5. Settlements, Urbanisation 2, city.doc

IDEAL CITY 

To change life, we must first change space”
- Henri Lefebvre, French writer

Ever since Ancient Egypt, civilizations have attempted to plan cities in order to make them work better. Planners seek to organize a city so that it benefits all its inhabitants. They do things such as build housing, construct infrastructure like roads and plumbing, provide public services like electricity and garbage collection, coordinate commerce, provide recreational facilities such as parks, stadiums and museums, and facilitate transport.
These days, planning is not a simple job suited for one department or group. More and more, the cooperation of a number of government departments, local organizations and private citizens is needed to make a city, even a neighborhood, function healthily. Nevertheless, a coherent vision of what is necessary, what is good and what works is needed if cities are going to survive in the future. The students’ job is to construct that vision.
In groups or as a class, students should form an “Ideal City” committee. Over the course of several weeks student committees will be designing their ideal city. Each week’s activity helps students build up their knowledge of cities and the things necessary to have a healthy, successful city. At the end, they will be ready to design their ideal city. The ideal city can be drawn, built (3-D model) or written up—the teacher will help decide which approach to take.
Before getting started, or as you go along, you may want to consult the “Doing Good” folder, which lists some of the cities that have made great improvements in one or more respects.
Good luck and make sure you enjoy your city—that’s essential for its health and yours.
Note: The teacher should keep in mind that, while the first two activities are simple and essential, the later ones become more difficult. Teachers of lower grades might think about (i) collapsing activities 3 and 4 into a single activity; (ii) simplifying activity 6 by asking students to design the city without considering the final suggestions and discussing those concerns (advantages and disadvantages, correlation with goals) at a later date.

Unit 1: What is a City?

Urban Definition
The city is a part of our lives and our language: we might say, "I live in a city" or "I live near a city" or "I am moving to a city". We know what we mean when we make these statements because we have certain ideas about the city: the bright lights, the tall buildings, the traffic jams.

But, if asked, could we really define a city? Where would we draw its boundaries? How do we distinguish a city from a "town" or a "village"? There used to be a time when it was easy to identify a town or city. A town was a living space with a place of worship, like a Church, Mosque or Synagogue, a town square, a central market and a town hall. Many large cities were encircled by walls. But what about today when the old walls are no more than tourist attractions and every little settlement has a market and a town hall? How do we identify or define a city?

We can check the dictionary.

Going to the dictionary, however, does not help us be more precise in defining the physical aspects of a city. While it tells us about the general concept of a city, it does not tell us at what point in its growth a "town" can be considered a "city" or where a "city" begins and where it ends.

The problem is that there is no agreement on these matters. Different countries, municipalities and scientists use different definitions. For example, the city of London, Great Britain, has less than 7 million inhabitants. But the city boundaries used to define London do not include an extended "metropolitan region". If considered as a metropolitan region, London would have a population of 12.5 million. Shanghai, China, on the other hand, uses a vast area of 6,000 square kilometres to define itself. Thirteen million people live within those boundaries, but the area covers large patches of farmland as well as some villages. Other large cities have similar problems with ambiguous definitions.

In trying to define themselves, some cities use physical attributes: only an area that is "continuously built up". Others extend their definitions beyond this to include nearby settlements because the population and economy of those outlying areas are closely tied to the central city -- in this case, the definition is "economic". In yet another case, a larger area may be defined, which, as with Shanghai, would include some farmland and typically rural areas. Such a vast definition is often useful for planning and administrative purposes. Urban Evolution
Cities have been called the highest forms of social organization. Think of the complexity of road systems, transportation, building laws, markets, food distribution, educational systems, etc., and you get an idea of what is meant by that statement. But that complexity didn't spring up over night. It is the result of long years of human development.

While the origin of cities dates back thousands of years, the city as we know it today dates back a few hundred years. Following industrialisation, large numbers of people moved to cities in search of jobs, mostly in factories, and since then there has been an unprecedented growth in the number and size of cities worldwide. This process is called "urbanization".

Urbanization is measured by the percentage change in a city's population from year to year. This is called the rate of "urban growth". For example, if your city had 200 people last year and has 210 people this year, its urban growth rate is 5%. On a global scale, the most rapid urban growth in history has taken place over the past 50 years. Whereas in 1950 fewer than 30% of people lived in a city, today over 45% of humanity are urban dwellers.

Urban Revolution
Cities are a fact of life for almost half the world's population. In the first few years of the 21st century, for the first time in history, urban dwellers will outnumber those living in traditionally rural areas. By the year 2025, the global urban population will have more than doubled from 2.4 billion in 1995 to 5 billion -- that means the equivalent of 86% of everyone alive on earth today will be packed into cities. This population shift from rural to urban has been called the largest migration in human history.

Consider the importance of this migration. Our world is predominantly urban not just because there is a large urban population, but because the key features of contemporary life are located in cities. For one thing, technological advances -- such as the one that has allowed the development of this on-line project -- are taking place in cities. At the same time, cities are important cultural centers, with their museums and galleries, newspapers and publishers encouraging creativity and artistic production. Cities have also turned into the economic engines of most countries, in some cases accounting for up to 80% of the gross national product (GNP). Finally, positive social change takes place faster in the city. There is usually better health, higher literacy, more varied employment options and greater equality between men and women.

Yet, for too large a number of urban dwellers the dream of a better life in the city is dashed on the garbage-filled streets of shanty towns and slums. Some 500 million people in cities and towns throughout the world are either homeless or live in life- threatening poverty. Overcrowding in cities also causes problems with waste disposal, health and pollution. There are other salient urban problems as well, among them violence, crime, drugs, and the over-consumption of energy and other resources. Most of these problems affect not only the city itself but the countryside and often the entire world. In short, cities contain within them the key challenges facing our civilisation.

These are the two sides of the city, the positive and the negative, the promise of success and the threat of disaster. We may never be able to create a perfect city, but we can certainly make improvements. The United Nations Center for Human Settlements (Habitat) released a recent report, "Global Report on Human Settlements", in which it stated that nothing short of "a revolution in urban problem solving" is needed to deal with the problems caused by urban growth and urban decay. The report emphasizes that the problem is not with cities. The problem lies in the management and the development of cities.

 

Unit 2: A Brief History of Urban Expansion



Cities have existed for millennia. Their fortunes have risen and fallen along with the fate of the civilizations to which they were joined. Some disappeared altogether and are now no more than the sites of archeological digs -- Moenjodaro, in Pakistan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one example. Others -- such as Cairo (Egypt) and Beijing (China) -- have been important cities for thousands of years. If not for millennia, then most of today's important cities have at least been around for the past 200 years.

Nevertheless, over the course of human history cities have changed dramatically. To understand how cities developed into what they are today and to explore solutions to the problems they face and possibilities they offer, one must look back to the evolution of urbanization.


Phase I: River Valley Civilizations
The first phase in the development of cities began around four thousand B.C. Settlements developed along the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia (present day Iraq), the Nile in Egypt, the Ganges in India, and the Yellow River in China. These have been called the river valley civilizations.

The physical landscape played an important role. The early cities were located on fertile flood plains next to large rivers and had access to pasture land for raising animals. They also benefited from a warm climate and a permanent supply of water.

These conditions were necessary for the transformation to a settled and organized society. They helped settlers domesticate animals such as cattle, sheep and goats, and cultivate cereal crops such as rice, wheat, and maize (corn).

Over time, small and simple settlements grew into larger and more complex centers for a variety of activities, from agriculture to trade to manufacturing. A greater volume of trade and a slowly growing settled population, encouraged labour to became more specialized. Families and individuals dedicated themselves to a specific task or profession, such as shoemaking or trading in grains. This made production more efficient and society more organized, while at the same time providing greater collective security for a city's inhabitants. Consequently, cities flourished and grew in size.

That early shift to an organized, specialized urban environment is one of the important changes in the history of human development. Many known and unknown civilizations followed the early ones, but the pattern of settlement stayed the same through the years, until the Industrial Revolution in Europe changed our methods of production and urban lifestyles.

Phase II: The Industrial Revolution

"Unreal city,
under the brown fog of a winter dawn...
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal..."
---T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

When the American poet T.S. Eliot was writing his famous poem, "The Wasteland", in the 1920s, there was a sense of disillusionment with cities among many writers and artists in Europe and North America.



Eliot and others lived at a time of great change in the development of cities. Before their eyes new sorts of cities were emerging -- cities that were more populated and less familiar than ever before; cities that were at the same time more automated and more chaotic than ever before; cities that were more efficient but also more polluted and wasteful; cities that offered contact with innumerable people and diverse work opportunities but also caused loneliness, unemployment and poverty.

This new kind of city began to take shape during the second significant stage in urban development, which occurred as a result of the Industrial Revolution (1750-1890) in what are now considered to be the developed countries of Europe and North America.

Two significant factors contributed to the rapid changes in the sizes and lifestyles of cities. The first factor was the development of large-scale manufacturing and mining industries which came about as a result of technical advances such as the steam engine, used to drive industrial machinery. Factories and mines required a large labour force, which migrated to the cities from rural areas and sometimes from other countries. As Charles Dickens' novels vividly illustrate, the new urban population did not live in the best of conditions, but the attractions of urban life and the prospect of employment "pulled" people into the city in greater numbers than ever before.

The second factor was the expansion of trade routes and access to cheap raw materials acquired through European colonization of other lands. Raw materials fed the industries, but they also created a concentration of wealthy merchants, shopkeepers and bankers who made money trading in goods. The combination of wealth, a large population and a diversity of goods created a market for consumer goods, which slowly evolved into the urban consumer patterns we see today.

Phase III: Global urban growth
What distinguishes the current phase of urban growth from previous ones, is that urbanization is not limited to a specific region. It is now a worldwide phenomenon. Looking at the rates of growth, it would seem that only cities in developing countries are growing fast. But keep in mind that the majority of the population in the developed countries already live in cities.

Towards the end of the 19th century many European and North American cities had very high growth rates, often doubling their size in 20 years. Now, towards the end of the 20th century, many cities in the developed countries have stopped growing, but 75% of the population of those countries already live in urban centers.

By contrast, the highest growth rates today are in the so- called developing world where only 37% of the population is urbanized. However, this is bound to change in the near future. Some cities in the developing world have tripled in size over the past 45 years. In the year 2015, it is estimated that of the ten largest cities in the world only one -- Tokyo -- will be in what is today called the developed world.

The majority of large cities in Asia, Latin America and Africa have been important urban centers for a long time. A few only became important during colonialism when they served as administrative or trading centers for European powers. In either case, the rapid pace of urbanization only took off after the Second World War as the world economy became more global and as colonized lands gained their independence.

Unfortunately, developing countries have limited resources to help new migrants to the cities. With the exception of some countries in East Asia, their economies and industries are not strongly developed, so that unemployment is high and many migrants live in poor conditions in shanty towns and slums.

Urban problems are not confined to the developing world. Cities everywhere have problems of homelessness, drugs, violence and unemployment. Urban growth is not confined to the developing world either. For example, many cities in the south and southwest of the United States, such as Phoenix, are among the fastest growing cities in the world. Urbanization is a global phenomenon.

The Future
It is hard to predict what shape cities will take in the future. In many areas, including in the developing countries, many people are moving out of the city, to nearby areas often called "suburbs". Efficient transport systems such as rail links and highways have enabled people in more affluent cities to live outside the city and travel in, or "commute", to work.

It is predicted that by the year 2025, 61% of the world's population will be urban. However, there could be changes in the world before then. Will people slowly move out of cities? Will computers and the Internet have an effect on how we work and, therefore, on where we live? What will cities look like then?

Unit 3: What is a City Made Of?



How a city works... and how it doesn't

With their crowded streets and air pollution, cities are better known for their chaos and grime than for their efficiency and organization. Those who have access to such things as water and electricity often take them for granted. Those who do not will obviously not consider the urban system an efficient one. Yet, it is. By and large, people in cities are better off than those who live in rural areas. They have greater access to safe water and sanitation as well as to schools and hospitals. Unfortunately, this is a generalization and not every citizen benefits from a city's offerings. Close to 600 million urban dwellers worldwide live in conditions that put their health and their lives at risk.

Population density and efficiency
One potential advantage of urbanization is the concentration of many people in a smaller space. The concentration of people in a specific area is called "population density" and is usually calculated in population per square kilometer. So, if 1,000 people live in an area of 1 square kilometer, the population density of that area is 1,000.

While a "high population density" can create overcrowded and unhealthy neighborhoods in some cases, it also offers the possibility of delivering the necessities of life with greater "efficiency". If 100 people are spread out over an area of 100 square kilometers, getting electricity or piped water to each of them requires a lot of wiring and plumbing, which means a lot of work and high costs. On the other hand, if the same hundred people live in a few buildings on one block, it would require much less work and resources to provide them with the necessary goods and services.

Infrastructure and services
To take advantage of this idea of "efficiency", to get water, electricity or gas to people, to provide them with educational opportunities, to make sure that garbage and sewage is safely disposed of, to do all of this requires a complex process of planning and building an "infrastructure" and delivering "services".

Education, electricity, health care, markets and public transport are examples of services. But such services require an "infrastructure" to help their delivery. Plumbing, electricity lines, road systems, drainage and sewers are examples of infrastructure. These are the things that keep a city running, the city's support system. How would we get water without plumbing? Electricity without lines? How would buses get around without roads?

Services are the great advantages of a city, one of the reasons why people move to cities. In an ideal world, everyone would benefit from them. In reality, a great number of people don't have proper access to many services, including water and even housing.

Here are some examples of the problems in providing citizens with their needs:

Water

Garbage

Unit 5: Consequences of Urbanization





What is Wrong with Cities?
So much is said about problems in cities that the word 'urban' almost automatically evokes a vision of blights: run-down neighborhoods, slums, throngs of people overcrowding the streets, traffic, noise and pollution, crime and violence...

Of course, that is not the complete picture. Otherwise people would not be flocking to cities. As noted in previous units, cities are also crucibles of cultural, economic and social development. In many ways, the story of human civilization is the history of its cities. The question that some people pose today is whether the history of cities will also provide the script for the decay of human civilization. (see for example development of the largest cities in the future: Bombay, Lagos, Sao Paolo)
This is the alarm that has been raised and the answer lies in the future. But it also lies with us. Many cities have shown that the urban environment can provide a healthy, stimulating setting for human development, that serious problems can be overcome -- unit 6 will provide some examples of this (Vienna, Geneva, Barcelona,) . In this unit we will be looking at some of the conditions that have prompted the predictions of urban doom.

Four problems are highlighted below and described in detail.

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