The Third Megacities lecture:
November 19 1999

Co-review by of the Third Megacities Lecture
Len de Klerk


[go to the Lecture by Deyan Sudjic]
[go to report discussion]

ABOUT URBANIZATION AND URBAN IDENTITY

IDENTITY

In 1864 Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges wrote a famous book, The Ancient City. In a chapter on settlements and building he wrote: 'It often happened that colonists or conquerors established themselves in a city already built. They had not to build the houses, for nothing opposed their occupying those of the vanquished; but they had to perform the ceremony of foundation - that is to establish their sacred fires, and to fix their national gods in their new home.'
Fustel de Coulanges makes clear, that fysical structures, houses, buildings, streets and squares have no generic meaning. Only people give it meaning or identity. For the Greeks and the Romans this was a religious meaning, because religion played a major role in their societies and daily life. The major buildings and squares of the antique cities were devoted to their gods.
In her essay Identity in the Global City (1996/99) professor Saskia Sassen (1996) does not speak about the identity in terms of architectural or fysical forms of cities, but about identity and meaning of the political economic language, which is applied to cities. She argues that the city debate is dominated by the international sectors of the urban economy. By using a specific language urban, politicians and planners encase the identity of cities, meanwhile ignoring the larger part of urban economies. Big companies cannot exist without hundreds of smaller companies in the (producers) services industry.
One may explain the international planners newspeak as an attempt to enforce new meaning and identity for existing cities. City marketing, and creating unique selling points to compete on the international location decision market are the new sacred fires of the international gods of shareholders capitalism.
At the end of his book The 100 Mile City, Deyan Sudjic draws an interesting conclusion: 'The very city that the Victorian reformers denounced is now seen as an ideal model, to be preserved at all costs, if possible recreated in new developments.'
What he says is interesting because of reasons. In the first place, because it is about the urban planners mind. Urban planners seem to live in the past, or look forward by looking backwards, and consequently show a striking lack of self-confidence in their own professionalism. In the second place urban planners and urban designers seem to believe that, in terms of urbanity, the unplanned 19th century and early 20th century cities stand for a stronger identity, than today's city.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is my material for tonight: Observations, telling us that the identity of the urban fabric is a matter of culture. And that meaning and identity vary from ages to ages, and from civilization to civilization.
Tonight I do not see it as my duty to find answers. I just would like to reflect upon these themes.

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THE RECONSTRUCTION ERA

The basic idea of The 100 Mile City is the thesis that between 1970 and 1990 megacities like Los Angelos, New York, London, Paris and Tokyo shook off the last traces of their 19th century economic basis of industrial mass production. Deyan Sudjic gives a convincingly description of the reshape of character of these cities, mainly in terms of the meaning and identity of new types of buildings, which represent the globalization of urban economies.
It were economic forces, which paved the way to the globalization of urban economies: the first and second oil crisis in the 1970s, but mainly new regulations for free trade of money and commodities in the 1980s and the third industrial revolution, the electronic data and communications industry in the 1990s. This third revolution is still in the making.
Since the late 1950s cities suffered from outmigration of people and firms. Sometimes the results of suburbanization and reconstruction of urban economies were s disastrous. In a article on American cities The Economist (1998) concluded: 'Jobs, businesses and services left [the city]; the tax base narrowed; taxes rose, pushing still more employers out, as well as the black middle class. What remained was a huddle of people without means or motivation to leave. Most of them black, most of them unemployed, and all of them a prey to rising crime and rapidly deteriorating schools.'
Dutch cities suffered not that worse, but this American scenario became a nightmare for Dutch city councils and urban planners. I would like you to remember that in 1985 cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Nijmegen and a few others, showed unemployment rates between 20 and 25%. And between 1970 and 1995 the Gross Regional Product (GRP) of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague was only 50% or less, as compared to the GRP of smaller cities like Eindhoven, Enschede, Deventer, Zwolle. Between 1970 and 1995 the number of jobs for unskilled employees in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague, decreased from 700.000 to 250.000.
From an economic point of view, the influx of immigrants from poor Mediterranean countries in the 1970s and 1980s came exactly on the wrong moment. And otherwise the influx caused socio-psychological shocks. In 1975 hardly anybody could imagine, that in late 1980s the nation got shocked, when scholars and authorities suddenly spoke about the problems of black schools. Within two decades inner city districts became the new home of immigrants of mixed cultural backgrounds.
We may conclude then, that, on a much smaller scale, Dutch cities too faced the same kind of developments and tendencies, which mr. Sudjic describes for the five megacities.

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NETHERLANDS IN THE MAINSTREAM

In the early eighties urban commissioners, anxious city councils and stylish city planners lost view on long term urbanization. Urban planning authorities were confronted with new issues like structural unemployment and the urge for economic revitalization. They soon experienced that urban renewal did not recover the urban economy, nor the social framework.
The complacent world of urban planning authorities then had to absorb more shocks. Social analyses made clear, that after several decades of welfare state Dutch people got born tired, and Dutch city councils had become subvention addicts, just holding up their hands to collect money from central government. In the 1980s Dutch government got chilled by the cold winds from Britain and America. President Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Margareth Thatcher saw public housing as a means of keeping people permanent dependend on state subventions, and consequently diminished their housing policies to minimum levels.
The Dutch did it their way. According to the principle of the corporate state, the housing sector was privatised by making the housing associations independend from state subsidies. Housing corporations were supposed to operate like private companies, which invest and run their business at their own expenses and responsibilities. The official argument does not principally differ from the Reagan-Thatcher doctrine: in the Dutch welfare state all people are said to be emancipated consequently to be able to take up self-responsibility for their housing needs.
This viewpoint was based on a new political paradigm, which may best illustrated by the changing view on disadvantaged people. Before 1985 poverty, low income and poor education were seen as class characteristics, due to the structural framework of a capitalist society. The public sector were held responsible to reform this framework.
After 1985 class notions and restructuring frameworks faded away in the new global capitalism. Poverty, low income etc, were more and more considered as private matters. Yes, it's still a public task to provide facilities and to create opportunities. But nowadays the poor and the disadvantaged citizens are taken for clients. Clients who ought to sign agreements with their own state, encouraging them to produce results, which could be monitored. It is an example how goal oriented policy has been replaced by objective oriented policy.
The new market-oriented policy affected also the urban and regional planning style. As if they were chief executive officers of multinationals, politicians started a debate on the core business of the public sector, and started to down sizing, and (semi)-privatising bureaucracies. Successful site planning schemes from abroad were copied and adapted to local taste and possibilities.
Schiphol and Rotterdam were promoted as mainports, gateways to Europe. We got our business parks along the freeways and our shopping malls outside the city. Reconstructed industrial sites and port areas have become genuine duplicates from the Baltimore and London Docklands schemes, or were it the San Francisco and Liverpool Docklands schemes?
New museums, new bridges, office towers and theatres have become the new landmarks of urbanity, and symbolize the new international battle on the location decision market.
Architectural and planning critics discovered a new issue. In order to create a new identity, all cities became look alikes. Because they applied the same strategies and means, simply by copying successful schemes from abroad, these cities lost partly their original identity.

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THE WORLD OF WORK

I agree with mr Sudjic that the world of work is the main force that shapes and reshapes the patterns of urbanization, and therefore the meaning and identity of urban areas. The world of work is a world of contiuous specialisation and differentiation of production and consumption, a world of the birth and death of firms. Essentially, this is the world of substitution of space, time and money. Analysis and prediction of this process are the big challenge for the planning science.
Do we have to prepare then the funeral of cities? I do not think so. Long before the first industrial revolution, important parts of urban economies were founded on trade, services, administration, science, education and even the production of arts. This traditional economic basis have been hardly undermined by successive industrial revolutions. On the contrary, new historic evidence shows that in The Netherlands the first industrial revolution only could take off, after revolutionary innovations in the world of banking.
Even the third industrial revolution, the electronic information and communications industry, gives hope to cities. In 1996 The Economist had an interesting article on the concentration of the new Internet services industry around 23rd Street in New York City. At first sight, no industry is as footloose as internetting. So, why this concentration of new entrepreneurs in Manhattan? Because traditionally, the publishing industry was concentrated in this area around Castiron Building. But there were more important location conditions: cheap office space and competiting providers of communications infrastructure and data pipes. But most important was the possibility of face-to-face relations: 'It is simply easier to do business with a neighbour, than with a stranger.'
It is an example of Peter Hall's conclusion (Cities in Civilization), that economic tradition and existing networks of internal and external relations highly facilitate economic innovation.

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POLYNUCLEAR URBANIZATION, A DUTCH PRODUCT

Last few years in The Netherlands a debate was started about the necessity to create a so-called metropolitan atmoshere. The polynuclear network of cities Randstad is said to miss the metropolitan character as a quality of life, and as an important location decision factor for multinational firms.
History shows that megacities are products of wild capitalism or state megalomania. Between 1800 and 1950 Andy Cap had to join the urban crowd to find a proper job. To get a job these days, you don't need the city, you need education and skills.
Why there's is no megacity in this country, and it will never have a megacity? Because culture and circumstances prevented existing cities to expand like London or even like the Ruhrgebiet. The Dutch case of Rheinlandcapitalism is built upon arranging, balancing and planning consensus. Around 1900 it produced a corporate state, in which politics plays the part to create a socially broad basis for goals as well as means. Equality is the key word to understand Dutch politics.
Equality is also the keyword to understand the Randstad polynuclear system, because this system reflected and still reflects the economic balance of interests and power.
Since the 17th century this country is characterized by a balance of functional economic interests of towns and country. Important parts of agricultural land have been reclaimed as parts of entrepreneurial capital investment by wealthy tradesman. On their turn wealthy farmers took shares in e.g. colonial trade.
In the 19th century prominent Dutch economists rejected the rough British and American capitalism. They did not like the French central planning system either. The reconstruction of Paris by baron Haussmann was denounced by the economist Boissevain, when he wrote in 1865: 'such reconstruction policy needs a government system, that we don't want at all.'
Urban and regional planning was fitted into the existing framework of culture, interests and balance of power. The present Dutch spatial planning system is a mixed order of public and private responsibilities, tasks and opportunities. The public sector allocates land to public and private land use.
Because the system works in a free market framework, local authorities behave like competitors. Consequently the planning system as a whole suffers from poor coordination between government levels.
The major goal of the 20th century national spatial planning was to preserve the system. Urban and regional planners were focused on two issues: (1) preventing unbalanced urban growth and (2) cleaning up the mess of the 19th and early 20th century urban growth.
One century of urban and regional planning resulted in an urban which was perfectly characterized by the architect Jan Willem Neutelings, when he wrote: 'A twenty minutes car drive [in the Randstad], leads you along sculptural oil refineries, colourful tulip fields, cosy garden cities, medieaval canal cities, eight lane freeways, suburban shopping malls, modern high rise neighbourhoods, recreation grounds and lakes, Old Dutch windmills, university campuses, tourist beaches, classified coastal dune landscapes, the glass cities of modern agriculture, business parks of mirroring office buildings, motels, waste belts, golf links, airports, market places and mosks. All these elements shape a tapistry of urban elements.'
Small-scale variety is the main characteristic of the Dutch polynuclear urban field. According to Peter Hall polynuclear city systems and a great variety of (sub)urban environments are the future.

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THE CULTURE OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

What does it take to come on top? In a special about Silicon Valley, The Economist of March 29th 1997 drawed following conclusions: a flexible labour market, a broad network of suppliers, access to venture capital, excellence of education facilities and research institutions, and a long time to build up such a tradition. The key to understand this success is what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction.
Above all things it is the cultural climate, which favors Silicon Valley. The Economist enlisted 10 cultural factors, which, 'how irritatingly vague though it may sound, [are] more important to Silicon Valley's success, than economic or technological factors.' These factors make clear, that culture and economic structure of Silicon Valley reinforce each other :

- Tolerance of failure; bankruptcy is stigmatised in Europe, but soon forgotten in Silicon Valley. It shows courage.
- Tolerance of treachery: you can't keep secrets in the valley. Nearly every company is a spin-off from another one.
-· Risk-seeking investors: these investors are not keen on business plans of 1.000 pages, but on the bold ideas how to face technological problems as personal opportunities.
-· Reinvestment in the community: most of the money made out of the technological industry has gone straight back, either via people starting their own companies, or via 'business angel' investors.
-· Enthusiasm for change
-· Promotion on merit: its openess to immigrants and women.
-· Obsession with the product.
-· Collaboration: staff are borrowed, ideas shared, favours exchanged.
-· Variety
-· Anybody can play: who you are doesn't matter.

Looking to the Manhattan and Silicon Valley cases, I draw the conclusion, that we have to promote the analysis of shifting economic trends and structures and labour markets in their cultural context as major spatial planning issues. On the level of urban fields, the combination of structure and quality of the labour market, environmental qualities and accessiblity play are decisive for location decisions.
Urban and regional planning must take a much greater interest in the supply side of the labour market, and the behaviour of employers as a major force of entrepreneurial innovation. The future of our cities is dependend on education and skills of the second and third generation of immigrants' children.
At first sight, this conclusion does not match with Deyan Sudjic's conclusion: location of housing is the main planning issue. I think however, that in the Dutch context it completes his conclusion. Until ten years ago the housing sector was reliable company to spatial planning. But preaching the gospel of the compact city does not make sense, when cities run out of land for industrial and office business parks.

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URBAN IDENTITY

What does urban identity mean today, or, to be more specific: what does it mean to whom? The French geographer Maximilien Sorre told us that actually a city is a series of cities. The city is a tapistry, which have been knotted for centuries. Urban identity can be characterized as a patchwork of different identities.
This patchworks contains crime, deterioration, poverty, wealth, loss of family values, immigrants, individual freedom, loneliness, business, leisure, etc. Identity is culture and values, buildings are merely expressions of cultures and values.
The new identity of megacities and even smaller cities like Rotterdam is a corporate identity, as I mentioned before. Saskia Sassen stipulates that this is only one part of the urban identity, be it the eye-catching and policy-catching part. It denies the primary identification of the vast majority of small firms and small citizens, who identify the city with their own neighbourhood or their own street, or even their own job or family values.
As long as neighbourhoods and streets are disturbed by traffic jams and show poor living conditions, they don't care too much for the elitist debate about urban identity. Besides there are the middle and higher classes, who identify themselves with their private life, and decided that the suburb and the village is their part of the urban field. Until yet we do not have out privatopia's, but on a small scale, there's a growing sense of privatising residential neighbourhoods.
Speaking about identity, I finally take a closer look into the soul of Dutch planning authorities. Primarely their soul is corporative, as I explained before. It does not match at all the anarchistic and contradictory characteristics of megacities, e.g. the sharp discrepancy between poor and rich. These cities are always in a ferment. They operate like the invisible full sized second hand car market. It works, it supplies the needs and wants of unidentified people, but economists cannot explain why this second hand market works and how it works, because it's ruled by irrational elements and emotions.
The Silicon Valley culture elements do not match Dutch corporative culture either. The Randstad is a man-made megacountry with a polynuclear urban field, that perfectly fits to the Dutch planning soul of balance and equality.
Dutch planning authorities complain about not establishing their sacred fires and gods, as there are: community, urbanity, identity, integration and a clear distinction between town and country. The overwhelming planning problem seems to be, that every day again, citizens and firms establish their own sacred fires, and fix their own gods in cities already built.

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References

  • N.D. Fustel de Coulanges: The Ancient City, Garden City, NY, 1956
  • Saskia Sassen: Globalisering; over mobiliteit van geld, mensen en informatie, Amsterdam 1999, 120-141
  • Deyan Sudjic: The 100 Mile City, London 1992, 298
  • America's cities; they can yet be surrected, The Economist, January 10th 1998
  • Hugo Priemus: Herstructurering van stadswijken: naar economisch vitale steden, 64-65. In: Ronald van Kempen en Hugo Priemus (red.): Stadswijken en herstructurering, Assen 1999
  • http://manhattan: The Economist, May 25th 1996, 102
    Three reasons why the first and second industrial revolution only produced small scale urbanization: (1) Since the 17th century agricultural land in Holland was very expensive. Agriculture alwas have been an integrated part of the urban and trade economy. (2) At the timen of the industrial take off , the larger part of the nationla railway system had been constructed. (3) Industrial production soon developed in smaller cities in peripheric regions.
    Dutch liberal economists denounced the reconstruction of Paris by baron Haussmann. In 1865 one of them wrote: 'such reconstruction policy needs a government system, which we don't want at all.'
  • J. Boissevain: Betere woningen voor de arbeidersklasse, Staat- en staathuishoudkundig Jaarboekje 1865, 401
  • W.J. Neutelings: Willem Jan Neutelings architect, Rotterdam, 40
  • Silicon Valley, The Economist, March 27th 1997, 12

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