THE BIG RETHINK: URBAN DESIGN

Summary

Many people around the world are now urbanised into new settlements in the city. The first generations entering these cities and slums had to sacrifice their lives to give their children the education and to support dependents in the countryside. Despite being in slums in unhealthy conditions, they do in a sense work hard to upgrade their homes, or move on, as they can afford to. Indeed it is a well-intended intervention, such as construction of state-funded new housing, that tend to fail.

For wealthier countries, it is becoming a trend for developing countries to focus on improving their open spaces and quality of life. Besides improving the quality of life, making better places for leisurely enjoyment, so less stressed and in various ways healthier. The spreading of Slow City movement also emphasises enhancing local characteristics and culture, including regional food and cuisine. Thus, resists the homogenising impact of globalisation. Due to this it also makes a city more attractive to skills and investment in our globalised world, where cities as much as countries compete for these economic essentials, and key assets are a city’s quality of life and individuality of character.

The most threatening are endemic to modernity. Resolving them would require, among other things, counterbalancing modernity’s too exclusive focus on the quantitative and objective with attention also to the qualitative and subjective, including the desire to live in accord with personal values and aspirations. Rural people arriving in the cities might willingly sacrifice themselves for dependents and future generations with very different aspirations. Nor being able to afford consumer goodies and distracting entertainment persuade them to compromise their ideals. They will want lives and work of dignity, offering meaning and personal desires which is what the city always promised, but delivered to only a minority, and will soon be deemed essential by most. So the challenges facing these developing cities are much more than the overwhelming current concerns of number and quantity. Difficult as these are to achieve, they are conceptually easier to entertain than dealing with such psycho-cultural challenges as conceiving of cities that offer lifestyles.

When undergoing massive and pivotal historic change, it is as likely for some trends to reverse as to continue. For instance, many analysts and commentators have been warning of problems of future supplies and security. the emissions produced, the poisoning of land and water, the loss of biodiversity and the un-nutritious food produced. Its unviability and the need to offer millions dignified and meaningful work suggests there may be a return to the land, to small-scale labour-intensive farming, to regenerating and living in harmony with the earth and its daily and seasonal cycles, to producing local nutritious food and leaving a long-term legacy for one’s descendants. After all, the poverty presently associated with such farming has been brought about by the corporations that are trashing the planet to maximise profits by driving down prices and feeding us highly processed, unhealthy food. What is being suggested here is not the end of cities, but rather that the future might lie with a range of differing kinds and sizes of settlements, some no doubt of a sort yet to be conceived. After all, thank to the Internet and various forms of energy-efficient public and private transport, combining the best of urban and rural life is now perfectly possible.