URBAN 21. Future Urban Lifestlyles
Future Urban Lifestyles
Entwicklung städtischer Lebensformen und Lebensstile
Overview
Author:
Sir Peter Hall
University College London
Bartlett School of Planning
in collaboration with:
Stephen Day
Hoang Huu Phe
Judith Ryser
David Sloan
Kurzfassung – Abstract
Mit Hilfe von Szenarien zu Lebens- und Arbeitsbedingungen im Jahr 2025 in ausgewählten Städten mit
unterschiedlichem sozio-ökonomischem und
geschichtlichem Hintergrund werden für den World
Report on Urban Future zukünftige Stadtentwicklungen
bis zum Jahr 2025 aufgezeigt. Es wird der Frage
nachgegangen, wie politische Maßnahmen – heute
getroffen – den zukünftigen Alltag in Städten
beeinflussen könnten.
Als Beispiele wurden die Regionen
– Großraum London und New York (anglo-american
capitalism)
– Karlsruhe – Straßburg – Freiburg – Basel – Zürich
(Rhineland capitalism)
– Hongkong – Guangzhou-Macau-Dreieck
ausgewählt.
Bei den anglo-amerikanischen Städten erfolgt dabei eine
thematische Konzentration auf wirtschaftlich bedingte
Aspekte der Stadtentwicklung mit den Konsequenzen für
Lebens- und Arbeitsbedingungen. Das Szenario
beschreibt eine hohe soziale Polarisierung und
räumliche Segregation der dort lebenden Bevölkerung
mit hohen beruflichen Risiken, anwachsender
Kriminalität, usw.
Bei den gewählten mitteleuropäischen Städten stehen
die Auswirkungen der Verkehrspolitik im Vordergrund:
Erreichbar erscheint eine hohe und zugleich
umweltfreundliche Mobilität durch gut ausgebauten
ÖPNV in Klein- und Mittelstädten, die die Vereinbarkeit
von Familie und Beruf, nachhaltige Lebensstile usw.
ermöglicht. Deutsche Leser mögen ob der
prognostizierten „heilen Welt” den Kopf schütteln – im
internationalen Vergleich dürften mitteleuropäische
Verhältnisse jedoch tatsächlich eine „heile Welt”
darstellen.
Bei den ostasiatischen Städten versucht das Szenario
aufzuzeigen, wie der spezifische kulturelle,
geschichtliche und politische Hintergrund dieser
Weltregion eine anglo-amerikanische Entwicklung
modifizieren könnte: Die Risiken des angloamerikanischen Typs werden durch traditionelle Werte –
familiäre, nachbarschaftliche Beziehungen, soziale
Kontrolle – abgefedert.
With the aid of scenarios of living and working conditions
in selected cities with different socio-economic and
historical backgrounds, future urban development is
described until the year 2025 for the World Report on the
Urban Future. Suggestions are made concerning the way
in which political decisions taken today can influence
everyday urban life in future.
The following regions were selected as examples:
– Greater London and New York (Anglo-American
capitalism)
– Karlsruhe – Strasbourg – Freiburg – Basel - Zürich
(Rhineland capitalism)
– Hongkong – Guangzhou – Macao – Triangle.
The Anglo-American cities are considered with a thematic
focus on the economic aspects of urban development and
their consequences for living and working conditions. The
scenario describes the strong social polarization and
spatial segregation of the local population with high
employment risks, increasing crime etc.
In the discussion of the selected Central European cities,
prominence is given to transport policy: It seems that high
and environment-friendly spatial mobility can be
achieved by means of well-developed local public
transport systems in small and medium-sized cities. This
makes family life and employment compatible and allows
sustainable lifestyles. German readers might shake their
heads when reading about the intact world described in
the forecast. In an international comparison, however, the
Central European conditions probably really constitute an
intact world.
In the scenario about Eastern Asia, the author tries to
show how the specific cultural, historical and political
background of this area could modify an Anglo-American
development: The risks of the Anglo-American type are
moderated by traditional values – family, neighbourhood
relationships and social control.
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33
Future Urban Lifestyles
1 Introduction
This is a study of urban change from the
individual viewpoint. Its central aim is to
understand how processes of urban
change, currently taking place and likely to
continue, will affect the quality of the
citizen’s everyday life in the year 2025. To
that end, it considers three main type cases
among a myriad of possible types:
– the Atlantic World City, represented by
New York City and London,
– the Central European EnvironmentFriendly City, represented by Freiburg,
Karlsruhe, Basel, Zürich and Strasbourg;
and
– the
Eastern
Asian
Mega-City,
represented by the cities of the Pearl
River Delta including Hong Kong and
Guangzhou.
The central argument of the report is that
though urbanisation trends are remarkably
uniform and strong across the world, their
manifestation in lifestyle and quality of life
varies remarkably from one city to another
and from one kind of city to another. The
most important trends are:
1. Continuing growth of cities, including
large cities: especially (but not
exclusively) in the South, and
particularly in Asia.
2. Continuing stability of the urban
hierarchy: the major cities are likely to
keep their relative position, though
those in the South will continue to gain
relative to those in the north; however,
the growth of these larger cities is likely
to slow everywhere, and may be subject
to economic perturbations.
3. General deconcentration or diffusion,
especially of the largest urban areas:
relative shifts of both residential
population and employment, from
central cities to their suburbs, and to
freestanding medium and smaller cities
within the general urban ambit. This
includes the development of so-called
Mega-Cities or megalopolitan corridors,
especially in eastern Asia. The general
result is that the growth of larger cities
will slow in relation to cities lower in the
urban hierarchy, but within relatively
easy access from these major cities
[broadly, a range of up to 140
kilometres], as has long been observable
in Northern cities such as London and
New York City, and is now also
noticeable in Southern cities such as
Mexico City.
4. Continuing
progression
toward
service- and information-based urban
economies, especially in the North but
increasingly also in the South: in both,
development of an internal functional
differentiation, with higher-level (“world
city”) informational service functions
continuing to concentrate in the cores of
the central cities of megalopolitan
regions, and more routine services and
manufacturing decentralized both to
smaller cities in the “metropolitan
ambit” [as observable around London
and New York City, and now developing
in the Pearl River Delta Mega-City] but
also to selected peripheral provincial
cities, such as Leeds, Glasgow and
Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK, or
Omaha and Salt Lake City in the USA.
All these trends are very general, affecting
Northern and Southern cities alike. But
they impact on them in very different ways,
with critical results for the style and quality
of life in different cities. This depends
fundamentally on the way that urban
growth is mediated by the prevailing
economic, social and political system in
different countries and major regions of the
world.
Models of Contemporary Capitalism
Underlying these differences is the thesis
that even advanced, highly-urbanized
economies in the 1990s are by no means
homogeneous;
different
forms
of
contemporary capitalism result from deep
cultural differences that may originate far
back in history:
– an Anglo-American form of capitalism,
characterized by a strong emphasis on
entrepreneurial
innovation,
free
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Urban Future
competition and deregulated labour
markets;
– a
mainland
European
model
[“Rhineland capitalism”], characterized
by stronger frameworks for the
regulation of enterprises, managed
labour markets, employee protection,
codetermination in management, and
generous social benefits;
– a Japanese or Pacific Asian model,
characterized by low public spending as
a percentage of GDP, relatively weak
social benefits and emphasis on self or
family provision, consensus in decisionmaking in both the economic and
political spheres, and cooperative
management processes to improve
quality in the workplace.
These different capitalisms produce
different
urban
structures,
urban
organization and quality of urban life.
There are limits to globalization of
the economy and even more so to
the globalization of culture.
Though
new technologies, especially transport
technologies, have changed and will
change all cities in broadly the same ways,
leading especially to deconcentration and
dispersal in the 20th century, older histories
still have a powerful imprint on the form
and the functioning of the city.
The report then goes on to consider three
representative case studies of city types,
each representing one distinctive style of
contemporary capitalism.
2 The Atlantic World City
The “World City” is a distinctive type
of great city, not necessarily a capital
city, which is characterised by its
global connections.
Such cities have
characteristically shed manufacturing and
goods-handling to other cities but remain
uniquely strong in high-level services.
London and New York City, considered in
this chapter, are archetypes.
Not necessarily all citizens of such
cities consider themselves “world citizens”.
They may be suburbanites with weak
connections to the central core, or routine
service workers, or members of segregated
ethnic ghettos. But all experience the
attractiveness of the great city, and many
have migrated there to find their fortunes,
even if they are unsuccessful.
The unique characteristic of the economies
of these cities is their dependence on
groups of interlocking advanced services:
finance and business services, “command
and control”, creative and cultural
industries, and tourism.
These are
especially concentrated in the urban cores
and in specialised extensions of these cores.
These require highly-educated, highlyskilled workers who are highly productive
and who generate high incomes. But,
especially through multiplier effects, they
also generate large numbers of unskilled
jobs, and the rapid structural change in the
economy may also produce high rates of
unemployment among certain groups,
concentrated in certain areas of the
city: a situation of extreme stratification
or polarisation.
Middle-class workers,
formerly in secure careers, may find
themselves part of a casualised clerical
labour force.
The physical fabric of the world cities
reflects a long history of complex publicprivate interaction which has produced the
structure of commerce and housing, and
also the transportation infrastructure that
connects them. There is an important
public space of streets and squares and
parks, formerly the responsibility of the
public sector, which has increasingly fallen
victim to physical decay and to partial
privatisation.
So large and complex are the world
cities, especially when their suburban
areas are included, that they very seldom
have a completely rational structure of
government.
In London the Greater
London Council was abolished in 1986,
though there are firm plans for a new
Greater London Authority; New York City
forms only a small part of a wider
functional region, which is divided among
three states and hundreds of local
government units as well as specialised ad
hoc agencies.
There are fundamental questions about
the future of the world cities in the 21st
century. Some argue that the revolution
in information and communications
technology will increasingly make them
irrelevant, allowing activities to spread
across the globe; others counter that faceto-face contact will still be vital in
generating innovation and creativity. On
balance, it appears that the world cities face
no fundamental threat as yet. But they will
need continuously to innovate, in order to
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provide new jobs to compensate for those
that will be lost to other cities, regions and
countries. And quality of life issues will be
increasingly important in attracting people
and activities; public confidence may easily
erode if they are seen as dirty, dangerous,
inefficient, polluted and unpleasant. Here,
in particular, a city like London faces major
challenges from smaller cities on the
European mainland – examples of which
are considered in Chapter 3.
3 The Central European
Environment-Friendly City
This chapter presents a special but very
important case study: a group of
free-standing,
medium-sized
“model
environmental cities” in the upper Rhine
valley, an area which straddles the borders
of Germany, Switzerland and France [in
particular, Karlsruhe, Freiburg, Strasbourg,
Basel and Zürich]. Each of these cities
became notable for its outstanding record
during the 1980s and 1990s of urban
innovation for sustainable development –
most notably, by planning to counter the
adverse impact of vehicular traffic on the
urban environment, by restricting car use
and promoting other forms of transport.
The chapter starts by looking at general
trends affecting urban growth in central
Europe. As around London and New York
City, people and jobs are deconcentrating
from the city to wide suburban and exurban
areas, including smaller towns in the rural
hinterland; the quality of the traditional
European “compact city” is being eroded.
The gainers are smaller and middle-size
cities, which offer a better human scale and
a more attractive environment. In those
parts of Europe where the large city has
never dominated, including much of
southern Germany and Switzerland, there
is a real hope that the entire range of cities
might prove to offer sustainable urbanism
and a good quality of life.
The key to this is through transport policies.
Though many European cities have proved
innovative and radical in developing new
policies during the last twenty years, the
report concentrates on a group with an
outstanding record, located in south-west
Germany, north-central Switzerland and
south-east France.
Interestingly, these
cities are among those with the highest
levels of GDP in Europe and in the world;
35
they have reacted against the impacts of
high car ownership. Technological means
to control traffic have been tested and
found wanting; the alternative is to
restrict car traffic and to promote public
transport, cycling and walking. This goes
hand in hand with land use policies in
favour of compact cities and mixed-use
development. This is not without problems
in the mobile, multiple-career household
of the 1990s. One answer is through
regional planning for “concentrated
deconcentration”, with a central mediumsized city surrounded by a number of
smaller cities, all compact and all linked by
good public transport. This can include
both nearby satellites, and more distant
freestanding towns.
Each of the case study cities has adopted a
similar bundle of policies, with local
variations: nearly all have introduced userfriendly travel cards for public transport,
available regionally; they have promoted
public transport priority over the car; they
have begun to develop new residential
areas structured around public transport;
Karlsruhe has introduced its Stadtbahn, a
revolutionary tram which shares tracks with
main-line trains as well as running on city
streets; they have promoted bicycle use
through extensive bicycle lane networks;
they have traffic-calmed wide areas of
their cities; and they have consciously
sought to restore their city centres for
living, working and cultural use, by
promoting redevelopment of disused
industrial or railway lands for housing, and
by improving the quality of the public
spaces. This has produced some dramatic
results, with big increases in public
transport use and reductions in the share of
car commuting.
These cities have had considerable success,
partly because – traditionally under the
federal constitutions of Germany and
Switzerland, increasingly in France since
the 1980s – they have had considerable
autonomy, including financial autonomy,
to manage their own affairs. They are thus
able to learn from each other, imitate
each other and compete with each other
to improve environmental quality. Public
attitudes, which are very advanced in this
part of Europe, have also encouraged city
administrations too take radical actions.
This pattern of life, made possible by
a combination of policies – energy
conservation, land use planning, transport
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Urban Future
– has been widely hailed throughout
Europe and the world as a model of
sustainable urbanism. However, it is not
without problems. The most important is
the growth of longer-distance commuting
in dual-career households, including crosscommuting by car between smaller centres
that have developed as independent
employment nodes under regional plans,
but are not so well served by direct
rail connections. This will require new
strategies: higher fuel taxes, selective road
pricing, encouragement of ride-sharing
through high-occupancy vehicle lanes
and preferential parking spaces, the
development of para-transit systems
utilising light vehicles transitional between
the bus and the taxi, and development of
new communities along widely-spaced
public transport corridors where the scope
for cross-commuting is necessarily more
limited.
The final problem is that the policies could
have prove if anything too successful: by
offering a high quality of life, these
medium-sized cities could encourage a
flood of in-migration from other parts of
Germany and of Europe. The consolation
could be that many other regions have
emulated the policies in self-defence, with
some recent degree of success in stemming
the flow.
4 The Eastern Asian Mega-City
The recent growth of urban areas in the
Asia-Pacific region is without precedent in
world history: it is equivalent to the
creation of a middle-size European city
every week, and is creating several
examples of the mega-city, a vast
polycentric complex of over 10 million
people. Thus it poses serious challenges
to almost all existing theories of
urban development. The process is fuelled
by
globalisation
of
export-oriented
production and by huge flows of capital to
the centres of the new productive regions,
partly to finance physical development.
Cities in this region exhibit a clash of
two opposite principles: a flexible,
adaptability-oriented approach based on
the principle of competition, and a strong,
intentional approach toward urban
development. The position of a city on this
continuum defines its character. The more
“intentional” a city is, the more life
style of its inhabitant differs from the
common, or universal norm, or special.
The less intentional cities are, therefore,
more cosmopolitan. Thus Beijing is an
“intentional” city, and has a different style
from, say, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or
Taipei.
The cities closer to the “intentional” end of
the continuum may lead in indicators
related to the traditional “nation building
goals”, such as low pollution, more
generous spatial standards, better health
care, etc., institutions of high-culture
(theatres, concert halls, etc.) while the city
located nearer to the laissez-fair end may
lead in indicators related to commercial
activities (number of cars, restaurants,
cinemas per capita), and personal stimuli
(recreation and entertainment). Since the
end of the Cold War, and under the
influence of trans-national capital, these
two models have demonstrated a partial
convergence. What is distinctive about
many of these cases, however, is that the
growth of mega-cities is seen as part of a
conscious nation-building process in which
physical development plays a key role.
The physical expression of this process is
very complex, with multiple nuclei, with
elite groups continuing to occupy the most
accessible positions near the cores – a
contrast, so far, with the Anglo-American
and European trends. However, the more
“intentional” a city is, the more the
lifestyles of its inhabitants are likely to
depart from the norm, and vice-versa:
Beijing will offer more surprises than
Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or Taipei, which
will share many common “cosmopolitan”
features. “Intentional” cities may perform
better on features like health standards or
pollution, while “cosmopolitan” cities will
score higher on indices of private
consumption. Similarly, these laissez-faire
cities will experience more frequent and
extreme development cycles.
The chapter considers the Pearl River Delta,
an archetype of the new Pacific Asian megacity. One of the fastest-growing regions of
the world in terms of output and of
urbanisation during the 1980s and 1990s, it
has a highly differentiated urban structure
with Hong Kong as command and control
centre, linking with the outside world, and a
number of networked production cities in
the interior of the region. This can be called
a pattern of “exo- urbanisation”, essentially
controlled by the flow of external capital
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with the blessing of the Chinese
government. There are serious resulting
problems, not least the rapid importation
of western standards and values which the
regime would rather exclude. Certainly, for
the future, such a region will continue to be
in the vanguard of areas through which
cosmopolitan norms are imported. But
major differences will continue to exist
within the region, in terms both of physical
quality of life and of lifestyle, between the
cosmopolitan “command and control”
centres fed by international flows of
capital and information, and the centres
of
technological
development
and
production. The result is likely to be a bipolar model of development with
continuing tensions between the poles and
their respective elites.
The future two-pole structure of the Pearl
River Delta, based on the twin centres of
Hong Kong and Guangzhou, will have
profound for the lives and lifestyles of the
residents.
First, in transport and communication
terms, the region will enjoy some of the
most advanced forms of mass transit urban
transport, both because they will be needed
for logistical purposes, in particular
movements of labour, and also for symbolic
reasons and “showcase” functions.
Second, in terms of skills and occupations,
a process of polarisation will gradually
sort
the
migrants
between
two
roughly established sectors: finance/
business
and
science/technology/
production. A substantial part of the both
socially
and
geographically
mobile
residents, who are flocking to the two poles,
will be intra-urban migrants rather than
in-migrants.
Hong Kong will attract
entrepreneurs
and
service
sector
workers (entertainers, domestic workers,
craftsmen), while Guangzhou will attract a
large number of blue-collar workforce and
the technocrats. The social implications of
this polarisation will be visible, both in
family composition and the pattern of
consumption.
Third, in terms of the built environment,
Hong Kong will retain its vital and diverse
urban landscape with a myriad of stimuli,
while Guangzhou will be a setting for urban
planning and urban design experiments
with eclectic styles, rigid standards, and a
series of mega-projects driven by prestige
and technocratic (over)optimism.
37
Fourth, awareness of environmental quality
is an increasingly important factor in urban
development. It is worth noting the almost
obvious fact that the long term prospect of
good environment is better in more
deliberately planned cities than otherwise,
barring serious unintended technological
oversights. If experience of adaptable-type
cities such as Bangkok or Manila is any
indication, it can be predicted that
somewhere half-way from now to 2025, the
environment in Hong Kong will suffer
near-limit pollution (especially in sea
water) before getting better. On one hand,
funding
necessary
to
tackle
the
environmental issues (such as treatment of
the notorious sewage contamination of the
sea water and sub-standard housing) is
simply beyond the available means, on the
other, the environmental threat may serve
as a convincing justification for much
needed de-population of the most crowded
city in the world acrimonious political
repercussions.
5 Comparisons and Conclusions
The first conclusion is that the broad
secular long-term trends will persist:
– Continuing growth of cities, including
large cities;
– Continuing stability of the urban
hierarchy;
– General deconcentration or diffusion,
especially of the largest urban areas;
– Continuing
progression
toward
service- and information-based urban
economies.
These trends are related and are mutually
reinforcing. They are likely to be further
fortified by other features that have begun
powerfully to emerge during the 1980s and
1990s:
And they will be fortified by emerging
trends and issues:
1. The
environmental
imperative:
Internationally and nationally, as well as
at local citizen level, there will be
increasing political pressure to conserve
non-renewable resources, to reduce
emissions and to limit greenhouse
gasses. The European cities considered
in Chapter 3, which during the 1990s
have demonstrated something of a world
lead, indicate what is likely to happen in
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Urban Future
many other places during the first
decade of the 21st century.
2. The search for quality of life: Cities
increasingly compete, not on the basis of
access to materials, but in terms of
intangible factors like cultural and
artistic riches, or a good quality of
urban living.
As suburbs become
more homogeneous, cities promote
themselves as the places that are
distinctively different, especially for
affluent professionals with new lifestyles
(particularly single households and
childless couples). Though the world’s
largest cities offer unequalled cultural
riches, these are compromised by the
fact that their quality of life is reduced by
traffic, long journeys to work, high
property values and rents, pollution,
crime and other social problems;
medium-sized cities [like Dublin,
Munich, Zürich and Barcelona], which
work harder to improve their local
environments,
therefore
compete
vigorously with them, especially in
attracting niche “World City” functions.
3. Social Polarisation: At least in the AngloAmerican version of capitalism, and
perhaps increasingly in the Rhineland
and Asiatic versions, the larger cities are
characterised
by
an
increasing
dispersion of real income between rich
and poor city-dwellers, with a
“disappearing middle” representing the
jobs that are exported to other places.
This is a result partly of economic shifts
which produce relatively large numbers
of highly-qualified and highly- paid
“informational services” jobs and of lowpaid, casualised “MacJobs”, and partly of
long-term structural unemployment
among large sections of the population
who formerly found employment in the
manufacturing and goods-handling
sector. This produces an increasingly
polarised society, with upper-income
high-consumption enclaves next door to
low-income ghettos dependent on
casual service work and welfare
payments. The quality of life of these
citizens clearly demonstrates extreme
contrasts, even though they occupy the
same geographical space.
Typically, such a situation was
characteristic of major cities in countries
undergoing rapid development (e.g.
19th-century
Europe
and
North
America; 20th-century Latin America).
Now, however, it seems to have returned
to the cities of the advanced world,
which earlier [in the “welfare state” era
of the 1950s and 1960s] appeared to have
passed through this phase and out of it.
A new wave of immigration is one
contributory factor in many such cities;
but
economic
restructuring,
in
particular the decline of well-paid
unionized
jobs
in
traditional
manufacturing and goods-handling
occupations, is another element that
impacts on old blue-collar workers and
new immigrants alike.
4. Continuing economic instability: quite
apart from the operation of the business
cycle, the contemporary economy
is
characterised
by
permanent
perturbation,
induced
by
the
processes of globalized competition. As
demonstrated by the history of Eastern
Asia in the 1990s, it is all too easy to pass
through a wave of rapid growth and then
out of it. Further, such structural
disturbances
are
amplified
or
exacerbated by the operation of urban
property markets, which act as a conduit
for speculative funds derived from
profits in the productive sector, but
which may then in turn produce a
“secondary wave” of hyper-profits
followed by slumps, amplifying and
greatly exaggerating the underlying
perturbations – a phenomenon already
noticed by Joseph Schumpeter in the
1930s (Schumpeter 1939).
5. Weakening social order: As urban society
becomes increasingly diverse and also
unstable, there is a potential problem
that
affluent
individuals
pursue
individual goals to the neglect of wider
social responsibilities – a transition that
some Japanese observers have suggested
has been occurring in that country
during the 1990s. Observers in different
countries and cities differ as to whether
this presents a real problem of imminent
social meltdown. The experience of
urban riots during the 1980s and 1990s,
in cities as diverse as Los Angeles,
London and Lyon, presents a warning,
though these events must be kept in
some kind of historical perspective: most
cities at most times are in a state of social
peace.
Even the general secular
tendency for rising crime rates, reported
almost universally since the 1950s, must
be balanced against the recent falls
reported in the United States; observers
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point out that much of the variation can
be ascribed to demographic shifts, in
particular the numbers of young men in
the “at risk” ages of 15–25. And, though
some observers have ascribed the
secular rise to increasing unemployment
and alienation among young men who
have been excluded by structural
changes from the labour market, it has to
be noticed that much of this rise
coincided with the “long boom” of 1950–
1970, when full employment was the
general rule.
The tentative conclusion is that certain
economic and social changes work
together to produce a very difficult
situation for certain sections of society.
These are groups that have become
excluded from normal lifetime career
patterns and who additionally have
become segregated in lower-quality
social housing areas where, in addition,
they are concentrated in certain lowperforming schools. They are exposed to
the blandishments of the hedonistic
consumer society through television, but
lack the means to participate. The
resultant stresses lead to high rates of
divorce and separation [and thus to lowincome lone parenthood], alcoholism
and drug abuse, and petty crime. The
mainstream society, which constitutes
the great majority of the active political
class, reacts unsympathetically with
demands for “zero tolerance” policing
and workfare programmes designed
to
wean
these
groups
from
welfare dependence. Such experiments,
pioneered in the United States and now
being imitated in the UK and elsewhere,
39
are still in their early stages; it is too early
to reach conclusions about their longterm effects.
The urban consequences have been
explored in three contrasting case studies
presented in Chapters 2–4. The concluding
questions must be:
– How Significant are the Differences? The
evidence suggests that mainland Europe
is following the Anglo-Saxon pattern of
deconcentration and social polarisation,
and this may now be appearing in the
Eastern Asian city;
– Will Differences Persist? If this is so,
the only question is how this
decentralisation is managed. Here,
differences in political style and culture
could make a difference: cities may
developed differently under laissez-faire
capitalism and managed capitalism.
And there is no one recipe for success: in
a world of global competition and global
choice, the quality of urban life – in both
large cities and small towns – will be an
increasingly critical factor, which cities
and nations will ignore at their peril.
The study ends by looking at the lives of
representative groups of people in each
of the three types of city in the year 2025,
deliberately chosen to span a wide
range demographically, economically and
socially. Though in all of the cases it is
possible to recognise the broad secular
trends that are affecting cities everywhere,
the remarkable fact is that there are
continuing differences in lifestyle which
depend on the particular type of capitalism
in force, and thus on the prevailing political
culture.
Entwicklung städtischer Lebensformen und Lebensstile
Overview
Author:
Sir Peter Hall
University College London
Bartlett School of Planning
in collaboration with:
Stephen Day
Hoang Huu Phe
Judith Ryser
David Sloan
Kurzfassung – Abstract
Mit Hilfe von Szenarien zu Lebens- und Arbeitsbedingungen im Jahr 2025 in ausgewählten Städten mit
unterschiedlichem sozio-ökonomischem und
geschichtlichem Hintergrund werden für den World
Report on Urban Future zukünftige Stadtentwicklungen
bis zum Jahr 2025 aufgezeigt. Es wird der Frage
nachgegangen, wie politische Maßnahmen – heute
getroffen – den zukünftigen Alltag in Städten
beeinflussen könnten.
Als Beispiele wurden die Regionen
– Großraum London und New York (anglo-american
capitalism)
– Karlsruhe – Straßburg – Freiburg – Basel – Zürich
(Rhineland capitalism)
– Hongkong – Guangzhou-Macau-Dreieck
ausgewählt.
Bei den anglo-amerikanischen Städten erfolgt dabei eine
thematische Konzentration auf wirtschaftlich bedingte
Aspekte der Stadtentwicklung mit den Konsequenzen für
Lebens- und Arbeitsbedingungen. Das Szenario
beschreibt eine hohe soziale Polarisierung und
räumliche Segregation der dort lebenden Bevölkerung
mit hohen beruflichen Risiken, anwachsender
Kriminalität, usw.
Bei den gewählten mitteleuropäischen Städten stehen
die Auswirkungen der Verkehrspolitik im Vordergrund:
Erreichbar erscheint eine hohe und zugleich
umweltfreundliche Mobilität durch gut ausgebauten
ÖPNV in Klein- und Mittelstädten, die die Vereinbarkeit
von Familie und Beruf, nachhaltige Lebensstile usw.
ermöglicht. Deutsche Leser mögen ob der
prognostizierten „heilen Welt” den Kopf schütteln – im
internationalen Vergleich dürften mitteleuropäische
Verhältnisse jedoch tatsächlich eine „heile Welt”
darstellen.
Bei den ostasiatischen Städten versucht das Szenario
aufzuzeigen, wie der spezifische kulturelle,
geschichtliche und politische Hintergrund dieser
Weltregion eine anglo-amerikanische Entwicklung
modifizieren könnte: Die Risiken des angloamerikanischen Typs werden durch traditionelle Werte –
familiäre, nachbarschaftliche Beziehungen, soziale
Kontrolle – abgefedert.
With the aid of scenarios of living and working conditions
in selected cities with different socio-economic and
historical backgrounds, future urban development is
described until the year 2025 for the World Report on the
Urban Future. Suggestions are made concerning the way
in which political decisions taken today can influence
everyday urban life in future.
The following regions were selected as examples:
– Greater London and New York (Anglo-American
capitalism)
– Karlsruhe – Strasbourg – Freiburg – Basel - Zürich
(Rhineland capitalism)
– Hongkong – Guangzhou – Macao – Triangle.
The Anglo-American cities are considered with a thematic
focus on the economic aspects of urban development and
their consequences for living and working conditions. The
scenario describes the strong social polarization and
spatial segregation of the local population with high
employment risks, increasing crime etc.
In the discussion of the selected Central European cities,
prominence is given to transport policy: It seems that high
and environment-friendly spatial mobility can be
achieved by means of well-developed local public
transport systems in small and medium-sized cities. This
makes family life and employment compatible and allows
sustainable lifestyles. German readers might shake their
heads when reading about the intact world described in
the forecast. In an international comparison, however, the
Central European conditions probably really constitute an
intact world.
In the scenario about Eastern Asia, the author tries to
show how the specific cultural, historical and political
background of this area could modify an Anglo-American
development: The risks of the Anglo-American type are
moderated by traditional values – family, neighbourhood
relationships and social control.
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33
Future Urban Lifestyles
1 Introduction
This is a study of urban change from the
individual viewpoint. Its central aim is to
understand how processes of urban
change, currently taking place and likely to
continue, will affect the quality of the
citizen’s everyday life in the year 2025. To
that end, it considers three main type cases
among a myriad of possible types:
– the Atlantic World City, represented by
New York City and London,
– the Central European EnvironmentFriendly City, represented by Freiburg,
Karlsruhe, Basel, Zürich and Strasbourg;
and
– the
Eastern
Asian
Mega-City,
represented by the cities of the Pearl
River Delta including Hong Kong and
Guangzhou.
The central argument of the report is that
though urbanisation trends are remarkably
uniform and strong across the world, their
manifestation in lifestyle and quality of life
varies remarkably from one city to another
and from one kind of city to another. The
most important trends are:
1. Continuing growth of cities, including
large cities: especially (but not
exclusively) in the South, and
particularly in Asia.
2. Continuing stability of the urban
hierarchy: the major cities are likely to
keep their relative position, though
those in the South will continue to gain
relative to those in the north; however,
the growth of these larger cities is likely
to slow everywhere, and may be subject
to economic perturbations.
3. General deconcentration or diffusion,
especially of the largest urban areas:
relative shifts of both residential
population and employment, from
central cities to their suburbs, and to
freestanding medium and smaller cities
within the general urban ambit. This
includes the development of so-called
Mega-Cities or megalopolitan corridors,
especially in eastern Asia. The general
result is that the growth of larger cities
will slow in relation to cities lower in the
urban hierarchy, but within relatively
easy access from these major cities
[broadly, a range of up to 140
kilometres], as has long been observable
in Northern cities such as London and
New York City, and is now also
noticeable in Southern cities such as
Mexico City.
4. Continuing
progression
toward
service- and information-based urban
economies, especially in the North but
increasingly also in the South: in both,
development of an internal functional
differentiation, with higher-level (“world
city”) informational service functions
continuing to concentrate in the cores of
the central cities of megalopolitan
regions, and more routine services and
manufacturing decentralized both to
smaller cities in the “metropolitan
ambit” [as observable around London
and New York City, and now developing
in the Pearl River Delta Mega-City] but
also to selected peripheral provincial
cities, such as Leeds, Glasgow and
Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK, or
Omaha and Salt Lake City in the USA.
All these trends are very general, affecting
Northern and Southern cities alike. But
they impact on them in very different ways,
with critical results for the style and quality
of life in different cities. This depends
fundamentally on the way that urban
growth is mediated by the prevailing
economic, social and political system in
different countries and major regions of the
world.
Models of Contemporary Capitalism
Underlying these differences is the thesis
that even advanced, highly-urbanized
economies in the 1990s are by no means
homogeneous;
different
forms
of
contemporary capitalism result from deep
cultural differences that may originate far
back in history:
– an Anglo-American form of capitalism,
characterized by a strong emphasis on
entrepreneurial
innovation,
free
34
Urban Future
competition and deregulated labour
markets;
– a
mainland
European
model
[“Rhineland capitalism”], characterized
by stronger frameworks for the
regulation of enterprises, managed
labour markets, employee protection,
codetermination in management, and
generous social benefits;
– a Japanese or Pacific Asian model,
characterized by low public spending as
a percentage of GDP, relatively weak
social benefits and emphasis on self or
family provision, consensus in decisionmaking in both the economic and
political spheres, and cooperative
management processes to improve
quality in the workplace.
These different capitalisms produce
different
urban
structures,
urban
organization and quality of urban life.
There are limits to globalization of
the economy and even more so to
the globalization of culture.
Though
new technologies, especially transport
technologies, have changed and will
change all cities in broadly the same ways,
leading especially to deconcentration and
dispersal in the 20th century, older histories
still have a powerful imprint on the form
and the functioning of the city.
The report then goes on to consider three
representative case studies of city types,
each representing one distinctive style of
contemporary capitalism.
2 The Atlantic World City
The “World City” is a distinctive type
of great city, not necessarily a capital
city, which is characterised by its
global connections.
Such cities have
characteristically shed manufacturing and
goods-handling to other cities but remain
uniquely strong in high-level services.
London and New York City, considered in
this chapter, are archetypes.
Not necessarily all citizens of such
cities consider themselves “world citizens”.
They may be suburbanites with weak
connections to the central core, or routine
service workers, or members of segregated
ethnic ghettos. But all experience the
attractiveness of the great city, and many
have migrated there to find their fortunes,
even if they are unsuccessful.
The unique characteristic of the economies
of these cities is their dependence on
groups of interlocking advanced services:
finance and business services, “command
and control”, creative and cultural
industries, and tourism.
These are
especially concentrated in the urban cores
and in specialised extensions of these cores.
These require highly-educated, highlyskilled workers who are highly productive
and who generate high incomes. But,
especially through multiplier effects, they
also generate large numbers of unskilled
jobs, and the rapid structural change in the
economy may also produce high rates of
unemployment among certain groups,
concentrated in certain areas of the
city: a situation of extreme stratification
or polarisation.
Middle-class workers,
formerly in secure careers, may find
themselves part of a casualised clerical
labour force.
The physical fabric of the world cities
reflects a long history of complex publicprivate interaction which has produced the
structure of commerce and housing, and
also the transportation infrastructure that
connects them. There is an important
public space of streets and squares and
parks, formerly the responsibility of the
public sector, which has increasingly fallen
victim to physical decay and to partial
privatisation.
So large and complex are the world
cities, especially when their suburban
areas are included, that they very seldom
have a completely rational structure of
government.
In London the Greater
London Council was abolished in 1986,
though there are firm plans for a new
Greater London Authority; New York City
forms only a small part of a wider
functional region, which is divided among
three states and hundreds of local
government units as well as specialised ad
hoc agencies.
There are fundamental questions about
the future of the world cities in the 21st
century. Some argue that the revolution
in information and communications
technology will increasingly make them
irrelevant, allowing activities to spread
across the globe; others counter that faceto-face contact will still be vital in
generating innovation and creativity. On
balance, it appears that the world cities face
no fundamental threat as yet. But they will
need continuously to innovate, in order to
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provide new jobs to compensate for those
that will be lost to other cities, regions and
countries. And quality of life issues will be
increasingly important in attracting people
and activities; public confidence may easily
erode if they are seen as dirty, dangerous,
inefficient, polluted and unpleasant. Here,
in particular, a city like London faces major
challenges from smaller cities on the
European mainland – examples of which
are considered in Chapter 3.
3 The Central European
Environment-Friendly City
This chapter presents a special but very
important case study: a group of
free-standing,
medium-sized
“model
environmental cities” in the upper Rhine
valley, an area which straddles the borders
of Germany, Switzerland and France [in
particular, Karlsruhe, Freiburg, Strasbourg,
Basel and Zürich]. Each of these cities
became notable for its outstanding record
during the 1980s and 1990s of urban
innovation for sustainable development –
most notably, by planning to counter the
adverse impact of vehicular traffic on the
urban environment, by restricting car use
and promoting other forms of transport.
The chapter starts by looking at general
trends affecting urban growth in central
Europe. As around London and New York
City, people and jobs are deconcentrating
from the city to wide suburban and exurban
areas, including smaller towns in the rural
hinterland; the quality of the traditional
European “compact city” is being eroded.
The gainers are smaller and middle-size
cities, which offer a better human scale and
a more attractive environment. In those
parts of Europe where the large city has
never dominated, including much of
southern Germany and Switzerland, there
is a real hope that the entire range of cities
might prove to offer sustainable urbanism
and a good quality of life.
The key to this is through transport policies.
Though many European cities have proved
innovative and radical in developing new
policies during the last twenty years, the
report concentrates on a group with an
outstanding record, located in south-west
Germany, north-central Switzerland and
south-east France.
Interestingly, these
cities are among those with the highest
levels of GDP in Europe and in the world;
35
they have reacted against the impacts of
high car ownership. Technological means
to control traffic have been tested and
found wanting; the alternative is to
restrict car traffic and to promote public
transport, cycling and walking. This goes
hand in hand with land use policies in
favour of compact cities and mixed-use
development. This is not without problems
in the mobile, multiple-career household
of the 1990s. One answer is through
regional planning for “concentrated
deconcentration”, with a central mediumsized city surrounded by a number of
smaller cities, all compact and all linked by
good public transport. This can include
both nearby satellites, and more distant
freestanding towns.
Each of the case study cities has adopted a
similar bundle of policies, with local
variations: nearly all have introduced userfriendly travel cards for public transport,
available regionally; they have promoted
public transport priority over the car; they
have begun to develop new residential
areas structured around public transport;
Karlsruhe has introduced its Stadtbahn, a
revolutionary tram which shares tracks with
main-line trains as well as running on city
streets; they have promoted bicycle use
through extensive bicycle lane networks;
they have traffic-calmed wide areas of
their cities; and they have consciously
sought to restore their city centres for
living, working and cultural use, by
promoting redevelopment of disused
industrial or railway lands for housing, and
by improving the quality of the public
spaces. This has produced some dramatic
results, with big increases in public
transport use and reductions in the share of
car commuting.
These cities have had considerable success,
partly because – traditionally under the
federal constitutions of Germany and
Switzerland, increasingly in France since
the 1980s – they have had considerable
autonomy, including financial autonomy,
to manage their own affairs. They are thus
able to learn from each other, imitate
each other and compete with each other
to improve environmental quality. Public
attitudes, which are very advanced in this
part of Europe, have also encouraged city
administrations too take radical actions.
This pattern of life, made possible by
a combination of policies – energy
conservation, land use planning, transport
36
Urban Future
– has been widely hailed throughout
Europe and the world as a model of
sustainable urbanism. However, it is not
without problems. The most important is
the growth of longer-distance commuting
in dual-career households, including crosscommuting by car between smaller centres
that have developed as independent
employment nodes under regional plans,
but are not so well served by direct
rail connections. This will require new
strategies: higher fuel taxes, selective road
pricing, encouragement of ride-sharing
through high-occupancy vehicle lanes
and preferential parking spaces, the
development of para-transit systems
utilising light vehicles transitional between
the bus and the taxi, and development of
new communities along widely-spaced
public transport corridors where the scope
for cross-commuting is necessarily more
limited.
The final problem is that the policies could
have prove if anything too successful: by
offering a high quality of life, these
medium-sized cities could encourage a
flood of in-migration from other parts of
Germany and of Europe. The consolation
could be that many other regions have
emulated the policies in self-defence, with
some recent degree of success in stemming
the flow.
4 The Eastern Asian Mega-City
The recent growth of urban areas in the
Asia-Pacific region is without precedent in
world history: it is equivalent to the
creation of a middle-size European city
every week, and is creating several
examples of the mega-city, a vast
polycentric complex of over 10 million
people. Thus it poses serious challenges
to almost all existing theories of
urban development. The process is fuelled
by
globalisation
of
export-oriented
production and by huge flows of capital to
the centres of the new productive regions,
partly to finance physical development.
Cities in this region exhibit a clash of
two opposite principles: a flexible,
adaptability-oriented approach based on
the principle of competition, and a strong,
intentional approach toward urban
development. The position of a city on this
continuum defines its character. The more
“intentional” a city is, the more life
style of its inhabitant differs from the
common, or universal norm, or special.
The less intentional cities are, therefore,
more cosmopolitan. Thus Beijing is an
“intentional” city, and has a different style
from, say, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or
Taipei.
The cities closer to the “intentional” end of
the continuum may lead in indicators
related to the traditional “nation building
goals”, such as low pollution, more
generous spatial standards, better health
care, etc., institutions of high-culture
(theatres, concert halls, etc.) while the city
located nearer to the laissez-fair end may
lead in indicators related to commercial
activities (number of cars, restaurants,
cinemas per capita), and personal stimuli
(recreation and entertainment). Since the
end of the Cold War, and under the
influence of trans-national capital, these
two models have demonstrated a partial
convergence. What is distinctive about
many of these cases, however, is that the
growth of mega-cities is seen as part of a
conscious nation-building process in which
physical development plays a key role.
The physical expression of this process is
very complex, with multiple nuclei, with
elite groups continuing to occupy the most
accessible positions near the cores – a
contrast, so far, with the Anglo-American
and European trends. However, the more
“intentional” a city is, the more the
lifestyles of its inhabitants are likely to
depart from the norm, and vice-versa:
Beijing will offer more surprises than
Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or Taipei, which
will share many common “cosmopolitan”
features. “Intentional” cities may perform
better on features like health standards or
pollution, while “cosmopolitan” cities will
score higher on indices of private
consumption. Similarly, these laissez-faire
cities will experience more frequent and
extreme development cycles.
The chapter considers the Pearl River Delta,
an archetype of the new Pacific Asian megacity. One of the fastest-growing regions of
the world in terms of output and of
urbanisation during the 1980s and 1990s, it
has a highly differentiated urban structure
with Hong Kong as command and control
centre, linking with the outside world, and a
number of networked production cities in
the interior of the region. This can be called
a pattern of “exo- urbanisation”, essentially
controlled by the flow of external capital
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with the blessing of the Chinese
government. There are serious resulting
problems, not least the rapid importation
of western standards and values which the
regime would rather exclude. Certainly, for
the future, such a region will continue to be
in the vanguard of areas through which
cosmopolitan norms are imported. But
major differences will continue to exist
within the region, in terms both of physical
quality of life and of lifestyle, between the
cosmopolitan “command and control”
centres fed by international flows of
capital and information, and the centres
of
technological
development
and
production. The result is likely to be a bipolar model of development with
continuing tensions between the poles and
their respective elites.
The future two-pole structure of the Pearl
River Delta, based on the twin centres of
Hong Kong and Guangzhou, will have
profound for the lives and lifestyles of the
residents.
First, in transport and communication
terms, the region will enjoy some of the
most advanced forms of mass transit urban
transport, both because they will be needed
for logistical purposes, in particular
movements of labour, and also for symbolic
reasons and “showcase” functions.
Second, in terms of skills and occupations,
a process of polarisation will gradually
sort
the
migrants
between
two
roughly established sectors: finance/
business
and
science/technology/
production. A substantial part of the both
socially
and
geographically
mobile
residents, who are flocking to the two poles,
will be intra-urban migrants rather than
in-migrants.
Hong Kong will attract
entrepreneurs
and
service
sector
workers (entertainers, domestic workers,
craftsmen), while Guangzhou will attract a
large number of blue-collar workforce and
the technocrats. The social implications of
this polarisation will be visible, both in
family composition and the pattern of
consumption.
Third, in terms of the built environment,
Hong Kong will retain its vital and diverse
urban landscape with a myriad of stimuli,
while Guangzhou will be a setting for urban
planning and urban design experiments
with eclectic styles, rigid standards, and a
series of mega-projects driven by prestige
and technocratic (over)optimism.
37
Fourth, awareness of environmental quality
is an increasingly important factor in urban
development. It is worth noting the almost
obvious fact that the long term prospect of
good environment is better in more
deliberately planned cities than otherwise,
barring serious unintended technological
oversights. If experience of adaptable-type
cities such as Bangkok or Manila is any
indication, it can be predicted that
somewhere half-way from now to 2025, the
environment in Hong Kong will suffer
near-limit pollution (especially in sea
water) before getting better. On one hand,
funding
necessary
to
tackle
the
environmental issues (such as treatment of
the notorious sewage contamination of the
sea water and sub-standard housing) is
simply beyond the available means, on the
other, the environmental threat may serve
as a convincing justification for much
needed de-population of the most crowded
city in the world acrimonious political
repercussions.
5 Comparisons and Conclusions
The first conclusion is that the broad
secular long-term trends will persist:
– Continuing growth of cities, including
large cities;
– Continuing stability of the urban
hierarchy;
– General deconcentration or diffusion,
especially of the largest urban areas;
– Continuing
progression
toward
service- and information-based urban
economies.
These trends are related and are mutually
reinforcing. They are likely to be further
fortified by other features that have begun
powerfully to emerge during the 1980s and
1990s:
And they will be fortified by emerging
trends and issues:
1. The
environmental
imperative:
Internationally and nationally, as well as
at local citizen level, there will be
increasing political pressure to conserve
non-renewable resources, to reduce
emissions and to limit greenhouse
gasses. The European cities considered
in Chapter 3, which during the 1990s
have demonstrated something of a world
lead, indicate what is likely to happen in
38
Urban Future
many other places during the first
decade of the 21st century.
2. The search for quality of life: Cities
increasingly compete, not on the basis of
access to materials, but in terms of
intangible factors like cultural and
artistic riches, or a good quality of
urban living.
As suburbs become
more homogeneous, cities promote
themselves as the places that are
distinctively different, especially for
affluent professionals with new lifestyles
(particularly single households and
childless couples). Though the world’s
largest cities offer unequalled cultural
riches, these are compromised by the
fact that their quality of life is reduced by
traffic, long journeys to work, high
property values and rents, pollution,
crime and other social problems;
medium-sized cities [like Dublin,
Munich, Zürich and Barcelona], which
work harder to improve their local
environments,
therefore
compete
vigorously with them, especially in
attracting niche “World City” functions.
3. Social Polarisation: At least in the AngloAmerican version of capitalism, and
perhaps increasingly in the Rhineland
and Asiatic versions, the larger cities are
characterised
by
an
increasing
dispersion of real income between rich
and poor city-dwellers, with a
“disappearing middle” representing the
jobs that are exported to other places.
This is a result partly of economic shifts
which produce relatively large numbers
of highly-qualified and highly- paid
“informational services” jobs and of lowpaid, casualised “MacJobs”, and partly of
long-term structural unemployment
among large sections of the population
who formerly found employment in the
manufacturing and goods-handling
sector. This produces an increasingly
polarised society, with upper-income
high-consumption enclaves next door to
low-income ghettos dependent on
casual service work and welfare
payments. The quality of life of these
citizens clearly demonstrates extreme
contrasts, even though they occupy the
same geographical space.
Typically, such a situation was
characteristic of major cities in countries
undergoing rapid development (e.g.
19th-century
Europe
and
North
America; 20th-century Latin America).
Now, however, it seems to have returned
to the cities of the advanced world,
which earlier [in the “welfare state” era
of the 1950s and 1960s] appeared to have
passed through this phase and out of it.
A new wave of immigration is one
contributory factor in many such cities;
but
economic
restructuring,
in
particular the decline of well-paid
unionized
jobs
in
traditional
manufacturing and goods-handling
occupations, is another element that
impacts on old blue-collar workers and
new immigrants alike.
4. Continuing economic instability: quite
apart from the operation of the business
cycle, the contemporary economy
is
characterised
by
permanent
perturbation,
induced
by
the
processes of globalized competition. As
demonstrated by the history of Eastern
Asia in the 1990s, it is all too easy to pass
through a wave of rapid growth and then
out of it. Further, such structural
disturbances
are
amplified
or
exacerbated by the operation of urban
property markets, which act as a conduit
for speculative funds derived from
profits in the productive sector, but
which may then in turn produce a
“secondary wave” of hyper-profits
followed by slumps, amplifying and
greatly exaggerating the underlying
perturbations – a phenomenon already
noticed by Joseph Schumpeter in the
1930s (Schumpeter 1939).
5. Weakening social order: As urban society
becomes increasingly diverse and also
unstable, there is a potential problem
that
affluent
individuals
pursue
individual goals to the neglect of wider
social responsibilities – a transition that
some Japanese observers have suggested
has been occurring in that country
during the 1990s. Observers in different
countries and cities differ as to whether
this presents a real problem of imminent
social meltdown. The experience of
urban riots during the 1980s and 1990s,
in cities as diverse as Los Angeles,
London and Lyon, presents a warning,
though these events must be kept in
some kind of historical perspective: most
cities at most times are in a state of social
peace.
Even the general secular
tendency for rising crime rates, reported
almost universally since the 1950s, must
be balanced against the recent falls
reported in the United States; observers
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Heft 92
point out that much of the variation can
be ascribed to demographic shifts, in
particular the numbers of young men in
the “at risk” ages of 15–25. And, though
some observers have ascribed the
secular rise to increasing unemployment
and alienation among young men who
have been excluded by structural
changes from the labour market, it has to
be noticed that much of this rise
coincided with the “long boom” of 1950–
1970, when full employment was the
general rule.
The tentative conclusion is that certain
economic and social changes work
together to produce a very difficult
situation for certain sections of society.
These are groups that have become
excluded from normal lifetime career
patterns and who additionally have
become segregated in lower-quality
social housing areas where, in addition,
they are concentrated in certain lowperforming schools. They are exposed to
the blandishments of the hedonistic
consumer society through television, but
lack the means to participate. The
resultant stresses lead to high rates of
divorce and separation [and thus to lowincome lone parenthood], alcoholism
and drug abuse, and petty crime. The
mainstream society, which constitutes
the great majority of the active political
class, reacts unsympathetically with
demands for “zero tolerance” policing
and workfare programmes designed
to
wean
these
groups
from
welfare dependence. Such experiments,
pioneered in the United States and now
being imitated in the UK and elsewhere,
39
are still in their early stages; it is too early
to reach conclusions about their longterm effects.
The urban consequences have been
explored in three contrasting case studies
presented in Chapters 2–4. The concluding
questions must be:
– How Significant are the Differences? The
evidence suggests that mainland Europe
is following the Anglo-Saxon pattern of
deconcentration and social polarisation,
and this may now be appearing in the
Eastern Asian city;
– Will Differences Persist? If this is so,
the only question is how this
decentralisation is managed. Here,
differences in political style and culture
could make a difference: cities may
developed differently under laissez-faire
capitalism and managed capitalism.
And there is no one recipe for success: in
a world of global competition and global
choice, the quality of urban life – in both
large cities and small towns – will be an
increasingly critical factor, which cities
and nations will ignore at their peril.
The study ends by looking at the lives of
representative groups of people in each
of the three types of city in the year 2025,
deliberately chosen to span a wide
range demographically, economically and
socially. Though in all of the cases it is
possible to recognise the broad secular
trends that are affecting cities everywhere,
the remarkable fact is that there are
continuing differences in lifestyle which
depend on the particular type of capitalism
in force, and thus on the prevailing political
culture.