Future cities

 

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fear

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities 

 

We only need to look into the future, and not too far into the future, just a few decades beyond our troubled present. The undesirable scenario that we can rationally forecast for cities is simply catastrophic, frightening. I'm not the one who says it, the UN's World Cities Report 2022 states it quite formally... So, what would we have to do to reach such a scenario? The answer is frighteningly simple: Business as usual will result in a pessimistic scenario, that is, continuing to do things as usual will inevitably lead us to misfortune. An inexcusable fate, then, in both senses: inexcusable because it is unavoidable and inexcusable because it will be unforgiving. Another way of saying it: we are heading towards the worst possible future. Another way of saying it: if we do not change our lifestyle, we will inevitably go straight to hell. 

In the introductory text of the publication, the executive director of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), Maimunah Mohd Sharif, recalls how the COVID-19 pandemic caused many urban people around the world, especially in major cities and metropolises, to flee to the countryside and small towns. " At the peak of the pandemic, what were once bustling cities became desolate as residents disappeared from public spaces during enforced lockdowns. Today, in 2022, many cities have begun to resemble their old selves, cautiously returning to the way they operated previously." 

A lot of people have taken the ideological mantra Back to Normal as meaning simply to act as if nothing had happened, to act as if before the malicious coronavirus appeared we were living in the best of all possible worlds. “There is a broad consensus that urbanization remains a powerful twenty-first century mega-trend ”. The urbanization process has not stopped and will continue to accelerate, so that more and more of us will be living in urban areas. This will intensify a process that, contextualized in the horizon of the existence of our species -a little more than 200 thousand years-, began not so long ago -no more than five thousand years-, and did not really become that relevant until a couple of centuries ago. 

It is believed that in the year 1500 only 4% of the planet's total population lived in urban environments. A quarter of a millennium later, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the proportion had only exceeded 5%, but the upswing had begun: in 1800, one out of every ten human beings was already living in urban areas. Just a hundred years later, in 1900, it was already more than 16%, and in 1950, three out of ten. Today, a little more than 56% of the population lives in cities, and it is expected that in 2050, that is, in only 28 years' time, it - hopefully, we - will be practically seven out of ten. 

But to increase, to grow, is not necessarily to be better off. Maimunah Mohd Sharif says that continuing on this trend, as if nothing had ever happened, is not an option: " We must start by acknowledging that the status quo leading up to 2020 was in many ways an unsustainable model of urban development." 

What if we change? What if we suddenly behave for a change? What if we put on the brakes and stop the mad race to the precipice? The optimistic scenario foresees urban futures where inequality and poverty are overcome, productive and inclusive economies are encouraged, clean energy and ecosystem conservation are the norm, and public health is prioritized. 

The tomorrow is not set in stone. We are not sentenced to these future cities that we can now foresee and that terrify us; it is not a tragic destiny. And what separates us from the desirable and possible city is not a matter of capacity, but of will. The space, the natural resources and the technology to do so are available. Even the time. There is a whole lot of things to be done, but all the things that we must do to solve the mess the human race is caught up in necessarily require the prioritization of the welfare of the majority instead of the profit of a few. Capitalism has gentrified the world, and this must be stopped. To say it simply it can even be said more concretely: it is urgent to change the civilizational model. " Cities do not exist in isolation from global challenges. The emergence of urbanization as a global mega- trend is intertwined with the existential challenges that the world has faced in the last 50 years, including climate change, rising inequality and the rise in zoonotic viruses with the latest being the novel coronavirus pandemic, which triggered the worst public health crisis in a century and the worst economic recession since the Great Depression”. We will not survive the Anthropocene if we remain faithful to the idea that overthrowing capitalism is impossible.