City Life

When I was young, I loved living in cities; the ten years I spent living in London in the 1970s gave me a great buzz. But now, I crave the quiet life. Visiting cities these days makes me feel like a country mouse wanting to scurry back to the open fields, the quiet woods, and the fresh air at the earliest opportunity. Then again, the megacities of today are utterly different from the London I knew thirty years ago.

It’s also the case that at some point this year, the human race will pass some sort of threshold – for the first time in its history, there will be more people living in cities than not. I find that quite staggering – up along with the statistic that, since I was born, the world’s population has almost trebled from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 6.7 billion last month.

I’m reminded of this by reading an article in today’s Observer. Deyan Sudjic writes about the current state of the city, and speculates about its future. As well as some positive data points, it also has some sobering passages:

Cities bring out a lurking paranoia in some people. They see this explosive growth as a tide of slums engulfing the world. Certainly there is plenty to be worried about.

Half of the 12 million people in Mumbai live in illegal shacks, 200,000 of them on the pavement. Every day, at least two people are killed falling off overcrowded suburban trains. In Mexico City, fewer than four workers in 10 have formal jobs, public transport is largely in the form of mafia-controlled minibuses, and taxis. The last mayor’s response was to build a second tier on the elevated motorway, to allow the rich to speed up their commuting time.

Johannesburg, with its horrifying levels of violent crime, has seen the affluent quit the city centre for fortified enclaves on its boundaries. As a result, South Africa is leading the world in developing new security techniques for gated housing, built appropriately enough in the style of Tuscan hill towns. Private security is also a divisive a topic in north London where I live where the clatter of police helicopters has become routine. My neighbourhood divides between those who want to install barriers and gates to cut us off from the world outside and those who see such measures as the ultimate negation of what life in a city should be. Despite our anxieties, London is a safe city by world standards. The murder rate is 2.1 for every 100,000 inhabitants. In Johannesburg, it is nine times that figure and you are eight times as likely to be killed in a car crash there. 

Of course, the article is also a puff-piece for the book that he co-edited being published next week: The Endless City. I’m definitely tempted to get it; perhaps it might shine a few rays of hope on my current feelings about city life. They seem to be closer to the views expressed by Mike Davis in his Planet of Slums.