Future Urban Lifestyles
Entwicklung städtischer Lebensformen und Lebensstile
Overview
Author: Sir Peter Hall
Mit Hilfe von Szenarien zu Lebens- und Arbeits-bedingungen im Jahr 2025 in ausgewählten Städten mit unterschiedlichem sozio-ökonomischem und
geschichtlichem Hintergrund werden für den World Report on Urban Future zukünftige Stadtentwicklungen bis zum Jahr 2025 aufgezeigt. Es wird der Frage
nachgegangen, wie politische Maßnahmen – heute getroffen – den zukünftigen Alltag in Städten beeinflussen könnten.
Als Beispiele wurden die Regionen
– Großraum London und New York (anglo-american capitalism)
– Karlsruhe – Straßburg – Freiburg – Basel – Zürich (Rhineland capitalism)
– Hongkong – Guangzhou-Macau-Dreieck ausgewählt.
Bei den anglo-amerikanischen Städten erfolgt dabei eine thematische Konzentration auf wirtschaftlich bedingte Aspekte der Stadtentwicklung mit den Konsequenzen für Lebens- und Arbeitsbedingungen. Das Szenario
beschreibt eine hohe soziale Polarisierung und räumliche Segregation der dort lebenden Bevölkerung mit hohen beruflichen Risiken, anwachsender Kriminalität, usw.
Bei den gewählten mitteleuropäischen Städten stehen die Auswirkungen der Verkehrspolitik im Vordergrund: Erreichbar erscheint eine hohe und zugleich
umweltfreundliche Mobilität durch gut ausgebauten ÖPNV in Klein- und Mittelstädten, die die Vereinbarkeit von Familie und Beruf, nachhaltige Lebensstile usw. ermöglicht. Deutsche Leser mögen ob der
prognostizierten „heilen Welt” den Kopf schütteln – im internationalen Vergleich dürften mitteleuropäische Verhältnisse jedoch tatsächlich eine „heile Welt” darstellen.
Bei den ostasiatischen Städten versucht das Szenario aufzuzeigen, wie der spezifische kulturelle,
geschichtliche und politische Hintergrund dieser Weltregion eine anglo-amerikanische Entwicklung modifizieren könnte: Die Risiken des
anglo-amerikanischen Typs werden durch traditionelle Werte – familiäre, nachbarschaftliche Beziehungen, soziale Kontrolle – abgefedert.
With the aid of scenarios of living and working conditions in selected cities with different socio-economic and historical backgrounds, future urban development is described until the year 2025 for the World Report on the Urban Future. Suggestions are made concerning the way in which political decisions taken today can influence everyday urban life in future.
The following regions were selected as examples: – Greater London and New York (Anglo-American
capitalism)
– Karlsruhe – Strasbourg – Freiburg – Basel - Zürich (Rhineland capitalism)
– Hongkong – Guangzhou – Macao – Triangle.
The Anglo-American cities are considered with a thematic focus on the economic aspects of urban development and their consequences for living and working conditions. The scenario describes the strong social polarization and spatial segregation of the local population with high employment risks, increasing crime etc.
In the discussion of the selected Central European cities, prominence is given to transport policy: It seems that high and environment-friendly spatial mobility can be achieved by means of well-developed local public transport systems in small and medium-sized cities. This makes family life and employment compatible and allows sustainable lifestyles. German readers might shake their heads when reading about the intact world described in the forecast. In an international comparison, however, the Central European conditions probably really constitute an intact world.
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Future Urban Lifestyles
1 Introduction
This is a study of urban change from the individual viewpoint. Its central aim is to understand how processes of urban change, currently taking place and likely to continue, will affect the quality of the citizen’s everyday life in the year 2025. To that end, it considers three main type cases among a myriad of possible types:
– the Atlantic World City, represented by New York City and London,
– the Central European Environment-Friendly City, represented by Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Basel, Zürich and Strasbourg; and
– the Eastern Asian Mega-City, represented by the cities of the Pearl River Delta including Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
The central argument of the report is that though urbanisation trends are remarkably uniform and strong across the world, their manifestation in lifestyle and quality of life varies remarkably from one city to another and from one kind of city to another. The most important trends are:
1. Continuing growth of cities, including large cities: especially (but not exclusively) in the South, and particularly in Asia.
2. Continuing stability of the urban hierarchy: the major cities are likely to keep their relative position, though those in the South will continue to gain relative to those in the north; however, the growth of these larger cities is likely to slow everywhere, and may be subject to economic perturbations.
3. General deconcentration or diffusion, especially of the largest urban areas: relative shifts of both residential population and employment, from central cities to their suburbs, and to freestanding medium and smaller cities within the general urban ambit. This includes the development of so-called Mega-Cities or megalopolitan corridors, especially in eastern Asia. The general
result is that the growth of larger cities will slow in relation to cities lower in the urban hierarchy, but within relatively easy access from these major cities [broadly, a range of up to 140 kilometres], as has long been observable in Northern cities such as London and New York City, and is now also noticeable in Southern cities such as Mexico City.
4. Continuing progression toward service- and information-based urban economies, especially in the North but increasingly also in the South: in both, development of an internal functional differentiation, with higher-level (“world city”) informational service functions continuing to concentrate in the cores of the central cities of megalopolitan regions, and more routine services and manufacturing decentralized both to smaller cities in the “metropolitan ambit” [as observable around London and New York City, and now developing in the Pearl River Delta Mega-City] but also to selected peripheral provincial cities, such as Leeds, Glasgow and Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK, or Omaha and Salt Lake City in the USA. All these trends are very general, affecting Northern and Southern cities alike. But they impact on them in very different ways, with critical results for the style and quality of life in different cities. This depends fundamentally on the way that urban growth is mediated by the prevailing economic, social and political system in different countries and major regions of the world.
Models of Contemporary Capitalism Underlying these differences is the thesis that even advanced, highly-urbanized economies in the 1990s are by no means homogeneous; different forms of contemporary capitalism result from deep cultural differences that may originate far back in history:
markets;
– a mainland European model [“Rhineland capitalism”], characterized by stronger frameworks for the regulation of enterprises, managed labour markets, employee protection, codetermination in management, and generous social benefits;
– a Japanese or Pacific Asian model, characterized by low public spending as a percentage of GDP, relatively weak social benefits and emphasis on self or family provision, consensus in decision-making in both the economic and political spheres, and cooperative management processes to improve quality in the workplace.
These different capitalisms produce different urban structures, urban organization and quality of urban life. There are limits to globalization of the economy and even more so to the globalization of culture. Though new technologies, especially transport technologies, have changed and will change all cities in broadly the same ways, leading especially to deconcentration and dispersal in the 20th century, older histories still have a powerful imprint on the form and the functioning of the city.
The report then goes on to consider three representative case studies of city types, each representing one distinctive style of contemporary capitalism.
2 The Atlantic World City
The “World City” is a distinctive type of great city, not necessarily a capital city, which is characterised by its global connections. Such cities have characteristically shed manufacturing and goods-handling to other cities but remain uniquely strong in high-level services. London and New York City, considered in this chapter, are archetypes.
Not necessarily all citizens of such cities consider themselves “world citizens”. They may be suburbanites with weak connections to the central core, or routine service workers, or members of segregated ethnic ghettos. But all experience the attractiveness of the great city, and many have migrated there to find their fortunes, even if they are unsuccessful.
of these cities is their dependence on groups of interlocking advanced services: finance and business services, “command and control”, creative and cultural industries, and tourism. These are especially concentrated in the urban cores and in specialised extensions of these cores. These require educated, highly-skilled workers who are highly productive and who generate high incomes. But, especially through multiplier effects, they also generate large numbers of unskilled jobs, and the rapid structural change in the economy may also produce high rates of unemployment among certain groups, concentrated in certain areas of the city: a situation of extreme stratification or polarisation. Middle-class workers, formerly in secure careers, may find themselves part of a casualised clerical labour force.
The physical fabric of the world cities reflects a long history of complex public-private interaction which has produced the structure of commerce and housing, and also the transportation infrastructure that connects them. There is an important public space of streets and squares and parks, formerly the responsibility of the public sector, which has increasingly fallen victim to physical decay and to partial privatisation.
So large and complex are the world cities, especially when their suburban areas are included, that they very seldom have a completely rational structure of government. In London the Greater London Council was abolished in 1986, though there are firm plans for a new Greater London Authority; New York City forms only a small part of a wider functional region, which is divided among three states and hundreds of local government units as well as specialised ad hoc agencies.
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provide new jobs to compensate for those that will be lost to other cities, regions and countries. And quality of life issues will be increasingly important in attracting people and activities; public confidence may easily erode if they are seen as dirty, dangerous, inefficient, polluted and unpleasant. Here, in particular, a city like London faces major challenges from smaller cities on the European mainland – examples of which are considered in Chapter 3.
3 The Central European
Environment-Friendly City
This chapter presents a special but very important case study: a group of free-standing, medium-sized “model environmental cities” in the upper Rhine valley, an area which straddles the borders of Germany, Switzerland and France [in particular, Karlsruhe, Freiburg, Strasbourg, Basel and Zürich]. Each of these cities became notable for its outstanding record during the 1980s and 1990s of urban innovation for sustainable development – most notably, by planning to counter the adverse impact of vehicular traffic on the urban environment, by restricting car use and promoting other forms of transport. The chapter starts by looking at general trends affecting urban growth in central Europe. As around London and New York City, people and jobs are deconcentrating from the city to wide suburban and exurban areas, including smaller towns in the rural hinterland; the quality of the traditional European “compact city” is being eroded. The gainers are smaller and middle-size cities, which offer a better human scale and a more attractive environment. In those parts of Europe where the large city has never dominated, including much of southern Germany and Switzerland, there is a real hope that the entire range of cities might prove to offer sustainable urbanism and a good quality of life.
The key to this is through transport policies. Though many European cities have proved innovative and radical in developing new policies during the last twenty years, the report concentrates on a group with an outstanding record, located in south-west Germany, north-central Switzerland and south-east France. Interestingly, these cities are among those with the highest levels of GDP in Europe and in the world;
they have reacted against the impacts of high car ownership. Technological means to control traffic have been tested and found wanting; the alternative is to restrict car traffic and to promote public transport, cycling and walking. This goes hand in hand with land use policies in favour of compact cities and mixed-use development. This is not without problems in the mobile, multiple-career household of the 1990s. One answer is through regional planning for “concentrated deconcentration”, with a central medium-sized city surrounded by a number of smaller cities, all compact and all linked by good public transport. This can include both nearby satellites, and more distant freestanding towns.
Each of the case study cities has adopted a similar bundle of policies, with local variations: nearly all have introduced user-friendly travel cards for public transport, available regionally; they have promoted public transport priority over the car; they have begun to develop new residential areas structured around public transport; Karlsruhe has introduced its Stadtbahn, a revolutionary tram which shares tracks with main-line trains as well as running on city streets; they have promoted bicycle use through extensive bicycle lane networks; they have traffic-calmed wide areas of their cities; and they have consciously sought to restore their city centres for living, working and cultural use, by promoting redevelopment of disused industrial or railway lands for housing, and by improving the quality of the public spaces. This has produced some dramatic results, with big increases in public transport use and reductions in the share of car commuting.
Europe and the world as a model of sustainable urbanism. However, it is not without problems. The most important is the growth of longer-distance commuting in dual-career households, including cross-commuting by car between smaller centres that have developed as independent employment nodes under regional plans, but are not so well served by direct rail connections. This will require new strategies: higher fuel taxes, selective road pricing, encouragement of ride-sharing through high-occupancy vehicle lanes and preferential parking spaces, the development of para-transit systems utilising light vehicles transitional between the bus and the taxi, and development of new communities along widely-spaced public transport corridors where the scope for cross-commuting is necessarily more limited.
The final problem is that the policies could have prove if anything too successful: by offering a high quality of life, these medium-sized cities could encourage a flood of in-migration from other parts of Germany and of Europe. The consolation could be that many other regions have emulated the policies in self-defence, with some recent degree of success in stemming the flow.
4 The Eastern Asian Mega-City
The recent growth of urban areas in the Asia-Pacific region is without precedent in world history: it is equivalent to the creation of a middle-size European city every week, and is creating several examples of the mega-city, a vast polycentric complex of over 10 million people. Thus it poses serious challenges to almost all existing theories of urban development. The process is fuelled by globalisation of export-oriented production and by huge flows of capital to the centres of the new productive regions, partly to finance physical development. Cities in this region exhibit a clash of two opposite principles: a flexible, adaptability-oriented approach based on the principle of competition, and a strong, intentional approach toward urban development. The position of a city on this continuum defines its character. The more “intentional” a city is, the more life
common, or universal norm, or special. The less intentional cities are, therefore, more cosmopolitan. Thus Beijing is an “intentional” city, and has a different style from, say, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or Taipei.
The cities closer to the “intentional” end of the continuum may lead in indicators related to the traditional “nation building goals”, such as low pollution, more generous spatial standards, better health care, etc., institutions of high-culture (theatres, concert halls, etc.) while the city located nearer to the laissez-fair end may lead in indicators related to commercial activities (number of cars, restaurants, cinemas per capita), and personal stimuli (recreation and entertainment). Since the end of the Cold War, and under the influence of trans-national capital, these two models have demonstrated a partial convergence. What is distinctive about many of these cases, however, is that the growth of mega-cities is seen as part of a conscious nation-building process in which physical development plays a key role. The physical expression of this process is very complex, with multiple nuclei, with elite groups continuing to occupy the most accessible positions near the cores – a contrast, so far, with the Anglo-American and European trends. However, the more “intentional” a city is, the more the lifestyles of its inhabitants are likely to depart from the norm, and vice-versa: Beijing will offer more surprises than Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or Taipei, which will share many common “cosmopolitan” features. “Intentional” cities may perform better on features like health standards or pollution, while “cosmopolitan” cities will score higher on indices of private consumption. Similarly, these laissez-faire cities will experience more frequent and extreme development cycles.
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with the blessing of the Chinese government. There are serious resulting problems, not least the rapid importation of western standards and values which the regime would rather exclude. Certainly, for the future, such a region will continue to be in the vanguard of areas through which cosmopolitan norms are imported. But major differences will continue to exist within the region, in terms both of physical quality of life and of lifestyle, between the cosmopolitan “command and control” centres fed by international flows of capital and information, and the centres of technological development and production. The result is likely to be a bi-polar model of development with continuing tensions between the poles and their respective elites.
The future two-pole structure of the Pearl River Delta, based on the twin centres of Hong Kong and Guangzhou, will have profound for the lives and lifestyles of the residents.
First, in transport and communication terms, the region will enjoy some of the most advanced forms of mass transit urban transport, both because they will be needed for logistical purposes, in particular movements of labour, and also for symbolic reasons and “showcase” functions.
Second, in terms of skills and occupations, a process of polarisation will gradually sort the migrants between two roughly established sectors: finance/ business and science/technology/ production. A substantial part of the both socially and geographically mobile residents, who are flocking to the two poles, will be intra-urban migrants rather than in-migrants. Hong Kong will attract entrepreneurs and service sector workers (entertainers, domestic workers, craftsmen), while Guangzhou will attract a large number of blue-collar workforce and the technocrats. The social implications of this polarisation will be visible, both in family composition and the pattern of consumption.
Third, in terms of the built environment, Hong Kong will retain its vital and diverse urban landscape with a myriad of stimuli, while Guangzhou will be a setting for urban planning and urban design experiments with eclectic styles, rigid standards, and a series of mega-projects driven by prestige and technocratic (over)optimism.
Fourth, awareness of environmental quality is an increasingly important factor in urban development. It is worth noting the almost obvious fact that the long term prospect of good environment is better in more deliberately planned cities than otherwise, barring serious unintended technological oversights. If experience of adaptable-type cities such as Bangkok or Manila is any indication, it can be predicted that somewhere half-way from now to 2025, the environment in Hong Kong will suffer near-limit pollution (especially in sea water) before getting better. On one hand, funding necessary to tackle the environmental issues (such as treatment of the notorious sewage contamination of the sea water and sub-standard housing) is simply beyond the available means, on the other, the environmental threat may serve as a convincing justification for much needed de-population of the most crowded city in the world acrimonious political repercussions.
5 Comparisons and Conclusions
The first conclusion is that the broad secular long-term trends will persist: – Continuing growth of cities, includinglarge cities;
– Continuing stability of the urban hierarchy;
– General deconcentration or diffusion, especially of the largest urban areas; – Continuing progression toward
service- and information-based urban economies.
These trends are related and are mutually reinforcing. They are likely to be further fortified by other features that have begun powerfully to emerge during the 1980s and 1990s:
And they will be fortified by emerging trends and issues:
decade of the 21st century.
2. The search for quality of life: Cities increasingly compete, not on the basis of access to materials, but in terms of intangible factors like cultural and artistic riches, or a good quality of urban living. As suburbs become more homogeneous, cities promote themselves as the places that are distinctively different, especially for affluent professionals with new lifestyles (particularly single households and childless couples). Though the world’s largest cities offer unequalled cultural riches, these are compromised by the fact that their quality of life is reduced by traffic, long journeys to work, high property values and rents, pollution, crime and other social problems; medium-sized cities [like Dublin, Munich, Zürich and Barcelona], which work harder to improve their local environments, therefore compete vigorously with them, especially in attracting niche “World City” functions. 3. Social Polarisation: At least in the
Anglo-American version of capitalism, and perhaps increasingly in the Rhineland and Asiatic versions, the larger cities are characterised by an increasing dispersion of real income between rich and poor city-dwellers, with a “disappearing middle” representing the jobs that are exported to other places. This is a result partly of economic shifts which produce relatively large numbers of highly-qualified and highly- paid “informational services” jobs and of low-paid, casualised “MacJobs”, and partly of long-term structural unemployment among large sections of the population who formerly found employment in the manufacturing and goods-handling sector. This produces an increasingly polarised society, with upper-income high-consumption enclaves next door to low-income ghettos dependent on casual service work and welfare payments. The quality of life of these citizens clearly demonstrates extreme contrasts, even though they occupy the same geographical space.
Typically, such a situation was characteristic of major cities in countries undergoing rapid development (e.g. 19th-century Europe and North America; 20th-century Latin America).
to the cities of the advanced world, which earlier [in the “welfare state” era of the 1950s and 1960s] appeared to have passed through this phase and out of it. A new wave of immigration is one contributory factor in many such cities; but economic restructuring, in particular the decline of well-paid unionized jobs in traditional manufacturing and goods-handling occupations, is another element that impacts on old blue-collar workers and new immigrants alike.
4. Continuing economic instability: quite apart from the operation of the business cycle, the contemporary economy is characterised by permanent perturbation, induced by the processes of globalized competition. As demonstrated by the history of Eastern Asia in the 1990s, it is all too easy to pass through a wave of rapid growth and then out of it. Further, such structural disturbances are amplified or exacerbated by the operation of urban property markets, which act as a conduit for speculative funds derived from profits in the productive sector, but which may then in turn produce a “secondary wave” of hyper-profits followed by slumps, amplifying and greatly exaggerating the underlying perturbations – a phenomenon already noticed by Joseph Schumpeter in the 1930s (Schumpeter 1939).
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point out that much of the variation can be ascribed to demographic shifts, in particular the numbers of young men in the “at risk” ages of 15–25. And, though some observers have ascribed the secular rise to increasing unemployment and alienation among young men who have been excluded by structural changes from the labour market, it has to be noticed that much of this rise coincided with the “long boom” of 1950– 1970, when full employment was the general rule.
The tentative conclusion is that certain economic and social changes work together to produce a very difficult situation for certain sections of society. These are groups that have become excluded from normal lifetime career patterns and who additionally have become segregated in lower-quality social housing areas where, in addition, they are concentrated in certain low-performing schools. They are exposed to the blandishments of the hedonistic consumer society through television, but lack the means to participate. The resultant stresses lead to high rates of divorce and separation [and thus to low-income lone parenthood], alcoholism and drug abuse, and petty crime. The mainstream society, which constitutes the great majority of the active political class, reacts unsympathetically with demands for “zero tolerance” policing and workfare programmes designed to wean these groups from welfare dependence. Such experiments, pioneered in the United States and now being imitated in the UK and elsewhere,
are still in their early stages; it is too early to reach conclusions about their long-term effects.
The urban consequences have been explored in three contrasting case studies presented in Chapters 2–4. The concluding questions must be:
– How Significant are the Differences? The evidence suggests that mainland Europe is following the Anglo-Saxon pattern of deconcentration and social polarisation, and this may now be appearing in the Eastern Asian city;
