Cities of the World

In last week’s column, we proposed two facts to consider in attempting to understand and find solutions to the problems of cities today.  First, we said that cities differ between countries of the world and between times in history.  And second, we postulated that most of the solutions are actually available if we look back at cities in the long course of their 6-millenium history.  Maybe the next other thing we need to look into is the “kind” of cities that differ all over the world, how they became what they are, and how do we shape our cities today.

People don’t usually realize that the “kind” of cities that we have in the world today depends to a very great extent on the kind of transport system they have.  Planning wise, it works the other way, and former Bogota mayor Enrique Peñalosa, in his interview with Streetfilms, said, “Before we know what the ideal transport is, we have to know what kind of a city we want.  But in order to know what kind of a city we want, we have to know how we want to live, because a city is really, only a means to a way of life.”  Beautiful words.  But how?

We have often heard, “Home is home, and there is no better place than home.”  Majority of the people in the world, if given a free choice of which cities to live in, will still choose the city where they are now.  In spite of the problems that we have – we wail and rant on all the mess and disorder – we consider our cities “our home.”  But we seldom think that these cities are what they are now because that’s how we wanted them to be, maybe without realizing it, … not by active intent but by passive resignation through actions and decisions of daily life.

The city is like a living organism, it thrives and grows by the collective aspirations of all of its residents, not by the tyranny of one person or a few or by an elitist minority (although many will insist otherwise).  City shape and configuration is shaped by their own residents’ way of life.  Vietnamese cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are full of bicycles because they wanted to use bikes (or maybe were forced to), not because government wanted to.  We have traffic congestion in many parts of the city because we choose (or some of us do) to use individual cars rather than use collective public transport.  We become what we choose to be.

I remember an old joke about a college class in the US which was asked, “What is the most common cause of divorce in America?” and someone tried to answer, “Marriage?”  But that’s the same, too, in the case of EDSA, which seems to represent the transport situation of the entire country (it’s the foremost topic discussed every time DOTC defends its budget in the House and in the Senate).  We live in a daily gridlock in Manila because we chose to buy and use cars in going to work.  We shout at the top of our lungs for government to build more roads and even build a second story to EDSA.  Then we buy more cars to fill it up and experience the traffic jams again.  A cycle so vicious it is second only to poverty.

In the current advocacies about livable cities, we often miss the point by asking the wrong questions.  More often than not, we ask, “How do we make livable cities,“ or better, “How do we make our cities livable?”  The more telling question should be, “Do we want to make our cities livable?” or as Peñalosa would have it, “How do we want to live?”  Both for the individual and for the government, it takes more than a policy slogan or a New Year’s Resolution, it has to be a decision and a commitment.  For the residents of the downtown district of Seoul, South Korea, it meant demolishing billions of dollars worth of a massive expressway, and replacing it with the famous Cheonggyecheon public recreation space.  No, not Gangnam style … (To be continued – “The size of cities”)