A Brief History of Cities
It was in 2009 that Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, proclaimed that “... with more than half of the world’s population now living in urban areas, this is the urban century.”1 Nevertheless, this has only been the beginning of an unprecedented wave of urbanisation as evidenced by a whole host of evidence. For example, it is said that hundred years ago there were only 20 cities globally that had more than 1 million people, whilst today we can count 450 of these with more added each year.2 Indeed, The United Nations has estimated that about half of the world’s population, 3.3 billion people, live in cities and towns, and projects that this figure will increase to nearly 5 billion people (60% of world population) by 2030.3
To put this staggering growth of urban areas into perspective, it is helpful to take a step back and to review where cities have come from. The future is never a direct continuation of the past, but understanding the context of these developments does assist in framing what the future will look like. Cities have evolved over millennia from simple settlements that came about because an individual focussed totally on a non-primary production activity (i.e. non-agricultural) to the vast, complex and sprawling metropolises that we know today. There have been many intervening stages, but Mitchell4 proposed a simple framework that consists of three main phases: skeletons and skins, mechanical metabolisms and electronic nervous systems.
Skeletons and Skins
The first urban areas began approximately 7,000 years before present times, in what is often referred to as the Formative Stage. In these times, as in the millennia to follow, cities were mostly associated with the formation of the state, which gave rise to the concept of city-states such as in southwestern Asia, particularly in the Tigris and Euphrates basins, the Indus valley, the Nile valley and China. Urbanization also developed in Central America, the Maya Aztec area, and the Andean area of South America. These early cities were theocratic, where the rulers had divine authority and were in essence "god-kings”. Urban growth required an urban elite, a group of decision makers and organizers who controlled the resources, and sometimes the lives of others. This stratified society which during the preceding agricultural period had remained largely egalitarian.5
From here on, cities expanded into Greece where city-states became the dominant principle and Rome with its extensive focus on infrastructure, transport and city planning in order to sustain the ambitions of the empire. Both city types focussed around an open market place which became the focus of city life: the agora in Greece and the forum in Rome. During the medieval period, faced with the technological advancements in weaponry, cities became fortifications but the wealth of European cities greatly declined during the Little Ice Age of the 18th century, which gave rise to disease ridden slums for the majority of citizens with ever increasing stratification between the classes. The pre-industrial city evolved further from here on and the consolidation of political power and the expansion of states were reflected in the growth of the cities, with eventually certain cities becoming so pre-eminent in their nations that they were referred to as primate cities (e.g. Amsterdam, London and Paris).
The dominant aspect of the preindustrial city was the imposing complex of religious (e.g., cathedrals) and governmental structures at its heart. Nevertheless, Mitchell4 argues that “The earliest cities consisted of little more than skeleton and skin. They provided walls, floors, and roofs for shelter and protection, in combination with simple structural skeletons to hold them up. Before long, though, primitive networks emerged to enhance operational efficiency and enable growth to larger scales.”
Mechanical Metabolisms
With the rise of the industrial revolution at the end of the 18th century, cities were confronted by a new set of challenges such as an explosion in manufacturing capacity and associated populations, mass-transport systems such as the railways and cheap (and mostly not so cheerful) houses and districts for the labour force. This gave rise to a period that is characterised by chaos and although some cities such as Paris and Amsterdam retained their historic cities, most became – in the words of Sjoberg5 “unregulated jumbles of activity” where some cities in the British Midlands were referred to as “black towns”. A similar pattern emerged in the United States of America where poor planning and excessive immigration lead to the rise of slums and ghettos.
After World War II, Moss Kanter6 argues that a renewed focus was being placed on the improvement of cities, although these were largely physically focussed and thus aiming to replace decaying parts of cities with modern buildings, often replacing vibrant communities in the process. The 1960s saw an uptake in so-called “model cities”, but these eventually fizzled out as the onus was placed too much on social services which resulted in disagreements between governmental structures and community organisations.
From a technological perspective, the industrial era had a significant impact on city design. Indeed, Mitchell4 stated that: “In the industrial era, urban networks multiplied, differentiated, and grew in scale. Furthermore, their operation was mechanized through the introduction of engines, pumps, and mechanically powered vehicles. On urban and regional scales, cities developed massive infrastructures for water supply and liquid waste removal, energy supply, transportation, and solid waste removal. In other words, they added mechanical metabolic systems to the skeletons and skins that they had traditionally provided. These systems then became major consumers of energy and producers of waste and pollution.”
Electronic Nervous Systems
Since the rise of the computer and the internet, we have been witnessing a shift away from manufacturing towards a services-based economy. Indeed, the traditional “bricks-and-mortar” drivers of economic growth are giving way to an economy based on “brains and creativity.” The age of the knowledge worker was upon us and it is estimated by the IDC that the growth rate of knowledge workers worldwide doubled compared to that of other occupations between 1999 and 2007. This has underpinned the continuing economic growth of the West, but also necessitated structural changes in its economies as knowledge work differs not only from manual work in that it delivers information rather than goods, but it also requires higher degrees of flexibility and autonomy and is reliant on innovation driven by collaboration. This, in turn, necessitates different systems, working practices, technology and organisational models.
In such an environment, competitive differentiation is based on vastly different characteristics (the knowledge economy vs the manufacturing economy):
- Availability of information vs availability of natural resources
- Invisible and flexible processes vs visible and task-based processes
- Presence of educated labour vs presence of physical labour
- Ability to absorb innovation vs manufacturing prowess
- Service development vs product development
- Economies of scope vs economies of scale
Unlike the previous generation of cities built during the industrial age, smart and connected communities of the information age will be able to leverage current information technology, which will become embedded in all its assets and processes. In the words of Mitchell4: “In the Internet era, these primitive nervous systems rapidly evolved into something approximating the advanced nervous systems of higher organisms. Ubiquitous digital networks supplanted the older analogue networks and formed a new kind of urban infrastructure. Distributed systems of networked computers and server farms became the brains of cities. Pervasive sensing connected vast, new streams of data about urban activities to these brains. The flows of resources into cities, the processing and distribution of materials, energy, and products, the coordination of the actions of individuals and organizations, and the eventual removal or recycling of waste were increasingly informed, coordinated, and some sometimes controlled by the new, rapidly growing, digital nervous systems.”
The Next Industrial Imperative
The forces that favour scope and scale are almost universal, which will give rise to a continuing growth of cities, but on the flipside such cities need increasingly intelligent management or they can trip over their own success as they end up in a quagmire of complexity. Part and parcel of this is understanding the natural ecosystems that make existence itself possible, but also to face the problem that plague all cities head on: crime rates, congestion in transport systems, social inequality, gaps in healthcare, education systems that are under pressure, pending shortfalls in electrify, water shortages, etcetera. Diamond7 states in his book “Collapse” that the disintegration of many ancient civilisations was at least partially due to governments that did not understand the fragilities of such support systems.”
Indeed, Senge8 argues that whilst the benefits of the industrial age in life expectancy, literacy rates, products, services, communication, health, education and entertainment have been undeniable, they also have much darker consequences: “... a host of environmental crises, including increased waste and toxicity, growing stresses on finite natural resources, a loss of community, and a commodification of daily life that led to a widening gap between the rich and the poor.” All these developments are not singular in notion but are in fact interrelated and, as Senge describes, are responses to the same shift of context. In his eyes, the industrial age was an extended bubble and that the chickens are now coming home to roost, which calls for urgent action on how we design, build and operate urban environments. After all, as Diamond eloquently put it: bad things can happen "when parents take good care of their individual children but not of their children's future."
References:
1 Dirks, Susanna; Gurdgiev, Constantin and Keeling, Mary “Smarter Cities for Smarter Growth”, IBM: USA, 2010
2 Palmisano, Samuel J. “Shining Cities on a Smarter Planet.” The Huffington Post. May 22, 2009.
3 World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations: New York, Feb. 2008.
4 Mitchell, William J. & Casalegno, Federico “Connected sustainable cities.” MIT Mobile Experience Lab Publishing: USA, 2008.
5 Sjoberg, Gideon "The origin and evolution of cities" Scientific American 213-3, 1965
6 Moss Kanter, Rosabeth and Litow, Stanley S. “Informed and Interconnected: A Manifesto for Smarter Cities”, Harvard Business School Working Paper 09-141, 2009
7 Diamond, Jared “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive”, Penguin: United Kingdom, 2006.
8 Senge, Peter; Smith, Bryan and Kruschwitz, Nina “The Next Industrial Imperative” Strategy+business, issue 51, summer 2008.
from: Martijn Moerbeek
http://www.smartconnectedcommunities.org/blogs/strategicperspectives/2011/04/...
