Distinctive Urbanizations
Urbanization stands out as one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. This truism is backed by the unprecedented amount of attention, research, data, knowledge and resources devoted to explaining and understanding worldwide urbanization. The city, however diverse in its form and function, has come to embody all the hopes and expectations aimed at achieving a better future for humanity. Cities and urban life may well prefigure the shape of things to come in a highly contested and disrupted globalized world.
Fascinated by the dynamics of cities since the early 1990s, I have witnessed with optimism recent trends in urban transformation and tried to contribute in my own way to the development of fairer, more efficient, sustainable, innovative and smarter cities through my intellectual and professional activity in Barcelona. At Mediaurban, we are taking on this challenge from a fresh perspective, with a 360º world-view and delving into the background of our own knowledge and research.
Following the recent Habitat III conference in Quito, the United Nations has adopted the so-called New Urban Agenda. This call for action is universal in scope and long-term in vision, participatory, and people-centered in its aim to protect the planet. The New Urban Agenda is a robust set of principles intended to guide future urban development and to promote equitable and affordable access to services in cities all over the world. Its principles are grounded in UN-Habitat’s decades of experience in promoting more equitable, sustainable and efficient human settlements.
Recommendations like balancing short-term needs with long-term desired outcomes, allowing flexibility in plans and projects, and promoting compactness, infill, renewal, regeneration and retrofitting, ensuring appropriate density and connectivity, or preventing sprawl by social and economic mixed-use are all wise options that any urban development project in the 21st century must take into consideration.
This is the good news. Yet, welcome as they are, some of these principles fail to address that the urban form is not a fixed entity, but a dynamic process materializing the scope of context-specific social, economic and spatial transformations. Reading the New Urban Agenda one feels that, although local and regional governments, national institutions and international organizations are at work to provide the necessary frameworks to drive and to sustain this new wave of urban transformation, they are being modelled on a strictly Euro-American-centric urban experience.
Worldwide urbanization, as we know it, is a child of the industrial revolution: a process by which cities grew upon previous strategic locations into centers of production, commerce and distribution of goods and services. During this process, some cities evolved into powerful metropolises where millions of people found their living, while others remained as second-tier, regional centers or colonial enclaves in remote corners far from the urbanized world. In projecting this urban structure to other cultural, economic and social contexts, like Asia, Africa or Latin America, we are assuming the European city to be a universal category ready to fit into different regions of the world.
Yet this narrative is being reversed as agglomeration in large urban areas remain the key feature of current world demographic trends. And this is so because historically cities have had the ability to secure the necessary social and physical infrastructure needed to sustain growing populations. Some countries are dealing with their current urban explosion at unprecedented rates, compared to the experience of the European and American model of urbanization. As the world gets urbanized, competing modes of growth are being tested, shattering traditional binary oppositions like urban and rural, city and countryside, center and periphery, metropolis and hinterland.
All these concepts have traditionally defined the urban experience of the West: they do not necessary fit in a world of blurred boundaries, global connectivity, mass migration, decentralized production and ubiquitous technology. As we approach an age of planetary urbanization, cities’ prospects and opportunities all over the world are being levelled and reshaped in a very distinctive way. This trend recasts the notion of the city as the place of unfolding potential for human interaction, production, innovation, and well-being. Thus we see the world’s first sustainable downtown regeneration project in Doha, a world-class IT cluster in Novosivirsk, a whole new city in Amaravati the state capital of Andhra Pradesh, the revitalization of Medellín’s poorest neighborhoods with an aerial lift, or the upgrading of a large flea-market of Chinese goods in Almaty.
These are all trends that show that distinctive forms of urbanization are rapidly evolving in different and distant places of the planet. The city remains nevertheless where we, as humans, have given meaning to our world and the place from which we have transformed our surroundings so as to better serve our needs and expectations. This has been so since antiquity, as we have developed urban centers as places for worship, learning, trade and protection. From London to Istanbul, Mecca to Kuala Lumpur, Bogotá to Dakar, Vancouver to Bangkok.
Urbanization in the 21st century cannot be retrofitted with the planning frameworks and concepts inherited from the 20th century. Today’s urbanization asks us instead to develop new models and patterns of urban development, and to design world-class urban templates and customizable mixed-use transformation projects that are ready to fit into most of today’s rapidly growing cities. This is a completely new city-making framework whose goal is to revitalize urban life, and develop healthy, resilient, safe and happy neighbourhoods where we can easily live, work, learn and play.
At Mediaurban, we are committed to developing an understanding of such distinctive patterns of urbanization and to contribute to the development of smart cities and communities all over the world. Currently working with cities in India, the Middle East and Latin America, we observe in practice how the principles of the New Urban Agenda may shape for good the future form of cities in the urbanizing world.
Originally published at www.mediaurban.es on February 23, 2017.
