Challenges For Us Today In the Urban World
The city is the gathering place where man creates and competes,
works and plays. It is the web, the very matrix that interlocks man with his
fellow man. Modern man and his city are almost inseparable. His successes, failures,
all take shape within the city itself. It provides the source of motivation
for those who wish to achieve. In the city, man has been able to maintain his
individuality and still be a member of a group with which he communicates and
works. It is the very base of stability and continuity for social institutions.
The city though, is also the stage for political unrest when the social and
economic institutions fail to catch up with the rapid pace of changes in population
and scientific progress, or when they fail to respond to the aspirations of
its people.
All of society appears to be in an ever increasing
state of flux. People change jobs more and more often and are constantly moving
from one home or apartment to another. Marriage partners are permuted and children
of fractured families are "redistributed". Businesses start up, shut
down, expand, contract, and relocate. Schools consolidate and children are streamed
to classes. A new tract of homes goes up in place of an old cherry orchard.
Life becomes like a game of "Musical Chairs".
Of the many challenges, the first and foremost is
to find a way of constructing the city so that it serves as a "platform"
for flexibly changing and rearranging internal structures. Our current cities
do not have the flexibility to meet the needs of a fast, turbulent, growing
society. The downtowns of cities try to adapt, and as a result, become an odd
mix of the new and the ancient. The city is always in a state of demolition,
jack-hammering, and rebuilding. Unfortunately, once a building goes up, economics
dictates that it remains until it rots. If the industrial or commercial area
where we work is no longer suitable, the city's inflexible construction usually
forces a major uprooting.
If the decision is to relocate, the move leaves
behind those who could not or would not adapt. A change to a new job in another
part of the city means enduring a frustrating commute, or uprooting the family
and forcing its members to find new neighbours, friends, teachers, and places
to shop.
The
second challenge concerns political organization. Present city administration
is faced with a dilemma. It must create opportunity for its poor and renew its
slums, programs which require tax money. But city politicians no longer have
the backing of wealthy communities that identify with the city's hopes and aspirations.
The city has its poor, its commuters who do not all pay taxes, and businesses
which are only too ready to move. Essentially, the problem becomes one of political
jurisdiction, for the technical and financial means to revitalize city life
exist in the combined city and its surrounding sprawl, for example, in the megalopolis
as a whole. The challenge is to restructure the design of the city so that the
exploding pressure that drove families to the suburbs will become an implosion
bringing them back to the city.
The third challenge has to do with conservation.
The encroachment of creeping suburbia on the countryside has destroyed valuable
farmland that may be needed one day to provide food to meet the population crisis.
It has destroyed the ability of urban dwellers to have easy access to unspoiled
nature. This is, in effect, a kind of destruction of man's soul. More important,
vast ecological problems have been created that can only be alleviated by the
effective redesign of the city to conserve land, water, energy, and waste. Cities
consume enormous quantities of water, electricity, and petroleum and other fuels,
but reprocess little of their waste products. A major technological challenge
is to redesign the city in such a way as to make it possible to share facilities,
to conserve resources, and to contribute positively to the environment and to
the future.
In the end, the challenges merge into form the following
objectives, which is to make our cities into convenient, simple, exciting places
to live, to make them more flexible to changing needs, more compact in order
to curtail sprawl, and to be less destructive of the natural environment, with
the hope that population growth will be curbed before the countryside disappears.
The means exist to meet these challenges. Our technological
society is able and well equipped to prepare a better world for all our children
and the children of our children, and yet, only the most meager of technical
ideas are pursued for the benefits of the billions who will live in tomorrow's
cities. Instead, material resources and energy are dissipated negatively in
the pursuit of nationalism, war, and power.