CityReads│How Can We Live Better Together?
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How Can We Live Better Together?
To build a just city, we should follow three principles: don’t exclude anybody from the law. Don’t exclude anybody from the conversation. And don’t exclude anybody from the celebration.
Source:http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/nov/30/beyond-maximum-cities-booming-party-ny-rio-mumbai
Picture source: https://lsecities.net/media/objects/events/narratives-of-inclusion
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Between November 19 and December 3, 2015, LSE Cities and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society, in association with Guardian Cities, held a series of public Global Debates to celebrate ten years of the Urban Age program. The debates discussed five core themes that have been the focus of research and debate at the Urban Age since 2005.
Confronting Climate Change: can cities be the solution?
Steering Urban Growth: can planning and architecture manage?
The Politics of Equity: who owns the city?
Designing Urban Infrastructure: investing for now or tomorrow?
Narratives of Inclusion: can cities help us live together?
Speakers included leading environmental and urban experts, mayors and policy-makers, architects, writers, sociologists and urban thinkers who will offer a global perspective on the social and spatial dynamics of 21st century urbanization.
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Cities like New York, Rio de Janeiro and Mumbai are booming. Things seem to be going well for these cities. But who exactly is it going well for? Eminent urban sociologist Richard In the session of “Narratives of Inclusion: can cities help us live together?”, Sennett and author Suketu Mehta raised questions of identity, grounding and belonging in the contemporary city. This debate considered one of the greatest challenges for any city builder today: how do we form a community within these enormous, historically unprecedented, and continuously mobile agglomerations of people? Can we create cities and neighborhoods which perhaps are not fully inclusive but at least are not exclusive to particular groups? How can we live better together in the 21st century city, these 10…20…60 million people living side-by-side, and on top of each other?
New York’s Coney Island is the capital of fun. If you sit on the Boardwalk in Coney Island and watch the everyday carnival of all the races of the earth strolling together without knowing much about each other – the hipsters in leather, the Bangladeshis in hijab, the Russians in bikinis – then you realize the great secret about why Coney Island works. It’s not that everyone is included. It’s that no-one is excluded. It’s not that you’ll get invited to every party on the beach. It’s that somewhere on the beach, there’s a party you can go to.
New York, like Rio, like Mumbai, is booming. Things seem to be going well for these cities. But who exactly is it going well for? To build a great city, a just city, we have to look at who’s included and who’s excluded. Then we should follow three principles: don’t exclude anybody from the law. Don’t exclude anybody from the conversation. And don’t exclude anybody from the celebration.
The cost of excluding large parts of a city can be political upheaval or large-scale protests, or just simple street crime. But the targets of crime are most often the excluded themselves, or newcomers, or women. The rapists in 2012 gang-rape and murder in a bus in Delhi and the gang-rape of a young intern for an English-language magazine in Mumbai were men in slum. These men had been excluded from the glitter of India Shining, and had lashed out against the most vulnerable.
The most important form of exclusion these days is in housing: who gets to live in a city? All around lower Manhattan, older buildings – often rent-controlled tenements, artists’ lofts, or garment factories – are being torn down, and condominiums coming up: in the West Village, on the Bowery, in SoHo. And across their facades, in prominent fonts, the city’s inequality – and your poverty – gets rubbed in your face: “12 INDIVIDUALLY CURATED RESIDENCES STARTING AT $3 MILLION”. Where thousands once worked, a dozen will now get to live. And they won’t even live there full-time; many of the owners have multiple such residences around the world, so very few of the lights will be on in the building at any given time.
Some say that the fact that the city has become unaffordable is a sign of progress. It’s what we call a good problem. As a developer said sarcastically:” I’m sorry I created so many jobs, I’m sorry so many people want to live here.”
Can a city be too successful for its own good? Where the crime is low, the subways run on time, the culture is world-class, the restaurants Michelin-starred? Yes, for that means you won’t be able to afford living in it. It is one thing to be excluded if you’re a newcomer to the city; it is another to be excluded in the city where your family has lived for four generations, for the rent will be too high.
It’s not just poor people who are getting excluded from the city. Those with several children are also facing the problem because of the unaffordable private school education. Cities like San Francisco and Berlin are finding that families with children are fleeing the city, to find bigger houses and better schools. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of children below 14 actually dropped in US cities of over half a million residents. The biggest drops were in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Don’t Exclude Anyone from the Law
Great cities flourish when they permit an accomodative illegality. The problem right now is that the law can be stretched or even outright flouted by the rich – as we see in the epic land grab taking place in the Mumbai mill areas. The poor live in a state of permanent legal insecurity, never knowing what law will be enforced when.
Activists march to New York’s City Hall to demand more affordable housing options for the homeless and poor.
An example of this is the debate around illegal basement apartments in New York. There are anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 spaces. Up to half a million New Yorkers live in these spaces. Some are squalid tenements without air or light; others are places you or I could live in. Some are rented out by unscrupulous landlords preying on tenants who don’t know or can’t enforce their rights. Others – often when there’s a common ethnic background.
Many of New York’s housing codes are absurd and arbitrary. If half the unit is above the ground, it is considered a “basement” and can legally be leased. If half is below the ground, it is considered a “cellar” and can never be rented. The landlord could be fined $15,000 or spend a year in jail. Housing advocates estimate that at least half of them are perfectly habitable, and should be legalised.
New York State defines a “housing emergency” as a vacancy rate below 5%. The current vacancy rate in Manhattan is 1%. Half of all New Yorkers spend over a third of their income on rent; a third spend over half. They desperately need more, and cheaper, housing options. One of the more obvious ones is to legalise basement residences, but very few politicians want to touch the issue, for fear of alienating the Nimbys on the community boards.
Don’t Exclude Anyone from the Conversation
The conversation around urbanism these days is like the Latin mass, laden with jargon, reinforcing the barriers around a professional guild. The debates of the planners sound like buildings talking to buildings. As a result, people don’t listen to good and smart planners. There is no joint programmes between university departments of urban planning and departments of journalism. So very few writers or journalists who really understand the workings of cities. And the ones that do don’t know how to translate it into a story that will grab ordinary readers leafing through the gossip pages.
If philosophers or literary theorists write incomprehensible jargon, it might hinder the rest of the populace’s ability to comprehend philosophy or literature – but it’s not going to affect their daily lives. But when it comes to urban planners, their dreams could become our nightmares. The rest of us have to walk in them, sleep in them, live in them. We need to understand the story they’re selling us.
It is critical for planners to go out from the academies into the public sphere and it is of importance for the urban planner to get the public informed and excited about planning.
In all storytelling, the choice of the words used in the story is crucial. And the most freighted of all these words, in the story of the city, is the word “slum”. The word is loaded, overloaded, toppling. The people in the Mumbai slums have another word for it: “basti” – makeshift community. The construction of the basti is crucial to the “spirit of Mumbai” that saves the city time and again, through floods, riots, and terror attacks. The construction of the basti is crucial to the “spirit of Mumbai” that saves the city time and again, through floods, riots, and terror attacks.
Mumbai’s record flood of 27 July 2005 showed up the worst and the best of the city.
Don’t Exclude Anyone from the Celebration
The value of ethnic diversity, like culture, is one of those intangibles that are difficult to measure in economic terms. Places that don’t have a lot of diversity in terms of ethnicity, or that have tied themselves to a single industry – are stagnating. But cities like New York, which actively encourage immigration, are doing better than ever before. So ethnic diversity can revitalise these old industrial cities across the richer countries, and make downtown central again.
Suburbs are boring, so programmed are they, so controlled by laws and codes and rules, that the human being withers. City life is exciting and unpredictable. These chaotic encounters enrich our life-narrative, make us more interesting person than someone who’s lived his life safely in a suburb.
The lists of the world’s “most livable cities” compiled by the financial magazines are a joke: they are made for expat bankers. The pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong last year resulted in a 3.2% decline in its ranking. “Hong Kong’s livability has been hit by the disruptive protests that took place last year,” pronounced the EIU survey editor. So: democratic protest means a city is unlivable. By that standard, the ideal city would be Pyongyang.
The pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong last year
Canberra, Geneva, Calgary are beautiful and deadly boring. They do well on the lists because they are mostly cleansed of immigrants, the poor, the necessary chaos that is the first marker of big-city life. A great city has the ability to, as Bob Marley urges, “Stir it up.”
The city has never been a more exciting place to live. Don’t excluded anyone from the thrill and pride celebration in city. To do so, the celebration must be like Coney Island: open, affordable and accessible.
Related CityReads:
57.Confronting Climate Change: City Is Key to A Solution
58.Who Owns Our Cities?
61.Better Infrastructure, Better Life.
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