The world is going through a massive urbanization, overturning the traditional demographic order and challenging two millennia of literary and cultural concepts of the urban. In this last post, I want to return to the ecological impacts of that urbanization…and what conservationists can do to mitigate it.
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In chapter eight of Anthony M. Tung’s erudite and impressive Preserving the World’s Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis, there is a passage that stopped me in my proverbial tracks and hasn’t left my thoughts since. Tung is writing about Amsterdam at the dawn of the 20th century:
As parts of the inner city became slums and were threatened with clearance, and as picturesque canals were filled in to create new roads and better circulation, elements of the historic environment began to be eliminated. Growing numbers of citizens became alarmed and called for preservation of the historic center. In addition, a new ring of speculative housing began to surround the old metropolis. Numerous Amsterdammers began to ask that the expansion of the city meet a reasonable standard of beauty.
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“Urbanization is a vital phase of development, and if managed well, it can be a key driver of long-term economic growth in a country,” said World Bank president Robert Zoellick as his agency announced its ten-year urban development strategy. This appraisal strikes me as aloof, given the out-of-control urbanization patterns in the global south that are causing what Mike Davis famously termed a “planet of slums.” Asia’s urban population will reach 2.6 billion by 2030, according to the UN. By then Africa’s cities will more than double in size to 740 million people and Latin America’s cities will have to meet the needs of 600 million. How, given these astonishing realities, do we curb the growth of the world’s informal settlements, now one billion residents strong? What can governments do to mitigate the “push effects” of economic despair in agrarian regions that force too many people willy-nilly into cities?
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In cities across the United States, sandwiched quietly between the newly coveted urban space of the central city and the suburban sprawl of the periphery, are outwardly conventional landscapes experiencing profound transformation. Neither urban nor suburban, they represent a hybrid condition — part global city, part garden suburb, part swinging singles complex, part disinvestment.
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John Julius Norwich is an earnest and somewhat stiff-backed editor. So it’s not entirely surprising that he reveals in his introduction that he is “braced for objections” over his selections for “The Great Cities in History,” a collection of essays and images. He anticipates that readers will ask, for instance, why Timbuktu is included and not Toronto, why Meroe (an ancient Nubian city) is included and not Melbourne. It’s a dull question, and Norwich answers it dully, by pointing to the “in history” part of the book’s title. The better answer would have been that there’s not a shred of romance in Toronto and Melbourne.
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Anyone travelling regularly through urban and suburban England might be struck, like me, with one contrasting and, sometimes, haunting image. While our city centres have been transformed beyond recognition – give or take the aberration of countless new blocks of bland, Shanghai-style flats, many of them empty – suburbia beyond is declining and, in some cases, decaying. That great wedge of housing in between, labelled the outer-city, is often in a much more shocking state.
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More than 10,000 families will be moved out of historic old city to make room for low-rise apartment blocks.
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On numerous visits to Manhattan, I have found myself poking around the city trying to find a moment of quiet and once located a hint of it in Central Park during a windless, late-night snowfall. There I stood absolutely still in the lemon glow of the city, a sky full of snow. The city still roared from all sides, a thousand noises compressed down to just one. I counted that distant, mild roar as quiet, a welcome relief from the more pressing noises of the daytime city.
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This Time-Lapse video has been compiled from images posted on NASA’s Earth Observatory.
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When our planet is in peril, it is no surprise that major attention should be taken to cities, after all “urban centers are the ticking hearts of civilization,” to use words of Sarbuland Khan, of the Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies.
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