Interview

Ricky Burdett, Professor of Urban Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science; Director, LSE Cities and the Urban Age Programme, in conversation with Priya Shankar, India Lead, Urban Age, a programme jointly organized by LSE Cities and the Alfred Herrhausen Society, the international forum of Deutsche Bank.

 

You’ve talked about a global urban churn in your work; could you describe what is meant by this process of global urban churn?

I think the urban churn is a way of describing urbanization, and the fact that it has increased so dramatically over the last century, more so in the last decade. But the reason I use the word ‘churn’ is because it’s not just an increase in numbers, which it is, and an increase in the rate of urbanization or of people moving to cities, but it’s also a significant change in the social and ecological dynamics of living in cities. If you take cities like New York or London – they’ve grown a bit, but that’s not the change, that’s not the important thing. What is important is that the population living in those cities born outside of their native countries has increased dramatically over the years. And that’s a different form of churn. Then there are other parts of the world – Africa and parts of Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia – where the sheer number of people moving to cities is obviously a major factor. What is happening in many cities is a dramatic polarization of those at the top and bottom ends of the scale. So what churn implies is that there is a variation, not just of scale but in the social texture of what is actually happening, with enormous consequences for management, governance, policy and other aspects.

 

What do you think are the most significant challenges that are presented by current patterns and processes of urbanization, both for practice as also for research and theory?

I’d respond to that by saying that there are two big challenges that concern us – the social sphere and the environmental sphere. And by definition, anything which has practical consequences also has theoretical consequences. So, I think that it’s both wrong and naive to assume that these are not connected, even though most urban policymakers do not see their work as having anything to do with complex theory, but more as a technocratic response to technical issues like water, earthquakes, flooding, or poverty. They see these as technical matters instead of actually representing an ideology of how one makes a city more fair, more efficient or more accessible to different people. But I think the two issues staring us in the face are social and environmental.

The social challenge, which varies in different parts of the world but not necessarily, is best captured by the statistic that one out of every three new urban residents in the next 25 years, according to UN statistics, will be living in some form of a slum or another. I don’t particularly like the term ‘slum’ because of its negative associations; informal settlements can have a vibrancy about them and a sort of natural ecology which is important. But the fact that say a third of all new dwellers – certainly in some Indian cities, and even more than a third in African cities – will be living without access to basic infrastructure, sewers, clean water, hospitals, schools and so on, is a sort of time bomb. We need to understand and deal with these major challenges in completely different ways, in different parts of the world. There is no one size fits all, one standard response. It depends on economic development and socio-cultural factors, as to what solution you might or might not apply. But that is undoubtedly the major social challenge for cities.

The second challenge is environmental. Even though there is some disagreement among experts, broadly speaking there is a view that between 60-75% CO2 emissions in the world come from cities. For good reason because cities are engines of the global economies where people come together to do things, to trade in ideas and money, and in human knowledge. And that requires a large movement of people and machinery; hence, the use of energy. But, there are choices which I will come to when discussing the pragmatic side to whether one has a laissez faire attitude to growth, whereby it is likely that the level of carbon emissions will actually be made worse by poorly performing cities (Caracas, Sao Paolo, Mexico City, Los Angeles), or whether one uses the great advantage of critical mass to concentrate resources, make them more efficient, so that over time cities actually become part of the solution as opposed to part of the problem.

At a practical level, the dimensions of the social and environmental problems that I’ve highlighted are clear. Any policymaker needs to ask: Do I want to manage and design a city which promotes inequality, or one that doesn’t? Those are fundamental decisions that a policymaker has to make. And equally, for the environment: Do I or not want to run a city which actually reduces the energy footprint per person, or of my city? These practical issues are all about the provision of resources – water, sewers, electricity and everything else, public transport – rail based as opposed to car based; electricity based, not fossil fuel dependent. There are numerous practical things out there, wonderful examples of what one can do, not just at high cost but at an affordable level. There are theoretical issues that are allied to that, and it’s all to do with: Whose city is it?

The Lefebvre arguments for the rights to the city – argued forcefully by David Harvey and taken further by Richard Senett and Jane Jacobs in the context of New York – are about making cities concrete manifestations of a democratic model where openness is all about allowing people to be together. That’s actually a theoretical problem, and one needs to make a decision about how one will deal with this issue because from that flow practical decisions. Clearly, if one were to leave everything to the market, one will have an increasingly unequal city. In many South American cities, in particular, it is literally evident on the ground that rather than becoming more equal, they have become more unequal, as for example measured by the Gini index.

At the environment level too, there’s a theoretical question as to whether decisions should be made whereby trade-offs are about what an individual wants or what is good for the collective. For me, the analogy is smoking. 40 years ago an individual could say – I can smoke what I want, what’s the problem? Then we found it leads to cancer and you die, and second-hand smoking gives cancer to other people, and the costs to the welfare state and the workforce are enormous because people die younger with lung cancer. I think the environmental debate is exactly the same. It’s a discussion worthy of theoretical debate as to whether the desire to use ones own car in order to have the freedom for which one has worked 10-15 years is actually acceptable, given the fact of emissions and the collective good.

I’m talking about these two as if the social and environmental are separate things, but they come together if one considers the sort of decisions that civic leaders need to make in India and in Latin America, but also in the global North or Western Europe. Does one privilege public transport and what impact does that have in terms of divides between the elites and the poor – that is a sort of political question. And one is reminded that in New York and London and many other European cities – literally everybody uses public transport; if anything, those at the top use it more because it’s just efficient to get to work that way. Even though you might have high car ownership, car usage is low. So the consequences of creating a more cohesive society are related to those sorts of issues.

 

And if we were to turn that around and think about the opportunities that arise from this moment of transition, this global churn, do you think there are significant opportunities, and if so what might they be?

I’m very optimistic that cities always have been and will continue to be the place where good solutions abound. And that is because cities are where people come together and exchange ideas. Whether it’s at the university – from the first universities in Italy and Spain in the late middle age, early Renaissance Europe, to what happens in innovation clusters, technology hubs – it’s all about coming together and generating ideas. And the reason to feel optimistic about what is happening in cities is that the opportunities are being recognized and grasped. The greatest advantage, the greatest opportunity provided by cities is that you have lots of people together. What the opportunities are is for creative policymakers to make the most out of.

One is undoubtedly the revolution in information technology, and the ability that this gives people to actually spend more time together and exchange even more ideas. But also to have access to a series of services in a concentrated way which includes public health, as also access to democracy, so that decisions can be made collectively. I think that is an extraordinary opportunity around IT and technology. Just imagine what that can actually provide.

The second is in technical or transport areas where there has been a sort of revolution. Part of it is not just modernization; some of it is looking back at very conventional systems like the bicycle and walking. For example, London has seen an extraordinary change in terms of the number of people who use bicycles on a regular basis. Those are real opportunities; you can only do that when people are living close by, in flat landscapes and where it is not too hot or too cold. But I’ll never forget seeing pictures of cyclists in Copenhagen, where it snows for a number of months, not giving up their bikes even with cycle ways full of snow and ice. In other words, it’s all to do with an attitude of what constitutes the best way to live in a city. I think the opportunities of developments and recognition that certain technologies can provide efficient, green sort of access to ways of getting around the city.

The third opportunity is around planning, and that is to do with the decisions we increasingly have to take about the shape of the city. Now, this is where the discussion really becomes very political and not just about design. Because the notion to let a city just grow forever, which is in the interest of those who own land and speculate on land ownership, is also a model which has incredibly negative environmental and social consequences. Simply put, if you allow Sao Paolo or Mexico City to keep on spreading forever as they do, and the average person, usually the poorest person, commutes four hours a day, two hours there and back, usually in a bus or a car using diesel, the consequences for the environment are obviously extremely negative; so also are the consequences for individuals in terms of the waste of time and the psychological dimensions that are associated with that. The opportunity then as a planner is to rethink the compact, a well connected city. In other words, well designed cities that bring people closer together are really the opportunities of the future – anywhere in the world.

In Asia, Africa and Europe, perhaps less so in North America, there are fantastic examples of this. Go back, say to the Italian medieval hill town; you can see with the naked eye where the city stops and the rural environment starts. That’s what we are talking about, but that doesn’t just apply to medieval towns on top of a beautiful hill in southern Italy. A similar approach can be applied to Shanghai, London, New York or any of the growing cities in Asia. That by containing and retrofitting the city with the services that they require for people to live well – which includes schools, hospitals and also high quality public space, the institutions that allow us to be civilized with each other, community halls, museums, theatres, are all a part of this mix, which is multilayered literally as an architectural mix, but multilayered also in terms of the issues that one addresses and therefore take advantage of. The classic examples are Bogota and Medellin, cities which over the last few years have experienced an enormously difficult time because of drugs and warlords, enormous levels of violence. These two cities turned themselves around, first by investing in public transport infrastructure. The cable cars in Medellin, the BRT in Bogota, are not a stand-alone but always connected to programmes of public spaces – very well designed, beautiful schools, health centres right in the heart of these areas. So do I see in the growth of the African cities – Lagos, Kinshasa – where money is beginning to flow, an opportunity or a threat? The question is: Does one let everything go, or try to grab hold of it?

 

How should the disciplines of architecture and planning respond to these challenges and opportunities?

I’m sitting here talking to you as an architect, trained as an architect, teaching at the LSE. Therefore, as a designer working in a social science environment. Not because I don’t believe in aesthetics, beauty, proportion, light, materials, but because we can add value to what our profession does by being socially and environmentally aware. This goes way beyond doing buildings with a green roof, or only working on housing for the poor. There is a much bigger responsibility in the design profession, in which I include planning, architecture and landscape design as well, but also engineering, civil environmental engineering, public health – all really come into the mix. I think that the opportunity for the design professions to engage in this and be part of that discussion is something which I would strongly argue for. I wouldn’t be at the LSE running this programme that I do with many colleagues if I didn’t believe that. It’s not merely a matter of chance that I chose not to spend my career in an architecture school. That then means or often the cost of that is – where do you get experimentation? Where are you going to get the next Zaha Hadid or the next Norman Foster? I think what is happening is that the top-end of each design recognizes the social and urban conundrum and are wanting to engage in it as it happens.

Herzog and de Meuron, the major Swiss architects have pro-bono designed a gymnasium in the Brazilian town of Matao, which is basically where kids, mainly male teenagers, come off of the street and have something to do, and somewhere to go. Now this has also happened in Venezuela and Colombia and elsewhere. This is where I see a fantastic synergy between the aesthetic aspect – this is not only a beautiful building, but it also serves a profound social function, and you couldn’t do one without the other. Earlier there were architects that did social building, community planning and then the others came in. I think the more blurred these lines become the more interesting it becomes. And, of course, Rahul Mehrotra’s work in India is one of the best examples of that.

 

How do you think governments and policymakers should respond to these processes?

We’ve already talked about the fact that there are opportunities out there. In our programme, particularly with Urban Age, organized with Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society, over the last decade what we find is not good news, and this is what we see happening in most cities around the world. I’ve talked mainly about the positive examples, rather than keep on painting a depressing picture. But the reality is that most cities around the world, as the urbanization process gets more significant in sheer numbers, are becoming spatially more fragmented, by which I have in mind a gated community, or a housing ghetto and environmentally, certainly more destructive. I’m also thinking about more and more people going in cars. Or say in Johannesburg, they don’t have cars so they use other forms of communal transport, mini bus services and all that. This is dangerous because of rape, attacks on women; dangerous because the cars are not regulated; dangerous because of what they do to the air. And the third one is: less democratic – most cities are becoming less rather than more fair. That is often because those in charge of the cities are not equipped with what I would call the ‘intellectual tools’, which goes back to your question on theoretical framing.

Those in charge are not equipped with enough ideas, experience, knowledge, to try and solve things without doing it in a very traditional ‘here is a problem, let me solve it my way.’ Take a classic example. Here is traffic; let’s widen the road. That is not a good idea if you want to reduce traffic. The best way is to provide alternatives. Train the next generation of urban citizens at school from the age of six to walk to work with their parents. I think a very small percentage of cities are really grasping those opportunities. But that is ok. All we can do – and that’s why Urban Age is important – is to provide a platform for understanding these different layers in an interdisciplinary manner, mixing academics with policymakers, practitioners with theoreticians, designers with people making decisions on the ground – not just in order to provide best practice, which has its limits (best practices in New York do not help someone in Lagos, but best practice in Delhi could help Lagos at the moment, or vice versa), but by helping us see the problem in a fresh light. Far too often one sees how big cities – Mumbai, Rio – sometimes delegate the big vision making to corporate companies: ‘Can we get a McKinsey or a Deloitte to articulate our vision?’ But there is a problem there already. The vision needs to reflect the DNA, the soul of a city, which is made up of its space and citizens. We also know that there is a great tendency towards nimbyism – ‘not in my backyard’; no we shouldn’t do that because building a new railway or tram system will disrupt my neighbourhood.

But someone has to make a decision about the wider interests of that city in the long-term, and that’s why I am turning your question around: What is the best solution? There is no doubt that it is empowering the directly elected urban representatives – mayor, governor – someone who could be kicked out after five years if no good, not serving political parties or whatever. We haven’t mentioned corruption, but of course political power anywhere in a city lends itself to corruption when representing interests of people who own land, people who have an interest in some forms of infrastructure over others. Being able to vote leaders out of office within a specified cycle is a way that we actually keep a check in the system.

It is interesting to remind ourselves that a city like London – which has been around for over 2000 years, has had a sort of democratic form of governance for close to 1000 years, and was the first city to invent the system of local governance in 1870 – only in 2000, 14 years ago, decided to have a directly elected mayor. And I think that everyone, be it on the right or left, supporter of Ken Livingstone, independent then Labour, or Boris Johnson, who is a conservative figure – everybody recognizes the significance of having a mayor to put London back on the map, not just internationally as a global city which is a tired phrase, but just improving what it’s like to live here. And that is why London, despite being expensive, is seen as a fairer and more open city than it was 15 year ago. And I think that a change in the political system is part of that. It’s not just by chance that the mayors of London, despite being part of the same power system, are dramatically pro-migration, pro-openness. The Metropolitan Police Force in London is seen as extremely able at dealing with problems of radicalism because of the openness of its policy. Nothing is perfect; of course, you get harassment. The mayor is the Chair of the Metropolitan Police Force and he appoints its head. So that’s why the public figure or head of a city is increasingly significant. But let’s not kid ourselves. Many of the problems I articulated at the beginning of this response – insufficiently democratic, inequality, spatial fragmentation, environmental destructiveness – are sometimes fuelled by these individuals, either because they just don’t see what is going on, or because they are in the hands of vested groups. So the issue is not only complicated but persistent; we have had to deal with this problem for thousands of years, and it is not something we can solve overnight.

 

What are your impressions of Delhi?

Urbanism in India has a very particular characteristic, which I think, broadly speaking, is different from other areas. This is a broad generalization and difficult to back up. But broadly speaking, urbanization in India, which is something that has been there for a long time, enforces a sense of engagement with democracy because of its sheer intensity. The sheer number of people on the street that you are brushing shoulders with. And of course the writings of people like Suketu Mehta and many others who represent the notion of the city always as an opportunity despite the gross inequalities that exist. There is for me the sense of a lightness of touch of being in an Indian city, but there are many things I don’t see. I don’t go home to a place without a toilet. Those are things I don’t see. And the sheer density and intensity of human life on the street in the Indian cities is something which can be a challenge, especially as one moves down the social ladder and sleeps on the street.

At the same time, there is also the opportunity to make more of what already exists through the process of retrofitting. In a city like Delhi or Mumbai or Bangalore – take what is there and make it better. Don’t tear it down and start again. Take the discussion about Dharavi: Should you knock it all down and replace what people are living there in with apartment blocks 10-20 stories high, when this might actually kill the economy that exists on the basis of a very delicate interrelationship is for me a problem. I think lessons are being learned and Indian municipal governors, central government officials and politicians need to understand that the models of the 1960s and ’70s in America and elsewhere – the new town model, the slash and burn, the starting from scratch – are not the best solutions. There is a delicate process of working with the grain with what Delhi or any other Indian city needs to deal with, and there is an enormous depth to this grain. But what one requires is a way of describing that. And that has to do with theoretical framing and then the tools to actually describe and take it forward.