Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 2013, volume 40, pages 191 – 194
doi:10.1068/b4002ed
Editorial
The future cities agenda
Suddenly, ‘cities’ have become the hottest topic on the planet. National research institutes
and local governments as well as various global agencies are all scrambling to get a piece
of the action as cities become the places where it is considered future economic prosperity
firmly lies while also offering the prospect of rescuing a developed world mired in recession.
In the UK, under the auspices of making cities smarter, the Technology Strategy Board has
announced two projects—a demonstrator in Glasgow and a catapult in London—to propel
computation and information services into the wider urban environment with a view that
this will be good for business. Many of the largest information technology (IT) companies
are doing the same: as, for example, in Birmingham and Belfast which have recently won
funding as part of IBM’s Smarter Cities challenge. The UK Government Office for Science
has embarked on a ‘future cities’ think-piece, while various London-based initiatives, such
as the government’s Tech City are providing a focus for high-tech start-ups in the fashion
that a generation ago were called ‘science parks’. This time, however, they are at the heart of
our cities, rather than part of the urban sprawl in greenfield environments, and this switch in
location is symptomatic of our changing attitudes towards cities which are likely to dominate
our thinking for the next fifty years.
Some of this interest is undoubtedly due to the fact that we recently passed the point
when, according to official statistics, more than 50% of the world’s population are now
deemed to be living in some sort of city; in short, the point where more than 50% of global
population is urbanised (UN, 2008), although it is arguable that this point was actually passed
some time ago at the end of the last century. Definitional matters aside, it appears that by the
end of this century most of the world’s population will be urbanised and, to all intents and
purposes, will be living in ‘cities’ (Batty, 2011). But a stronger force for elevating cities to
the point where they become the focus of interest is that the largest cities—world cities if
you like—now appear to be acting more like city-states, driving economic development and
acting on a global stage that cuts across the nation-state in ways that are confusing, liberating,
and confounding.
Yet the most powerful force in this revival of interest in cities is undoubtedly the
transition from a world based on energy to one based on information: from an industrial to
a postindustrial world where the majority of pursuits are information based and where many
previous occupations involving agriculture and manufacturing will be entirely automated.
Most of our cities still reflect the built environment shells that were appropriate to a previous
era, one wedded to the internal combustion engine, to an industrial base that in many places
contained over half the workforce, and to patterns of living that tended to reinforce localities
rather than more distant places. However, what takes place in our cities is now very different
from the economic and social activities that defined them at the end of the 19th century. Most
manufacturing employment has disappeared from more developed countries and, in any case,
there has been a progressive loss of jobs due to automation in the manufacturing industries
that have moved offshore in the last fifty years. Agriculture is now highly automated and it is
very likely that it will be completely so by the end of this century; what will remain in terms
of traditional farming lifestyles will be in small but persistent pockets of deep rural poverty
amidst a much wider sea of cities where occupations will be essentially urban. There is much
talk of manufacturing being repatriated into the developed world from its offshore base but
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this can only ever provide a very few jobs in comparison with the past and, in any case, most
of these jobs now involve information processing.
If you want evidence that our cities no longer function as part of the physical form they
manifest, just consider the City of London, the financial quarter or square mile which still
exists on a street pattern that was established before Christopher Wren began its rebuilding
after the Great Fire of 1666. Since the end of the Second World War, the ‘City’ has been
more or less rebuilt three times but on the same street pattern. It looks the same as it was,
but in fact everything has changed; everything that goes on within these streets is different
from seventy-five years ago. Consider too the way we now shop, the way we complement
our work from home with that in the office, the way we move about the city, the friendship
patterns that we invoke. The infrastructure which contains and perhaps constrains this is
similar to that of the past but in time it will change and one of the biggest challenges is to
know how this will happen. In a world where most of what we do involves communicating
information and where distance is no longer the constraint that it was, it is extremely difficult
to speculate on what the future physical form of our cities will be like. This is a conundrum
that defines one of the major dilemmas faced both in understanding as well as in planning
the future city.
In this mix, cities are of course the crucibles where information is produced and
disseminated through invention and discussion and this has always been the case. All
informed commentators from Jacobs (1961) to Glaeser (2011) make this point and argue
that cities are not necessarily places where material goods are produced—notwithstanding
that many cities do grow around such production centres—but they are places for bringing
people together to innovate, to interact socially, which in turn leads to various forms of
production, which are by no means exclusively material. One of the major reasons why big
cities have come back onto the agenda is because they are now regarded as the places where
the future will be defined. In an increasingly competitive global world, cities are seen as the
hot spots in terms of business, economic vibrancy, wealth and of course, as they have always
been, the sources of economic and political power.
The bigger the city, the better, so it now appears, in quiet contrast to Schumacher’s
(1973) message of forty years or more ago that “Small is Beautiful”. It was not always
so and, until quite recently, our love affair with the city was highly muted despite a longstanding recognition that cities were the keystones to the economy. In fact most of the 20th
century was a reaction against the idea of the industrial city which was seen as an evil,
polluted, sprawling place, out of control. Our planning then, and even now, was very much
to contain the city by green belts, to disperse its functions to new towns, to regenerate
activity at a regional rather than urban level. In fact by 1975, US cities were no longer
growing—more people were leaving them for the suburbs and for small town America than
were moving to them. This is what Vining and Strauss (1977) referred to as the ‘clean
break’, something which since then appears to have turned itself around. Cities are growing
once again in the developed world as witnessed in the population of Greater London which
reached 8.2 million in 1961 only to fall systematically to 8.0 million in 1961, 7.4 million in
1971, and 6.8 million in 1981 but then to rise again back almost to its 1951 figure by 2011
(6.8 million in 1991, 7.3 million in 2001, and 8.1 million in 2011).
This then is the backcloth for an agenda of what our futures cities will be like. Production
and consumption of material goods that determine to a large extent our immediate prosperity
will be highly automated, with a very substantial proportion of the effort in automation being
information based. The way production and consumption will be connected will increasingly
involve flows of information rather than materials and, in this sense, there will be big changes
in the way we live and work. If cities get bigger and greener as the largest cities appear to be
doing, then transport systems will be different. Unless there are dramatic developments in
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automated driverless cars, suitably coordinated in terms of an appropriate urban infrastructure
and this is incredibly tricky given the inertia and vested interests in the built environment, then
the drift back to public transport of various kinds is likely to continue. Increasingly services
will be delivered as information, only at the very last minute to be converted into material
provision. All this focus on cities getting bigger will be predicated on their getting richer, but
the climate in which this is happening is one of increasing polarisation and disadvantage.
Population growth through natural replacement will slow in comparison to migration which
will continue to increase as population becomes more mobile globally and as cities compete
for the brightest and the best. Although the world’s population might stabilise, migration will
become the really significant determinant of local growth, and this is already happening as
evidenced by recent global patterns of population change.
The key issues on the agenda involve: automating cities which is an inevitable consequence
of networking and the decentralisation of all aspects of computation across the globe; the
dominance of migration as a force for local change; globalisation where everyone who uses
the net is in some way part of a world city of sorts (with the implication that every city, no
matter what size, has elements of ‘world city’ within it); the consequences of aging which
will change the way we physically move around the city combined with the automation of
transit and the private automobile; the rise of health care as a basic urban function; the demise
of physical retailing and the ‘high street’, as much through online activity as through physical
decentralisation; and, of course, the general automation of all sectors of the economy. Many
problems confound this agenda and it is worth noting these as they are likely to dominate the
extent to which we are able to build resilient and sustainable cities that are smart enough to
enable them to function better than any of those we have created in the past.
First, the issue of automating the city is highly problematic. Our experience with IT
systems at every level is somewhat mixed, with integration being a major problem not only
of organisation but also of best practice and the physical limits on how information might be
linked. It is by no means axiomatic that the data that the smart city will provide will be any
better than those we have generated in the past using conventional, manual means. In fact,
these data will be different and our experience to date in adding value by merging big data
indicates many problems. Much of the smart city will be built like all cities from the bottom
up, not from any top-down mandate or plan for the information city, and those that have
been proposed by the big IT companies are more like ideal types, like new towns once were.
Practice will be very different.
The second feature which will distort the agenda is the notion that large cities will provide
massive numbers of new jobs. It is already clear that information technologies have by and
large not generated the kind of increases in jobs that previous technologies based on energy
achieved. Productivity increases have slowed everywhere during the last fifty years and
increasingly this is seen as being due to the fact that the technologies now being produced
tend to be complementary to existing practice: they do not disrupt in quite the same way
that industrial technologies did, for they do not replace or substitute but simply add new
behaviours in parallel. Moreover, the number of jobs created from these appears smaller than
the number generated in industrial society, so like for like (if ever a comparison can be truly
made), it looks at though the quest for providing new jobs through start-ups in large cities
is the icing on the cake, rather than the provision of a new cake which will generate a new
labour market. Much will, of course, depend on other sectors of the economy all of which are
being informed by new information technologies, but in these terms the future is uncertain.
All of this is against a general background of increased global competition, increasing
movement of populations at all levels, and the provision of health care and education, with
very high proportions of information technology and much lower levels of labour input,
increasing migration which distorts stably functioning systems in cities due to the rate at which
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change takes place, and a general move to automate construction. This agenda is inevitably
incomplete and it is not well mapped out, but what is very clear is that the repercussions of
information technologies on the future form of our cities is very hard to figure out. As with all
innovation, there is little to go on from a study of the past; other than to say that the diffusion
appears to be ever faster and the polarisation and segregation that emerge from this take us
increasingly by surprise. There is, however, one clear message in thinking about future cities:
it is that such analysis and study should concentrate on the multiple repercussions over time
and space that now characterise change in the contemporary city. There is little doubt that
getting a grip of what our future cities will be like must be based on the information and
communication technologies and urban analytics that make the greatest use of the data
and models that use these technologies to study the impact of the same technologies which
are changing and transforming the very system of interest that we are studying. The fact that
we use these technologies to explore how these very same technologies are changing the
system we are studying is part of the paradox that a future cities agenda must grapple with.
Michael Batty
References
Batty M, 2011, “Commentary. When all the world’s a city” Environment and Planning A 43 765–772
Glaeser E, 2011 Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter,
Greener, Healthier, and Happier (Penguin Books, New York)
Jacobs J, 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, New York)
Schumacher E F, 1973 Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered (Vintage Books,
New York)
UN, 2008 World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision ESA/P/WP/205, Population Division,
UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, New York,
http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wup2007/2007WUP_Highlights_web.pdf
Vining D R Jr, Strauss A, 1977, “A demonstration that the current deconcentration of population in
the United States is a clean break with the past” Environment and Planning A 9 751–758