittingly, the plaza has become one of the economic centers as well. Most job growth in Mexico occurs in the underground sector—in street stalls that cover every square inch of sidewalk space, women flipping tortillas curbside, and kids hawking phone cards or pirated CDs to passersby. Despite efforts to clean up activities that are illegal or considered eyesores, street vendors make up an enormous part of Mexico’s job force and, according to the Los Angeles Times, are primarily responsible for keeping the official unemployment rate below that of the United States.

While problems abound, the city is doing its best to find solutions. Bicycles are the new grassroots rage, carrying everything from tentative tourists to head-high deliveries of Coca-Cola and fresh-baked bread. The city has had a thriving light rail system for years, with nine lines, 75 miles of tracks and more under construction. Neighborhood groups band together to build houses, remove trash and cut down on crime.

Volunteers also bring hope to many of the bleakest parts of the city. San Francisco has long served as a “partner” city to Mexico City through the nonprofit program Partners of the Americas. Through this program, Bay Area residents have worked with a counterpart committee in Mexico City and volunteered to teach English, bring medical supplies and develop micro-enterprises. The program has also developed numerous exchanges—in arts, economics, forestry and education, among others—that benefit citizens on both sides of the border.

Tom Gaman, a California forester and the Secretary of the San Francisco/Mexico City partnership, hopes that population growth will decline as economic conditions improve in the areas. He says of his many trips south, “Every time I go there I feel renewed in hope… the relevant issues that are so foreign to us Yankees are front and center in Mexico City.”

Lagos, Nigeria

In 1950, with just 288,000 people, Lagos wasn’t even a speck on the map of the largest urban centers. Today, the rapidly growing city of 14 million in Africa’s most populous country is on its way to becoming the third-largest city in the world. By 2015, the Population Reference Bureau estimates Lagos will reach number three status with a population hovering somewhere around 23.2 million people.

According to John Walther, a professor of geology at Southern Methodist University, Lagos grew by 4,761 percent between 1950 and today. In comparison, New York City grew by just 5.1 percent over the same interval.

The discovery of oil in the 1950s and subsequent oil boom of the 1970s—helped by the worldwide oil crisis of that era—encouraged waves of migrants to seek their fortunes in the city. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Mega-Cities Project reports that the city grew by more than 300,000 persons per year, despite the 1981 world recession, which sent Lagos “reeling into debt and runaway inflation.” According to the United Nations, Lagos is expected to continue growing by close to four percent a year.

While the city’s most affluent can afford to sequester themselves on two islands off the mainland, two-thirds of the city’s residents live at or below the poverty line in one of many slums afflicted with a slew of problems. “Unlit highways run past canyons of smoldering garbage before giving way to dirt streets weaving through 200 slums, their sewers running with raw waste,” writes Amy Otchet, a UNESCO journalist.

A Lagos factory worker, interviewed by the alternative magazine NewYouth, said of living conditions for millions of poverty-stricken Lagosians: “[Workers] live in one-room apartments unfit for human beings. The impression upon entering these districts is one of entering a war zone with row upon row

of crumbling houses. The walls have big cracks in them, the plaster is falling away and quite often bits of the roof have been blown away by the wind. In these one-room apartments, it is not uncommon to find a family of 10. There is no water, no proper sanitation. Sewage spills down the roads. There are no medical facilities in these districts, no hospitals or clinics.”

Even middle-class people in Lagos live in very crowded accommodations. Unsanitary conditions have led to cholera outbreaks, says Environment-Nigeria, and over 50 percent of the population is infected with malaria, according to the Mega-Cities Project. One of every 20 children is believed to die before the age of five. The population density of the built-up urban areas of metropolitan Lagos is almost suffocating, at nearly 20,000 persons per square kilometer. As a result, says Environment-Nigeria, “Residents live in what are called ‘face-me-I-face-you’ single rooms with shared kitchen, bathroom and toilet facilities. In some buildings, these rooms can house as many as eight people.”

As a result of the staggering growth rate, air pollution is a chronic problem in Lagos, owing in large part to the city’s surfeit of smog-producing automobiles and diesel generators. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says that Lagos’ central city is “daily plagued by smog shrouding the skyline.” Tests have revealed high levels of air pollutants forming a perpetual noxious brew in the worst affected areas. “Studies carried out by the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (FEPA) show a moderate-to-high concentration of pollutants such as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, organic acids and hydrocarbons in the atmosphere,” the EIA reports.

A rickshaw transportation system, poorly constructed and maintained roadways, frequent road flooding and auto accidents, and the lack of a subway or intra-city rail service has made Lagos legendary for its chaotic (and pollution-inducing) traffic jams. Native Lagosians typically must rise at 4 a.m. to negotiate the morning rush through the now infamous “go-slow”—a ubiquitous term referring to the ritual slog of cars vying for space on the city’s super-saturated highways. With only three bridges from mainland Lagos to Lagos Island, the commercial and business hub, congestion is chronic and unavoidable. It can take an average of two to three hours to travel just six to 12 miles. Uche Onyabadi, a journalism doctoral student at the University of Missouri-Columbia who lived in Lagos for about 10 years before coming to the U.S., says that the government tried to address the problem of bottle-necking bridge traffic in the 1980s by implementing an “Odd-and-Even” policy. On certain days of the week, Onyebadi says, only cars with license numbers starting with an odd number were permitted across the bridge. Other days were for even-numbered vehicles. “It didn’t work,” Onyebadi says. “People got creative and would get two cars.”

Water quality in the city doesn’t fare much better. The fresh water supply is often contaminated with human waste, as only half the population has toilets. Water-challenged citizens have a choice of buying high-priced water or stealing it from neighbor’s wells. Flooding is a major problem, as it is in Dhaka, and it is partially caused by similar problems: unplanned buildings block natural watercourses. Solid waste in Lagos is disposed of haphazardly, often in illegal dumps.

For all its crime, poverty and chaos, the city has a vibrant pulse. “Lagos is one city that has some form of magnetism that you can’t explain,” Onyebadi says. “People hate to go there. They say ‘Oh! The traffic is terrible,’ but then you need a bulldozer to get them out again.”

Innovation also breeds in the unlikeliest places. Unesco journalist Amy Otchet explains, “Behind the informal sector lies a powerful if not desperate spirit of initiative: Wheelbarrows are rolled out of a construction site at night to serve as rented beds at 20 cents a shot for homeless people seeking shelter under an overhang. When rain makes a market run with mud, kids wait with buckets of water to wash shoppers’ feet for a few coins.”

Rem Koolhaas, a well-known Dutch architect, former journalist and Harvard professor, has been taking a group of his graduate design students to Lagos for the past four years as part of an ongoing project entitled “Project on the City” in an effort to study West Africa’s urbanization patterns. Koolhaas believes that Lagos’ “improvisational urbanism” may become a model for other major cities of the world.

In a report Koolhaas helped prepare after one trip to the city, he writes, “Dangerous breakdowns of order and infrastructure in Nigeria are often transformed into productive urban forms: Stalled traffic turns into an open-air market, defunct railroad bridges become pedestrian walkways.” In his view, the “go-slow” is actually a prime example of the innovation and ad-hoc efficiency characterizing the city’s haphazard march to modernity. “Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos,” he writes.

To address the city’s rapid growth, Thompson Ayodele, coordinator of the Institute for Public Policy Analysis in Nigeria, says that the government “has approved a new population policy that would force Nigeria’s population growth rate from between 2.5 and three percent now to not more than two percent by the year 2015.”

In 2000, the state’s Ministry of Transport established the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority to help monitor and patrol traffic jams, especially at peak hours. Since then, the major Nigerian newspaper This Day reports that “journeys within the metropolis have become less burdensome.”

Additional help may soon be on the way. In 2003, Lagos was chosen by the UN to be one of seven cities to launch the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) Sustainable Cities Program. The UN will work with Lagos “to manage the challenges of its mega-city status.”

Mumbai (Bombay), India

The Indian coastal city of Mumbai, formerly Bombay, is home to India’s vibrant film industry (“Bollywood”) and probably boasts more cell phones per capita than any other city on the subcontinent. The city is responsible for generating one sixth of the gross domestic product of the entire country. But Mumbai is bursting at the seams. The first glimpse of the city, as the airplane hits the runway, is Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, home to 2.8 million people.

According to a 2004 estimate, the population of metropolitan Mumbai was approximately 17 million. Every year, the city receives more than 250,000 rural-to-urban emigrants. Mumbai could be the world’s most populous city by 2020, with 28.5 million, says the Population Institute.

“With this sizeable number of people, resources are getting increasingly scarce. Buildings are getting taller, with no care for where water and space, children’s playgrounds and parking areas will come from,” says Preeti Gopalkrishnan, Communications Executive of Population First, a sustainable human development program based in Mumbai.

Half of the metropolis’ population lacks running water or electricity, and the smoke from hundreds of thousands of open cooking fires joins with the sooty smoke from two-stroke auto rickshaws, belching taxis, diesel buses and coal-fired power plants in a symphony of air pollutants. Breathing Mumbai’s inversion-trapped air, experts say, is the equivalent of smoking 20 cigarettes a day.

According to a 2000 estimate by the Mega-Cities Project, 70 to 75 percent of women living in slums complain of general weakness and anemia, while 50 to 60 percent suffer from chronic malnutrition, recurrent gastroenteritis and helminthic [caused by parasitic worms] infections. Malnutrition and paralysis are common causes of mortality.

The water supply situation in Mumbai is critical, reports the UN, with the level of supply so much below demand that water use is restricted and reaches emergency proportions when the monsoon fails. More than two million Mumbai residents have no sanitary facilities, and much sewage is discharged untreated or partially treated into waterways. Attempts have been made to relocate industries outside the island city, but industrial pollution remains a serious problem.

In addition to this, Mumbai is also one of the noisiest cities in the world, a key factor being the considerable number of vehicles on the city’s streets. There are more than 500,000 private automobiles on Mumbai streets. Despite a substantial public transit system, congestion in the metropolitan area continues. As Business Week reports, “After years of neglect, combined with helter-skelter growth, Bombay is falling apart. Its suburban train service carries six million passengers a day, which works out to 570 per train car, nearly three times their capacity.”

“Public transport in Mumbai has reached a point of almost complete gridlock,” says Gordon Feller of the Urban Age Institute. “The emission standards of vehicles in the city are very bad and the local government is shy about talking about alternatives because it doesn’t know when it will implement them.”

Despite the high level of poverty in the city, however, crime isn’t increasing as rapidly as one would imagine. According to the State of the World Cities Report, 2004/05, of all the world regions, developed and developing, Asia ranks lowest in almost all types of crimes. “I wouldn’t say there is rampant lawlessness; most people are going about their day-to-day life trying to scratch together a living,” Feller says.

Yet daily life in Mumbai is extremely difficult. This is especially true of the city’s slum dwellers. As the BBC reports, Mumbai’s poor build unstable, flimsy huts on any available land. The city’s older slums—such as Dharavi, Byculla and Khar—have houses made of brick and mortar but lack drainage systems and toilets. Many people also live dangerously close to the railway tracks, which cut through the heart of Bombay. The Times of India regularly reports vehicles backing or barreling over children, or rows of sleeping citizens. “Bombay,” wrote V.S. Naipaul in the first sentence of his India: A Million Mutinies Now, “is a crowd.”

“Although the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme has been implemented to accommodate the city’s poor, most often slum-dwellers sell the houses and return to the streets,” Gopalkrishnan says. “The rules have to be enforced more stringently.”

The Slum Rehabilitation Scheme is one of many ventures created to improve Mumbai’s standard of living. According to Feller, several non-governmental organizations are focused on governance issues, as well as on social services. One such project is the Mega-Cities Project’s Community of Resource Organization (CORO) Pay Toilet Project.

In July 1992, CORO took over the management of government-constructed toilet facilities in congested slum areas. It proceeded to set up a partnership with its long-standing literacy program, combining community libraries with sanitary facilities. Local groups maintain the toilets on a cooperative basis, sometimes finding sponsors for the poorest areas. Community members benefit from clean facilities and adequate water, while five hundred new maintenance jobs have been created in the bargain.

The Child-to-Child Program, also initiated by the organization, is an activity-based approach to health education for children in formal and non-formal systems of education. The program identifies children as “mini-doctors” who can spread awareness among children regarding their own health. Through these activities, this information is then communicated to the rest of the community.

“Bombay is stretched to the limit,” Feller says. “Citizens have a mismatch between what they were promised and what they received. And their patience is wearing thin.”

Tokyo, Japan

Far from the struggle to survive that is Mumbai or the baked-in poverty of Lagos, Tokyo is the world’s largest and also one of the world’s most sophisticated cities. The capital of Japan, Tokyo is every bit the high-powered, tech-savvy city that its reputation suggests. Its residents enjoy one of the world’s highest standards of living, with an average income per household of $71,600 in 1994 and an employment rate of 96.5 percent in 1997. Nearly 100 percent of the population has access to health care, and the city’s population is treated at 754 individual hospitals. The government has a well-developed plan for the welfare of its senior citizens. Nearly all adults in Tokyo are literate and 45 percent enroll in college.

Calling Tokyo a city would be an understatement and a misnomer. It is technically a metropolis (or to in Japanese), which means a collection of smaller political units. Twenty-three distinct city wards form the heart of Tokyo along with 26 individual cities, five towns, and eight villages. Included in this group are the islands of Izu and Ogasawara, located off the coast of the main island of Honshu. Tokyo spans 237 square miles and includes the cities of Yokohama and Kawasaki. Tokyo proper has less than 15 million citizens, but the entire metropolitan area has well over 30 million.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) is adept at planning and is constantly seeking to alleviate the effects of having so many people in such a small space. While the high standard of living buffers Tokyo from many problems faced by mega-cities (like sanitation concerns and access to water and sewerage), some problems simply come with the territory.

Japan’s cultural, economic and political center is the Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama region, which accounts for 23 percent of Japan’s industrial manufacturing, 52 percent of all financial accumulation and 76 percent of stock market trading. The Tokyo economy grew so fast in the 1980s that the city faced a shortage of blue-collar workers. “The gap has been filled with foreign labor and illegal immigrants, who...often create their own ethnic ghettoes,” according to Junjiro Takahashi and Noriyuki Sugiura of Tokyo’s United Nations University.

The vast array of production and destruction, transactions and interactions, result in massive amounts of shipping, trading and, of course, waste. Local governments have worked hard to increase recycling and decrease waste production, but it is often community efforts that work best. Abiko City started Ecopure Abiko, the Citizens’ Campaign for Reduction and Recycling of Garbage. This program helps residents collect compostable waste and deliver it to local organic farmers.

Twelve subway lines provide convenient transportation in and around Tokyo. The impressive public transportation system alleviates pressures on roads and eliminates much of the traffic and accompanying air pollution found in other major cities (nearly 90 percent of workers in Tokyo commute by rail).

Tokyo’s cars, asphalt, buildings and people cause another problem—heat. The “heat island phenomenon” has become a major problem for the city; thermal loading in the jam-packed, hectic urban centers contributes to global warming and health problems, as well as making things downright uncomfortable. The TMG has now mapped the regional thermal environment and the city is planting trees, creating more lawns, and paving streets with water-retentive asphalt.

Official regional planning began here in 1956 with the passage of the National Capital Region Development law, which was intended to limit the growth of urban Tokyo. The law failed to stop the

expansion of the city, though, and was soon amended to include a “Suburban Development Area.” According to a United Nations University report, “In the late 1960s, [Tokyo’s] suburban fringe already stretched as far as 25 miles from the city center.” While this trend eliminated some of the downtown congestion, it magnified transportation problems dramatically by increasing the number of commuters.

Under today’s plan, the suburbs expand in and among the existing city structures while green spaces are protected. Most importantly, satellite towns are developed to accommodate new industries and economic booms. This plan is pushing Tokyo away from the single-city mode and toward a concept of “multi-core” urban zones, each of which can draw congestion and people away from the center city. The Japanese government also increased spending in outlying areas to encourage further growth and development of “micropolitan areas.”

Cities of the Future Won't Look Like OursThe era of cheap oil is over, and lost with it an energy-rich way of life that billions of city dwellers have come to take for granted.

October 23, 2006 |

Back in the early 20th Century, when the cheap oil fiesta was just getting underway, and some major new

technological innovation made its debut every month -- cars, radio, movies, airplanes -- there was no

practical limit to what men of vision could imagine about the future city, though often their imaginings were

ridiculous. The representative case is Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret; 1887 -- 1965), the

leading architectural hoodoo-meister of Early High Modernism, whose 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris

proposed to knock down the entire Marais district on the Right Bank and replace it with rows of identical

towers set between freeways.

Luckily for Paris, the city officials laughed at him every time he came back with the scheme over the next

40 years -- and Corb was nothing if not a relentless self-promoter. Ironically and tragically, though, the

Plan Voisin model was later adopted gleefully by post WWII American planners, and resulted in such

urban monstrosities as the infamous Cabrini Green housing projects of Chicago and scores of things like it

around the country.

Other visions of that early period involved Tom Swiftian scenes of Everest-size skyscrapers with Zeppelin

moorings on top, linked to zooming air trams, while various types of personal helicopters swooped

between things. Virtually all these schemes had one thing in common: the city of the future they depicted

was vibrant. We know now, here in the USA anyway, that this was the one thing they got most wrong. By

1970, many American cities were stone dead at their centers, especially the industrial giants of the

Midwest. Ten years later, the American city of the future was the nightmare vision of Blade Runner, an

acid rain-dripping ruin fit only for androids.

These days, a new generation of mojo architect savants such as Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas are

retailing an urban futurism that is basically warmed-over Corbu with an expressionist horror movie spin,

featuring torqued and tortured skyscrapers, made possible by computer-aided design, clad in Darth Vadar

glass or other sheer surfaces, with grim public spaces exquisitely engineered to induce agoraphobia.

There's more than a tinge of sadism in all this, though Koolhaas is much more explicit in his many writings

than the less-voluble Libeskind about consciously surrendering to a zeitgeist of cruel alienation. But these

are also very rarified exercises among a tiny group of mutually-referential fashionista narcissists, while the

general public itself -- at least the fraction that thinks about anything -- only grudgingly goes along with it

as a sort of drear obeisance to the religion of art.

An alternate awful urban vision of the future, advanced by public intellectuals such as author Mike Davis

(The Ecology of Fear), is actually more about the city of the present: the third world mega-slum as

embodied by such ghastly organisms as present-day Lagos, Lima, and Karachi. This is a vision of plain

toxic hypertrophy with no particular artistic or architectural overlay to it. These cities have organized

according to a simple logarithmic progression of horrible conditions -- more people, more pollutiaon, more

poverty -- nourished by cheap energy globalism, with the expectation that they will only continue along

that path and get worse.

Yet another vision of the future is supplied by the New Urbanists, who have campaigned for a return to the

body of principle and methodology drawn from successful historic practice rather than science fiction,

politics, or metaphysics. That is, they rely on urban design that has proven to work well in the past and is

worth emulating -- by which I mean the relations of buildings to public space and with each other, not the

deployment of sewer lines and other infrastructure. The New Urbanists are marginalized because their

reliance on tradition is considered sentimental and nostalgic. Their work is viewed by the mandarins of

architecture through the lens of Modernist ideology, which, going back a hundred years to Adolf Loos's

declaration that ornament is crime, has worked to decouple contemporary practice from what they regard

as the filthy claptrap of history. Of course, Modernism itself has self-evidently become historical in its own

right, and the more this is true, paradoxically, the more its defenders insist that history does not matter.

Whatever else this represents in the form of intellectual imprudence, it at least promotes a discontinuity of

human experience which cannot be healthy.

The New Urbanists are also disdained for their modesty of ambition. They are not interested in the biggest

this or that. Their plans are typically scaled to the quarter-mile walk and rarely include super-sized

buildings. The cutting edge holds no attractions for them in and of itself. They want to create

neighborhoods and quarters, not intergalactic space ports. They want the streets, squares, and building

facades to provide decorum, legibility, and even beauty, while the latest crop of Modernists seek to

confound our expectations about the urban environment as much as possible, in the service of generating

anxiety rather than pleasure. The Modernists use the lame adjective edgy to describe their methods. It is

supposed to signify excitement, novelty, and especially innovation, but mostly they have managed to

innovate only new ways to make people feel bad about where they are.

The future direction of urban experience depends a great deal on an understanding of history, and of

recent history in particular, because the hyper development of the past two hundred years has followed

the arc of increasing energy resources and, above all, we are now facing the world-wide depletion of

energy resources.

As the industrial age gained traction in the early 19th century, so did the demographic trend of people

increasingly moving from the farms and villages to the big cities. Industrial production was centralized in

the cities and recruited armies of workers insatiably. Meanwhile, mechanized farming required fewer

farmers to feed more people. The railroad, by its nature, favored centralization. By 1900, cities such as

London and New York had evolved into mega-urbanisms of multiple millions of people. Around the same

time, electrification was generally complete and with it came skyscrapers serviced by elevators. Over the

next twenty years, oil moved ahead of coal as the primary fuel for transport and, especially in the US

where oil was cheap and abundant, led to mass automobile ownership. That, in turn, sparked the

decanting of households into massive new suburban hinterlands, and to the extreme separation of

activities by zoning law there, which climaxed -- with interruptions for depression and war -- in the

evolution of the late 20th century car-dependent metroplexes like Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, and

Atlanta. That is where things stand now.

Now my own view is that we face severe energy problems in the decades ahead and they will not be

ameliorated by any combination of alternative fuels or schemes for running them. This permanent global

energy crisis will have all kinds of consequences, most particularly on our cities. These looming

circumstances imply several major trends which contradict conventional expectations, especially of

continued urban growth.

One certain impact will be the contraction of industrial activity per se and of the financial sector whose

instruments and certificates represent the expectation of growth in accumulated wealth. This alone will

comprise a basic challenge to industrial capitalism -- apart from the sociopolitical strife that such financial

catastrophe is apt to generate.

I hasten to add it is a mistake to suppose that the US industrial economy has already been replaced by a

so-called "information" economy or a consumer economy. In reality, manufacturing activities have been

insidiously replaced over the past twenty years by a suburban-sprawl-building economy -- and the mass

production of suburban houses, highways, strip malls and big box stores is just a different sort of

manufacturing than making hair driers and TV sets. The sprawl industry also drove a reckless debt

creation racket and multiple layers of traffic in mortgages and spinoffs of mortgages (such as the

derivatives trade based on bundled, securitized debt) which represents, at bottom, hallucinated wealth

that in turn has spread false liquidity through the equity markets and is certain to affect them badly sooner

or later. All this is what we have been calling the "housing bubble" and it is now beginning to fly apart with

deadly effect.

Much of the suburban real estate produced by this process is destined to lose its supposed value, both in

practical and monetary terms as energy scarcities get traction. So, on top of the sheer distortions and

perversities of the glut in bad mortgage paper, America will be faced with the accelerating worthlessness

of the collateral -- the houses, Jiffy Lubes, and office parks -- as gasoline prices go up, and long

commutes become untenable, and jobs along with incomes are lost, and the cost of heating houses larger

than 1500 square feet becomes an insuperable burden. All this is to say that the suburban rings of our

cities have poor prospects in the future. They therefore represent a massive tragic misinvestment,

perhaps the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It is hard to say how this stuff

might be reused or retrofitted, if at all, but some of it, perhaps a lot, may end up as a combined salvage

yard and sheer ruin.

Another major impact of the coming energy scarcity will be the end of industrial agriculture. Without

abundant and cheap oil and gas-based fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fuels for running huge

machines and irrigation systems, we will have to make other arrangements for feeding ourselves. Crop

yields will go down -- a big reason, by the way, to be skeptical of ethanol and bio-diesel alternative fuel

schemes based on corn or soybean crops. We will have to grow food closer to home, on a smaller scale,

probably requiring more human and even animal labor, and agriculture is likely to come closer to the

center of economic life than it has within memory -- at the same time that mass production homebuilding,

tourism based on mass aviation, easy motoring, and a host of other obsolete activities fade into history.

I think this will lead to an epochal demographic shift, a reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people

moving from the farms and rural places to the big cities. Instead, I believe we will see is a substantial

contraction of our cities at the same time that they densify at their cores and along their waterfronts. A

preview of this can be seen in Baltimore today. The remaining viable fabric of the pre-automobile city is

relatively tiny and concentrated in the old center around a complex harbor system. With little need for

industrial workers, vast neighborhoods of row housing built for them are either abandoned or inhabited

now only by such economically distressed people that abandonment is inevitable. The pattern of

contraction may not be identical in all American cities.

In some it will be a lot worse. Phoenix, Tucson, and Las Vegas will just dry up and blow away, since local

agriculture will not be possible, and they will be afflicted with severe water problems on top of all the other

problems growing out of energy scarcity and an extreme car-dependent development pattern. Cities in the

"wet" sunbelt such as Houston, Orlando, and Atlanta, will probably still be there but revert to insignificance

for the additional simple reason that a lack of cheap air conditioning will make them unbearable.

It is worth keeping in mind that cities generally are located on important geographical sites -- harbors,

rivers, railroad junctions -- and some kind of urban settlement is likely to persist in many of these places,

unless climate change drowns them. In recent years, most waterfront property has been reassigned from

industrial and commercial uses to condominium sites, and greenways. This will not continue. If we are

going to have any kind of commerce between one place and another, we will have to reactivate our

waterfronts for shipping -- and not necessarily of the automated steel container variety. Like virtually

everything else in the coming energy scarce world, maritime trade will have to be rescaled. It may even

have to rely on wind power again to some extent. These operations will require wharves, warehouses,

cheap quarters for sailors and all the other furnishings typically required through history.

Those who are infatuated with skyscrapers are going to be disappointed. I do not think we will be building

many more of them further along in this century. We will have trouble running the ones we have, since

most of the glass towers built after 1965 have inoperable windows, and even the ones that have them

would have to be retrofitted for coal furnaces, and a less than absolutely reliable electric power grid may

make life in a twenty-fifth floor apartment impossible when the elevators go out. In short, I think we will

discover that the skyscraper was purely a product of the cheap oil and gas age. Exciting as they may be,

we might have to live without them.

The process I have described will probably be messy. Social turbulence should be expected. For instance,

the urban underclass will be squeezed even harder than the suffering middle classes, and they already

have a nascent warrior culture that could easily redirect its energies from hip hop entertainments to real

guerilla warfare if the competition for resources became desperate. Economic distress in the US is also

likely to only aggravate unfavorable conditions in Mexico, sending increased streams of impoverished

migrants north. Meanwhile, the faltering US middle classes may be so inflamed by the loss of their

entitlements to an easy motoring existence that they will vote for maniacs and venture into scapegoating. I

certainly expect the American public and their leaders to mount a vigorous defense of suburbia, even if it

proves to be a gigantic exercise in futility and a waste of precious resources.

We will be lucky if we can make the transition from our current circumstances to a future of re-sized, re-

scaled cities and a reactivated productive rural landscape outside them, with a hierarchy of hamlets,

villages, and towns in between, and some ability to conduct commerce and manufacturing. This would, in

effect, be a reversion to prior living arrangements, and to some extent it is a model proposed by the New

Urbanists -- or at least a template they would understand as fundamental. Many things might stand in the

way of this. The physical disaggregation of civic life in our small towns is now so extreme that nothing

might avail to repair it, especially since we will have far less capital to work with. The suburbs running from

Boston through New Jersey to Washington have paved over some of the best farmland in the nation's

most populous region and it may be centuries before it is restored to productivity, if ever. Physical security

may become so tenuous that people will sell their allegiance for protection, or take to living behind

fortifications. In earlier periods of history when societies got into trouble -- for instance, the plague years in

Europe -- rural places were beset by banditry and lawlessness, adding another layer of difficulty to food

production on top of the loss of the peasant labor.

We don't know how any of these things may actually play out. I have not even mentioned the potential for

geopolitical mischief, which could skew the picture a lot more.

But the urban future isn't what it was cracked up to be when we were riding high, surfing the big waves of

cheap energy in the seemingly endless summer of oil. It won't be fun fun fun 'til Daddy takes the T-bird

away. It won't be a Herbert Muschamp smorgasbord of delicious, rarified architectural irony. The Koolhaas

celebration of alienation will not seem worth partying for. The metaphysics of Libeskind and Peter

Eisenman will stand naked in the transparency of their phoniness. By and by, even the mega slums of the

third world will contract as the surplus grain supplies of the formerly-developed nations are reduced to

nothing and export ceases.

I often wonder what people will think decades from now if they are able to view those old Doris Day and

Rock Hudson comedies of the mid 20th century. Invariably these stories took place in a Manhattan of

sparkly new glass towers, and streets full of cars with tail fins, and companies that ruled the world, and

men and women who had come back from a World War full of confidence that there was no limit to what

people with good intentions could do and nothing that they couldn't handle. We are their children and

grandchildren and it is a different world now.

Global citiesMain article: Global city

A global city, also known as a world city, is a prominent centre of trade, banking, finance, innovation, and markets. The term "global city", as opposed to megacity, was coined by Saskia Sassen in a seminal 1991 work.[citation needed] Whereas "megacity" refers to any city of enormous size, a global city is one of enormous power or influence. Global cities, according to Sassen, have more in common with each other than with other cities in their host nations. Notable examples of such cities include Mumbai, London, New York City, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Chicago, Singapore and Shanghai.

The notion of global cities is rooted in the concentration of power and capabilities within all cities. The city is seen as a container where skills and resources are concentrated: the better able a city is to concentrate its skills and resources, the more successful and powerful the city. This makes the city itself more powerful in the sense that it can influence what is happening around the world. Following this view of cities, it is possible to rank the world's cities hierarchically.[43]

Critics of the notion point to the different realms of power. The term global city is heavily influenced by economic factors and, thus, may not account for places that are otherwise significant. For example, cities like Rome, Beijing, Delhi, Istanbul, Mecca, Mashhad, Karbala, Jerusalem and Lisbon are powerful in religious and historical terms but would not be considered "global cities." Additionally, it has been questioned whether the city itself can be regarded as an actor.

In 1995, Kanter argued that successful cities can be identified by three elements: good thinkers (concepts), good makers (competence) or good traders (connections). The interplay of these three elements, Kanter argued, means that good cities are not planned but managed.

21st century

New Songdo City

There is a debate about whether technology and instantaneous communications are making cities obsolete, or reinforcing the importance of big cities as centres of the knowledge economy.[44][45][46] Knowledge-based development of cities, globalization of innovation networks, and broadband services are driving forces of a new city planning paradigm towards intelligent cities. Intelligent / smart cities use technology and communication to create more efficient agglomerations in terms of competitiveness, innovation, environment, energy, utilities, governance, and delivery of services to the citizen. Some companies are building brand new masterplanned cities from scratch on greenfield sites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenfield_land

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_planning

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_cities

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_cities

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_economy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_technology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Songdo_City

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_network

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karbala

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashhad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mecca

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delhi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city#GaWC_Inventory_of_World_Cities

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(sociology)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskia_Sassen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city

Mega Gradovi i Urbani Koridori

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