[Urbanstudy] Fwd: Welcome to the urban revolution (Paulo Varela Gomes, Goa)

[Frederick Noronha [फ़रेदरिक नोरो]

Just a couple of corrections/additions to the text below. FN

- It is northEASTERN coast of France, obviously, next to Belgium and
Holland, not out there in Normandy with the cows and the nice
churches.

- Brugman's book has just been published in India (HarperCollins).
Hence the prose.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Frederick Noronha [फ़रेदरिक नोरोनया] <fred at bytesforall.org>
Date: 2009/7/29
Subject: Welcome to the urban revolution (Paulo Varela Gomes, Goa)
To: urbanstudygroup at sarai.net, Paulo Varela Gomes <paulovarelagomes at gmail.com>


WELCOME TO THE URBAN REVOLUTION

But let us pray first.

Cities no longer matter. There is something else out there.

The boundaries between city and countryside, city centre and periphery
(or suburbia), consolidated city and shanty town (or slum), public
urban spaces and private urban spaces, are quickly becoming blurred
both in reality and for the thinking about urban phenomena.

Cities in the traditional sense, cities as they have existed in many
different forms but always recognizable as entities-named-cities by
people all over the planet for the last eight millennia or so, are
becoming merely one component of complex systems that comprise several
cities, their “suburbia”, the “countryside” articulated with them, the
communication and economic network which integrates them.

Some of these urban systems are geographically very vast and
economically very dynamic. Think for instance of those on the east
coast of China, of the main Indian metropolitan regions, of Mexico, of
Lagos in Nigeria. But also think of the northwest region of
continental Europe, comprising north-western France, Belgium, Holland
and the Ruhr, or of the north-eastern coast of the United States.

For regions such as these the concept of city is no longer very useful
or operative from the social, economical and environmental points of
view, or as a design idea. Cities have been absorbed, and are being
transformed, by urban realities of an entirely different nature. The
metropolitan region of Delhi, for instance, cannot and should not be
described as a city. It is a urban system so powerful in its dynamic
and growth that the cities of Old and New Delhi, which were caught in
its web, are entirely subordinate entities, devoid of all autonomy in
urban, social and economic terms.

There are urban systems in Western Europe or North America as well but
not of the same type of those of the developing world. The
metropolitan region of Paris, for instance, is a urban system (as the
metropolitan region of London and any other large European city) in
which the city of Paris itself, and other minor cities in the region,
still make urban, formal, social, economic and environmental sense.
They have not been “eroded”, so to speak, by the system, merely
articulated in it as components. In these regions, one can still feel
the distinction between the city and the other components of the urban
system. In some parts of the developed world this distinction has
actually been reinforced over the last decades as the countryside
became depopulated and as villages were transformed into middle-class
residential areas. In vast areas of Germany, Spain, France, Britain,
and other developed countries, urban and rural landscape actually
began to look again like before the Industrial revolution of the 18th
and 19th centuries (if we disregard roads, shopping areas and the
like): there is countryside, and there are towns and little towns. In
the West, cities have actually put up a fierce resistance and have
done quite well in the last decades, proving that they can be
resilient and economically viable organisms. Growing numbers of middle
class urban dwellers prefer their gentile manners and ways of life to
the rush of formless urban systems.

The evolution from city to urban system began in the Western world as
it industrialized. Cities grew and changed. They absorbed the
countryside around them and established new types of connexions with
the territory, with other cities, with distant lands. Modernist urban
thinkers and planners devised many schemes and plans to control and
plan the eroding of the frontiers between city and countryside, which
they perceived as both inevitable and positive. Visionary political
activists, the communists for example, fervently preached in favour of
a world where such differences would be abolished. But the process
took place by the hands of capitalism, in most of the world in a
savage manner, when the communication and transport revolution of the
second half of the 20th century, and globalization, gave birth to the
contemporary network of urban systems in Asia and Latin America, and
as the number of humans living in urban conditions rapidly grew. It is
now more than half of the world’s population and everywhere cities are
being absorbed.

In the developing world the urban system effect is spilling over the
cities. Many of these are in the process of being destroyed - as is
happening in Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta, Bombay - to suit the needs
and forms of what was known as suburbia or urban sprawl (and what is
now the endless urban landscape): flyovers and large thoroughfares rip
trough its tissues, huge commercial areas replace old neighbourhoods.
“Suburban” life and cars reign supreme.

This has also happened in the West in the decades after World War II
when urban systems began to grow and cities were severely threatened.
Some European large cities still exhibit the scars of this
transformation (see downtown Brussels for instance), but it was
stopped in its tracks sometime in the 1970s and the 1980s when the
pressure for new housing eased off with population decrease and middle
class consciousness demanded the salvation of cities.

In those decades, the idea, then perceived as nightmarish, of a
civilization characterized by immense inter-connected urban-sprawls
covering the Earth, was left to the imagination of visionaries like
William Gibson and other so called cyber-punk writers and of
cinematographers such as Riddley Scott. Only very recently, after the
turn of the millennium, have academic and professional writers begun
to explore the consequences of this post-urban revolution in a much
more optimistic tone. The latest one in Jeb Brugman, a well known
urbanist and adviser of many a international body and many a city
administration, whose recent “Welcome to the Urban Revolution, how
cities are changing the world” (2009) looks eagerly into the present
and the future of urban systems. Somewhat disregarding the differences
between what happens in the West and in the developing world, Brugman
seems to believe that these systems will eventually regulate
themselves, absorb the more catastrophic consequences of their rapid
growth (environmental, social, visual), and that a new extraordinarily
productive urban civilization will take over planet Earth.

Let us all join our hands and pray that he is right. Recent events in
the field of economical science have proven that the analytical
instruments of international academics are as effective in
scrutinizing the present and predicting the future as a good solid
prayer.

Paulo Varela Gomes
paulovarelagomes at gmail.com

FORWARDED VIA
--
FN * http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com http://twitter.com/fn
M +91-9822122436 P +91-832-2409490
http://fredericknoronha.multiply.com/ http://goa1556.goa-india.org

"Success in life means not becoming like your parents." - Louise Bowie