The Third Megacities lecture:
November 19 1999
Report on the discussion after the Lecture
by Deyan Sudjic
by Olof Koekenbakker
[go to the Lecture by Deyan Sudjic]
[go to the co-review by Len de Klerk]
Deyan Sudjic's lecture and
Len de Klerk's co-review were followed by a discussion, chaired
by Roel den Dunnen, secretary-general of the Dutch ministry of housing,
spatial planning en environment.
Publicist Hans van Dijk started the debate. He questioned the consequences
for democracy of the emergence of the airport as the most important
defining landmark of the new urban landscape. Schiphol Airport has
many (temporary) inhabitants and thousands of jobs, but it has no
elected council.
Sudjic agreed. He stated that the model of the 'corporate state'
is taking over parts of the cities - not only airports, but also
shopping malls and, at least in the United States, privatised housing
developments. The private sector is adopting more and more elements
of the city (in the United Kingdom even the prisons are being privatised).
As a consequence the British electorate is hardly interested in
local democracy any more. Because he considers democratic control
essential, Sudjic found these facts disturbing. Democratic spaces
are necessary to keep the city healthy. Therefore it should e.g.
be possible to demonstrate in the arrival lounge of airports.
Urbanist Yap Hong Seng, himself being born in Jakarta, did not
approve of the comparison of Asian with European cities. Each year
Jakarta's population increases by half a million. Urbanists who
are dealing with the situation in Holland do not understand the
magnitude of this problem. The shantytowns of Jakarta are sprawls,
by wich Yap meant that they have no structure, control or morphology.
Compare cities within their own 'families', he stated. African cities
are, for example, another completely different category.
Sudjic did not agree. The forces that keep cities going on are remarkably
similar, they effect them all over the world. 150 years ago the
expansion of Manchester was as frightening as the growth of Jakarta
is now.
The chairman detected a contrast between De Klerk's thesis that
'culture' has a binding effect upon cities and Sudjic's proposition
that the essential urban processes are universal. At that moment
it appeared appropriate to sharpen some definitions. De Klerk said
that processes of urbanization are not identical with cities. One
needs urban planners to transform these processes into cities: spatial
forms, to which people add 'identities' that may change. City, sprawl,
suburb: they are all different products of urbanization. It does
not work when one tries to put too much in just one term (like 'identity'),
said De Klerk.
Joost Schrijnen, head of the urban planning department of the city
of Rotterdam, noted that people in Holland like cities, but they
don't like urbanity. And they like to move, but they dislike mobility.
This, he said, has caused the crisis in the identity of the city.
Schrijnen also wondered if identity and differentiation are still
possible in Sudjic's 'city' of 40 million. With overwhelming economic
forces like these there must be enormous shifts in identities.
At the end of the discussion Hans van Dijk stated that the problem
of a missing identity emerges particularly in the new housing estates.
Is it possible to establish some identity in the sprawl, Van Dijk
wondered. Until now the only answer he had seen has been the 'monumentalization'
of the periphery. In a way this strategy has proven to be succesful,
but at the same time it is obsolete and romantic. Now one in the
room could give him a more contemporary alternative.
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