CITIES FROM SCRATCH
The statistics are grimly eloquent. Half the world’s 6 billion people are now living in cities and the rate of urban growth is over one million per week. Disproportionately, this burgeoning population is in the developing world and the vast majority of these new city dwellers are very poor. According to one study, 90 percent of urban household growth in South Asia in the slums. By 2015, sub-Saharan Africa will have 332 million slum dwellers, doubling every 15 years. By the most conservative estimates, at least a billion people are currently in slums, possibly as many as twice that. Of the thirty largest “mega-slums” on the planet three – Soweto (1.5 million), Cape Flats (1.2 million), and Inanda INK (0.5 million) are in South Africa.
Debates over what can be done about this misery have now been going on for centuries. Whether the answer to slums lies in a rising economy, in rationalization and improvement in place, in demolition, or in dramatically new forms of urban physical organization, it has long seemed clear that the contemporary convergence of exponential urban growth, vastly increasing slums, the emergence of the unsustainable pattern of megacities and the ubiquity of a continuously sprawling, interurban, “non-place” ooze demands the construction of new cities, imagined from scratch. Indeed, at our current rates of growth, two cities of half a million are needed every week, just to keep up with growth.
The images here are from an on-going project to study potential morphologies of new cities of various sizes in a number of locations – real and imagined – and try to address several fundamental issues of new town design. The first goal is self-sufficiency, based on a careful reading of the settlement’s ecological footprint and on an effort to achieve neutrality in such things as energy, carbon, temperature, food, employment, housing, movement, waste, diversity, and other categories. While the idea of a completely self-sufficient – import replacing - metropolis may not be fully practical, its degree of autonomy is a crucial measure of urban success economically, environmentally, and politically. In an era of weak states and powerful corporations, the tractable city remains at the bulwark of democratic popular power.
If new cities are logical increments of social, political, economic, and environmental organization, they confront – in their potential numerousness – fundamental issues of form. Some of the principles are easy: these cities need to be compact, green, independent of the private automobile, structured around walkable neighborhoods, and contoured to the particulars of local landscape and bio-climate. While these critieria may be beyond any useful dispute, they do not directly conduce form. The morphological question for these, cities, then, is just where their character will come from. As historic cultures of place experience are stressed by globalized culture and technology, their relvance must be vigorously questioned if they are not – in the manner of so-called “new urbanism” - to wind up as camouflage, forms from which all originary meaning has been sucked. Nor is it rational to simply surf the global flows, accepting the spatial character of multinational culture, flecking the sprawl with the odd bit of dramatic architecture.
The work presented here offers another argument. As both traditional and contemporary urban culture become more and more alienated from both experience and nature, the singularity of new cities will more and more rely on artistic invention as a point of origin for self-expression. Producing a Fez, a Kyoto, or a Prague does not happen automatically and our desperately needed new cities – which must make huge levels of accommodation available at a stroke – will not have centuries of intimate interaction to give them their form and patina. Rather, new cities must be born with challenging, beautiful, functional, and sustainable characters, engaging their citizens at once with the promise of both a life well-lived and with a thick texture of annealing points to which local identity can attach itself. This is no luxury. The modern culture of the minimum that informs so much of our urban ideology, polarizing the planet into internees in their squalid camps and slums and global citizens with their uniform infrastructure of highways, condos, Starbucks, and Bilbao Museums, must be opposed by numerous acts of inventive love. Universal architecture is the enemy of the most important of our universal values: difference, tolerance, sustainability, and the beautiful. |
