Cities of the Future

The world in the 21st century is on a path to become increasingly urban. In the 19th century, the world was predominantly rural, but the 20th century ushered in a historic shift that gained momentum and diffused throughout world regions. The trend of people moving away from the countryside looks set to continue in the coming decades as rural areas are drawn increasingly into cities’ orbits and as a deep transformation takes place. According to UN-HABITAT (2010), by 2030, 60% of the world’s population will reside in cities. This is an urban revolution in the making.

Much of the new growth in urban centers will occur in the Global South in cities such as Accra, Mumbai, Nairobi, and Johannesburg. The highest growth rates, though, are being recorded and forecasted for secondary cities—for example, Kumasi, Ghana (see Owusu & Oteng-Ababio, this issue, p. 311)—and, in particular, for midsized cities hitherto outside of the global spotlight—for example, Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana’s new oil city (see Obeng-Odoom, this issue, p. 424). But exceptional rates of rapid urbanization have also been recorded in specific cities such as Juba (South Sudan; Grant & Thompson, 2013). George Owusu and Martin Oteng-Ababio remind us, however, that population and housing censuses are notoriously unreliable in the developing world even though they do provide essential benchmarking data for strategic and spatial planning as well as for the allocation of municipal resources. Reclassifications of metropolitan boundaries are commonplace in rapidly urbanizing areas. For example, a 2008 reclassification of the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area in Ghana created the Ledzokuku-Krowor Municipal Assembly, and researchers often differ over whether to include or exclude this new municipality (a district of 228,000 in 2010) when discussing urbanization trends in Accra and when elucidating general patterns in African cities. Inclusion of extended metropolitan areas supports the rapid urbanization thesis (Grant, 2014), whereas their exclusion bolsters the counterurbanization thesis (Potts, 2012). Owusu and Oteng-Ababio emphasize that this debate over the pace of urbanization in Africa—and India, as Nijman (this issue, p. 406) illustrates—is far from settled.

Important differences at the regional level in the Global South are observed: India’s rate of urbanization is much lower than of sub-Saharan Africa. In general, cities in North America are contending with lower demographic growth rates. Growth is recorded in the contemporary “sunbelt” cities (e.g., Miami, Atlanta, Houston), but “rustbelt” cities (e.g., Detroit, Buffalo, Syracuse) are dealing with a different set of contraction and repurposing phenomena. For example, Detroit is the best example of a city contracting, and it achieved international notoriety when it filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy on July 18, 2013. Despite major financial and depopulation challenges, city officials in the former “Motor City”/“Motown” are implementing a plan to reinvent Detroit’s metropolitan area and repurpose its inner core.

This is a critical moment to take stock of what metropolitan futures will entail. For the most part, social scientists are trained to understand the past in order to inform their understanding of the present, but urban scholars have demonstrated a reluctance to reflect on the future and to outline emerging trends. Indeed, academics’ reluctance to present forward-thinking analyses has meant that they have ceded discussions of urban futures to a subgroup in the policy community, the media, and corporate visionaries, as well as to futurists who tend to forecast speculative trend lines that grab immediate attention. In the academy, highly speculative visions of world-class cities in the developing world, sometimes referred to as the Dubai and Shanghai model, transferred to Africa or elsewhere (see Watson, 2014, for a critique) versus urban dystopias such as “a planet of slums” (Davis, 2006), “fortress citadels” (Murray, 2011), and/or environmental degradation moving toward collapse precipitated by resource depletion, sea level rises, and mass migration of climate refugees (see Swilling & Annecke, 2012, for a discussion) span the urban futures continuum.

Moving beyond the highly speculative futuristic tropes, this special issue on the future of cities provides informed analyses from urban experts with extensive experience researching, writing, and critically reflecting on various metropolitan issues. Each of the contributors reflects on demographic trends in a metropolitan area, assesses future plans and proposed developments, assesses urban challenges, and provides an insightful and informed analysis. Authors were given freedom to research what they deemed to be the most important issue and to contextualize their topic in terms of the future development of their respective city of focus. Most of the contributors unpack highly optimistic urban visions for the next few decades being put forward by various elite place promoters. They reflect on the urban future around 2030—a key benchmark and a common target date for realizing various urban visions detailed in metropolitan vision plans (e.g., Nairobi Metro 2030) and the target completion date for the United Nation’s Sustainable Development goals, which will be launched in 2015.

This set of articles focuses on urban case studies from the United States, Africa, and India. The majority of the articles were presented at the Urban Studies Program’s Cities 2030 Conference held at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, in April 2013. These diverse and rich case studies allow for unexpected comparisons, such as the retrofit challenges within existing urban development (e.g., Detroit, Nairobi, and Accra) and a trend toward the application of green technologies in both new and older urban developments. Growing inequality, the persistence of marginalization (sociospatial and ethnoracial), the sidestepping of historical sociospatial and ethnoracial injustices, and the embeddedness of slum urbanism in the Global South are identified as common global urban challenges.

Richard Grant (this issue, p. 294) maps new satellite cities and major retrofit initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa. International architectural and engineering firms, property developers, and entrepreneurs are cooperating to develop new visions for satellite cities on greenfield sites, typically 30 to 60 km outside of capital cities, that will offer new world-class infrastructure and unlimited possibilities. Governments are willing promoters of new satellite developments in the context of polycentric development. In addition, governments are heavily promoting new central business districts (CBDs), expected to mirror the CBDs in the developed world; examples include Eko-Atlantic in Lagos in Nigeria and La Cité de Fleuve in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Unfortunately, plans for new satellite cities in Africa are actively promoted to avoid grappling with the messy spatial realities of existing cities.

Garth Myers (this issue, p. 347) takes up the theme of reimagining African cities with a detailed study of Nairobi 2030, an initiative by state-led planners that aims to create a “world-class city region.” He notes,

The latest wave of urban plans and visions for the city’s future continue the contradictions that have been a hallmark of the planned cityscape for its entire existence, albeit with regard to new trends and discourses of 21st century planning. (pp. 331-332)

Indeed, new plans for the metropolitan regions of Nairobi, Accra, Johannesburg and other cities have some of the hallmarks of colonial era plans in that planning for elites takes precedence and the chasm between the elites’ visions and the experiences of ordinary residents remains intact, despite the lip service to participatory development and democratized planning at the grass roots. Indeed, the plans to create new satellite cities from scratch, high-tech hubs, and retrofitted CBDs seem wildly at odds with what grassroots organizations promote and with the sustainable development goals of making cities more inclusive, both socially and economically. Myers emphasizes that all of the master plans in the world will not lead to the growth of inclusive, relational cities with an improving quality of life and declining rates of inequality and inequities.

Writing from Johannesburg, Christian Rogerson and Jayne Rogerson (this issue, p. 347) highlight that the complex policy-making arena and policy makers grapple with multiple challenges: the legacy of the city’s racially divided past (apartheid era), urban growth, management, absorption of international immigrants and South African migrants, sustainability, food security, resilience, and environmental pressures. Adding to the mix, Johannesburg, relative to its size and economic importance, is underresearched (compared to Cape Town), and the processes of formal reindustrialization are poorly understood. Rogerson and Rogerson note that the contemporary Johannesburg informal economy may be better understood than the transformation of the formal economy (see Grant, 2010, 2013; Rogerson & Rogerson, 1997; as examples of informal economy literature). Importantly, Rogerson and Rogerson contend that the economic contours of Johannesburg 2030 will, to a large extent, be determined by the city’s role as a linking city in the global economy as well as by successes of large-scale strategic policy interventions that are mediated through the metropolitan prism, where inequality and international immigration pose considerable challenges, especially when and where they are linked.

Daniel Clement and Miguel Kanai (this issue, p. 369) focus on the Detroit Future City Strategic Framework Plan. They emphasize that the Detroit plan relies on narrow elite market-oriented logics, public–private partnerships, and areas readied for investment designated as future “innovation landscapes.” Importantly, the plan overlooks Detroit’s poor and most isolated residents and makes assumptions about their mobility and benefits from rezoning and repurposing. According to Clement and Kanai, the plan’s imagery of “green and blue infrastructure,” “desirable landscapes,” and “flowering fields that clean contaminated soils” (p. 381) is yet another attempt to represent the city as investment-ready but whitewashes the problematic history of extreme uneven development at the metropolitan scale.

Laura Kohn-Wood, Frank Samson, and Jomills Braddock (this issue, p. 386) underscore that the increased 21st-century mobilities of population raise the prospect of moving beyond standard racial categories toward categorical complexity and a more cosmopolitan urban future. Arguing that globalization and corporate-led urban development projects are as seductive as they are shallow, these authors maintain that top-down initiatives fail to disrupt the on-the-ground unequal distribution of economic gains across ethnoracial groups; indeed, they may extend ethnoracialized spatial injustices. Through fresh thinking about the settled ethnoracial divides, these researchers argue in their case study of Miami that the diversity and transcience that characterize the city create precisely the opportunity to disrupt deeply embedded ethnoracial social and economic inequalities. Kohn et al. emphasize that strong public coordinating institutions, guided by necessary conditions, are essential to closing the gaps in group-based social distance. They also contend that children-targeted programming, emerging prospects in health care, and diversity-focused planning in education and housing offer potential opportunities to place Miami and other immigrant hubs on the path toward cohesive and egalitarian diversity.

A number of the contributors in this issue focus on the role of slums in urban environments in the developing world. Rather than highlighting slum eradication and housing rehabilitation efforts, the common focus of the latter half of the 20th century, they maintain that the permanency of slums and their role as sites for economic production activities and entrepreneurialism needs more appreciation (see also Grant, 2010; Nijman, 2010). Slum urbanism is a mode of urbanization in its own right, and a critical question for futures in the developing world is whether slum dwellers will be incorporated in productive and creative ways or if the status quo of adverse incorporation will remain intact. With respect to Indian cities, Jan Nijman argues that slums may well be a structural feature of India’s modern urban landscape given the country’s outstanding challenge to create significant employment opportunities in modern industries. Indeed, urban slum environments, even considering all their shortcomings and challenges, may be conducive to small-scale, labor-intensive production activity and thus may provide relatively secure livelihoods. Challenging the view that slums arise due to rapid urbanization, Nijman demonstrates that slow urbanization and a lethargic formal manufacturing sector explain a large part of slum persistence in urban India.

Many of the contributors discuss alternative grassroots urban agendas and highlight the role that ordinary citizens have in appropriating the city for their own ends, maintaining that ordinary urbanism or the urbanism of slum dwellers cannot be ignored or wished away. Unfortunately, much of the research on grassroots urbanism is overly theoretical and too focused on critiques of new planning initiatives and contemporary projects. Many grassroots accomplishments go unnoticed beyond particularly civil society academic circles and select publications (e.g., journals such as Environment & Urbanization and Urban Forum). Moreover, the gray literature produced by civil society is not taken as seriously as peer-reviewed research although more and more academic research is picking up on themes and evidence produced by nongovernmental organization reporting. Several of the contributors remind us not to forget the agency of ordinary citizens (generally overlooked in master planning) and their aspirations and ideas about creating their own urban futures.

Incorporating ordinary city dwellers and their agency in making city futures is pivotal to moving beyond elite, incremental projects toward development of more democratic, inclusive, and sustainable urban futures. Although acknowledging that cities are shaped by large-scale structural forces and master planning, urban environments are also made from the ground up, on a daily basis, by city dwellers, their mind-sets and aspirations, their day-to-day activities, and the institutions that organize their lives. Thinking about the future of cities, then, must include thinking about the future of slums. This necessitates a better understanding of the complexity, diversity, and capacities of slums and of the aspirations of slum dwellers, along with alternative views of urban sustainability. Clearly, more effort and creative thinking are needed to link grassroots approaches to municipal strategic planning initiatives. This interface needs urgent attention.

The development of transport infrastructure and systems is a key concern in all cities. Franklin Obeng-Odoom argues that the development of alternatives (to automobile) transport systems is a critical sustainability challenge. Drawing on evidence from Sekondi-Takoradi, he illustrates that an overreliance on automobiles has already resulted in heavy congestion, high emissions, and an increasing number of road accidents. Framing the transport equation in terms of sustainable development, he calls into question the orthodox growth-first view of urban development. Although acknowledging the immense contribution of vehicular transportation to material progress, ecological, economic, and social contradictions are underexamined. These contradictions are functions of both design challenges and structural integration into the global economy. For example, free trade enables the dumping of old vehicles in African countries and shifts the burden of pollution to the subaltern periphery while also augmenting the hegemony of vehicular transportation that contributes to advancing urban sprawl in African cities. Obeng-Odoom proposes an alternative transport pathway that would entail a switch toward the development of more public transport and alternative modes (e.g., rail and bicycle) and a reorganization of land uses to support their development. However, he remains pessimistic about the development of sustainable transportation and believes that the power structures in the international economy may impede the development of alternative sustainable transport systems throughout the developing world.

There is a growing trend to reference city plans for sustainability as organizing frameworks. According to Grant (2014), the sustainable development turn offers a unique opportunity for collaboration among nontraditional partners (e.g., government and civil society/business and environmental organizations) and for adoption of a more holistic approach to future urban experiences, especially when human well-being, social and economic inclusion, reliance in the face of climate change, and greater environmental sustainability are at the core of new plans.

Similar global ambitions of world-class CBDs and globally connected cities with high-tech hubs amid ample green spaces are documented in the contributions here. Plan and vision similarities and reliance on market-centric schemes are striking despite vastly different regional, local, and historical contexts. Clearly, key components of these visions are related to the global infrastructure of policy transfer heavily influenced by the most recent urban development experiences and to the latest policy bandwagon. Charismatic experts and consultants, international city alliances, and year-round circuits of conferences, special events, and policy tourism provide ample evidence of the conditions that produce a reinforcement syndrome of dominant contemporary ideas (Clement & Kanai) to the detriment of alternative visioning. Worse still, Clement and Kanai remind us that many of the current plans fail to grapple with deeply entrenched socio/ethno/racialized spatial injustices. Without doubt, major shifts are needed in intellectual frameworks to transition toward more sustainable, equitable, ethnoracial, and cohesive urban 21st-century environments. This is the key urban challenge for coming decades.