Why Should We Care About Cities?
Cities are where we want to be. As Aristotle said, “While coming into being for the sake of living, the city exists for the sake of living well.” The promise to raise our lives above mere existence to the plane of “living well” is the siren call of cities
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WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT CITIES?
ities are where we want to be. As Aristotle said, “While coming into being for the sake of living, the city exists for the sake of living well.” The promise to raise our lives above mere existence to the plane of “living well” is the siren call of cities through the ages, and explains why cities have attracted an ever larger share of the world’s population over the course of history. If present trends continue, more than two-thirds of us will choose to live in cities by century’s end. Across the globe, we may complain of those cities as difficult, expensive, overcrowded, yet the attraction remains. Despite the hassles and challenges of urban life, all of us who have tasted life in cities know that what John Updike wrote about New Yorkers also applies to those who live in cities anywhere across the globe from São Paulo to Istanbul to Shanghai. “The true New Yorker,”
A. Washburn, The Nature of Urban Design: A New York Perspective on Resilience, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-516-8_1, © 2013 Alexandros Washburn
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Every mon th, approxima tely four million people leave villages and countryside for the fringes of an already established city. and by extension, the true urbanite, “secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.” There is a wondrous attraction of cities, as powerful as our imagination. People so much want to live in cities that their migrations result in forming the
new arrivals to cities, statistics show they have prob-
equivalent of a city the size of Paris every month. But
ably made the right bet if they are looking for a bet-
this is a woefully misleading statistic, which might
ter life. As a measure of prosperity, the World Bank
suggest the monthly unveiling of a lovely new city
records economic density—the amount of economic
with cafes, boulevards, art museums, and a great
activity that takes place in a given land area—and
subway system. But the reality of rapid urbanization
finds that it correlates with urban density. Cities are
is nothing of the sort.
indeed the land of opportunity. Today there are just
Every month, approximately four million people
over three billion people living in cities. According to
leave villages and countrysides for the fringes of an
the United Nations, by 2050, there will be three bil-
already established city. These cities grow by burst-
lion more. Pulled by opportunity or pushed by des-
ing at the seams, with sewers, if any, overflowing. In
titution, the half of the world’s people who don’t live
the fastest growing cities, which tend to be the poor-
in cities but want a better life will move to cities to
est, little planning is done ahead of time. The new
find it.
arrivals often meet danger and discomfort in what seems like an alien world. Despite often deplorable conditions faced by
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THE NATURE OF URBAN DESIGN
The population shift to cities comes with an uncomfortable corollary. People who live in cities as they are currently designed produce more
greenhouse gases than
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