Ricky Burdett on Shaping Cities in an Urban Age - 'On Cities' Masterclass Series

[Music] the city is probably the oldest most enduring invention of our civilization the words are interchangeable civilization civil civic city cities evolve over time they respond to crises and historically they emerge from crises stronger than ever before so what are the future trends for cities and what are the lessons of history [Music] my name is ricky burdette i'm a professor of urban studies and director of a research center called lsc cities at the london school of economics and political science i'm also trustee of the norman foster foundation i will be talking for the next 20 minutes or so about shaping cities in an urban age and i'm going to talk about cities at three levels i'm going to talk about some of the global trends that are happening in cities literally around the world economic uh social and environmental i'm then going to focus in on one of the bigger issues that i think anyone who studies cities needs to understand which is how they are governed how they are managed and then i'm going to end by focusing in narrowing in on a city that i know well which is the city of london where i work and live and have been involved in a number of projects trying to bring all three uh strands together through my talk from the global to the governance and through the experience of planning london which is what i've been able to assist in as an adviser to the mayor of london together with my friend and colleague richard rogers we were advisers to mayor ken livingston in the early 2000s i mentioned that i am the director of a research center which does teaching and research on cities around the world and has done that for nearly 20 years so some of the data and research i will be presenting comes from the group of researchers very multi-disciplinary group that has been involved in this project to date let me start when it comes to major global trends with probably the most important issue which is economic growth cities would not be there they've been there for 10 11 000 years if they did not concentrate jobs and cities today just as they did then and they have over the last say 2 000 years have continued to create jobs and generate wealth and if you see this map of the world with the larger circles showing where cities are growing in terms of economic development and the size of the circle represents the population you can see that in parts of the east of this map on the right hand side of the map there are areas in india cities in india china but also africa which are growing in terms of economic potential very significantly if you then overlap on this map the population growth not the economic growth but where people are actually being born or people are moving to you see a not completely different distribution but an important one what these numbers show in large figures in front of you 47 56 42 is how many people are either born or moved into one of these cities per hour so for example every minute minute and a half that i'm speaking to you one more person has moved into lagos into karachi in fact even more into delhi and other cities that we see here and we have to understand what the impacts of this growth means in terms of housing in terms of hospitals in terms of lighting in terms of electricity in terms of all the requirements for a modern cohesive and environmentally sustainable society these are sort of the global trends that i want to talk about but what you see from these maps is that there's an unequal distribution across the surface of the earth most of the growth both economic and population is concentrated on the right of the map in the east but also in africa in fact in terms of numbers 2.5 more billion people will be living in cities by 2050 but 90 percent will actually be moving or being born in cities in asia and africa if you look at this of cities over 400 000 people where growth is most rapid and most intense between now and 2030 that's only 10 years from now you don't see the familiar names there are one or two obvious ones but not all of them dara salaam luanda lagos addis ababa kingshasa abhijam cartoon all african cities and then some chinese some asian pakistani and indian so the growth is happening and it's happening in some countries which today are relatively underdeveloped economically by growing fast and also low energy cities relatively speaking we'll come back to this later the shape around which these cities are growing is also significant when i took this picture a number of years ago above king saga in congo the area to the left the fields were empty i'm sure that by now the informal development with no planning at all have actually eaten up all the green space the green fields the agricultural land on the left-hand side and we know what the consequences of sprawl are we don't need detailed analysis even though many centers many research universities are looking at this very very carefully mexico city 22 million people one of the most sprawling cities of the world and has been that for some time has very very severe problems in terms of pollution because of fuel-based fossil fuel based vehicles moving across this vast surface with the air polluting air trapped on this plateau very high up now the statistics that i've talked about in cities have actually been and are being increased in terms of numbers by climate change crisis there's an unfortunate connection between the fact that many cities continue to uh contribute to climate change in a negative way by causing something like 70 of the world's co2 emissions which are forcing floods forcing fires and forcing people to move where to cities where often they are actually at risk because of the very conditions that cities are on they're on lakes they're on rivers they're on the edges of seas or in areas of danger these are let's call it natural disasters which are affecting people but of course we've witnessed in the last years particularly in europe at the moment the effect of let's call it man-made disaster wars in incredible suffering of people who are trying to leave war-torn areas syria and other parts of the middle east zone moving to european cities trying to find safety and jobs who knew that germany france italy and other countries had to absorb tens of thousands of people of different backgrounds and different experiences and how resilient our cities to absorb this change is one of the key questions that we need to understand in terms of the growth that is happening in terms of the global trends around the world it's important to see not just the size but the speed of change just look at these figures here china used in a couple of years in the early parts of the 21st century as much cement the number is 6.5 gigatons and the whole of the usa did in the 20th century that is the scale of change that cities like guan and others present to us in fact you see here this image of actually a well-planned quite efficient city like many other cities in china are but the images that we've produced at lse in our center show in the darker colors in the darker blue in the map on the left where guan zu was in 1990 and in the lighter blue how much it's expanded in the period up until 2015. the population has grown an astronomical number nearly a thousand percent 925 percent but the built up area how much it's spread out is over 3000 so there isn't a neat sync between the population growth and the sprawl and that creates extraordinary problems in terms of negative impacts on the environment and negative impacts on society which becomes to be thinned out and create levels of exclusion on the periphery there are other cities which of course provide much more positive examples singapore uh city-state which has also grown but by 88 in the same period in fact also densified by design and we'll come back to that in terms of the importance of good governance and massive investment in public transport now all these cities present environmental concerns but they also present profound social concerns this picture which has now become incredibly well known of a informal settlement of favela in uh in the city of sao paulo and brazil show two sides of the same coin of a city on the left you have an area with little sanitation poor levels of running water where people live in informal housing um it has its own economy it has its own form of social cohesion of course but on the right hand side with the wall in the middle you see what was then and we're talking about 10 15 years ago the height of the strong brazilian economy and the new middle classes so wealthy that they actually had a swimming pool on each terrace actually this photograph was retaken only a few years ago and the situation remains not dissimilar what you have in front of you it's not the same in every city around the world not in every city in brazil is poverty and wealth cheek by jowl the real problem is that there's a wall which keeps the two separate which is not how cohesive cities need to be designed and that is why we've studied at the lse this issue of inequality here are three cities london rio de janeiro hong kong showing you in the darker green compared to the lighter colors and then the gray where the most deprived people live most deprived means that they live shorter lives that they have lower levels of education uh certainly less income and other social deprivation measures and not every city is the same london has deprivation concentrated in the east and in the south i'll come back to that rio de janeiro has most of its deprivation concentrated on the much more poorer peripheral areas on the far west and hong kong has another dynamic but one can't think of cities in terms of wealth in terms of distribution without thinking of them as part of a global network of connection connections of people connections of information connections obviously of money and most importantly connections through sea and by air this diagram represents what saska assassin has been talking about for a number of years in her description of global cities they are not single entities they are interrelated and the information age is fundamental to that the access to uh technology and the speed of that technology is just as important as the good connections of airports and other transit systems but of course all that positive side of the connectivity of cities this very year that we are talking together about cities has come to be a negative the pandemic covert has spread through exactly those networks of connectivity airplanes in particular and it was the flights from wuhan originally to parts of the states to parts of italy and europe in fact which began to spread the pandemic in ways that we are still suffering the consequences are and the statistics are changing the numbers are growing still today and becoming actually worse even though the window of the vaccine is suddenly opening up other possibilities and every city has dealt with it in completely different ways asian cities so all in particular has been very effective at dealing with the control and spread of covert other cities in different countries particularly in europe but the united states is unfortunately at the moment as we speak one of the worst examples different cities have responded to the spread of the pandemic in different ways let's take europe for an example you see that the number of unexpected deaths or excess deaths as they're called in the medical industry in some cities like london or stockholm or some urban areas surrounding madrid or parts of holland have very different dynamics and madrid very very intense while in holland actually much lower the number of excess there so there is no one phenomenon such as density which defines how the spread of a disease can be controlled or is caused by spatial determinants again understanding cities and their complexities is essential to any person any student of the complexities of city life there are many layers in which they work let's use new york city as an example to understand some of these dynamics and the relationships between density and the spread of the disease and importantly inequality this aerial views shows right in the middle uh the central park and manhattan with the dense areas around it and then the three or four rather sprawling parts of new york city queens nearer to the bottom of the photograph bronx further up on the right staten island and so it goes on and these diagrams where you can see on the top left manhattan with central park and gray show on the left diagram the population density and darker colors and as you can see the highest densities are in manhattan in midtown as it's called or downtown but on the right hand map this is an image from may 2020 the level of deaths or the case rates of covert are in fact elsewhere they're not in the denser areas they're in the slightly outlying areas which are lived in mainly by black populations latinos and others in the bronx in queens and in staten island so in fact what has happened there is that covert has had a much more negative impact on their lives with more people dying more people suffering who belong to communities that have less access to welfare and different lifestyles and little to do with issues of density per se it's not a surprise that the discussion about what constitutes a safe and good city is now returning to some issues that have been boiling under the surface of the big urban debate for some time an image of a park in london where the recognition of having an urban lung a green urban lung as a place to get some fresh air maintain your mental health let alone your physical health as a sort of counterbalance to living in a small apartment is an obvious and important example and i'm delighted that it's coming back to the top of the planning agenda as is the notion of reducing the need for mass transit to get from a to b the parisian mayor and hidalgo who you see her on a bicycle has was re-elected only very recently on the basis of the 15-minute city in other words that you can go to work that you can get food that you can get all the basic social services like education health and more within a 15 minute walk or even cycle from your home not many cities will be able to adapt to that but certainly the dense multi-centered city of which the european city is a good example but also many asian cities are organized in that way is certainly a positive model so behind these global trends and these are behind even some of these problem issues that we're having to suddenly deal with lie solutions which i think bring the social the spatial and the environmental together but governance must be the central question which lies behind many of these issues i also am an architect like norman foster and many others who are speaking in this series but i have to say that for us to solve the problems of the city we need to work with urban leaders whether they're mayors or governors or in fact national presidents and it was a great architect charles career a friend of many of the speakers uh in this group who noted many many years ago that governance needed to be understood for cities to be part of the solution in the case of his country of india which of course is one of the most rapidly urbanizing in the world so in the second section let me look at the issue of governance before i turn to london and what's been happening there these two maps summarize the issue of governance and urban development in a very simple way on the left hand side you see in gray where people live homes buildings offices and with the pink you see the outline of the jurisdiction of the mayor of london where he has his powers where people vote and you can see that roughly and this is by design there's a alignment between where people live vote and pay their taxes by the way and where the powers lie now if you look at the other map on the right hand side of new york city in blue you see where the mayor whether it was michael bloomberg or bill de blasio at the moment has the powers the jurisdiction but the gray area spills way beyond that in fact into different states neighboring states which spill outside so people commute in use the services of new york city but don't necessarily contribute to its tax base and that is why and we'll see in a moment there's been some difference in the way that these two cities have dealt with transport investment with inequality education and much else but this has all come to the fore in these months because of the pandemic the voice of new york city was not the mayor and it was certainly not the president of united states donald trump it was the governor of new york state who actually dealt with all the infrastructure medical requirements and who issued uh decisions as to whether schools should be shut down in new york city or mass transit should be used in london we've actually had a very interesting experiment which has entered its 20th year so it's very new it's a very new experiment and we've had a directly elected mayor since the year 2000 here you see on the left ken livingston in the middle boris johnson of course today our prime minister and on the right sadiq khan our current mayor who is coming up for election and if you look at this diagram which we produce at the lse in blue you see the powers that central government has or federal government in red the powers of the mayor and in green the power of the next level or community level what we call the number level in green and in the middle you can see the mayor of london the new institution the mayor of london has powers over public transport the police the emergency services but also economic development including planning and now even housing and it is the mayor who determines what actually happens in the different boroughs with relatively little relatively little intervention from central government even though the tax money comes from them now look at exactly the same map of new york city there's a new line and that is the yellow line of new york state like texas for example or california and the state actually has more powers on some of the key infrastructure elements of new york city and new york is therefore than the mayor so transit again housing much of it is controlled by the state and that's why perhaps there hasn't been the sort of investment in this city that we've seen in london over the years a key spatial determinant that is controlled by the governors of these cities is obviously the planning component and the planning component determines the density or the sprawl if we were to take two different extremes and again at the lse we've looked at around 60 different cities around the world and compared their densities the taller the spikes on these comparative diagrams is not the height of the building but the number of people who live close together so for example mumbai which has not very tall buildings has enormous density people let's call it crammed together but hong kong with 30 40 story high buildings also has high density and look at the difference between new york and london london is closer to a flatter pancake than new york itself and of course density has many positive impacts in terms of economic agglomeration as my colleague ed glaser at harvard has written extensively about but it also has consequences on social equity and importantly access to drug jobs and public transport fact if one just looks at those same cities where i have just shown the density maps you can see that some of the densities like hong kong or mumbai have actually very high use of public transport because they are very efficient systems while others including london and of course i could be showing many others are less efficient because they're more sprawled but there is massive investment in the case of london new york and the richer more mature cities in public transport for at least 100 in fact london 150 years so let me complete my talk on global cities the trends that are underlying growth and change and the key issue of governance by looking at how these come together in the case of the city that i inhabit and live in this is view of a city at night in november looking at its most glamorous it is truly a global city undergoing dramatic change as we speak and we also saw this map before of how london is actually contained within a relatively defined area the so to speak the green belt and in fact it was in 1947 that the great planner patrick abercrombie decided with the greater london authorities that were in charge at the time to stop the growth of london stop it from becoming a mexican city or lagos and designed that green area which is the green belt where there is only agricultural land and then built a number of new towns beyond that highly connected through rail and and road to the commuter hinterland shall we call that it's a system that has actually worked quite well for london even though of course the costs of property have gone up and when the cost of property go up so does inequality and what you can see here is in the darker red colors on the right hand side of this image and on the bottom part in particular the higher concentration of deprivation i mentioned the parameters before actually there are eight or nine years difference in life expectancy between some parts of red areas on the right hand side and some parts of the green areas on the left-hand side the western areas which are more affluent red being more deprived and green being least deprived what you can also hear see here is that the edges of the city perhaps bizarrely less deprived more wealthy what we call stock broker belt um and it's actually some of the central and particularly eastern areas which are deprived for historic reasons they used to be where the working river which you could see there winding its way in from the east had most of the manufacturing and dock jobs and all those disappeared as the ports moved out beyond this image and jobs were lost so deprivation was sort of locked into these areas if you did this map of paris it would be completely different you'd have an affluent center and you'd have a periphery which was far more deprived and in fact also uh completely connected to ethnic distribution this is a slightly joking way of describing in simplistic language uh how this city london is actually organized so the inequality applies at many levels not just in terms of well-being which is what we were looking at social and economic determinants but also in terms of transport provision this diagram again you see the shape of london shows you in purple and red the best connected areas in terms of public transport and in blue the worst connected and it's not surprising that the center is actually well connected but there are also some some a few hot spots in the south in croydon in the far eastern areas and a bit in the north and some of the west which are actually well connected but much of east london is less well connected than west and central london so it's another form of deprivation and then if we look at green space provision public health public uh quality of public space and open spaces again you get another layer of uh inequality and and issues of access so when the city mayors were tasked as all three of them have been to produce a 25-year plan of how the city should grow how it should remain sustainable and how the city can remain more equal rather than unequal they produced effectively this diagram it's more or less the same for all three mayors over the 20 years and there are three simple rules keep the city within the greenbelt don't build over the edges allow more development particularly in x industrial what we call brownfield land in the eastern swathes of the city and where you see the stars promote higher density of development that can be housing hospitals offices places which create jobs as long and only and only if there is good levels of public transport so it's like spreading the public transport from what we saw before between to east and west and densifying creating more homes more jobs in those areas where there is good public transport so very recently there are these images of london that you can see from its uh strategic view corridors of a denser city actually growing before our eyes and it's only happened in the last 20 years by design this is the city of london traditionally the equivalent of downtown where major offices are all concentrated it's doubled tripled in size with a number of buildings that you can see in the foreground the same has happened further east along the river thames in the owl of dogs which for many many years was a completely desolate deprived area now it has excellent public transport and you can see the density not all of that is house is offices quite a lot of it is now housing similar things have been happening in central parts of london here is a disused railway station in the area called king's cross you can see on one side saint pancras the railway station that leads to the continent to paris to brussels with trains every couple of hours and on the right the king's cross station it used to be desolate the few rather dignified all the buildings in the middle and this is how this development which is nearly a three billion dollar four billion dollar private development is now growing google is moving its european headquarters here and there are something like 10 000 different types of people many living also in social housing who moved here to live take advantage of good transport facilities but also offices shop and much else at the heart of this project is an insistence on the quality of the public realm and this comes very much from the directives of the mayor's london plan london has completely changed the quality of its public spaces over the years and bessie there's a quid pro quo where does good plan transport where you have higher density you have to have very well managed and design public space and that's beginning to happen and i want to end with probably the best known example which i have to say i was happily involved in as the chief advisor to the london 2012 olympics for a number of years which is the transformation that has happened in that area of east london that we've looked at before the olympic games is always a closed event while it happens for the two weeks of the games and two weeks of the paralympics it's a tiny amount of time for a vast investment in the city and the winning master planners which fits into the ethos that i've been talking about did this diagram which was very very convincing at the time and is beginning to actually realize itself after a period of nearly nearly 20 years that will come nearly uh 15 years that we're coming up to now it's from a closed piece of city to an open and integrated piece of city very important concepts that i want to hang on to politically the idea of investing a lot of public money and we're talking about nearly 20 billion pounds euros 23 billion dollars into this part of east london and it's written here was that the ambition was that after 20 years of the games which is going to be not uh in about eight years from now those who live in east london have the same life chances as those who live in the rest of london so there's a social program behind the games and it's not just a two-day event it's also a spatial program of re-stitching together the fabric of a piece of city that by intent had been separated out from its surroundings because it was a railway goods yard that's what it was like only in 2005. a site empty surrounded by railways surrounded by motorways in fact but really redundant and not badly connected to public transport and this is what it's like now before and after it's happened in a pretty short period of time nearly just over 15 years you can see some of the stadia you can see some of the major facilities you can see completely new park but also what you're beginning to see is one of the best neighborhoods for families to live in anywhere in london i have to say and particularly for those who need support and affordable housing the image here in fact you can't tell what is private for sale and what is actually affordable or should we call subsidized housing because it was designed to be that way an area that a number of years ago remember that map of deprivation uh with the red on the right hand side lower levels of employment lower levels of education is also changing and has changed as a result not only of the olympics but also so for example in the middle of the site now institutions like one of the great museums of london the victoria and albert is building a new facility there uh two universities are building student and other research laboratories and facilities for something like 10 15 000 students dance and even the bbc is actually providing premises for its orchestra so that will bring a new demographic a new type of person to live in an area which also brings of course education wealth and different cultural social standards the mayor actually underpinned this project with a rather substantial contribution so you need a good planning vision you need financial support but you also need to get the private sector to buy into these long-term projects something like a hundred thousand i'm sure already more by now jobs have been created some of them uh long-term some of them for people who live in the area and some are for the new populations but of course not everything is perfect gentrification has pushed some people out the local community feels that not everything has been done to help them but only the new coming ones so it's a complex process which is what i've been wanting to talk about cities are not simple things the process of urbanization is something that is complex it takes time and is never complete i think any planner who comes along with a perfect diagram says this is how we're going to change city x or y with a perfect design is probably wrong and i think understanding these different levels of social economic and environmental complexity and the way that i've been talking about throughout this lecture is probably one way of trying to understand how these global trends which i talked about right at the beginning actually impact on the potential of cities to be more sustainable more integrated and more equitable in the future thanks very much for listening [Music] you

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Length: 39min 54sec (2394 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021