The future of the metropolis

Hanns-Uve Schwedler, European Academy of the Urban Environment

If we believe what the media tell us, the future of the metropolis looks bad. Traffic chaos, noise, polluted air, breakdown of law and order, anonymity, unemployment .... this list could be continued almost ad infinitum. Quite clearly the city has long since reached its zenith and is in danger of coming to an apocalyptic end. Dante's Inferno will seem like a summer holiday compared with what our cities are about to experience. And this is particularly true of our major cities, the metropolises.

The cliché of the ungovernability of the metropolis is on everyone's lips. All that means, however, is that we are abandoning the idea that we can do anything at all to avert the horror scenario I have just described. So we will sit back with our hands in our laps and enjoy life - as long as this is possible.

According to a United Nations' prognosis, by the year 2010 there will be 26 cities in the world with more than 10 million inhabitants. A total of nearly 400 million people will be living in these cities - the population of the Europe Union distributed over 26 cities.

The trend towards urbanisation cannot be stopped. The question is, is there an alternative to the scenario I have depicted, that of the end of the metropolis?

May I begin by attempting to define 'metropolis'. The study of metropolises has become established as a part of urban studies since the 1970s. The major cities of New York, Paris and London, to mention only a few, have been analysed over and over again. Although there is no such thing as THE metropolis, nevertheless most studies come to the conclusion that major cities are in a state of crisis. The conclusion is this: metropolises are shrinking:

Vu-foil 2 (growth of metropolises)

Even if researchers of metropolises are not like Churchill, who only believed the statistics he had doctored himself, this conclusion that metropolises are dwindling cannot possibly be correct. The reason is that the figures are based on population changes simply within urban administrative boundaries. But as we all know, cities today are settlement structures which are not bound by political demarcations. Cities are no longer surrounded by the city wall; the con-urbation extends much further than these old limits. If we look at population figures in the urban area the picture will tell quite a different story from the previous one:

Vu-foil 3 (growth in conurbations)

There is no need for me to go into the question of why cities have increased in area and incorporated 2nd magnitude cities in their catchment area; this has been done in numerous studies on suburbanisation. What has not been done is to revise current definitions of metropolises in the light of this process. As a representative example I would like to show you this definition by Häuîermann and Siebel in 1991:

Vu-foil 4 (definition of a metropolis)

So it is not possible to say exactly what a metropolis consists of, at what point a city becomes a metropolis, what figures are crucial. Of course, there clearly are some quantitative determinants. But what matters more are qualitative criteria.

As far as Europe is concerned, the question as to how the metropolises will develop and which metropolises may well be in the process of creation is almost certainly bound up with the criterion of the concentration of political elites. Most significantly, the capital cities in Central Europe are the ones which are loudly articulating the wish to become metropolises: Warsaw, Prague, Berlin, Budapest, Vienna. The wish may be connected with the search for a new image which all these cities so desperately need. Their old glory has gone for ever, so where do they go from here? What is more significant is that these cities are located in the area where the entire dynamies of political and economic change in the last decade has been and will continue to be focused. The genesis of the traditional metropolises reveals that the source of their progress into metropolises is to be found in global structural changes.

There will be new metropolises coming into being in Europe during the next fifty years - not mega-cities, but metropolises all the same. At least some of the Central European capital cities I mentioned - plus a number of others - will by then fulfil all the criteria. These capital cities are already what might be described as 'local' metropolises - only superficially a contradiction in terms. The cities are poised on the starting blocks. These are the cities which are at this very moment experiencing the stages of suburbanisation at a faster rate than any other cities in the continent.

What implications does this have for the future survival of metropolis? Does this appearance of several new metropolises represent a final flourish before the death rattle? Or is it possible that a qualitatively different city will arise?

It is my belief that the latter is the case - but only with a proviso: the paradigm of 'sustainable urban development' needs to be amplified, precisely because it needs to be tailored to metropolises.

The concept of sustainable development was first propounded in the report by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987, which has come to be known as the Brundtland Report. The actual text was:

"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

At first glance it may seem that such an all- embracing and - in the end - fuzzy definition could never be operationally verifiable - in our specific instance: able to be put into practice. The multiplicity of examples of best practice in urban development taken from all over the continent and which are continually presented and discussed at conferences like this demonstrate that this is far from the truth.

No, it is not a lack of possibilities to be put into practice, which makes the paradigm of sustainable development ineffective. What is patently obvious is that early ecological approaches, dealing as they did above all with natural processes in cities, were incapable of expanding to the target. The task of amplifying these approaches to urban ecology was taken up by Brugmann in 1992 and Tjallingii in 1994. It is useful to highlight three groups of ideas:

• cities are seen as physical eco-systems, involving flows of energy and nutriments, etc.
• cities are described as social eco-systems. In order to do this, concepts and approaches found in ecology are transferred to social systems; for example, relationships between population groups are described as symbiosis or parasitism, etc., etc.
• finally, cities are seen as case-studies in systems theory; examples of feedback effect, processes of generation, snowball effects are investigated.

If the relationships between a city and its hinterland are included in these analyses at all, nevertheless every one of them remains inadequate: they see a city as an island - perhaps only at high-tide! - but nonetheless as an island. What they fail to see is that cities, and as we have seen, this is all the more true of metropolises, have global interconnections. Cities are not enclosed eco-systems. The processes within them can therefore only be explained to a limited and unsatisfactory extent by use of the tools of biological ecology.

Please do not misunderstand me: ecological development is a necessary component for cities of the future. It is necessary, but by no means the panacea. What we need for our cities is a paradigm which takes full account of the challenges which are to come - and they are not only to be in the ecological dimension.

Metropolises, as the focal point for societal change, will be the first to have to face these challenges. In my view there are besides ecology - two other developments which will affect metropolises, and at a later date all towns and cities, to a dramatic degree. These two are:

• migration and
• information technology.

Migration.

Cities and migration have always been linked. Migration is not a new phenomenon they are facing:

Vu-foil 5 (Patterns of population movement)

This map only shows movements of population between continents; movement here is an escape. Those people who do get to Europe and North America are however only a fraction of the mass of refugees on the move. The migratory and refugee movements in a European Union dimension, that is within the countries of Europe, in Northern Africa and the Near East, are the ones which are affecting us to a much larger extend. If we compare the position with the traditional country for immigration in the 19th century, the United States of America, we can see that immigration has become a constitutive element in Europe as well; between 1950 and 1980, Europe took in roughly as many immigrants as the number entering America at the peak of immigration from 1850 to 1900. This is now the base line from which the city of the future has to proceed. People from the Third World escaping from hunger or political persecution will continue to arrive in Europe. In addition, the traditional reason for emigration, the tremendous economic gap between Eastern and Western Europe, still exerts its influence.

If Europe does not want to be drawn into the whirlpool of wars based on poverty, the continent will not be able to close its doors to refugees. Cities in Europe, in particular the metropolises, will have to be prepared to take in quite large movements of immigrants, because larger cities give immigrants a greater chance of assimilation and integration due to their greater complexity and diversity. There is no way round this integration; many studies indicate that integration into their new society is a goal for the immigrants too (if one lets them):

Vu-foil 6: migration model

Admittedly, this model is derived from research in the East, but the structures detected can almost certainly be applied to European cities and the attitudes of immigrants there. This implies that a metropolis needs to speed up and encourage the integration of immigrants, both spatially and in other ways.

A city where immigration is a predominant feature is characterised these days by ethnic quarters. These are both a first refuge and permanent settlement for the majority of immigrants. A city which makes integration possible cannot dispense with first port of call areas. They provide initial orientation and support in the new situation. However, they must not be allowed to become permanent locations for the individual immigrant. This means the city must bring about no more and no less than a dismantling of the present socio- functional separation, in order to provide sufficient points of contact to enable the multi-cultural society to develop. Not only separation between different ethnic quarters, those between residential and industrial or commercial areas must be broken down as well and architects and planners must be challenged to plan buildings and districts in such a way that the needs of people from a variety of backgrounds can be met.

It is quite amazing to realise to what extent these demands on a city which is open to immigration coincide with those for an ecologically based city.

Information society

The word 'internet' is on everyone's lips, there is talk of 'data highways', of removing the distinction between home and work place, that we live in an information society. As applied to cities this would mean that they are no longer necessary. Employees could live in the country and do their work from the computer keyboard. I don't need to attend a university of the traditional kind any more in order to study. Service industries can carry out their work from the smallest village far away on the periphery of the country. It could be Los Angeles, but also somewhere in the marsh. The attraction for the firms is of course being able to pay lower wages; they couldn't do this in a city, and certainly not in a metropolis.

Does this all mean that the city's time is up? I would put forward three arguments to the contrary:

1. it may be useful to offer jobs to the inhabitants in structurally weak regions by means of new technology. But seen only from the point of view of land use it cannot be ecologically desirable to contribute to the flight from the city in this way.
2. regions with an excessive proportion of low wage inhabitants only continue to be cheap as long as there is no large supply of jobs. Demand raises prices - this truism applies just as much to the labour market.
3. data highways do just what their name implies - they transport data. And data are only one component of information, of knowledge. Our economy, like other facets of our society, is dependent on ever more complex knowledge. "Knowledge-based societies" - and 1996 has been designated the Year of life- long learning - are based not on information alone in the sense of amassing data, but on knowledge derived from personal contacts. The more diverse the opportunities to acquire knowledge become, the more comprehensive are the opportunities for learning by social contact, the greater the likelihood of being able to respond appropriately to the demands of radically- changing economies.

These are the massive opportunities open to metropolises. If the contention that information technology has made the question of location irrelevant is true, then the corollary of this is: why not the city? Just the cost factor itself is not sufficient argument. If we accept the ramifications of a 'knowledge-based society', the city is streets ahead in all respects because of its complex nature. And once again the metropolises, the yet more complex settlements, are in a position to lead the way.

Conclusion

Briefly to sum up the challenges which metropolises have to cope with and which will result in the appearance of new metropolises:

1. Ecology: the demands of this challange are generally accepted, even if implementation is lagging behind.

2. Migration: this is not often considered; planners and decision makers more often perceive it as a disruptive factor, not as formative for the metropolis).

3. Information technology is seen as a source of competition, rather than as a major source of opportunity for just this most complex of all human settlement forms, the metropolis.

What we need is not a different paradigm other than that of sustainable urban development. What we do need is to change the orientation of the paradigm in view of the present challenges to cities which I have described: away from the still resource-fixated and thus and in the end natural science oriented paradigm. The new aspects are close at hand - they can even have the effect of releasing synergies. Migration and cultural diversity on the one hand, complex and multifarious knowledge on the other, these are two sides of a mutually complementary perspective on the future. We noticed the similarity between at least some of these challenges, that of migration and of ecology. Both of these pressures are pulling us in the same direction. All we need to do is perceive the overall context which makes sense of them.