June 1, 1996
The Toronto Globe and Mail
THE GLOBAL CITY
The majority of the world's people are moving to thecity.
What are the challenges this brings? The world's poor flock to cities
and
Crowded centres challenge planners.
By John Stackhouse
The Globe and Mail
Bombay - FEW would envy Zahida Nadafe's urban existence.
Along with her husband, daughter, son-in-law and grandson, Ms. Nadafe
lives on a sidewalk in Bombay, in a 12-square-metre concoction of scrap
wood and chicken wiring. The family's front door is a jute sack, its front
yard an open sewer that carries the family's waste, along with that of 30 or
so other families who live in huts along the same stretch of sidewalk.
Yet Ms. Nadafe would not give up Bombay for anywhere else in India,
especially not for the village she came from in the 1970s.
"You can get mutton, fish, chicken here, everything," the middle-aged
woman laughed, while playing on the street with her only grandchild. "In
the village, you have to die without food."
Ms. Nadafe is not alone in her enthusiasm. Every day, an estimated 1,000
newcomers are born into or move to Bombay, a city of 12.6 million and a
metropolitan area of 15 million, that already ranks among the world's most
crowded places. Within 20 years, the greater city is projected to reach 27.4
million people, nearly the current population of Canada.
Congested, chaotic, frenetic and frayed, the world's cities have never been
so popular. Soon, for the first time in history, more humans will live in
urban areas than in rural ones, as developing countries undergo an almost
unparalleled transformation.
Through birth more than migration, the world is adding 200,000 new city
dwellers every week, and is likely to continue to do so for the next 30
years. In one generation, cities like Jakarta, Tehran and Sao Paulo have
tripled in size to reach populations that are greater than those of most
members of the United Nations.
If there were any doubt, we have become an urban species, living not in a
global village but a global city.
In the next century, there will be as many as 1,657 cities with populations
in excess of one million people. In the last century, there was only one:
London. And the majority of the big new cities will be in Asia. Fewer than
one in five will be in Europe and North America.
"Urbanization is desirable. It is inevitable. It is an unstoppable
phenomenon," said O. P. Mathur, an urban specialist at India's National
Institute of Public Finance and Policy.
But how much urbanization can the world take?
Starting June 3, the United Nations will try to find out at its second-ever
Conference on Human Settlements, known as Habitat 2, to be held in
Istanbul, Turkey, a city of 7.8 million that has seen urban societies rise and
fall for millennia.
When the first UN Habitat conference was held in Vancouver in 1976, the
world believed in fix-it urban development, a belief that investments in
sewers, water pipes, roads and mass transit systems would cure the ills of
a city.
Twenty years on, with cities bursting at the seams, there is less faith in
such solutions and more concern with management; less focus on fixing
cities and more focus on fixing city halls.
The reason is that the explosion of cities is seen mostly in developing
countries, the places that can least afford the urban infrastructure to serve
such large numbers.
In the year 2015, the world's 10 largest cities will not include New York, Los
Angeles or London. The great metropolises of the 20th century will be
replaced by the likes of Lagos, Shanghai, Jakarta and Dhaka, each with
populations greater than that of present-day Australia.
Even more daunting challenges may lie away from the national capitals and
megacities, in the hundreds of towns and trading posts that will become
major cities, in size if not stature--places like Surat, India, already home to
1.5 million but with no garbage collection, no waste-water treatment and an
outbreak of bubonic plague in 1994.
For all their faults, however, cities have become humanity's residence of
choice.
"If you only see cities as statistical numbers, it can be quite frightening,"
said Bombay's best-known architect and planner, Charles Correa. "What
those figures don't take into account is that these are human places."
In big, bad Bombay, Ms. Nadafe's husband Mohamad selected a patch of
sidewalk for his family in the 1970s because it offered a better life than they
had in their village. The sidewalk was near a mosque and a railway station,
thus offering the security of community and liberty of movement. Mohamad
then found a job--a city's other great asset--as a street vendor
specializing in balloons.
After losing two of their three children to diseases in the desert state of
Rajasthan, the couple saw much appeal in Bombay life, even on a sidewalk.
A full 80 per cent of the city's population is literate, and half of all children
attend secondary school.
With health clinics in every neighbourhood and food in abundance,
Bombay's infant-mortality rate is about half the national average. Birth
rates are much lower. Incomes are far higher. People live much longer. And
85 per cent of homes have access to electricity and water.
On Ms. Nadafe's sidewalk, each of the 30 or so huts has a television. And
at the end of their ramshackle row, a tiny shop sells Kit Kat chocolate bars,
Colgate toothpaste and Lux soap.
But the appeal of a city is much more than the sum of development
statistics and consumer products. The agglomeration of humans--creative,
consuming humans--has fostered the world's dominant social and political
cultures. Cities allow for universities, theatres, community groups, sports
leagues and ideas, from the French Revolution in Paris to Burma's
modern-day struggle for democracy in Rangoon.
"The chief function of the city," wrote the late Lewis Mumford in his 1961
classic work The City in History, "is to convert power into form, energy into
culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction
into social creativity."
But as cities grow from one million people to three million, and then from
three million to 10 million, their conversion power is not automatically
positive. Energy can turn into violence, dead matter into pollution, and
biological reproduction into disease.
The difference--the source of a city's conversion power--is not the size of a
population, its rate of growth or even its level of economic development,
although all are important. It is the city's ability to manage itself.
Often seen as fat cats, cities have been ignored, even abused, by national
and state governments. They often get the smallest slice of a tax pie even
though they have the biggest plate to fill. Many cannot raise their own
investment capital to finance transit systems and sewers, or even set their
own laws and regulations, without higher approval.
That may change as cities become the dominant voting centres in most
countries.
But strong city councils are not enough to make a city work. Long-term
investments in public transport, thoughtful regional planning, active
communities, vibrant and diverse economies, free and fair housing
markets--these are some ingredients of success that soon will be needed in
abundance, and not just for those who live in cities.
As the world prepares for its first urban millennium, the humans who once
defined the city are now defined by it, too.
POPULATION IN CITIES WITH MORE THAN ONE
MILLION RESIDENTS, BY REGION:
1950-2015
................Total population in all cities with more
................than one million residents (population in millions)
.................1950......1970......1990....2015
Africa...........3..........16........59......225
Latin America...17..........57.......118......225
Asia............58.........168.......359......903
Europe..........73.........116.......141......156
North America...40..........78.......105......148
Source: United Nations Population Division.