Cities of the world (Part 1)

Most of us, who read the local dailies, listen to the radio and watch TV, have a rather narrow view of the word “city.”  Not that we’re narrow-minded, but when we say or hear the word, “city,” what we think about is/are the city or cities we live in.  In particular, we imagine Lapu-Lapu City, Mandaue, Cebu, and Talisay.  I mentioned that in that order because I’ve been living in Lapu-Lapu for the last two years now.  Simply, our immediate concept of cities is shaped by the one we live in.

More often than not, we tend to compare ourselves with other cities, especially with those that have certain better characteristics than ours.  Singapore has these … Hong Kong is like that … never mind Manila - it has more problems of its own that we often say, we should not follow the footsteps of Manila.  But we are, in many aspects, it won’t be surprising we will find ourselves in the same trap if drastic steps are not taken.  We forget that there is a big difference between our cities and the cities we compare ourselves to.

In the latter part of May this year, we discussed a 2-part series of “why cities make sense.”  It’s basically a treatise on why cities are different from the rest of the world, the non-urban that is, and why the aggregation of human activities drove human society to urbanization, followed by the need of urban planning, land use, zoning and the development of transport systems.  If we are to inventory all of the news stories in all the newspapers, radio, and TV programs in the world, we will find out more than 90% happen in cities!  A popular book was titled, “75% of the world’s wealth is made in cities.”  I’m tempted to disagree - I suspect it’s more like 90%!

But cities are diverse – that’s an absolute fact.  Cities differ between countries of the world and between times in history.  Their prominence does not, but in order to solve many of the problems of modern cities, we need to look at all the cities of the world from the start of time (or the time cities first made their appearance).  Our cities now are mere infants compared to others, especially to those which are extinct.  Cities in general started to emerged 6 millenniums (or millennia) ago.  Might be good to remember a millennium is 1,000 years!

The first cities were the Sumerian cities which lasted for millenniums.  Sometime later, the Babylonian and Egyptian cities were built.  This was around 2000 B.C.  On the other side of the world, the Chinese cities emerged.  It’s hard to imagine how long ago these times were.  Just imagine the 6 millenniums as 4000 BC, 2000, BC, 0, and 2000 AD, the last being 12 years ago.  All those years, cities ruled the world, from the Greek city-states, and cities like Carthage, Alexandria, and Syracuse, to Haoqing in China, and Angkor in Cambodia in the East.  Hundreds more cities literally “ruled the world” in their particular places in time, as “Capitals” of large Empires, permanently imprinted in our history books.

The world was shaped by cities, or by decisions made by them.  The British Empire was ruled from London, and the Roman Empire from Rome.  Both World Wars were started with the intent of making empires.  In the modern times, CNN and BBC cover the world’s most important cities.  And the primacy of cities continue to reign – by the end of the 2nd millennium, the world’s population who live in cities breached the 50% mark.  And it keeps on growing.

The irony is, all of the world’s cities are now facing much bigger problems than they ever had before.  And ironically, most of the solutions are actually available if we look back at cities long ago.  The old adage is true – we know not how to move forward because we forgot to look back from whence we came from.

And this is particularly true in urban transportation … (To be continued)