Cities, the American-Canadian author Jane Jacobs once said, are engines for national prosperity and economic growth, but in their current form, modern cities are also catalysts of inequality and environmental degradation.
The share of city dwellers in poverty is growing: 33 percent live in slums and 75 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions originate in metropolitan areas.
Statistics like these should give us pause — are cities really the best way to organize human life?
They can be, but only with significant adjustments to how they are planned, built and managed. For city-led growth to empower a sustainable, prosperous future, governments and developers must reintroduce a user-centered approach to urbanization.
Most cities fail to include key stakeholders in the planning process, leading to exclusionary development.
Consider the ubiquitous housing project on the edge of town, a characteristic of many poorly planned cities. Built in the middle of nowhere, these multi-unit eyesores are often cut off from public transportation and other services, compounding residents’ isolation from the urban core.
However, design flaws like these, which have both economic and social implications, are just the beginning. Even more worrying to urban planning professionals is that in many places the entire planning process — the way we think about cities, how they are used and by whom — is flawed.
Even the best-intentioned planning departments do not always put the public first. Part of this reflects uncertainty about who “owns” a city. Residents might call a city “theirs,” but government leaders often act in ways that suggest otherwise.
For example, a government seeking to attract investment might equate economic interests with residents’ needs and thus lower environmental standards or tax burdens for businesses.
However, such decisions might lead to deurbanization, with people leaving cities as they become less livable.
The gap between economic viability and environmental responsibility can be especially wide.
Consider the production of traditional, gasoline-powered cars. Although this type of industry might power some cities’ growth today, the public’s growing concern about carbon dioxide emissions from these vehicles is spurring changes in consumer demand. Businesses that can capitalize on such shifts will be better positioned for long-term growth.
Unfortunately, for-profit entities typically fail to see future generations as tomorrow’s customers. Their short-term vision not only hurts their bottom line — it also affects cities by trading immediate gain for quality of life.
What can be done to ensure that urban planning is conducted with the interests of cities’ actual users — particularly their residents — in mind?
Most cities lack a democratic planning process and in many large metropolitan areas inequality is sewn into the social fabric, so institutionalizing participatory planning must be the starting point. Programs that safeguard local democracy by encouraging transparency and accountability are critical.
Residents who are equipped with the knowledge and means to express their views on issues affecting their communities make better neighbors, and planning discussions that take their views into account produce better design.
Because leaders everywhere, under any type of political system, are judged by the livability of the places they oversee, an inclusive planning process should be every city’s goal.
With participatory planning as a starting point, governments and residents can move toward building cities that are more strategically linked to their surrounding regions and areas beyond.
This type of growth is not only about transportation links, but also about coordinating policies and actions across sectors, including housing, social services and banking. In this way, regional roles and responsibilities become more clearly defined, with finite resources allocated strategically, equitably and according to a common agenda.
Too often, cities manage resources in bureaucratic silos, which can increase competition among precisely those who must work in concert if the urban areas they regulate are to invest wisely and implement policies effectively. Local autonomy can be achieved only through strong regional cooperation and coordination.
Urban sprawl is a good example of why a regional approach to planning is critical. Limiting sprawl requires a coordinated territorial strategy so that cities can address common concerns, like the transportation of goods, clustering of housing and services, and management and placement of industrial corridors.
Inter-municipal cooperation can also achieve economies of scale by discouraging unnecessary competition.
Many urban areas are being designed as “cities for the rich,” rather than population centers for all. This is gradually encouraging social segregation, and threatening the security and safety of residents.
Planning buzzwords like “smart cities” and “sustainable urban development” mean little if the theories behind them benefit only a few.
As Jacobs predicted, the “city” will remain the world’s engine of economic growth and prosperity for many decades to come, but if that engine is to run most efficiently, the mechanism powering it — the urban planning process itself — will need a tune-up.
Christine Auclair is project leader of the World Urban Campaign at the UN Human Settlements Programme. Mahmoud Al Burai is chief executive of the Dubai Real Estate Institute, an arm of the Dubai government.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past