Urban Future Peter Hall & Ulrich Pfeiffer
URBAN FUTURE 21 A global agenda for twenty-first century cities
By Peter Hall and Ulrich Pfeiffer Taylor & Francis 2000 £19.99
This book follows the tradition of world visions produced under Gro Harlem Brundtland or Willy Brandt which, originated in the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth. Peter Hall was the moderator of the Commission and Ulrich Pfeiffer headed the Expert Group. It became their task to consolidate the many inputs produced by the 14 commissioners, 16 experts and third parties who helped to prepare the World Report on the Urban Future 21 which was presented at the Urban 2000 conference in Berlin last year.
The idea was to focus on cities, taking stock of the state of the art worldwide, to devise alternative scenarios for the long term future and to provide an action plan for good governance.
For that purpose cities were divided into the city of hypergrowth, the city of dynamism, and the mature city. Only thus could different strategies for sustainable urban development and change be accommodated. Recommendations for action are addressed to nations and cities separately, and sometimes to industry, with the aim to shift responsibilities and resources towards the city level. The key message is that strong urban government is the linch pin for the improvement of urban quality of life, be it in the field of the environment, local economy, social disparity, intellectural and cultural life, or physical infrastructure, housing, transportation, urban management and planning. The action plan for the liveable city which takes up almost half of the World Report published by the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building anc Housing of Germany is reproduced in the book.
In mega-cities such as those in the Pearl Delta in China, in India or in informal urbanisation in sub-Saharan Africa urban population may well triple by 2025. Only by economising scarce resources and setting priorities and by curbing population growth could these hypergrowing cities head for a more socially and environmentally balanced future.
Cities coping with dynamic economic growth in middle income and rapidly developing Eastern Asia, Latin America and the Middle East may be challenged by others and run into environmental problems due to rapidly increasing prosperity and informal settlements dispersed to the suburbs. Their industries may lose out to lower income cities despite their skilled workforce and they would need to exploit their advanced knowledge base and apply it also to advance sustainability.
The weakening mature city is representative of the advanced world of North America, Europe, Japan, Eastern Asia and Australasia. It has to cope with population decline, ageing, decline of household size and dispersal. Benefiting from a well educated population, mature democracy, good administration and a strong tax base, such cities can use enlightened self-interest to plan for demographic change and assist reconcentration to remain viable as service centres and incubators of innovative small employers in an attractive urban heritage and environment.
Finally, there are the transition cities in ex communist Eastern Europe which cannot be equated with Western cities nor cities in the developing world. The private house and the private car are symbols of their liberalisation but carry the seeds of their urban problems. It will require enlightened governance to come up with liveable solutions for the city collective in places where lack of freedom ranks so high in recent memory.
The bulk of the book starts with a presentation of the millennial challenge with its dilemmas and opportunities. Aiming at sustainability in every aspect of urban life means balancing conflicting interests and trading off sectoral objectives against each other. The book analyses the basic driving forces which create new opportunities and constraints and shows what would happen if they continued their trajectory unfettered. Such a projected outcome of a 'business as usual' scenario uncovers the main deficiencies which policy makers will have to address. The scenario of realistic alternatives could come about if cities were ready to act. Two key principles would steer such urban change: sustainable urban development as a central policy objective, and decentralised local empowerment as the means of delivery. The trends and outcomes of the urban world by 2025 are based on concise case studies presented in boxes. Some of them make gruesome reading.
The emphasis of the book is on economic problems and solutions even for social and cultural urban problems and its overall line of argument advocates principles of positive economics. However, there are other dimensions to an urban quality of life than income and material consumer satisfaction. Little is said about less tangible aspects such as the arts, aesthetics of the built environment, provision and use of the public realm, let alone urban design. The section on 'rules for design' in the developed world takes up two pages (pp 298-90) referring to Jacobs and Appleyard's work of 1987 and concluding that cities which are extremely fashionable living places with buoyant real estate markets such as San Francisco and inner London are desirable models. The discussion on how much planning can poor cities afford does not mention urban design at all.
Overall, great efforts went into compressing two years of intensive work of the World Commission and its miriad of expert contributors. The book is very informative and can inspire traditional as well as bare foot urban policy makers. #
Judith Ryser
