After this year the majority of people will live in cities. Human historywill ever more emphatically become urban history, says John Grimond

urban one. Cities’ development is synony-mous with human development. The �rstvillages came with the emergence of agri-culture and the domestication of animals:people no longer had to wander as theyhunted and gathered but could insteaddraw together in settlements, allowingsome to develop particular skills and all tolive in greater safety from predators. Aftera while the farmers could produce sur-pluses, at least in good times, and the va-rious products of the villagers�grain,meat, cloth, pots�could be exchanged.Around 2000BC metal tokens, the forerun-ners of coins, were produced as receipts forquantities of grain placed in granaries. Notcoincidentally, cities began to take shapeat about the same time.

They did so, �rst, in the Fertile Crescent,the sweep of productive land that ranthrough Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Palestine,from which Jericho, Ur, Nineveh andBabylon (pictured above) would emerge.In time came other cities in other places:Harappa and Mohenjodaro in the Indusvalley, Memphis and Thebes in Egypt, Yinand Shang cities in China, Mycenae inGreece, Knossos in Crete, Ugarit in Syriaand, most spectacularly, Rome, the �rstgreat metropolis, which boasted, at its ze-nith in the third century AD, a populationof more than 1m people.

Living together meant security. Butpeople also drew together for the practical

The strange allure of the slumsPeople prefer urban squalor to rural hope-lessness. Page 5

A cul-de-sac of povertySuccessful cities need economic growth. Page 9

Thronged, creaking and �lthyBursting cities, bust infrastructure. Page 12

Failures at the topLucky the city with a decent government.Page 14

In place of GodCulture replaces religion. Page 15

The reinvention testA successful city must expect to go throughseveral rebirths over time. Page 17

Et in suburbia ego?With age, cities go centrifugal�but maybenot for ever. Page 18

The Economist May 5th 2007 A special report on cities 3

1

The world goes to town

WHETHER you think the human storybegins in a garden in Mesopotamia

known as Eden, or more prosaically on thesavannahs of present-day east Africa, it isclear that Homo sapiens did not start life asan urban creature. Man’s habitat at the out-set was dominated by the need to �ndfood, and hunting and foraging were ruralpursuits. Not until the end of the last iceage, around 11,000 years ago, did he startbuilding anything that might be called avillage, and by that time man had beenaround for about 120,000 years. It took an-other six millennia, to the days of classicalantiquity, for cities of more than 100,000people to develop. Even in 1800 only 3% ofthe world’s population lived in cities.Sometime in the next few months, though,that proportion will pass the 50% mark, if ithas not done so already. Wisely or not,Homo sapiens has become Homo urbanus.

In terms of human history this mayseem a welcome development. It wouldbe contentious to say that nothing of con-sequence has ever come out of the coun-tryside. The wheel was presumably a ruralinvention. Even city-dwellers need breadas well as circuses. And if Dr Johnson andShelley were right to say that poets are thetrue legislators of mankind, then all thosehills and lakes and other rural delightsmust be given credit for inspiring them.

But the rural contribution to humanprogress seems slight compared with the

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1

4 A special report on cities The Economist May 5th 2007

2 advantages of being in a particular place:by a river or spring, on a defensible hill orpeninsula, next to an estuary or othersource of food. Also important, argue his-torians, was a settlement’s capacity todraw people to it as a meeting-place, oftenfor sacred or spiritual purposes. Graves,groves, even caves might become shrinesor places for ceremonies and rituals, towhich people would make a pilgrimage.Man did not live by bread alone.

But bread, in the broadest sense, wasimportant. People came to cities not just toworship but to trade�the shrine was oftenthe market, too�and the goods theybought and sold were not just farm pro-ducts but the manufactures of urban arti-sans and skilled workers. The city becamea centre of exchange, both of goods and ofideas, and so it also became a centre oflearning, innovation and sophistication.

This was so not just in the Fertile Cres-cent but, over the centuries, in Alexandriaand Amsterdam, Cambay and Constan-tinople, London and Lisbon, Teotihuacánand Tenochtitlán. It was in the city thatman was liberated from the tyranny of thesoil and could develop skills, learn fromother people, study, teach and develop thesocial arts that made country folk seembumpkins. Homo urbanus did not just livein a town: he was urbane.

Cities were much more than all of this,

of course, and they were not all the same.As they developed, some were most nota-ble for their religious role (latter-dayRome), as the hub of an empire (Constan-tinople, Vijayanagara), as centres of ad-ministration (Beijing), political develop-ment (Florence), learning (Bologna, Fez),commerce (Hamburg) or a special product(Toledo). Some �ourished, some died,their longevity depending on factors as va-ried as conquest, plague, misgovernmentor economic collapse.

Technology turns even-handedWhatever the particular circumstances ofa city, though, its vigour was likely to be af-fected by technological change. Just as itwas improvements in farming thatbrought about the surpluses that madepossible the �rst �xed settlements, so itwas improvements in transport that madepossible the development of trade onwhich the prosperity of so many cities de-pended. Other technological changesmade it possible to survive in a city. TheRomans, for instance, constructed aque-ducts to bring fresh water to their townsand sewers to provide sanitation.

But only the rich bene�ted. Most Ro-mans, and many city-dwellers throughouthistory, lived in squalor, and many died ofit. Towns were crowded and insanitary;people were often malnourished; and dis-ease spread fast. Though cities grew in sizeand number for long periods, they coulddecline and fall, too. Between 1000 and1300 Europe’s urban population morethan doubled, to about 70m (thanks partlyto a new system of crop rotation, madepossible by better tools). Then, with theBlack Death, it fell by a quarter. Countrypeople died too, but the city-dwellers wereespecially vulnerable. Their health de-pended above all on clean water and sani-tation, which few had, and cheap soap andmedicines, which had yet to be invented.

Not surprisingly, the next big change inthe development of the city also turned ona leap in technology: the invention of en-gines and manufacturing machinery. TheIndustrial Revolution did nothing at �rst tomake urban life easier, but it did providejobs�lots of them. With the new factoriesof the industrial age that began in the late18th century was born an entirely new ur-ban era. Peasants left the land in their mul-titudes to live in new cities, �rst in thenorth of England, then all over Europe andNorth America. By 1900, 13% of theworld’s population had become urban.

The latest leap, from 13% to 50% in just107 years, also owes something to science

and technology: improvements in medi-cine, coupled with new knowledge aboutways to avoid disease, have enabled moreand more people to live together withoutsuccumbing as once they did to diarrhoea,tuberculosis, cholera and other pesti-lences. The same developments, however,have similarly lengthened lives in thecountryside, leading to a huge increase inrural population. Human ingenuity hasnot matched this increase with com-mensurate growth in rural prosperity. As aresult, ever more villagers have been up-ping sticks to seek a better life in the city.

The sheer scale and speed of the cur-rent urban expansion make it unlike anyof the big changes that have punctuatedurban history. It mostly consists of poorpeople migrating in unprecedented num-bers, and then producing babies on a simi-larly unprecedented scale. It is thus largelya phenomenon of poor and middle-in-come countries; the rich world has putmost of its urbanisation behind it.

In poor countries, though, the trend is

More cities

Source: UN-Habitat

Number of cities by population

1

0 20 40 60 80

Africa

Asia

Latin America and the Caribbean

2000 2015

0.5m-1m

1m-5m

over 5m

0 20 40 60 80

0 20 40 60 80

195241

166244

0.5m-1m

1m-5m

over 5m

0.5m-1m

1m-5m

over 5m

More city-dominance

Source: UN World Urbanisation Prospects 2005 revision

Urban and rural population by region, bn

2005: 2030:

2

0 1 2 3 4 5

Europe

North America

Africa

Asia

Latin America& the Caribbean

Oceania

Urban Rural Urban Rural

1950 60 70 80 90 2000 10 20 300

20

40

60

80

100

Urban population by region, %

Africa

Asia

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

North America

WorldOceania

1

The Economist May 5th 2007 A special report on cities 5

2 ity. The cities that now go by that genericname are far from Arcadian. Successfulthese places may be, if success is measuredby growth of population. But most are inpoor countries and many, if not most, oftheir inhabitants live in slums.

In the rich world, though, the city is un-dergoing very di�erent changes. Many ofthe new towns that �ourished in the In-dustrial Revolution and the manufactur-ing era that followed have been losingpopulation. Even New York, for so long theepitome of urban sophistication, wentthrough a bad patch in the 1970s. Some cit-ies retain their role as administrative cen-tres, by virtue of their political status.Some are still trading hubs, by virtue oftheir geographical position. Some enduresimply because they have reached an equi-librium. But others struggle.

Of the traditional reasons for urban liv-ing, several (the presence of the shrine, theproximity of food) have lost their impor-tance. Some of what the city provided(shops, factories) can now be o�ered insuburban malls or industrial parks�or inlow-cost urban rivals in the developing

set to continue. The United Nations fore-casts that today’s urban population of 3.2billion will rise to nearly 5 billion by 2030,when three out of �ve people will live incities. The increase will be most dramaticin the poorest and least-urbanised conti-nents, Asia and Africa. They are the onesleast able to cope. Already over 90% of theurban population of Ethiopia, Malawi andUganda, three of the world’s most ruralcountries, live in slums.

Within ten years the world will havenearly 500 cities of more than 1m people.Most of the newcomers will be absorbedin a metropolis of up to 5m people. Butsome will live in a megacity, de�ned ashome to 10m or more inhabitants. In 1950only New York and Tokyo could claim tobe as big, but by 2020, says the UN, nine cit-ies�Delhi, Dhaka, Jakarta, Lagos, MexicoCity, Mumbai, New York, São Paulo andTokyo�will have more than 20m inhabit-ants. Greater Tokyo already has 35m, morethan the entire population of Canada.

The Megalopolis of the ancient worldwas in Arcadia, a part of Greece cited byVirgil as a model of happy, rural simplic-

world. Security, once one of the main rea-sons for huddling together, is often nowmore elusive in the druggy streets of themetropolis than in the exurbs. And tech-nology, which has usually favoured urbanprogress, now enables people to work inrural bliss on home computers. No won-der so many cities �nd that in order to�ourish they have to reinvent themselves.

Nearly all rich-country cities, whetherprospering or declining, worry abouttransport, pollution, energy, pockets ofpoverty and so on. These o�er troubles a-plenty. But they are of a di�erent order tothose faced by poor-country cities, whoseproblems are vastly greater and resourcesvastly smaller. While rich cities fret over arelatively modest ebb and �ow of popula-tion, poor cities must cope with a tidalwave of migrants.

So the history of the city has come to afork. This report will explore the divergingpaths of rich and poor, and the prospectsfor the city if the developing world can oneday clamber out of poverty. First, though,it looks at the urban reality awaiting theDick Whittingtons of the 21st century. 7

NO CONTINENT is urbanising fasterthan Africa. Why? One answer is

partly statistical: Africa has been the slow-est to get started. Another is that parts ofAfrica, such as the Sahel, have been af-fected recently by severe climate change,making marginal land unfarmable. And incountries like Angola and Congo years of�ghting have propelled millions to the cit-ies. But a fuller explanation is needed. Alook at Nairobi provides some answers,and throws up more questions.

For many years the biggest city in eastAfrica, where human life seems to havebegun, was not a bad advertisement forthe urban condition. As the capital of Ken-ya, Nairobi had the subdued bustle of anadministrative centre, some industry, ho-tels for tourists on their way to or fromwildlife safaris, lots of greenery and even asmall forest. The population in 1960 wasabout 250,000. Today the forest remains,but, with 3m people, Nairobi has lostmuch of its charm. The tra�c is awful, as isthe crime, and the superlatives are usuallyreserved for Kibera, which is supposedly

Africa’s largest, densest and poorest slum.It probably is not. Luanda, Kinshasa

and Lagos, the world’s fastest-growingmegacity, may all have slums to matchKibera, whose population is put at any-thing from 600,000 to 1.2m, dependingboth on the estimator and on the time ofyear, many of its inhabitants being sea-sonal migrants. What makes Kibera un-usual is, �rst, that its 256 hectares (630acres) sit right in the middle of Nairobiand, second, that it �nds itself on the door-step of Habitat, the UN’s agency for townsand cities, which is based in a campus ofbucolic tranquillity not far away. Accord-ingly, Kibera gets no end of attention fromoutsiders, whether governments throwingmoney at it, NGOs engaged in mappingand studying it, or �lm stars shooting �TheConstant Gardener�. Ban Ki-moon paid it avisit within a month of becoming the UN’ssecretary-general this year.

Most of what makes Kibera interesting,though, is what it shares with other Afri-can slums. The density (shacks packed sotightly that many are accessible only on

foot); the dust (in the dry seasons) and themud (when it rains); the squalor (you oftenhave to pick your way through streams ofblack ooze); the hazards (low eaves of jag-ged corrugated iron); and the litter, espe-cially the plastic (Kibera’s women, lackingsanitation and fearing robbery or rape ifthey risk the unlit pathways to the latrines,resort at night to the ��ying toilet�, a poly-thene bag to be cast from their doorway,much as chamber pots were emptied intothe street below in pre-plumbing Edin-burgh). Most striking of all, to those inuredto the sight of such places through photog-raphy, is the smell. With piles of humanfaeces littering the ground and sewage run-ning freely, the stench is ever-present.

Not much, but it’s homeStriking, too, though, is the apparent con-tentment with which the inhabitants ac-cept their lot. It falls short of cheerfulness:tension is constant in Kibera, and small in-cidents can quickly turn nasty. But mostpeople are busy getting on with life.Churches abound, and schools too. Chil-

The strange allure of the slums

People prefer urban squalor to rural hopelessness

1

6 A special report on cities The Economist May 5th 2007

2 dren play in the dirt or on the railwaytracks that bisect the slum. Stall-holderssell their goods. Men, ragged or smartlydressed in dark suits, clean their teethwherever they can spit.

Indoors, things can be more wretched.On the northern slope of the area knownas Soweto East, Josephine Kadenyi lives ina shack three metres square (ten feet by tenfeet). It consists of one room, with a curtaindividing it. It has no electricity and no sani-tation. Outside is a vast heap of litter andplastic bags used by children as a lavatory.Just below that, 14 thin water pipes emergefrom the ground, bound with sticky tape ina half-successful e�ort to stem the leaks.Sewage runs alongside. Mrs Kadenyimakes her living by selling uncontami-nated water and looking after the disabledchild of a neighbour.

In NGO-speak, Kibera is an �informal�settlement. That means it does not o�-cially exist. The government providesnothing. If there are schools or latrines orwashrooms, they are privately run (it coststhree shillings, about four American cents,to use the latrine). The government pro-vides no basic services, no schools, no hos-pital, no clinics, no running water, no lava-tories. It does, however, own nearly all theland, so if you want to put up a shack, youmust go to the chief, a civil servant in theprovincial government, and get his per-mission. For a consideration, perhaps5,000 shillings (about $70), this can be ob-tained, but you receive no piece of paper,merely an oral consent.

Most shacks are in fact owned by �land-lords�, some of them descended from Nu-bians rewarded by the British for their mili-

tary service in the �rst world war with theright of abode in Kibera. They now jostlewith others who have established,through custom, corruption or force, theright to put up a �unit�. These are thenrented out to tenants, who have no rightsof any kind. The cost of erecting a shack isrecouped within a year or two.

Daniel arap Moi, who served as presi-dent of Kenya from 1978 to 2002, has longowned a house that abuts Kibera. Like al-most all other ministers of his as well asthe present government, he does his bestto ignore the slum next door. Kenyan poli-ticians seldom if ever visit it, or indeed the200 or so smaller �informal settlements�in Nairobi, even though 60% of the capi-tal’s population live in these slums. Severalpoliticians are, however, reputed to belandlords, as are many civil servants andother local worthies.

Why does the government not bull-doze Kibera and rehouse everyone inmulti-storey �ats on the same site? Oh, thatwould be very complicated, the ques-tioner is told. The di�culties abound, ap-parently, and they are not all �nancial. Thereal reason is that lots of people make lotsof money from the slums, providing theservices the state does not provide and ex-tracting the bribes that anyone living in anillegal city has to pay just to survive. More-over, the slums provide the cheap labourthat enables the city to operate. The statusquo suits the authorities quite nicely.

And what about the people who live inKibera? Strangely, it suits them too, up to apoint anyway. Asked whether shewouldn’t prefer to go back to the village inwestern Kenya that she left six years ago,Mrs Kadenyi says, �Yes, of course. Butwhat would I do back home?� What in-deed? Kenya’s average rate of populationgrowth for the past 30 years has been over3% a year, putting enormous pressure onthe land. With mouths to feed and no pros-pect of a job in the countryside, the ruralpoor head for the cities. There at least theyhave some hope of employment.

Hope is all it is for most of them, at leastin the formal economy. But hope is whatkeeps them in places like Kibera. It may bea dump, but it is central. This means thatanyone lucky enough to have a job, eitherin the o�ces or houses of the city, or in theindustrial area nearby, can walk to work.Those who have to peddle goods or searchfor casual labour are equally well placed.Being able to avoid a time-consuming andexpensive commute is a great bene�t.

Still, centrality does not have to meansqualor. In many cities the slums are on

the outskirts, by the airport or somewhereout of sight. But the people of Kibera aresuspicious of e�orts to improve their hous-ing. In the 1980s they saw some of theirland taken for new �ats, 400 in all. No onein Kibera bene�ted, says Raphael Handa, aclergyman who heads a community com-mittee set up with support from Habitatand the government; all the tenants werebrought in from outside.

Same story in MumbaiThe people of Kibera are increasingly or-ganised, and increasingly determined tobe involved in any plans to spruce up theirslum. In this they are typical of their coun-terparts elsewhere. But in other respects,do Africa’s new cities, slums and slum-dwellers resemble those in other conti-nents? An ocean away, Mumbai o�ersplenty of parallels.

Between 14m and 18m people live inMumbai, according to where you draw thecity limits, maybe half of them in slums.That is about the same proportion as inNairobi. But as you drive in from the air-port or along P. D’Mello Road by the port,you quickly see that these slums are classy.Many of the shacks on the pavements aredouble-decked, and beds, chairs, goats and

Squashed in squalor

Source: UN-Habitat

Urban population living in slums% of total, 2005

3

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

Ex-Soviet Europe

Ex-Soviet Asia

North Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa

Latin America &the Caribbean

East Asia

West Asia

South Asia

South-East Asia

East Asia exl. China

Oceania

Slum annualgrowth rate, %

4.53

2.20

2.28

1.28

0.11

2.71

1.76

–0.15

1.34

3.24

–0.33

8 A special report on cities The Economist May 5th 2007

2 children spill on to the street, where head-carriers�porters with straight backs�wash themselves from buckets.

The peninsula of modern Mumbaiwas, 350 years ago, seven islands, whichhave gradually been joined and expandedby land�lls to make up 65 square kilo-metres of land shaped a bit like a chilli pep-per. The city is hot in every sense but, moreseriously, it is crowded, and room for ex-pansion is limited. Until 60 years ago new-comers to Mumbai tended to settle justoutside, at Dharavi, where no rules ap-plied and so sheep could be slaughteredand hides tanned. Over the years evermore people came and squatted, and thecity, India’s �nancial and commercial cap-ital, expanded. Today about 600,000 peo-ple live in Dharavi’s 210 hectares, whichnow lie in the heart of Mumbai. Dharavi’sboast is that it is the biggest slum in Asia.

Conditions here are similar to Kibera’s:miserable housing, no security of tenure,contaminated water for the 40% luckyenough to have it piped, mud for fourmonths out of 12, bribes needed for a blindeye to be turned to an illegal electricityconnection, one lavatory for 800 people,the stink of sewage, and so on.

People come here for familiar reasons,too. Life is grindingly hard for many ruralIndians. Agriculture has recently beengrowing at only 2% a year, while the econ-omy as a whole booms at over 8%. Cropsfail, and many farmers are so deeply indebt that they are little more than bondedlabourers. Suicide is common: in just oneregion of Maharashtra, the state of whichMumbai is the capital, 1,450 farmers killedthemselves last year. In particular, manydalits, members of the lowest Hindu caste,see no hope of betterment amid the harshconservatism of rural India. Their onlyhope is to move to the cities. It is an echo ofwhat happened in medieval Europe, whenmoving to a city was for many an escapefrom serfdom. Stadtluft macht frei (City airsets you free), said the Germans.

Beats commuting, tooLife may indeed be a bit easier in a city.Jockin Arputham, who has lived in Mum-bai’s slums since 1963, when he was 16,makes Dharavi sound almost romantic.�You don’t have to work very hard to makea living,� he says. �You can collect and sellgarbage. You can always ask people forfood, and to sleep somewhere.� He madehis bed on someone’s verandah for 12years. Then he founded an organisationfor the inhabitants of India’s slums. Nowhe is also head of the international federa-

tion of shack- and slum-dwellers. People in Dharavi look cheerful. Every-

one is busy and many are reasonably wello�. Some live in �ats and own televisionsets and other electronic gadgets. Amongslum-dwellers they are fortunate, for, likeKibera, Dharavi is central, close not just tothe diamond market and the �nancial cen-tre but also the airport, beyond whichmost Mumbaikars live. Many thereforespend hours getting to and from work.About 7m commuters make their journeyto and from the bottom of the peninsulaeach day. The roads are jammed and thetrains over�owing: 700 passengers arecrammed into (or clinging onto) carriagesmeant for 120. About 3,000 people arekilled on the tracks each year.

Some people from the slums have beenhappily resettled farther out but close to arailway, which gives them ready access totheir work. Others are bene�ting from thecitizens’ groups that have taken root. MrArputham’s National Slum-DwellersAssociation, for instance, is allied to a co-operative through which some 250,000people, nearly all of them women, regu-larly put money aside for their commongood. And governments, donors and inter-national agencies �nd the two organisa-tions to be reliable partners if they want toimprove slum life.

Mr Arputham got involved in commu-nity action in 1975, when the authoritiesdecided to clear the slum in which he livedto make way for the Atomic Energy De-partment. He failed to stop the evictions,but learnt that people a�ected by suchclearance schemes had to organise if they

Even Diogenes would despair

were to have any in�uence. Plain con-frontation is much less successful, says Ce-line d’Cruz, who works with Mumbai’spavement-dwellers, than informed argu-ment, backed by statistics, surveys and theinvolvement of lots of potential victims.

Thanks to the e�orts of such groupsand consequent changes in the law, thereare fewer evictions nowadays. The con-troversies, instead, surround e�orts to im-prove the slums. The idea now in vogue isto bring in a developer, let him put upmulti-storey buildings, use some of the�ats to rehouse those living on the site andsell others at a pro�t. Slum-dwellers oftenhave enough money to pay rent, and suchdeals remove a �nancial burden from thelocal authority or landlord.

But the scheme is controversial. Someslum-dwellers are too poor to pay even aservice charge, which will be levied in re-turn for water and the use of a lift, even ifthe �ats are rent-free. Others complain thatonly those who were resident before 1995will be eligible for rehousing, leavingnewer arrivals with nowhere to go. Mr Ar-putham, who is not against development,says the chosen developer has no plans fora sewer and will undoubtedly make25,000 families homeless.

Others worry that such schemes willallow corrupt o�cials and corrupt de-velopers to make huge fortunes at the ex-pense of the poor. Under the headline�Mumbai’s great slum robbery�, the Hin-dustan Times recently published details ofa police investigation involving, it wasclaimed, pay-o�s to o�cials to free thebuilders’ hands. Shirish Patel, a civil engi-neer with a long-standing concern forplanning the city, believes that there aresimply too many people in Dharavi to al-low a developer to rehouse everyone andat the same time make an honest pro�t.

More generally, he believes that bothgovernment and developers have a stronginterest in keeping property prices high�and Mumbai’s rank among the highest inthe world. Vijay Mahajan, of Bombay First,a businessmen’s group formed to promoteand improve the city, agrees. The higherthe prices, the more builders can charge.As for the politicians, they pro�t from aninvisible line that runs directly from slum-lord to local politician to state minister tohis boss. Money runs up along this line,and so do votes. In return, the governmentlets the slums remain undemolished. It is apay-and-stay arrangement.

Nairobi and Mumbai certainly havelots in common. Luckily, other places havefared better. The outlook is not all bleak. 7

The Economist May 5th 2007 A special report on cities 9

THE English men and women who �edtheir farms and villages in the late 18th

century to seek a better life in the factoriesof burgeoning Manchester, Leeds andBradford found no streets paved with gold.Rather, they encountered disease, malnu-trition and often brutality. In his book�The City�, Joel Kotkin cites the West In-dian slave-holder who, on a visit to Brad-ford, could not believe that anyone could�be so cruel as to require a child of nine towork 12½ hours a day.� Yet by 1850, says MrKotkin, this time quoting Alexis de Tocque-ville, there was in Britain �at every stepsomething to make the tourist’s heartleap.� Social activists and enlightened pro-fessionals had brought about legislativereforms; and the bene�ts of mechanisa-tion, plus wages pushed up by trade un-ions, had enabled the poor to start buyingthe sort of cheap goods they were helpingto make. Cities now seemed almost heroic.Can today’s urban poor expect to see asimilar transformation?

In many places, such as India, saysEduardo Lopez-Moreno, head of the UN’sGlobal Urban Observatory, new migrantsto the towns are no better o� than theywere in the country. And in poorer nationsgenerally the proportion of urban poor isactually increasing faster than the rate ofurbanisation. But the hope that keeps poorpeople in cities is not always vain. Asiashows that even a region in which 40% ofthe inhabitants already live in cities, andwhich is urbanising almost as fast as Af-rica, is not condemned to misery for ever.

In the early 1970s over half of Asianswere poor; they could expect to live, on av-erage, to an age of only 48 years; and two-�fths of adults were illiterate. Today theproportion of poor people is about a quar-ter, life expectancy has risen to 69 years,and about 70% can read and write. Thatdoes not mean that everyone has bene-�ted. Far from it: Asia still accounts for two-thirds of the world’s poor, of whom 250mare in cities. But even the urban poor ofSouth Asia, who have been largely by-passed by the growth that has lifted EastAsia, have reason to hope for better times.

Not much of it is coming the way it didin the 19th century, though. It is true thatactivists and donors are beginning to take

an interest in cities, and ideas are now cir-culating about upgrading slums and at-tacking urban poverty. Some of these con-cern the problems of illegal squatting,which are now well known. With no titleto your shack you have no incentive to im-prove it, no way to insure it, no collateralwith which to secure a loan, no addresswith which to become an o�cial citizen,let alone to open a bank account: you arelocked in poverty. Yet there is money inslums, and enterprise�and numbers.

Getting it togetherMany ideas to unlock the enterprise turnon using the numbers. This can be done,say, by encouraging a majority of the localresidents to form a savings group or a co-operative and ask the municipality togrant collective development rights, someof which may be used in the slum andsome sold o�. Other community groups,under a suitable leader, may be able to ne-gotiate with a commercial lender and thenhire a project manager to oversee the re-housing of several people. Or a group ofco-ops may hire a �nancial intermediary.

A more top-down approach is to askgovernments to issue land certi�cates indi-cating a range of personal rights ratherthan strict title deeds. This has workedwell on a small scale in a dozen Africancountries. Vietnam has successfullybrought in the concept of private lease-hold. Other schemes involve a donor ac-cepting the responsibility of upgrading aslum in return for a sovereign debt.

All these ideas have their merits andshould be copied more widely. But themain conclusion to be drawn from the suc-cess stories is that few poor people in citieswill grow richer if their local economy isnot growing, and few local economies willprosper if the national economy is not alsoprospering. Cities often play a dispropor-tionate role in the national economy.Mumbai accounts for 40% of India’s taxrevenues, for example; Tokyo accounts fora third of Japan’s GDP; and over three-quarters of Senegal’s industrial produc-tion comes from around Dakar. In abso-lute terms, too, cities can be huge wealthcreators. Seoul’s economy equalled thewhole of Argentina’s in the late 1990s, and

Mexico City’s equalled that of Thailand. This is not to say that all cities will

prosper in step with each other, or with thenation as a whole. In both rich and poorcountries, some cities may �ourish as oth-ers decline. Several metropolitan areas inAmerica’s Great Lakes region�never mindthe cities at their heart, such as Bu�alo,Cleveland and Pittsburgh�have long beenlosing inhabitants, their population is age-ing and income growth has lagged behindrivals in other parts of the country.

Even Mumbai’s economy, successfulthough it seems, has been growing less fastthan the economies of such places as Ben-galooru (Bangalore), Chennai and Hyder-abad. Indeed, in 2003 Mumbai’s growthrate was behind Maharashtra’s, which wasbehind India’s. Sanjay Ubale, the state o�-cial in charge of co-ordinating all the plansto develop the city, says that $10 billion ofpublic and private money is being spenton infrastructure projects. That will bewelcome, but surely not enough if Mum-bai is to realise its ambition to overtakeHong Kong and Singapore as a �nancialcentre, and to become a �world-class city�.

In some respects cities compete witheach other, even across borders. Fiercecompetition now takes place within Indiato win, say, a new BMW plant or a Nokiaspecial economic zone. Similarly, HongKong and Shanghai vie to call themselvesChina’s �nancial capital, just as New Yorkand London vie for the world title. Thebusiest stock exchange may mean thelion’s share of the market in �nancial ser-vices, and the jobs that go with it.

In general, though, one city’s successdoes not mean another’s failure. Onlywhen they are competing for �nite re-sources or a speci�c prize, an investmentor the Olympic games, say, does one citystand to gain at another’s expense. Mostcities must therefore hope that they canbene�t from a sound national economicpolicy. Even in an expanding economy,the bene�ts of growth do not alwaystrickle down to the slums very fast. That iswhy other policies are needed, too. But inplaces where growth has been negative,notably Africa, it is well nigh impossible toeradicate slums. Even so, life for the urbanpoor can be improved. 7

A cul-de-sac of poverty

Successful cities need economic growth

1

12 A special report on cities The Economist May 5th 2007

IT IS hard to say exactly what makes for asuccessful city. Some can be polluted

and alive, others spotless and sterile. Still,no one wants to live in a city that is impos-sibly congested, su�ers constant blackoutsand frequent �oods, chops down its trees,concretes over its parks, has awful schoolsand hospitals, is devoid of any buildingsof charm or character and is governed bycorrupt politicians and incompetent civilservants. Yet many people have to.

Transport can sometimes de�ne theform of a city, as river tra�c helped shapeTudor London’s Thames-side expansion,and the freeways that replaced the old lightrailways of Los Angeles are both the arter-ies and the bone structure of the moderncity. Transport, too, is often the most obvi-ous of a city’s shortcomings. From Beijingto Tehran to São Paulo, streets are chokedwith tra�c and pedestrians are chokingwith fumes.

The solution to this is clear: good publictransport. In some places that is recog-nised. In southern Brazil, Curitiba, the cap-ital of Paraná state, has been trying to keepits transport system abreast of an expand-ing city’s needs since the 1940s, when thetown got its �rst urban plan. In the 1970s abusy commercial street was pedestrian-ised�a �rst for Brazil�and elsewherebuses and local tra�c were made to rundown the centre of broad roads whilefaster tra�c whizzed one way down eitherside. In the 1980s the city went increas-ingly green, creating parks, extending thetransport system and bringing in multi-carriage buses. The transport authoritycollected the fares and paid the bus oper-ator. Curitiba’s buses achieved averagespeeds above 20kph, carrying 12,000 pas-sengers at peak hours. Rail transport gener-ally does better, but the buses were popu-lar and cheap (though they have recentlybeen losing market share).

Other Brazilian cities have copied Curi-tiba, but without much success. Their fail-ure is blamed on the imperfections of de-mocracy: the Curitiban reforms werepushed through with military backingduring a dictatorship that ended in 1985,since when other cities’ e�orts have beenstymied by the lobbying of the a�ectedbus companies. This has always ensured

that some crucial element of the schemewas missing. Yet in Quito, the capital of Ec-uador, and Bogotá, that of Colombia, theCuritiba bus system has worked well, andit has been copied successfully from Ja-karta to Brisbane and Ottawa to Rouen.

In most other places, though, peoplewho can a�ord cars seem to prefer them.Public transport is often slow, unreliableand unpleasant. Edward Glaeser, of Har-vard University, reckons that the averageAmerican commuter’s journey takes 48minutes by public transport but only 24minutes by car. No wonder so manyAmericans drive to work. In Tehran petrolis heavily subsidised, so taxis are cheap,and the new metro is still far from com-plete. Karachi is probably the biggest cityin the world without a rail network of anykind, and the buses are overloaded. Thosewho have the option mostly drive.

Probably the only way to get people outof their cars is to hit their pockets. Singa-pore was the �rst city to introduce roadcharges, in 1975. London and Oslo have fol-lowed suit (Stockholm will join them),with some success in reducing tra�c. Butpunitive charges will work only if the dis-placed drivers can switch to a decent pub-lic transport system. Often they cannot.

Some cities are trying to build rail sys-tems, but many seem, even so, to bedoomed to reliance on buses. Manila’snew railway carries only 8% of the tra�c;Bangkok’s smart new sky train and metroonly 3%; and Kolkata’s metro even less.Happy the people of Copenhagen, two-�fths of whom bicycle to work.

A half-way house for many is a scooteror motorbike. Yet even these are underthreat. Guangzhou, the richest city inmainland China and therefore a magnetfor migrants, has recently banned mopedsand motorbikes, supposedly to reducecongestion and crime but in reality to dis-courage job-seeking incomers. Neither ob-jective is likely to be achieved.

A greater folly, however, can be seen inthose Chinese cities that are responding toclogged roads by building carriagewaysone above the other. Such places would dobetter to emulate Seoul, whose last mayortore down an elevated freeway in the mid-dle of the city and thus restored to view a

long-buried river seen by the locals as asource of spiritual life. That, and his im-provements to the public-transport sys-tem, have done wonders for his popular-ity. He now hopes to become president.

Dirty water, fetid airCities can be great levellers: congestedstreets and immobile trains hit rich andpoor alike. Similarly, when Hurricane Ka-trina swept across America’s Gulf coast onAugust 29th 2005, deluging New Orleansand making more than 1m people home-less, the world realised that nature couldsmite a rich country as easily as a poor one.

An equally sobering lesson, though,had come just a month earlier, on July26th, when 994mm (over three feet) of rainhad fallen in 24 hours on Mumbai. A thirdof the city was submerged, hundreds ofpeople lost their lives and thousands ofhomes were destroyed. The two eventsshould give pause for thought, for the newurge to urbanise has been matched not justby global warming but by another massmovement: a dash for the coast.

Thronged, creaking and �lthy

Bursting cities, bust infrastructure

Green exercise machines

1

The Economist May 5th 2007 A special report on cities 13

into which the city dumps quantities ofsewage, almost all of it untreated, to join acocktail of farm chemicals and industriale�uents, including arsenic.

Human ingenuity allows some peopleto make use of pollution. Waves of glean-ers sift the sweepings of Hanoi’s streets,just as children pick over the rubbish ofMaputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia andLatin America has an industry based ongathering up old cardboard boxes. Recy-cling in Mumbai is so sophisticated thatthe guts of dead animals are said to be col-lected and turned into medical sutures.

But most pollution has a cost. Dirty air,says the UN, causes the premature death of400,000 Chinese each year. The diseasescaused or carried by contaminated waterkill children the world over in huge num-bers. Solid rubbish is also bad for youwhen you literally live on top of it, as dothe people of Korogocho, a Nairobi slum.And even recycling can be lethal. In Chinaand India the destitute dismantlers ofcomputers and electronic goods, many ofwhich are shipped from rich countries, areoften exposed to toxins.

With people pouring into the cities andcars pouring on to the roads�only 1% ofChinese own a car as yet�and with richercountries exporting many of their mostpolluting industries, the outlook for theenvironment looks grim. Yet some placeshave done better than others.

Bangkok provides an example of how

4Hold your breath

Source: World Bank

Particulate matterMicrogrammes per cubic metre, 2002

0 50 100 150 200

Delhi

Cairo

Calcutta

Beijing

Mexico City

Tokyo

Los Angeles

London

New York

Two-�fths of the world’s cities of1m-10m people, and 15 of the world’s 20megacities, lie on or near a coast, wheremany are at risk from �ooding. Their vul-nerability is likely to increase. Londonbuilt a barrier in the 1980s to save it fromthe �oods that occasionally saturated partsof the city when high tides and storms co-incided. The barrier was raised only 27times between 1986 and 1996. In the nextten years it went up 66 times. Forecasterssay that, thanks to the rising sea level, itwill go up and down ever more frequently,and may be overwhelmed by 2030.

In most cities, rich or poor, it is the lesswell o� who are most at risk from �oodsand natural disasters. It was the poor ofNew Orleans, nearly a third of the popula-tion, who lived in the lowest-lying parts ofthe city and su�ered most from Katrina’swrath. Similarly, it was the urban poor ofHonduras and its neighbours who weresmitten hardest by Hurricane Mitch in1998. And it is the people of the slumsmore widely in Latin America who aremost vulnerable: �oods often sweepthrough the favelas of São Paulo, half ofwhich stand on river banks.

In some places too little water, not toomuch, is the problem. China’s thirst for in-dustry and irrigation has combined withclimate change to drain the aquifers, someof which hold fossil water that has lain un-disturbed for millennia. Droughts seem tobe ever more frequent in northern China,and southern cities such as Guangzhou arealso a�ected. Rivers are drying up: the Yel-low river now �ows to the sea for only afew weeks a year. And the rain, when itcomes, is intensely acid. To make mattersworse, the glaciers on which both Chinaand India partly depend are melting. Anybene�ts from extra water supplies will beshort-term, and vitiated by �oods.

No wonder water is expensive, espe-cially for the poor. Those slum-dwellerswho buy their water by the litre, whetherthey live in Kibera, Dharavi or a Brazilianfavela, will pay more for it than their neigh-bours in richer districts who get it from atap. And the water that �ushes sewers is lit-erally beyond them (in Dharavi it is actu-ally below them: a sewer lies under theslum, but no one can a�ord a connection).

Only three-�fths of the people ofShanghai live in buildings connected to asewer, and barely 3% of the inhabitants ofJakarta have access to the main drains.Most cities in the developing world dis-charge their sewage untreated into riversor the sea. Delhi draws three-quarters of itsdrinking water from the Yamuna river,

to reduce air pollution. Fifteen years ago itwas a byword for foul air, a city where thetra�c stood still and anyone tempted to re-sort to a tuk-tuk, the local version of the In-dian open-sided auto-rickshaw, risked as-phyxiation. It was much like Beijing, SãoPaulo or Mexico City, where views are usu-ally seen only in pictures and the atmo-sphere can be cut with a knife.

In Bangkok, though, a group of city o�-cials, with notably little support from asuccession of ephemeral governments,has reduced the air-pollution levels by20-50%, depending on the measure, de-spite an increase in vehicles of 40% in thepast ten years alone. They have done so byimposing �ercer pollution controls on cars,raising taxes on two-stroke motorbikesand making all taxis run on (subsidised)lique�ed natural gas.

Natural gas has also bene�ted Delhi,whose air has become signi�cantly freshersince 2002, when the Supreme Court or-dered its buses to convert to gas. Delhi’s airis today half as polluted as it was in 1994,and recent �gures suggest that Beijing’s isnow dirtier. China as a whole has 16 of theworld’s 20 most polluted cities. But thecountry is starting, with varying degrees ofurgency, to realise that green investmentoften makes sense. First, it is coming to seethat the costs of inaction are huge: the UN

believes environmental degradation robsthe country of 12% of potential GDP. Sec-ond, it is increasingly persuaded thatspending may pay o�. The World Bank es-timates, for example, that the $3.15 billionspent in China on �ood control since the1960s has averted losses of $12 billion.

In any event, China now proudlypoints to developments like Dongtan, justnorth of Shanghai, which is designed to bethe world’s �rst sustainable city. The

An ever-more-regular event

2

1

14 A special report on cities The Economist May 5th 2007

2 claims for it may be extravagant: the citywill, it is said, be self-su�cient in energyand water, green with parks, silent withelectric cars and utterly in harmony withnature. But the ambitions are laudable.

In other parts of China, too, signs ofsensitivity to the environment are grow-ing. Shanghai, Chongqing, Fatou and Xianjoined with their collaborator, Denmark,to show o� a series of urban innovationsat the Venice architecture Biennale lastyear. Shenzen, whose extraordinary econ-omic boom has been partly built on con-tempt for the environment, is now re-

garded within China as a place not toemulate. And even in much smaller cities anew environmentalism is on display: in Ri-uli, a free-and-easy way station on theMyanmar border, solar panels are sold al-most as commonly as sex.

Richer countries are experimenting inother ways. Some cities are encouraginggreen buildings. Melbourne’s council hascommissioned �a landmark ecologicallysustainable building� air-conditioned by anatural �breathing system�, which drawsin cool air at night to �ush out the previousday’s heat, and uses vegetation to �lter out-

side air. Chicago’s mayor has put a greenroof on city hall�a miniature expanse ofprairie that soaks up water and absorbsheat. And Abu Dhabi, anticipating theworld after oil, is investing in a huge solar-power project, part of a scheme to turn thecity into a green-energy pioneer.

All this suggests that the �lthy cities ofthe urbanising world can, and will, cleanthemselves up, just as the squalid cities ofthe rich world have done. But they cannotdo so alone. In this, as in most urban mat-ters, a collaborative national governmentis essential, and international help, too. 7

NOT all happy cities resemble one an-other, but each unhappy city is at least

partly unhappy for a single reason: mis-government. The quality of government,local and national, is the most importantfactor, apart from the economy, in the suc-cess of a city.

The failure of American governmentsat all levels both to prepare for and to re-spond to Hurricane Katrina has beenwidely noted. Less noted, though just asshocking, was the abject failure of Indianstate and local o�cials before and afterMumbai’s �ooding. The cleansing of Bang-kok’s polluted air showed that govern-ments can take action if they want to. Buteven there the politicians were supine,and the initiatives were taken by deter-mined bureaucrats in spite of their politi-cal masters’ passivity.

One feature common to most of thespilling-out-all-over cities of the develop-ing world is a huge di�erence in wealth be-tween the slum-dwellers at the bottomand the rich at the top. In virtually everymisgoverned city, which is probably mostof them, the politicians in power areamong the rich. Any well-governed city islikely to have an honest administration.

So it should be no surprise that themayor of Curitiba, Jaime Lerner, thoughhe was �rst appointed by a military re-gime, was later elected as mayor, and wenton to be twice elected governor of Paraná.He got things done, and most of them werefor the bene�t of rich and poor alike: he ca-joled the poor to clear their slums of rub-bish by rewarding them with bags of gro-ceries; he persuaded �shermen to clean up

a nearby polluted bay for a small fractionof the cost of having it done profes-sionally; he created parks and encouragedshops and other sponsors to take respon-sibility for local orphans. As mayor of Bo-gotá ten years ago, Enrique Peñalosa alsowon popularity by similarly fosteringgreenery and bicycle paths, and by gettingpeople out of cars and on to buses.

In rich countries, too, the well-gov-

erned cities stand out. Chicago is a rustbelttown whose economic base was manufac-turing, an activity that has all but run outof pu� in the old industrial heartland ofAmerica. In the 1980s Chicago lost compa-nies, jobs and people, and seemed des-tined to languish in gradual decline inmuch the same way as Cleveland, Detroitand Pittsburgh. But energetic governmentled by a mayor, Richard Daley, whose am-bitions start and end in his home town,has turned the city round. Having greenedthe streets with �owers and trees, takenover Chicago’s intractable public housingand then set about reforming the schoolsystem, his administration has helpedbreathe new life into a moribund metrop-olis. He was re-elected in February for asixth term, with 70% of the vote.

Running a city is not easy. The job hasall the di�culties of running a country, ex-cept that public attention cannot be di-verted to foreign a�airs, and the control ofthe economy lies elsewhere. Mayors oftenhave little control even of their own city. InMumbai, for instance, neither the mayornor the municipal commissioner exercisesreal power, which in India often lies withthe surrounding state. It is notable thatDelhi, which as the capital has its own leg-islative authority, is the only big Indiancity to produce a comprehensive urbanplan�now, incidentally, arousing muchcontroversy. The Nairobi mayor’s o�cehas been similarly neutered, lest it shouldbecome too powerful.

Having one government responsiblefor both the city and its surrounding statewould, however, be the envy of many

Failures at the top

Lucky the city with a decent government

The bureaucrats cleaned up Bangok

1

The Economist May 5th 2007 A special report on cities 15

2 American o�cials. It would lead to betterco-ordination of transport, education andother services, and a better chance of get-ting richer people in the suburbs to pay ashare of the costs of the big city fromwhich they usually bene�t. But any kindof collaboration is complicated if, like Min-neapolis, you have 344 local governmentswithin your metropolitan area.

This fragmentation of government isless common in the South of the UnitedStates: Virginia’s Fairfax county containsno municipalities, whereas Alleghenycounty in Pennsylvania, with a similarpopulation, has 130. But for the northern-ers consolidation is di�cult. Only a fewAmerican cities, such as Louisville andJacksonville, have managed to rationalisea multiplicity of competing jurisdictions.

France has done better, as has South Af-rica, which has reduced the number of lo-cal authorities from 1,100 in 1994 to 283 to-day. However, it has yet to enable poorand black communities to be joined ad-ministratively to rich and white ones, asgeographical logic would often suggest.Brazil has created special urban zones withcomprehensive planning for health, job-training, microcredit, you name it. By con-trast, Mexico City, with 79 executive bo-dies, 63 legislative zones and three levels ofgovernment, has yet to succeed in its ef-forts to co-ordinate its many urban plans.

Not all cities need to be planned, in theway that 16th-century Rome was laid outby Pope Sixtus V, with his obelisks andconnecting streets, and Paris was designedby Baron Haussmann, with his boulevardsand grands travaux. And some planninghas been a disappointment, if not an out-

right failure. It took almost 200 years�andthe Kennedy Centre, and the invention ofair-conditioning�to make Washington,DC, for example, a civilised city. Canberrahas yet to rid itself of its deadening politi-cal monoculture. Brasilia has grown tatty,attracting slums, as has Abuja, yet anotherplanned capital. But planning is needed ifinfrastructure is to work, the local econ-omy is to �t in with the regional and na-tional economies and if health, educationand other social policies are to be suitablefor the people they must serve.

Plan of inactionThe failure to plan can be seen most obvi-ously in inadequate physical infrastruc-ture. Bengalooru’s streets are choked be-cause no public transport system has beenbuilt to carry the tra�c that economic suc-cess has created. Mumbai’s airport, crucialfor the city that has long been the gatewayto India, is already handling many morepassengers than it was designed for. Theonly solution is to build a new airportacross the harbour, with a rail link to thecity across a bridge.

But then almost every aspect of Mum-bai’s infrastructure is inadequate. Powershortages mean daily blackouts for manyareas, which in turn lead to train delaysand cuts in water supplies. An eight-lanebridge, with two lanes set aside for buses,is being built over the sea along the west ofthe peninsula, with the aim of relievingcongestion ashore. Other bridges areplanned to carry tra�c across the bay onthe east side, where a huge new city, NaviMumbai, is to be built round a specialeconomic zone, one of 72 approved for the

state of Maharashtra. And a metro, 80%paid for by private investors, will eventu-ally carry commuters to and from theirplace of work on the peninsula.

A collection of o�cials, industrialists,professionals and NGO workers known asthe Citizens Action Group gather regularlyunder the chairmanship of the state’s chiefminister to help push all these projectsalong. It is supported by Bombay First, thebusinessmen’s organisation, and other in-terested parties. But the task that confrontsthem is simply huge, ranging from improv-ing the city’s schools and hospitals to per-suading the national Ministry of Shipping,which owns the port, to release some of its800 hectares of land for municipal use.

With 300-400 families moving intoMumbai every day and the city needing atleast 1.1m houses for poorer Mumbaikars(according to McKinsey in 2003), the neces-sary sense of urgency will be hard toachieve. Mumbai really needs a com-pletely di�erent form of government, onethat would ideally be led by a mayor whocould give his authority to all the endeav-ours that the city requires and be heldresponsible for both their successes andany shortcomings. Of that there is no sign.

It is a paradox, common even in the de-mocracies of the developing world, thatvoting and city government appear dis-connected. The explanation is that mostvoters in cities are poor. The slums aloneaccount for nearly 1 billion people, one inthree of the world’s city-dwellers. Yet theyare not organised and, lacking money, alsolack political power. Until that changes,many cities may be destined to fester incorruption and misgovernment. 7

FROM the earliest times, a central role ofany big town was sacred or religious.

Until the 16th century, the status of a citywas in England granted only to towns thathad a diocesan cathedral, and to this daythe title �metropolitan� is in somechurches given to senior clerics. Cities stilltend to have bigger and more splendidchurches, mosques and temples than domere towns and villages. But in the richworld the religious role of the metropolishas diminished, often to vanishing point.The ensuing vacuum has generally been

�lled by a secular alternative.In some places it is shopping, appropri-

ately if you believe that consumerism is anew religion, and remember that theshrines of old often had a market close by.In others the shrine-substitute is a culturalor sporting attraction. This has the merit offeeding the soul while at the same timeproviding employment, producing pro�tsand helping to �ll the co�ers of the citygovernment.

Some cities created their special non-re-ligious attractions without realising that

they would draw tourists. Long beforeFlorence, Venice and other Europeantowns became must-see sights of the 18th-century Grand Tour, Rome had built itsColiseum, Babylon its hanging gardensand Alexandria its lighthouse. Nowadaysvisitors �ock to Berlin, London or Paris tosee an exhibition or collection, watch aplay or opera, or listen to a concert. And itis not just tourists who are drawn. Whenwooing investors or companies ready tomove their headquarters, rival cities willnow �aunt their galleries, theatres and or-

In place of God

Culture replaces religion

16 A special report on cities The Economist May 5th 2007

2 chestras as much as their airline connec-tions, modern hospitals and �bre-opticnetworks. That was partly how Chicago in2000 stole Boeing’s headquarters from un-der the noses of Dallas and Denver.

No city can overnight create a great or-chestra, a gallery �lled with rare master-pieces or a theatre district to rival Broad-way. But it took no time for Sydney, then afaltering but by no means moribund city,to become visually synonymous with itsunconventional opera house, �nished in1973. By contrast, Bilbao was a run-downindustrial town in a run-down part ofSpain, but when it opened its Guggenheimmuseum in 1997, it inspired imitators allover the world.

Bilbao’s coup was to get a �rst-classAmerican architect, Frank Gehry, to de-sign a futuristic building which has servedto transform the image of the city (if notthe reality) into that of an ultra-modern,arty, fun-�lled metropolis. Milwaukee, an-other depressed city, has likewise cheereditself up with a showy art gallery, this onedesigned by a Spanish architect, SantiagoCalatrava. Seattle commissioned RemKoolhaas, a Dutch architect, to design aneye-catching library, and Fort Worth se-cured a prize-winning Japanese, TadaoAndo, for its new museum.

One museum does not make a culturecomplex, however, and the more skilfulexponents of the art of dazzle-and-regen-erate go for a succession of buildings. AbuDhabi is to open branches of both the Lou-vre and the Guggenheim. Chicago has

created a Millennium Park, with sculp-tures, an auditorium and an extraordinaryfountain, though the humdrum amuse-ments of its Navy Pier seem to pull in morepeople. And Valencia has recently addedan opera house, designed by its own MrCalatrava, to the new museums, aquariumand sculpture garden that make up its Cityof Arts and Sciences.

Other cities�Kuala Lumpur, Taipei,Shanghai, soon perhaps St Petersburg andParis�go for tall buildings, believing, asdid the burghers of medieval San Gimi-gnano, that height means importance.And others lure expositions, jamborees orsporting events. Few have done this as skil-fully as Barcelona, which used the 1992Olympic games to renew its transport sys-tem, put up new buildings, revamp its air-port and rebuild most of its infrastructure.

Beyond the fringeAn alternative is to hold an annual fair orfestival, which almost every city in theworld now seems to be doing in someform. Edinburgh, however, may havemilked the cultural variety as successfullyas any city. Founded in 1947, the main festi-val has spawned sub-festivals for books,�lms and television, not to mention a hostof fringe events. It is widely imitated.

Yet neither buildings nor events areguaranteed to pay o�, either �nancially orin terms of pleasing the citizenry. The se-ries of Maggie’s centres being built for can-cer patients near hospitals in British citiesshows that small functional buildings can

Calatrava cheers up Milwaukee

be well designed and aesthetically satisfy-ing (all are the work of well-known archi-tects). But many people value the characterof old neighbourhoods, whether architec-turally notable or not.

Modern cities tend to look alike. Cheaphousing seems to mean identical blocksbuilt of concrete. And even more expen-sive buildings tend to be constructed torun-of-the-mill designs. No wonder thatswathes of Seoul look like swathes of SãoPaulo and swathes of Shanghai. Even themost ambitious buildings, many designedby trophy architects who �it from onecountry to the next, often seem alien totheir context. Dubai’s Burj Al Arab hotel,which is meant to resemble a giant dhow,may have visual echoes of local history.But the City of London’s gigantic Gherkinis as in or out of place there as it would beanywhere else. The same could be said ofthe Roppongi Hills centre in Tokyo, Fran-çois Mitterrand’s national library in Parisor countless buildings elsewhere.

Most cities in rich countries, with hon-ourable exceptions, have been wanton intearing down buildings, domestic, com-mercial and public, that were built to a hu-man scale and re�ected local history. To-kyo has been vandalised. More damagewas visited on Britain’s cities by architectsand planners in the 1950s and 1960s thanby all the German bombing in the secondworld war. Unfortunately, similar mis-takes are being repeated in the fast-grow-ing cities of Africa and Asia, where thestock of old buildings is often smaller.

Shanghai has allowed block uponblock of distinctive red-brick tenements tobe demolished, just as Beijing has let de-velopers destroy the courtyard houses ofits hutong neighbourhoods. Mumbai hasbeen exemplary in listing for preservationmost of its notable old buildings�it hassome of the best Victorian architecture inthe world�but is still destroying chawls,the single-room tenemented buildingsthat give the city so much of its proletariancharacter. Even Mecca is tearing down itsheritage, including the house in which theProphet Muhammad was born, to makeway for nondescript developments.

People want all sorts of things fromtheir neighbourhood. As the urban icono-clast Jane Jacobs said, they want the untidi-ness that comes with having houses closeto workplaces, shops next to �ats, and richnext to poor. They also want a balance be-tween privacy and the opportunity ofchance, or planned, encounter. But noneof that need mean ugliness. Cities, after all,still have spiritual needs to satisfy. 7

The Economist May 5th 2007 A special report on cities 17

CITIES are durable. Most last longerthan the countries that surround

them, or indeed any other human institu-tions. But some thrive, whereas othersmerely mark time (Cleveland, Minsk,Pyongyang), go into apparently long-termdecline (Detroit, New Orleans, Venice) ordisappear (Tenochtitlán, Tikal, Troy). Whatare the characteristics of a successful city?

The short answer is good governmentand a �ourishing economy. But such attri-butes may come and go in the life of ametropolis. In order to be continuouslysuccessful, a city has to be able to reinventitself, perhaps several times. Harvard’s Ed-ward Glaeser describes how Boston hasdone this three times��in the early 19thcentury as the provider of seafaring hu-man capital for a far-�ung maritime trad-ing and �shing empire, in the late 19th cen-tury as a factory town built on immigrantlabour and Brahmin capital, and �nally inthe 20th century as a centre of the informa-tion economy.� On each occasion, humancapital provided the secret to Boston’s re-birth. A strong base of skilled workers,writes Mr Glaeser, has been a source oflong-run urban health.

Education was important from the �rstin Boston. But Mr Glaeser draws attentionto other characteristics of the city thatwere present even in colonial times. It hada strong set of community organisations,because of its church structure, and some-thing like the rule of law. It also had a tradi-tion of �democratic egalitarianism�.

Law has been essential for urban lifesince Babylonian times, both because cit-ies have usually been centres of com-merce, and trade needs regulation, and be-cause cities tend to draw di�erent kinds ofpeople, whose success in living togetherdepends on common rules of behaviour.Democracy, too, has served cities well,providing a shock-absorber for changingeconomic times and a mechanism where-by immigrants can join the mainstream.

Immigration, or at least an ethnic andreligious mix, has also been closely associ-ated with urban success. As Joel Kotkinpoints out in �The City�, Chinese towns atthe end of the �rst millennium AD showedthe same cosmopolitan mixture as did Al-exandria, Cairo, Antioch and Venice.

Pre-1492 Seville, 16th-century London and19th-century Bombay (now Mumbai) allcontained a variety of di�erent peoples,whether Muslims, Jews, Parsis or others.

Throughout history, cities open to theworld have bene�ted both from an ex-change of goods and from a trade in ideasfrom abroad. Japan, by closing its doors toforeigners, condemned its cities to slowmarination in their own culture until thecountry’s opening up after 1853. Today theburgeoning cities with the best chance ofovercoming their di�culties are those inAsia and Latin America that can gain fromglobalisation. Africa’s cities, largely ex-cluded from this phenomenon, are win-ning relatively little invesment, trade or en-trepreneurial �zz from foreigners.

Some cities in the rich world, too, havebeen much more successful than others atexploiting globalisation. The ones thathave done best are those that have pluggedinto global industries and been able to cap-ture the headquarters or lesser corporatecentres of globalised companies, espe-cially banks and other �nancial �rms, ar-gues Saskia Sassen, of the University ofChicago. London, New York and Tokyo arepre-eminent in this, but some other cities�Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich, Amsterdam, Chi-cago, Los Angeles, Sydney, Hong Kong, SãoPaulo, Mexico City�are not far behind.

Not every city can �go global� or willeven want to. There are other types of rai-son d’être. One is simply to be a pleasantplace to live and work, pleasant meaningdi�erent things to di�erent people, ofcourse. In the developing world most peo-ple would be delighted to live in a city thatwas prosperous and well governed, if thatmeant jobs were available, o�cials werehonest, the streets were safe, housing wasa�ordable and transport, sanitation andbasic utilities operated to minimum stan-dards. Even in rich countries not all thesethings can be taken for granted.

Mercer, a consulting �rm, publishes aranking of big cities each year based on anassessment of about 40 factors falling intoten categories (political, economic, cul-tural, medical, educational, public-service,recreational, consumer-goods, housingand environmental). Last year the top tencities were Zurich, Geneva, Vancouver, Vi-

enna, Auckland, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt,Munich, Bern and Sydney.

The Economist Intelligence Unit, a sis-ter organisation to The Economist, carriesout a similar exercise (see table). Five of itstop ten cities for 2005 were also in Mercer’stop ten. All ten in each list, with the excep-tion of Sydney and Calgary, might be con-sidered rather homely, even dull. The citiesthat have done most to excite attention theworld over�New York, Chicago and LosAngeles�are also-rans. Smallish countriesmostly do well, and Australia, the most ur-banised country of all, ranks notablyhighly, at least in the EIU list.

No list includes the ability to reinvent it-self among the desirable qualities of a city.That may, however, be increasingly put tothe test, for some people believe that citieshave had their day. 7

The reinvention test

A successful city must expect to go through several rebirths over time

5No points for thrills

Source: Economist Intelligence Unit

Global livability rankings, 2005

City Ranking City Ranking

Vancouver 1 Dusseldorf 26

Melbourne 2 Amsterdam 26

Vienna 2 Reykjavik 26

Geneva 2 Munich 26

Perth 5 Luxembourg 26

Adelaide 5 Cleveland 26

Sydney 5 Pittsburgh 26

Zurich 5 Honolulu 33

Toronto 5 Boston 33

Calgary 5 Lyon 33

Brisbane 11 Chicago 33

Copenhagen 11 Miami 33

Helsinki 11 Seattle 33

Stockholm 11 Madrid 33

Frankfurt 11 Barcelona 33

Montreal 16 Atlanta 41

Tokyo 16 Hong Kong 41

Hamburg 16 Minneapolis 41

Paris 16 Manchester 41

Oslo 20 Washington, DC 41

Auckland 20 Detroit 41

Berlin 20 Houston 47

Brussels 20 London 47

Osaka Kobe 20 Los Angeles 47

Wellington 20 Dublin 47

1

18 A special report on cities The Economist May 5th 2007

WITH people heading for cities asnever before, it may seem an odd

moment to be announcing their impend-ing demise. In fact, it is an old cry: as longago as 1967 Marshall McLuhan declared,�The city no longer exists, except as a cul-tural ghost for tourists.� Some of today’surban critics, such as James Heart�eld,take much the same view. Many of the cit-ies that have been around longest are ineconomic decline, such critics point out,and in some places more people are leav-ing them than joining them. When thenewly popular cities of the developingworld are a bit older, will they be consid-ered just as undesirable places to live in ascentral Bu�alo or central Bradford?

In America you certainly have to be anoptimist to believe that the old rustbelt cit-ies will soon regain population or econ-omic vitality. The surroundings of Detroitmay be pleasant and prosperous enough,and may stay that way, but the centre is dy-ing. Cities of this kind are like hummocksof spinifex, or porcupine grass, whose cen-tre eventually collapses, leaving live ringssurrounding a dead middle.

City centres might actually look muchdeader than they already do but for onecurious change. In parts of America atleast, such as Detroit and Philadelphia,many houses have become less expensiveto buy than they were to build. Poor Amer-icans live in cities largely because of accessto public transport and services providedby benign municipal governments, arguesHarvard’s Mr Glaeser. But in blighted cit-ies, he says, they have an extra reason tostay: if they move out, they will not be ableto a�ord a house elsewhere.

Plenty of cities are not dying, of course,even in the United States, where peoplehave been �ocking to the metropolises ofthe South and West for decades. But�MrGlaeser again�the dominant form of cityliving in America, whether in the rustbeltor the sunbelt, is sprawl, a natural conse-quence of lots of land and a car-based cul-ture. As a result, the typical, denselypacked metropolis of 1900 has become adi�use agglomeration of old city centre,rich suburbs and then even-lower-density,semi-urban exurbs, where every house sitson its own little prairie. So while central At-

lanta grew by 6% in the 1990s, its overallmetropolitan area expanded by 39%, withthe biggest expansion farthest from themiddle. A similar pattern of �ourishingfringes can be seen all over the country�sunbelt, rustbelt or snowbelt.

The centre may be a place to visit forwork or entertainment rather than to livein. That is true, for instance, of Los Angeles,despite its e�orts to give itself a beating,lovable heart. But then the suburbs, espe-cially if they are fairly old, may have ac-quired all the characteristics of cities: a�downtown�, swanky shops, the head-quarters of a Fortune 500 company, maybea mega-church, a theatre, a symphony or-chestra and often an army of Latino mi-grants who have never been near a tradi-tional ghetto in the city centre. The exurbsare more formless.

Much of this is uniquely American, butsuburban living is not. In his book�Sprawl�, Robert Bruegmann quotes Dan-iel Defoe’s comments 300 years ago on thenumber of houses of �gentlemen of qual-ity� springing up in Surrey villages outsideLondon. Nowadays, says Mr Heart�eld,the city critic, only 9% of Britons live in anurban core, whereas 43% prefer the sub-urbs; barely 5% live in true country. EvenFrance, a late urbaniser, is becoming sub-urban. Its banlieues are usually associatedwith immigrants, poverty and unrest. Butthose are typical only of some inner sub-urbs. The outer ones are much like Amer-ica’s: white, prosperous and gaining in-habitants, just as French city centres arelosing them.

Some of those who say the city has had

its day also point to economic and techni-cal changes that seem to remove one of themost basic reasons for getting together inan urban huddle. No longer do peoplehave to gather round the agora to do theirbusiness. Information technology allowsthem to work wherever they want. Giventhat they can also get a religious, sportingor cultural �x by turning on the television,and do their shopping as well as theirwork on the internet, why live in a city? AsJe�erson said, cities are �pestilential to themorals, the health, and the liberties ofman.� They are the sort of places whereyou get mugged.

Not so fast. Other changes suggest thatit may be sprawl, not the city, that isdoomed. Land is �nite, population is stillexpanding and the motor car’s dominancemay not last much longer. With globalwarming and no economic alternative toscarce petrol, it may not be feasible to go onliving 20km away from everything�school, work, babysitter, Starbucks.

In any event, other trends suggest thatfor every Timmy Willie, there is a JohnnyTown-Mouse: many people like urban lifeand want to go on living in a city, particu-larly the centre. Among them are the el-derly, a growing share of the population,who want easy access to transport, doc-tors, hospitals, cinemas and above all fam-ily and friends. And the young are urbancreatures, too. They like the buzz of a city,the concentration of restaurants, clubs andother forms of entertainment. And the bet-ter educated (and so the richer) are likely to�nd work in the universities, hospitals andresearch centres that tend to cluster in cit-

Et in suburbia ego?

With age, cities go centrifugal�but maybe not for ever

6Onward and southward

Source: UN-Habitat

Urban agglomerations, population, m

0

10

20

30

40

London Paris New York-Newark

Lagos São Paulo Dhaka MexicoCity

Delhi Mumbai Tokyo

1950 2005 2020

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might help: they could then a�ord to liveon less expensive land in the suburbs.

In that event, rich and poor cities mightstart to look more similar and, for some,more attractive. For it is tempting to see inthe popularity of the suburbs an attemptto marry the convenience of urban lifewith the traditional charms of the country.Human beings are adaptive. Many havefor centuries relished city life. Like the rob-ins and great tits that adjust their songs tocity noises, they are urban survivors.

But talk to many an inhabitant of to-day’s big cities and you soon detect a ruralbackground, and often a slight wistfulnesswith it. Where do Chinese city-dwellers gofor their holidays? Back to where they, or

Centripetal heads, centrifugal hearts

ies. The suburbs may be pleasant enoughwhen parents are absorbed with work andchildren, but for the childless and theempty-nesters the city has many merits.

Several academics take this view.Some, such as Richard Florida, of GeorgeMason University, see cities as naturalhomes for the �creative class�, whosemembers are artists, designers, academicsand so on. Others, such as Terry NicholsClark, of the University of Chicago, stressthe pleasures of the city as a reason to livethere: entertainment, they say, can replacemanufacturing in the post-industrial city,providing both jobs and fun.

Others �nd further reasons for opti-mism. Bruce Katz, of the Brookings Institu-tion in Washington, argues that there ismuch more inventiveness at municipaland state level in America than at federallevel. A city like Denver is exploiting itspower to tax to introduce a light-rail sys-tem. Private-sector investment is beingcombined with government money for ur-ban purposes much more widely and ef-fectively. Cities such as Chicago are nowseen as central to environmental improve-ments. All this means that public policy isbecoming more city-centred.

At the same time cities are becomingsexier in the popular imagination�liter-ally, in the case of �Sex and the City�, butmore metaphorically through other televi-sion shows like �Seinfeld� and �Friends�.The trendiness is not con�ned to NewYork. For anyone on the way up, the city isthe place to be. Some 60% of the jobs inAmerican cities fall into the �new econ-omy� category, compared with about 40%in the Sprawl-Mart suburbs. And once theyhave got to the top, the successful do not al-ways opt for wide-open spaces: the mostdensely populated borough in Britain isLondon’s smart Kensington & Chelsea.

Looking to the future, William Mitchell,of the Massachusetts Institute of Technol-ogy, argues that the next urban age will becharacterised by �the new, network-medi-ated metropolis of the digital electronicera�. He believes that 21st-century citieswill be �e-topias��places where peoplelive and work in the same building, leadbusy local lives in pedestrian-scale neigh-bourhoods and strong communities, butalso gather virtually in electronic meeting-places and link themselves up to enabledecentralised production.

To the slum-dwellers of Kibera or Dha-ravi, all this may seem distant, indeed far-fetched. Their �rst need is to get out of pov-erty�and the slums. Yet technology, if itbrought cheap and reliable commuting,

their family, once came from. Where do ur-ban Africans get buried? In their villages.Even in highly urbanised Japan the farmerand his rice �eld maintain a special placein the mind of the Tokyo sarariman.

When the current rush to the cities endsand this great episode in the history of ur-banisation is over, which will probably bewhen 80% of the world’s population livein cities, the true e�ects of urban life maybe clearer. In their book �Mismatch: WhyOur World No Longer Fits Our Bodies�, Pe-ter Gluckman and Mark Hanson arguethat the big changes in human history,most of which have happened rather re-cently in humans’ evolutionary history,have not been matched by changes in hu-man biology. Cities may be the epitome ofmodernity, but they are inhabited by acreature designed for a pre-agricultural ex-istence. The supermarket is no substitutefor the steppes, plains and savannahs ofthe hunter-gatherer. The o�ce chair is noplace for the descendants of Homo erectus.No wonder there is a tension betweenhabitat and inhabitant.

Perhaps that tension will lead to someterrible rupture in the megacities now tak-ing shape. It is not hard to see that politicalchanges�perhaps new city-states, per-haps new forms of city-cum-regional gov-ernment�may ensue. With luck, though,the tension can instead be put to work, re-inventively, to create better cities. Dachasand weekend cottages will be popular. Thesuburbs will keep some adherents; if acheap and non-polluting substitute forpetrol can be found, they may even repre-sent the compromise of choice for discom-bobulated 21st-century man. But there isno going back to the countryside now. 7

Future special reportsCountries and regionsHong Kong June 30thIran July 14th

Business, �nance, economics and ideasInternational banking May 19thBusiness and climate change June 2ndAir travel June 16th