Tearing down the quest for a better city

By Jonathan Power

ISTANBUL, Turkey (JP): "What did these vain and presumptuous men intend? How did they expect to raise this lofty mass against God when they had built it above all the mountains and clouds of the earth's atmosphere?" asks Saint Augustine about Babylon in his City of God. Yet, it could easily be David Satterthwaite writing about An Urbanizing World in his splendid book prepared for Habitat, the on-going UN Conference on Human Settlements. Or it could be Jonathan Raban in his collected essays on metropolitan life, Soft City. The city, he writes, "has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of festering guilt: A dream pursued and found vain, wanting and destructive."

Saint Augustine wrote The City of God in a state of sorrowful contemplation of a succession of earthly cities. The city of man, he believed, ought to be a harmonious reflection of the city of God; in actuality it is vulgar, lazy and corrupt, a place so brutish that it lacks even the dignity of the satanic. St. Augustine would perhaps surely write the same way today if reincarnated in Istanbul, Chicago, Liverpool, Jakarta, Bogota, Bombay or Johannesburg. Johannesburg? Who can forget Alan Paton's dark description of that damned city?

"We shall live from day to day, and put more locks on the doors, and get a fine fierce dog when the fine fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold onto our handbags more tenaciously, and the beauty of the trees by night and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things shall we forgo. We shall forgo the coming home drunken through the midnight streets and the evening walk over the starlit veldt. We shall be careful, and knock this off our lives and that off our lives, and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution."

When that was written 30 years ago Johannesburg was almost an oddity. Now it is becoming the norm and we watch apparently helpless as any number of large cities seem to be sucked into a vortex of urban blight, unimaginative planning, a drug-ridden underclass and ever more daring criminal gangs. But there is another instinct, close to us too, that orders us to construct a better city. Plato did this in his Republic. Napoleon III asked Baron Haussmans to build in Paris a beautiful city. Cesar Manrique has shown in Spain's Lanzarote how if the authorities give one sensitive man leeway to impose a vision what could have been just one more bleak Canarian high- rise holiday island can become a restful and aesthetic architectural feast.

High-rise? Dreamers can be dangerous. Le Corbusier's vertical city with the skyscraper's towers blocks of prestressed concrete must be man's worst attempt at the soulless "lofty mass" since St. Augustine's Babylon.

At the last Habitat conference 20 years ago in Vancouver, Canada, the journalistic scare was that the world was going to be overwhelmed with "exploding cities" and "megacities." In fact we can now see that most of the world's largest cities have had relatively slow population growth rates. Indeed, many of these "exploding" conurbations have had more people moving out than moving in, including Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro and Calcutta. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of Third World inhabitants still live outside centers with 100,000 or more people.

Nevertheless, if there was a smaller increase in big city populations than expected there was a more rapid increase in the scale and intensity of urban poverty. Even this we must get in perspective. As David Sattarthwaibe says, "the rapid growth of illegal settlements in and around cities should not be viewed as the growth of slums but as the development of cities which are more appropriate to the local culture, climate and materials than the plans produced by the governments of these same cities."

The origins of deepening poverty often lie not in the squatter settlements themselves but in the unrealistic attitudes of government and aid agencies towards them. What these should be doing is not hampering or short-changing the settlers -- the poor regularly pay water vendors 10 or 20 times the price paid by the middle classes with their government-organized piped water -- but to make sure they get all the basic services of the city: water, electricity and sanitation. Moreover, the authorities must introduce a legislative and regulatory system to protect squatter citizens from being exploited by landlords and employers.

The true planners and builders of Third World cities are often the poor themselves. St. Augustine would have embraced them. So should we.