By Roger Keil
It had to happen one day. That day was yesterday. Buried under the ambient noise of sabre rattling in the Chinese Sea, the atrocities of Syria, royal wardrobe malfunctions, and traveling mayoral football coaches, three items arrived in my twitter inbox that, as I will explain shortly, signal the beginning of the end of the infatuation of the media and general public with the ‘urban century’.
The first item is a remarkable piece by the most consistently interesting urban writer in the mainstream media today, The Atlantic Cities’ Nate Berg (@nate_berg). As his many twitter followers know, Berg has an uncanny ability to push our noses weekly onto the important topic in a more and more complex and confusing urban world. Based on a recently published article in PNAS, Berg reported yesterday that in just 18 years, in 2030, it is expected that urbanized land on the planet will cover 1.2 million square kilometres. That is twice as much as twelve years ago, in 2000. These dates are important as it is easy for most of us to remember 2000. It should be just as easy to imagine a world in 2030. The problem with this kind of growth is its unequal distribution, with China and Africa absorbing the lion’s share of global urbanization during the next generation. Consequences for climate change, biodiversity, etc. will be significant, the study assumes.
The second item is based on the same PNAS piece. Time Magazine headlines Urban Planet: “How Growing Cities Will Wreck the Environment Unless We Build Them Right.” The author of this blog post, Bryan Walsh seems puzzled about the conclusions of the study: “All of this might seem surprising to people who’ve read this blog for the past couple of years. Counter-intuitive as it might be, we’ve usually presented urbanization as a good thing for the environment – and especially for carbon emissions.” As you can imagine, the moment of doubt is of a rhetorical nature and the author comes around again to confirming the mantra that density is good for urban sustainability, at least in the Global North. The case is not so clear-cut in the Global South where admittedly more wicked problematiques persist and where the urbanization leads to income stabilization and hence higher environmental impacts and the perceived ‘beneficial’ effects of bourgeoisification of the inner city (as happens in the US, for example) are not present. Walsh notes that “The urbanization wave can’t be stopped — and it shouldn’t be” and quotes the author of the PNAS paper, Karen Seto, in these words: “There is an enormous opportunity here, and a lot of pressure and responsibility to think about how we urbanize. The one thing that’s clear is that we can’t build cities the way we have over the last couple of hundred years. The scale of this transition won’t allow that.”
The third piece that came my way via twitter yesterday has a different – lighter -- weight, but is still based on a scientific study. Sort of. A report in the American daily USA Today noted that front porches are “making a big comeback.” Based on census data, 65 percent of new homes in the United States came with front porches in 2011 versus only 42 percent in 1992. The verdict on this massive statistical reorientation in the built environment arrives quickly. The porches are declared a harbinger of a different America and of a “shift in the way Americans want to live: in smaller houses and dense neighborhoods that promote walking and social interaction”. The porch has been the indicator species of the New Urbanism. They have pushed garages from the fronts of houses to back alleys that have consolidated the technical functions from where the continuous metabolic exchange of the neotraditionalist suburb is mastered. The front of the house, with its porch, is reserved for a feeble performance of urbanity. The porch is a distancing space, a buffer between the private and the public.[quote] In my view, this triumph of the front porch is not really a new urbanism but a new ruralism, the victory march of a perennially non-urban built environment whose main pillars are the single family home and private property. It is the seal on the continuation of suburban development. There will never be LRTs or other higher level transit coming down the porch-lined streets. While the cars are banned to the back alley, and the pedestrians wave to the occupants of the front porch, public infrastructure remains restricted to the automobilized street. Density interrupted. Sociality performed. Urbanity abandoned.
Why do these three posts make me pessimistic? Three initial points can be made here:
The discussions evoked in these posts miss the central irony that the continued urbanization is necessarily continued SUBurbanization. Yes, we (as in urban professionals, planners, academics in urban studies, etc.) have collectively embraced centralism and compactness as the guiding idea of 21st century urbanism, just at a time when there is a massive explosion in the way land around existing cities is used. Suburban land, as one of the chief products of post-neoliberal capitalism, continues to be readied for settlement whether it is in the form of subdivisions in North America or squatter settlements in India or Africa. This inevitable push flies in the face of the well-meaning downtown centredness that we have collectively espoused.
The urban is presented as a ‘thing’ and not a process as in “Counter-intuitive as it might be, we’ve usually presented urbanization as a good thing for the environment — and especially for carbon emissions” in the Time story. Urbanization is treated as a set of physical things that, if arranged right, will lead to good outcomes. Well, folks, this is not the way it works. Anybody who has read more than 10 pages of critical urban theory would attest to that. Technological solutions are suggested where economic, political and social ones are needed. Similarly, and correspondingly, the city is seen as a product of natural and organic processes that can be steered by good human action. Conflict, contradiction and struggle are entirely eclipsed from this picture.
Lastly, the debate is stubbornly US-centric. The apparent remedy of new urbanism misses the target almost completely. Another irony: continuing to build single family homes is the real problem, adding a front porch is like moving the deck chairs on the Titanic.
All in all, the confidence in techno-engineering solutions and the trust in changes to the built environment will not be enough. True, “things” need to change. But urbanization is a much more complex process than the “best practices” approach of urban change suggests. This is not Legoland. It is the real world of contested spaces and conflict over land, accumulation, exclusions and government (in)action. The articles I read yesterday signaled to me that we might be at the point where the infatuation with the “new urbanist” solutions may be on the wane. Adding porches to American suburban single family homes will not save the urban world.
To be fair, the article in PNAS is pointing into the right direction: “Urbanization is often considered a local issue. However, our analysis shows that the direct impacts of future urban expansion on global biodiversity hotspots and carbon pools are significant. At the same time, the full environmental impacts will not be confined to urban boundaries and will largely be felt elsewhere”.
