Global Cities

August 20, 2010 1:10 PM

Beyond City Limits: The age of nations is over. The new urban age has begun. "The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built. This new world is not -- and will not be -- one global village, so much as a network of different ones."
posted by homunculus (31 comments total)

Urban Legends: Why suburbs, not cities, are the answer.
posted by homunculus at 1:34 PM on August 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

Good.
posted by millipede at 1:36 PM on August 20, 2010 [4 favorites]

Now, I know what you are thinking. Where will the food come from? How about high rise hydroponics?

I very much like the city I live in, in part because actually grew up on an honest to god hobby farm in the country.

Of the cities mentioned here, I've lived in London, DC, New York, Brussels an San Francisco. San Francisco (Where I live now) is my favorite, but I have fond memories of all of them. I do not envy the person who is trying to capture a whole city in a few sentences here. You don't really know a city until you have been there 3 years at least. I only really know DC and SF for this reason.

Cities aren't the answer for everyone, but they are certainly the answer for me.
posted by poe at 1:43 PM on August 20, 2010

80% of the residents of developed nations live in cities.

I read a fun book a few years ago called "The 1st Edition City-Dwellers Almanac." The dedication read, "To the other 20%: You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."
posted by dry white toast at 1:45 PM on August 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

From homunculus's link above:

Consider the environment. We tend to associate suburbia with carbon dioxide-producing sprawl and urban areas with sustainability and green living. But though it's true that urban residents use less gas to get to work than their suburban or rural counterparts, when it comes to overall energy use the picture gets more complicated. Studies in Australia and Spain have found that when you factor in apartment common areas, second residences, consumption, and air travel, urban residents can easily use more energy than their less densely packed neighbors.

In other words, it's not cities that are the problem, it's urbanites.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 1:57 PM on August 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

Urban Legends: Why suburbs, not cities, are the answer.

Ick. What a godawful article. Can somebody please smack that author with the correlation/causation stick?

My take: The social, technological, and environmental problems of cities and dense urban areas can be fixed. The social, technological, and environmental problems of suburbia are only likely to grow worse over time, and there's not a whole lot we can do about it.

...and that's not to say that I believe we should be piled on top of each other like sardines either. Small cities and towns are OK as long, as they are built on a human scale. There are many well-preserved examples of towns that were planned and built prior to the automobile era. In these cities, it's possible to live within walking distance of your place of work, a school, and a grocery store, and still be able to own a single-family home.

Another perk of this model is: More parks, more open space.
posted by schmod at 2:01 PM on August 20, 2010

Isn't this the essential cosmopolitan thesis?
posted by kuatto at 2:03 PM on August 20, 2010

God help us if Los Angeles is going to try to run itself as a "global city." LA is barely functional even with lots of help from the US government.
posted by zoogleplex at 2:06 PM on August 20, 2010

Not only are cities better, but the people that live in cities are better than people from the suburbs. Not just fitter, or happier, or more self-reliant or educated. They're all those things, too. But they're also just intrinsically better. I'd go into more detail but I've run out of margin space for the proof.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 2:18 PM on August 20, 2010 [4 favorites]

From homunculus's link:

[V]ibrant smaller cities, suburbs, and towns: Which do you think is likelier to produce a higher quality of life, a cleaner environment, and a lifestyle conducive to creative thinking?

I don't think you can lump suburbs in with smaller cities and towns, especially when you're talking about a lifestyle conducive to creative thinking. Suburbs are the most boring, repetitive, antiseptic places in the entire world. Cf. J. F. Batellier.
posted by Dr. Send at 2:19 PM on August 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Networks of small cities/towns seems to really work in the Netherlands. With the great public transport it's really easy to stay in one town and commute to work two or three towns down the line, and still never have to own a car.
posted by PenDevil at 2:27 PM on August 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Regarding your second link, from the perspective of a lot of people in urban studies, the suburbs are part of cities. The statistic quoted in the first link about 50% of the world's population living in cities - that only is valid if you count suburbs. Michael Batty's Cities and Complexity gets at how cities actually look and how they actually develop, as opposed to our idea of them.
posted by outlandishmarxist at 2:30 PM on August 20, 2010 [3 favorites]

Also, nobody seems to have mentioned slums. They're a pretty significant aspect of the emerging megalopolises.
posted by outlandishmarxist at 2:32 PM on August 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

I predict that in the 21st century, people who predict and theorize what the future will be like will continue to be proven wrong.
posted by rocket88 at 2:34 PM on August 20, 2010

Regarding your second link, from the perspective of a lot of people in urban studies, the suburbs are part of cities.

"Urban" gets to be a pretty floaty term. "Not rural" is really different from "dense older city core," but people through the word around quite loosely.
posted by Forktine at 2:54 PM on August 20, 2010

Then: claves!
posted by cobra_high_tigers at 3:07 PM on August 20, 2010

This new world is not -- and will not be -- one global village, so much as a network of different ones." Funny, since I've heard the complaint that cities are becoming increasingly homogenized.
posted by QuarterlyProphet at 3:13 PM on August 20, 2010

One tactical nuke in downtown Trenton would end the dream of cities for a generation. Strategic dispersion is essential. The federal government, Wall Street, the treasures of the Smithsonian, Philadelphia museums, and NY museums need to be distributed to smaller cities nationwide. Our nation is gifted with enormous defensive space. Let the rest of the world clump into into tense, well-defined targets. We'll spread out and relax.
posted by Faze at 3:38 PM on August 20, 2010 [4 favorites]

Cities cannot and will not produce enough food internally to feed themselves without massive influxes of external resources - chiefly water, but also energy and things like fertilizer, plant nutrients, etc. Building and maintenance materials, especially raw resources, usually come from hundreds if not thousands of miles away.

Any city can be held up for ransom by the folks that do the digging for all those raw natural resources.

How do all those resources get apportioned? We've already got conflict brewing between Northern and Southern California over water distribution, not to mention that much of SoCal's water also comes from the Colorado River, making a conflict involving several southwestern states. What happens if MegaDenver, with access to much mineral resources, decides to dam up the Colorado way north of Lake Mead? Will San Angeles commandeer MCAS Miramar's F/A-18s and bomb Denver's dam project?

Where will cities be generating their power?

I'm not buying this one, and I'm a fan of urbanism. Everything is way too interdependent and dependent on very long resource and energy supply chains these days. There still has to be some kind of "nation state" organization to administer the larger geographic areas full of resources.

By the way, the whole "shining metropolis surrounded by giant cardboard shack slum" is not only a crappy example of functioning urbanism, it's a societal powder keg.
posted by zoogleplex at 3:44 PM on August 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

This is idiotic. As long as the cities are part of currency-issuing nations, they face significant policy and spending constraints. Because the cities are not currency issues (save Singapore) then they cannot deficit spend to build full employment.

Only a nation state that is a sovereign currency issuer can do that. When people say "the nation state is dead," look very carefully at their motivations.
posted by wuwei at 3:50 PM on August 20, 2010

zoogleplex, your examples seems to contradict your point. Los Angeles (and it's suburb, Las Vegas) was largely responsible for re-wiring the water flow of the western United States, in the face of sometimes violent opposition. And your description of Northern vs Southern California water conflict is fight between the Los Angeles and San Jose urban clusters. State and even Federal government are often just the playing field for the fights between megacities.

As for where they'll get their power, I'm not sure about the other cities, but the Los Angeles municipal utility actually runs on your hate. Does that make you hate LA more? Yesss. Goood. I'm going to go turn on some lights in empty rooms...
posted by zota at 4:17 PM on August 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

I could also point out that the situation described in the FPP article relating to the World Cup in South Africa, where private security forces far outnumbered the city police presence, is a *failure* of urbanism (and probably also state-ism), not a success.

That sounds more like plutocratic feudalism to me.
posted by zoogleplex at 4:20 PM on August 20, 2010

This entire discussion completely discounts the rising influence of the Internet, where everything is right next door.

I think that we're seeing the emergence of virtual towns in the form of internet communities, places where the like-minded from all over the world go to be together.

Already, for some people those places are more real and more important than the place where they physically live.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:35 PM on August 20, 2010

zota, I don't hate Los Angeles, I actually like it a lot (and I'm pretty pleased we still have actual public utilities). There are a lot of positive, interesting things going on here, though there's also some big messes, but I'm generally hopeful for LA's future as long as the water problem can be worked out.

Re the NoCal/Socal water dispute, there's another big factor, which is that something like 25% of the entire United States' food supply comes from the California Central Valley, which is largely irrigated by that same water supply that SoCal imports from NoCal. Not likely the rest of the country is going to sacrifice a quarter of its food to a regional resource conflict; that makes it of national interest, if not national security interest.

There are still quite a lot of people who are unhappy about how the LA/SoCal/Vegas water "rewiring" worked out. It's inherently very unfair, especially to the parts of Mexico that used to be well-watered by the Colorado, and now barely get a trickle.

(I personally think developing Las Vegas to the point it's at now was a really bad idea, no offense to those who live there. Los Angeles has inherent value as a seaport/land transport interface, which also gives it value as a hub of manufacturing and refining, but Vegas... is there any real resource coming out of Vegas besides the gambling losses of the rest of the US... maybe some programming and video games?)

Anyway, the cities of the US Southwest are just one microcosm of inter-urban resource conflict, and no clear solutions have been found in over a century. I'm sure it's repeated in every region all over the world.

I think I get what you're saying though, the cities are in general winning out over the rural areas right now.

What you say about the Federal and State governments being the playing field for fights between cities is precisely the point - we need those larger, regional governing entities to moderate the conflicts and help work out compromises. wuwei's point about currency is also extremely important.
posted by zoogleplex at 4:50 PM on August 20, 2010

Also, nobody seems to have mentioned slums.

I think the idea is that the suburbs will become the future slums as coveted central urban real estate basically prices the poor further to the outer edges. And the Wal-Mart's et. al. will continue to service the poor suburbs, while the wealthy that can afford all the coffee shops and museums and pretty buildings fight tooth and nail for each coveted square foot of real estate.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:04 PM on August 20, 2010

When people say "the nation state is dead," look very carefully at their motivations.

Neo Feudalism
posted by stbalbach at 9:41 PM on August 20, 2010

Can I be Doge?
posted by thivaia at 11:25 AM on August 21, 2010

governing entities to moderate the conflicts and help work out compromises

Yeah, but that hasn't really been how it works. For example, when San Francisco wanted to turn the most beautiful valley in Yosemite into a water tank, they were having some difficulty what with it being inside a national park and John Muir annoying rants about it being a holy temple, and blah blah blah. So San Francisco got Congress to pass the Raker Act, specifically for the purpose of allowing them to dam up the Hetch Hetchy Valley. The city used the feds as a tool to get their way, and to this day the citizens of the city sip the crystalline fruits of their victory over the greater good of the state and the public at large.

Water is just the most egregious and dramatic example of this. It's not really an exaggeration to say the Metropolitan Water District has more control over the environment of northwestern Mexico than the federal governments of either state. And agriculture in the Central Valley is less threatened by the destruction of salmon runs in the rivers it drains than by the inexorable spread of San Jose's urban tendrils.

It isn't about the "death" of the nation state. It's about the nation state's increasing impotence in the face of these massive concentrations of people, money and power which put their own interests first. Which is nothing new -- it's just growing by orders of magnitude.
posted by zota at 11:51 AM on August 21, 2010

I'm still waiting for the Diamond Age. Now, to be Google phyle or MeFi phyle?
posted by anotherkate at 3:26 PM on August 21, 2010

So San Francisco got Congress to pass the Raker Act, specifically for the purpose of allowing them to dam up the Hetch Hetchy Valley. The city used the feds as a tool to get their way, and to this day the citizens of the city sip the crystalline fruits of their victory over the greater good of the state and the public at large.

This seems to assume that the political interests of Congress are opposed to the interests of a well-watered Northern California metropolis. I'm pretty sure that assumption—whether or not it belongs to zota—doesn't conform to reality.
posted by mistersquid at 1:25 PM on August 22, 2010

Could self-aware cities be the first forms of artificial intelligence?
posted by homunculus at 4:49 PM on August 23, 2010