11 A Place Called Home

At the end of 2011, my family and I moved to suburbia. According to my mother this felt as if we, the prodigal family, had finally made it back home; I am not so certain. I grew up in a place like this, far from the centre; and now, here I am again, making the same journey to the periphery in search of an extra bedroom and a bit of garden. I have followed a well-worn rite of passage that comes to many comfortably secure people living in the city in the western world at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

We have moved to what many people call the ‘inner suburbs’ of London, the ring of development that encircled the city during the first decades of the twentieth century. Here, we are no longer within easy distance of the centre, but looking down our perfectly regular street northwards I see urban sprawl all the way to the horizon. Our house was built in 1907 when pasture was turned over to tarmacadam and respectable housing, built with a hint of Elizabethan historicism, aimed at middle-ranking professionals who could get into St Pancras Station within fifteen minutes on the commuter train.

When we bought it, the house had been kept in its original state, but like many others in the street we have adapted it to our modern tastes. We have changed colour schemes and added our own furniture into the standardised room plan that can be found in every abode along the street; our pictures now hang from the walls, making it our own through decoration. We knocked down the wall that divided the kitchen and the dining room in order to make one large room with a view of the garden, so that this room becomes the heart of the house, where once it was a service area. We still have not decided what to do with the privy, an outdoor toilet.

The house was built at the dying moments of London’s pre-eminence as the world’s capital city, the twilight of empire reflected in an increased passion for domestication. The home was raised up as a last redoubt against the horrors of the city, as the antithesis of the office, a barrier against the tide of the world, as described by the Metroland advertisements:

London is at your very doorstep, if your needs must keep in touch with London, but it is always pure country at the corner of the lane beyond your garden fence . . . Metroland is a strip of England at its fairest, a gracious district formed by nature for the homes of a healthy, happy race.1

But my street now looks nothing like the Arcadian brochures produced by the Metroland Company that had young Edwardian ladies cutting flowers, or groups of young, shiny couples heading to the tennis club. And if London is changing this is only a small reflection of what is going on in cities around the world.

According to the American urbanist Alan Ehrenhalt, I am heading against the current, and we are currently experiencing the Great Inversion, a reverse white flight from the periphery to the centre of the city. This will have a huge impact on the life of American cities in the next decades, with the reinvention of downtown, while the poor are being driven out of the centre to the outskirts, the banlieus, far from metropolitan opportunities.

This return to the centre in some cities and the benefits of increased densification stands in contrast to the galloping suburban sprawl of cities like Houston. Which is the best way forward? It is increasingly hard to find a connection between our everyday lives and the enormous shifts that are happening to cities around the globe. How can I relate my own life, with its daily decisions and mundane trials, to what is going on with the rest of the planet’s cities? Where do I fit in, and what can I do about it?

It is easy to feel lost as one faces the sheer scale of the urban world. For much of the last 300 years we have assumed that when we talk about the city, we are talking about a social form that derives – like Rem Koolhaas’s Roman Operating System – from the ancient European template. But the balance of world urban populations is shifting. It is not only cities getting larger, but where they are, that will define their future shape.

In 1950 there were only eighty-three cities that had a population exceeding 1 million; today there are over 460. Sixty years ago, there was only one mega-city, defined as an urban area containing more than 10 million people. In those days New York had a total population of 12 million, London just under 9 million and Tokyo, the third-largest city, accounted for 7 million. The development of new mega-cities was a sharp, millennial shift: in 1985, there were nine in all; this rose to nineteen in 2004, and today is estimated at twenty-five. By 2025 the number will have climbed to thirty-six. It is significant where these cities have grown and how fast. Here is the top ten:

Tokyo	34.5 m	0.6 per cent growth per year
Guangzhou	25.8 m	3.8 per cent
Jakarta	25.3 m	3.2 per cent
Seoul	25.3 m	1.25 per cent
Shanghai	25.3 m	4.0 per cent
Mexico City	23.2 m	1.7 per cent
Delhi	23.0 m	3.0 per cent
New York	21.5 m	0.35 per cent
São Paulo	20.8 m	1.3 per cent
Mumbai	20.8 m	2.0 per cent.2

The size, as well as the speed at which these cities are growing, will have a huge impact on how the urban world develops. As I saw in Mumbai, in the next decades as urbanisation continues at such a rapid pace, many world cities will become world slums. We know that it is estimated that two people are arriving into cities every second, 180,000 every day, yet as the figures above show, these new citizens are not just making their journeys to the established metropolises of Tokyo and New York. Rather, it is estimated that the urban population in Africa and Asia will double by 2030; for example, the population of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, currently stands at about 8.75 million; by 2025 this will have risen to 15.04 million. China will continue to urbanise, and in the next twenty years over 350 million will settle in new cities, more than the entire population of the US. India, a nation that its liberating founder Mahatma Gandhi claimed had its soul in the village, will, by 2030, be a country of sixty-eight cities of over 1 million, thirteen cities with over 4 million and six mega-cities with a population each of over 10 million, with the capital at New Delhi reaching 46 million, twice as large as the total population of Australia.

What will these mega-cities feel like? In many ways, they have already arrived and one only needs to visit Mexico City or Nairobi to experience the impact of so many bodies crammed into one place together. Getting around Mumbai was a constant battle. Bodies, cars, taxis, autorickshaws, the unusual sight of an ox-drawn cart and the back-breaking effort of pulling a hand trolley laden with packing boxes, overstuffed sacks and timber. Riding the train at rush hour was a test of urban grit and savvy as on average nearly 4,700 people routinely pile into a space meant for less than a quarter of that number. People hang from the doors, learning the skills of jumping off as the engine enters the station before the next human wave attempts to fill the final crannies of the compartment. As the writer Suketu Mehta so rightly observes, Mumbai is a city where one is always adjusting, bunching up and making a little more room for the next person. Amongst this traffic, going by foot seemed the best of all possible methods of getting around.

Hanging on to the train’s door jamb, it was easy to think that at that moment the world was too full. Mega-cities can be seen both as a sign of increasing efficiency in our management of lives and proof that we are over-populated. In 1789 the Reverend Thomas Malthus warned that mankind was doomed if it ever reached 1 billion, because ‘the power of population is infinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man’.3 In 1968 Paul Ehrlich came up with the same cry for help in his influential book, Population Bomb, whose first editions started with the prediction: ‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.’4 Even James Lovelock, the father of Gaia, warned in 2009 that we faced ‘death on a grand scale from famine and lack of water [unless there is] a reduction to 1 billion people or less’.5

However, cities might just be the only solution we have in the face of such prophesies. In 1994 the American journalist P. J. O’Rourke calculated that if the world’s population were gathered together in a place with the same density of Manhattan, ‘everyone on earth can live in former Yugoslavia’.6 This constitutes less than 0.08 per cent of the planet’s surface. Today, the world’s population might need slightly more wriggle room, but no more than Nicaragua. Therefore, living together in crowded spaces is clearly not the problem; how we live, and how we are allowed to live together, is what matters most.

Cities are often the places that we blame for overcrowding when they are the places where the bustle is most visible. However, it is the city that offers one of the answers to the supposed demographic time bomb. Urbanisation itself, the movement from the countryside to the city, will act as the single most important factor in halting the current unsustainable rates of population growth in the next century. According to most estimates the global population will continue to rise until 2050, reaching somewhere near 9 billion, the same year that the world becomes 70 per cent urban. This means that we will be growing at about 1 billion every 14–20 years. The global population will continue to rise, peaking at about 10.1 billion in 2100. It will then start to decline.

There are many factors included within these predictions: the current economic crisis has already had an impact, as people are having fewer babies during the recession. The urbanisation of women is also dramatically affecting fertility rates. In the developed world this is reflected in the rise of professional women who have remained unmarried or without children until much later in their lives.

In 2011 it was revealed that the highly successful TV programme Sex and the City was not far off the mark. While 34.8 per cent of women over fifteen had never been married in New York State, within the city itself this figure rose to 41.7 per cent. It was also calculated that there were 149,219 more single women in the city than single men. Female New Yorkers also tend to get married much later, and will plan to have fewer children.

Cities are becoming more female – almost everywhere in the world, the proportion of women to men is changing. In her groundbreaking 2010 article in the Atlantic, ‘The End of Men’, Hannah Roisin showed how the economic downturn of 2008 transformed the workplace and now more women work in America than men. While there continues to be protest for the lack of women in the boardroom, now ‘women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools – for every two men who will receive BA this year, three women will do the same. Of the fifteen job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the US, all but two are occupied primarily by women’.7 The rise of women in the city is perhaps one of the least-discussed aspects of the urban future, and its impact cannot just be found in the developed world.

Elsewhere across the planet, the same imperatives of access to work, contraception and better healthcare are allowing women to make choices that were not available to them in the village. Coming to the city offers the new female immigrant previously unthinkable opportunities. In 2007 the UN Population Fund produced a special report stating that ‘the best recipe for a life without poverty is still to grow up in the city’.8

The advantages start early, with access to education. In developing countries, school attendance for girls between the ages of 10–14 is 18.4 per cent higher in the city than in the countryside. This percentage rises to 37.5 per cent between the ages of 15–19. For young women, child marriage is also a barrier to empowerment and is more prevalent in the countryside where, for example, 71 per cent of all young women in Bangladesh are wed by the time they are eighteen years old, as opposed to 31 per cent in the city. In a survey conducted in the slums of Addis Ababa, a quarter of all young migrants aged 10–19 were escaping a forced marriage. Women in the city, even in the slums where healthcare and conditions are precarious, are having fewer children. As a result, fertility rates are lower in the city than in the village. In addition, more children are staying alive. Where in the 1950s it was necessary to have somewhere between five or six children born to replace both parents, twenty years later this dropped to 3.9; by 2000 it was 2.8 and by 2008, 2.6 (in the developed world it is closer to 2.1).

Spending time in airports can give you a strange perspective on the world. Looking at a map of the major flight paths criss-crossing the globe appears like a spider’s web, displaying the network of major centres. Airports are solid examples of the connections between cities. Have you ever stood in front of a departure board and thought, ‘Where shall I go today?’

Standing in Terminal 3 of Dubai International Airport at four o’clock in the morning was one of the most bizarre moments of all my travels while writing this book. I was outside a stall displaying all the newspapers of the world, while an endless bustling crowd circled and swirled around me. This was a place without time; there were so many people whose body clocks were working in different time zones that it did not seem to matter that dawn was an hour away. From this position, just reading the headlines, I could find out what was happening in every city from Cape Town to Los Angeles. As this was Dubai, I could also pay for the paper with any currency, as long as I was happy to accept dirham as change.

I can also buy the latest bestseller in any number of languages, as well as the finest French wine from a concession that displays Château Pétrus in its window. There are shops heaped with luxury labels from electronics to perfume. International high-end fashion hangs on railings beneath glossy images of supermodels, waiting to be bagged up and carried to who-knows-where. Expensive golf clubs are racked beside posters of impossibly verdant greens in the middle of the desert.

The terminal itself was constructed as a single long space, and completed in 2011. Below a broad curved ceiling, it is the third-largest building in the world. As I wander in a daze past familiar chain cafés and fast-food restaurants, there is a palpable babble of languages being spoken around me, and I can imagine that thousands of people are coming together for a matter of moments and then departing to all points of the globe, never to meet again.

The airport is an instant city, continuously in tumultuous overdrive. Part of me is disoriented as I walk through the terminal, waiting for my connecting flight back home. I am uncertain that I understand this place as it is so different from any other public space that we normally encounter in a city. It feels like the agglomeration of every city, and yet has no real identity of its own. There is no sense of history, nationality or personality: a consumption-scape that leaves no impression upon the memory. Yet the airport only makes sense as a place because of the network of other airports to which it is linked. In terms of scale, Dubai Airport is a mega-city, the fourth-largest hub for international passengers in the world, dealing with over 50 million travellers in 2011 alone. Yet it is also the reminder that the airport itself is a place of perpetual movement, a super-connected place that gives it a completely different power of scale altogether.

If the idea of the mega-city seems daunting, the arrival of the interconnected mega-region – the vast conglomerations of major cities – will be a further challenge to the urban future. In the coming decades we will see not just the escalation of cities over 10 million people but the development of connected megapolises to create massive economic powerhouses that dwarf our common understanding of the city. This will likely change the way that we think about urban infrastructure, how the metropolis works. We will no longer judge the city just on its internal strengths but, like Dubai Airport, on the power of its connections.

In 2007 Richard Florida and his team at the Martin Prosperity Institute decided to look at a global map of the world at night in order to discover not just where the great mega-cities of the world were, but also to see how they connected with other major conurbations. Comparing this data with other statistics such as GDP and population, they were able to work out that there were forty mega-regions in the world. In addition, they calculated that these regions were the fastest-growing areas of the globe – accounting for 1.5 billion people or 23 per cent of total population – as well as the most productive, accounting for 66 per cent of the world’s output and 86 per cent of all innovation. The mega-region, in effect, is the end result of Geoffrey West’s experiment in urban metabolism – the superlinear benefits of size.9

Some of these mega-regions had been identified for some time. The relationship between Washington, New York and Boston was first named in 1961 by the French geographer Jean Gottmann who came up with the word ‘megapolis’ to indicate a city growing so large that it was reaching outwards beyond sprawl. Gottmann meant it as a warning to overdevelopment, stretching out of control. Today the America 2050 organisation reports that there are eleven mega-regions across the US: the Arizona Sun Corridor, which includes Phoenix and Tucson; the Cascadia, which stretches from Seattle to Vancouver; the sun-belt cities of Florida from Miami to Jacksonville; the Front Range, which stretches along the southern Rockies from Denver to Wyoming; the cities of the Great Lakes that include Chicago, Toronto, Detroit, all the way to Buffalo; the Gulf Coast; the northern corridor from New York to Boston; the Bay Area in California; the Piedmont Atlantic from Atlanta to Carolina; the southern Californian conurbation from San Diego to Las Vegas; and the Texas Triangle of Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston.

What is noticeable about these new mega-regions is that in most cases they are not defined by states; more than that they are not even restricted by national boundaries. It seems that being part of a mega-region has more influence on the economic prosperity of a place than the national government. This perhaps stretches plausibility when looking at Europe where the powers-that-be have decided to emphasise the nature of the economic union by defining two main mega-regions. The naming of the power regions does not help the economist’s case: the Blue Banana – which begins in Liverpool in England – connects with London, Brussels, Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, Zurich and ends in Milan, northern Italy. This is in contrast with the sun-belt Golden Banana, which stretches along the Mediterranean from northern Spain to northern Italy.

Perhaps the most innovative development of a mega-region can be found on the planning desk of the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, one of the most exciting thinkers about city design. In a short career Ingels has already started to make people think differently about the urban space they live in. His team has gained acclaim for what he calls the practice of ‘hedonistic sustainability’, designing buildings that are sustainable not because of what has been taken away in order to make them greener but because the architecture encourages enjoyment and increases quality of life. This is expressed in 8House in Southern Orestad, a suburb of Copenhagen, which offered housing, retail and offices in a vertical, twisting, layered village. Proximity increases efficiency, and everything is designed with the carbon footprint in mind: it is possible to bicycle around the whole complex without having to get off.

A similar sense of fun can be found in Ingels’s designs for the Superkilen, a 33,000-square-metre playground in vibrant colours that provides a unique space for Copenhagen’s children. Ingels realised that the neighbourhood of the proposed site contained fifty different ethnic groups and as a result the park gathers together the signs, colours, even the manhole covers from around the world. In some ways resembling something from Yellow Submarine, the half-mile-long park is a ‘surrealist collection of global urban diversity that in fact reflects the true nature of the local neighbourhood’.10 Ingels has also proposed a vast waste-to-energy incinerator plant in the centre of Copenhagen that doubles as a mountainous ski slope, and that also releases a smoke ring every time the plant emits 200 kilograms of carbon into the atmosphere.

At the Venice Biennale in 2010, Ingels launched his ideas to unite the Danish capital of Copenhagen and the southern Swedish city of Malmö. Currrently the two cities are connected by the Oresund Bridge, a four-lane superhighway that spans nearly 8 kilometres across the strait of water, which then links to the artificial island of Peberholm, after which the journey is completed through a 4-kilometre tunnel. The bridge was designed by George Rotne and opened in 2000. Ingels suggested that a Loop City should be created, connecting the two cities at two points around the Oresund Straits, developing a single urban link that crosses boundaries. The impact for Copenhagen would be like a release valve on the problems of population growth, spreading out the industrial corridor and increasing mobility as well as addressing climate-change issues. The design also included innovative architecture such as a living bridge, where houses and offices were built into the body of the piers.11 As a new mega-region, reaching across boundaries as well as water, Ingels’s vision is a vivid example of how our cities – and their limits – are growing out of our current definitions and assumptions.

The mega-regions of the future, however, need to be planned; they will not happen organically. The designs of smart infrastructure to link together urban centres – such as Ingels’s living bridge – have to be bold, thought out in advance, and will undoubtedly be expensive. Such projects can also inflame political divisions, where parties can make capital out of proposing or opposing schemes. Thus while business interests might back a particular scheme – such as a new airport, more roads, or an industrial park – it can then often be attacked by protesters or local residents.

In the UK, the campaigning fervour of Nimby activists has been brought to bear in protest against most developments in recent years. However, the proposal of adding high-speed rail to the transport infrastructure is one of the hotly contested debates of the moment. The new train link, HS2, will connect England’s second city to the capital, cutting travel times to forty minutes. This will have a big impact on both cities: in the next twenty years London’s population is expected to grow by 1.3 million; there will also be an estimated 730,000 new jobs in the capital, mainly in the service sectors. Where are these people going to live? With a high-speed link to Birmingham, some of those jobs could be spread out to the Midlands; alternatively Birmingham might be able to support some of the population growth with its own economy. The alternative is that London grows and Birmingham will find it difficult to compete.

This is more than a debate between ‘mega-regions’ advocates and Nimbys. For its advocates, HS2 is an obvious sound investment, an infrastructure project that equates to Roosevelt’s New Deal initiative of the 1930s. The ecological campaigners Friends of the Earth support the scheme because it will reduce carbon emissions. Yet HS2 will cost £33 billion, will not be completed until 2026 and, protesters say, will destroy countryside, villages and offer little provable economic value. The debate highlights another consequence of the rise of mega-cities and mega-regions. In the mind of politicians and planners, the economic power of the cities has become more important than the homes and livelihoods of the rest of the nation. The mega-regions are super-charged regions of creativity and productivity but they come at a price: the cost of expensive infrastructure projects but also the concerns of those who are affected or even excluded from their benefits.

This begs the question: do cities need countries any more? There are increasing signs of trends that cities are becoming independent of their surroundings, that London, Paris and Tokyo have more in common with each other than they do with Britain, France or Japan. When people ask me where I come from I am more likely to say ‘London’ than ‘Britain’. Are we now citizens rather than patriots?

My city has become a world city: it is engaged with a global market but it has also absorbed people from around the planet. Today over 40 per cent of people in London were born into ethnic groups outside white British; there are over 300 languages spoken. I experience this multi-culture on a daily basis. In 1923 an ‘Empire Exhibition’ was held in neighbouring Wembley to display the wonders of the British Imperial reach. Now Wembley is the most diverse community in Europe. Where once London was the capital of the world, it is now the world within a city.

My neighbourhood itself has a strong Irish community that moved here in the nineteenth century to work on the local railways; at the end of my street is the Catholic church, which is always full on Sundays. Across the road from the church is a mosque that is becoming so popular that the local council is concerned about parking congestion. We also have a Hindi Cultural Centre. A few streets away an Afghan community has developed and runs a series of shops along the high street. Early every morning, by the builders’ depot, groups of Eastern European labourers congregate in all weathers, hoping to pick up some work in the city’s bustling construction sites. Thus, the vastness of the globalised market interweaves with the intricate threads of the local.

We live in an age of hyper-mobility and this is most clearly seen on our own streets. You are no longer defined solely by where you are born, and you are more likely to travel – sometimes long distances – in order to find a job. Once this would have entailed a carriage ride from the provinces to the capital; today it is a long-haul flight across oceans and national borders. Thus the rise of mega-cities, mega-regions and the world city will not happen ‘over there’ but around you. But the world city is a different place from one we have experienced so far: it forces new levels of social toleration and mixture. As a result the city is more than just a crucible where cultures come together and mix; it is a place where something completely new is formed.

In the past few decades Los Angeles has been reinvented as a Latino city. In the 2010 census, 47.7 per cent of the city’s population was Latino or Hispanic, as opposed to 27 per cent white non-Hispanics, 8.7 per cent black and 13.7 per cent Asian. As leading urban sociologist Saskia Sassen points out, the city disguises great differences within this group: LA is often called the second city of Mexico, but also has a larger Salvadorian population than San Salvador itself. These groups are intermixing: 14 per cent of all Mexican Angelenos are married to members of other ethnic groups (this percentage increases to 50 per cent in New York and Miami). The Latino community is becoming a city within a city, but at the same time LA is becoming increasingly Latinised, thus redefining what it means to be a southern Californian.

In his book Magical Urbanism, Mike Davis looks at how the geography of LA has been transformed by the Latino community, creating an enclave within the metropolitan centre, focused in the old central manufacturing district, while the valleys, beaches and surrounding hills remain ‘Anglo-majority’ neighbourhoods. In addition, the Latino community has also become concentrated in particular areas of the economy: services, catering, light manufacturing, home construction. These neighbourhoods are transformed: the shops and the streets are different, the music pumping from the windows, the fast food being sold from sidewalk vendors. In the suburb of Southgate you can even see the difference in the colours the houses are painted. The community also encourages alternative urban spaces and placitas or small plazas have been retrofitted into the city plan. As Davis observes:

All of Latin America is now a dynamo turning the lights back on in the dark spaces of North American cities. While there is lots of abstract talk in planning and architectural schools about the need to ‘reurbanise’ American cities, there is little recognition that Latino and Asian immigrants are already doing this on an epic scale.12

Today, Marseilles, the French port on the Mediterranean, is the first European city to become a majority Muslim community, as a result of the significant immigration of people from the Magreb. It has long been a joke that Marseilles is in fact the first African stop-off on the famous Paris to Dakar road race. Yet walking through the city, this otherness is not the only thing one appreciates.

Along the Vieux Port during the summer of 2012, there was a sense that Marseilles was searching for a new identity on a number of different levels. It had already been named the 2013 European City of Culture and preparations were apace on getting things ready. The historical neighbourhood, once famously seedy and exciting, was being turned into the largest pedestrianised area in Europe. Historic buildings, the glories of civic pride, were being spruced and cleaned. Marseilles was transforming itself from a thriving port that had seen better days, into a heritage site, forgetting the intervening decades of history.

Yet only a street away, going from the centre up to the Place Notre-Dame-du-Mont, one quickly found a different space. At the foot of the hill there was a series of Moroccan shops selling piles of olives, scoops of brightly coloured spices. Further up the road was a fabric store filled to the roof with bolts of highly tinted cloth from central Africa. As the evening was drawing in a barbecue was being set up outside a small café promising specialities from the Cap Verte.

Being in the centre was obviously no way of seeing the complete panoply of the city. Rather it was still at the peripheries, amongst the banlieus, where the new Marseilles was evolving. Nonetheless, even here one got the impression that a new city was growing out of the fabric of the old, that the new arrivals were adapting and using the traditional social spaces to find a compromise with the European way of doing things. In those corners of the city Marseilles was not just French, or just Africa, but something in between.

It is exactly this energetic mixing of cultures that ignites the genius of the metropolis. As we become increasingly mobile, the city will become globally connected and as the network gets stronger, so it starts to develop its own identity. This is what urban theorist Saskia Sassen means when she talks about ‘the global city’. Globalisation has unified the urban experience: those who live inside the city have more in common than those outside. There is a set of norms, a code of conduct to living in the city, a passport that allows one to move from city to city, east to west, without having to change. For Sassen, the global city is a by-product of the globalised economy: our sense of citizenship determined by our place within the worldwide market that influences our behaviour, hopes and fears. The great cities of the world – London, New York and Tokyo – have become ‘one transterritorial marketplace’.13

There are, therefore, consequences of this worldwide network of cities; for the metropolis is not just a mixture of cultures but a vector of markets. Take the relationship between a house foreclosure in Florida and ramifications of the toxic credit default swap – an incomprehensible financial instrument created to hedge the subprime mortgage market – in banks around the world. A family arranged a loan to buy their own home, to become part of their community. Yet this promise of repayment and the payment schedule were bundled together with similar promises from other families, businesses and institutions, and then sold off once again in packages that supposedly balanced out the riskier bets with more safe investments. After 2008, when families suddenly found that they could no longer honour their agreements, a shock wave juddered through the worldwide financial system. No one who had been involved in this network of transactions was safe.

The global network is highly interdependent, and even without the calamity of the international banking crisis, another example shows us how the activities in one city can have an impact on another. Many of the leading high-street retailers in London and New York have their underwear and cotton goods manufactured in Chittagong, Bangladesh. The factories moved there in the 1960s when it became too expensive to have the goods made in the traditional factories of Bradford in the north-west of Britain. Yet, since 2010, Bangladeshi garment workers have been campaigning for a minimum wage.

Earlier that year the government had raised the limit from $25 to $45 per month, but the workers claimed the factory owners had not implemented the policy. These factories supply outlets such as Walmart, Tesco, H&M, Zara, Carrefour, Gap, Metro, JCPenney, Marks & Spencer, Kohl’s, Levi Strauss and Tommy Hilfiger. In more than one case, the companies are now looking for new factories in China and elsewhere with lower costs and fewer industrial disturbances. The garment industry provides $10 billion annually to Bangladesh and the government is determined to keep its workforce competitive. This has resulted in violent clashes, strikes and vicious disputes as the workers defend their rights, even if it jeopardises their own competitiveness with other markets.14

We have now reached the end of an era when the world was divided between the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ world. The impact of the 2008 credit crunch on the world’s cities offers a very sobering overview of the global economy. In terms of the world’s leading cities, the rate of urban growth of New York, Tokyo, London (0.35 per cent; 0.6 per cent; 0.8 per cent respectively) is almost flatlining; ‘developed’ could easily be mistaken for stagnant. Elsewhere, as we have seen, in the rust-belt cities like Detroit, as well as in the former Soviet nations of Eastern Europe, some cities are, in fact, in decline. By contrast, the rate of development of cities such as Karachi, Pakistan (4.9 per cent), Luanda, Angola (4.7 per cent) or Beijing (4.5 per cent), shows that parts of the world are urbanising at an impressive velocity.

For the foreseeable future cities like my home, London, and New York will maintain their economic predominance; elsewhere, the remainder of the leaders’ pack will be shuffled. In the 2012 Wealth Report produced by estate agents Knight Frank and Citibank, the top ten cities that matter today, and in ten years’ time, show the rapid movement towards the east:

London is in the fortunate position of being able to charge the best prices for the luxuries that it offers. As a financial and legal capital it attracts many of the major institutions as well as high-net-wealth individuals who enjoy the benefits of a light-touch fiscal policy and regulations as well as the level of expertise within the city financial services. But the rich do not come to London simply because of the advantageous non-domicile tax policy; the city also delivers on top-quality culture, fashion and liveability. It is a place where the rich want to visit, invest and consume. The city has thus benefited economically from an increase in the share of the world’s financial markets (from 2 per cent in 1998 to 3.7 per cent in 2008) as well as through promoting an open, welcoming culture.

Yet this position is not secure. According to the 2012 Honor Chapman Report produced by a group of leading land-management firms, London needs to remain competitive over the next decade. The report warns that the city needs to attract new industries to reinforce global leadership. Other concerns include a low standard of education within the city itself, making a home-grown knowledge economy more difficult to launch; the high price of property and the failures of an ambitious housing policy; the problems with infrastructure such as rail and airports; the increasing gulf between the political needs of the city and the UK at large; and the failure to establish itself as a leader in sustainability.16

In particular, London is forced to consider its competitiveness not only against historic rivals such as Amsterdam, Paris or New York but also against a new group of emerging economies that seem supercharged in comparison, especially a rapidly transforming urban China. At the start of 2012 it was estimated that 691 million people lived in the cities of mainland China, nearly double the figure – 389 million – of the mid-1980s. In other words, one out of every twenty-five people in the world today moved to a Chinese city in the last thirty years. And this will continue. By 2030 China will be 70 per cent urban, having started off as 26 per cent urban in 1990. These huge numbers of people are spread out over 800 cities, with the expectation of 15–20 million new arrivals settling down every year. In terms of housing, the state needs to provide a new Greater Chicago annually to respond to demand.

The Chinese were building impressive cities long before the first gates were constructed in Europe. Evidence of the first cities can be found in the Shang Dynasty dating to about 1600 bce in places like Banpo. From that moment the character for ‘wall’ – cheng – was the same as for city. The early Chinese cities were also highly symbolically designed. Chengzhou, which was created as a holy refuge by the Duke of Zhou in 1136 bce, was designed to follow intricate cosmological rules, so that the order of the heavens could be reflected in the same equilibrium on earth. The design was so successful that the Duke’s ideas, called the Zhouli, influenced urban planning throughout the empire for the following centuries.

As was seen from Marco Polo’s description of Beijing nearly 2,500 years later, the Chinese city has always been strictly regimented. In addition to a celestial order, other readings of the universe – I Ching, feng shui and geomancy – were used to devise the Imperial City, to reflect the rigid human hierarchy. This remained a constant until the arrival of European merchants in the nineteenth century, when the economic demands of international trade forced the city to absorb foreign plans.

Foreign communities developed in Shanghai after the first Opium War in the 1840s, making the port a multicultural entrepot. This had an impact on the port as well as the fabric of the city, as ex-pats brought their own ways and customs with them. The Bund, a wide road running along the Huangpu river, became a showcase for the finest in European architecture. The French Concession, a section of land given to the French government in 1849, became renowned for its shops as well as its distinctive domestic architecture, which seemed to transport a hotchpotch of styles from colonial plantation to Art Deco, ranged along avenues lined with British plane trees.

During the Mao era, Shanghai remained a formidable trading city, as well as a hotbed of radical ideas. Nevertheless, the revolution made little impact upon the fabric of the city. Between 1949 and the late 1970s, Shanghai generated over $350 billion yuan in taxes for the central government, but 99 per cent of this was redistributed to smaller cities in the heartland. It was not until 1980 that a new era of super-development rocketed into being. That year the central government decided that four secondary cities – Shenzen, Zhuhai, Shantou and Xiamen – should be opened up to foreign investment. Four years later fourteen other major metropolises – including Shanghai – were added to the list of ‘open cities’.

Between the 1970s and the 2000s the nature of the urban Chinese economy was transformed: where once 70 per cent of the population worked in the public sector, this was reduced to 25 per cent; by contrast the private sector exploded, rising from 4.7 per cent of the workforce to 20.8 per cent. Foreign investment started to pour in; according to one estimate, $10 billion a year since 1992. Shanghai’s economy itself galloped, growing at 15 per cent a year. In 2011 the city’s GDP peaked at 1.92 trillion yuan. But this success brought with it huge demands. Between 2000 and 2010, the population rose by 13 per cent, to over 23 million. Included within this are 9 million long-term migrants who are working despite the Hukou system.

This urbanisation has had an impact on China’s creativity, which is a further threat to established centres like London. The new mega-regions that encircle Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong house 25 per cent of the nation’s population, but produce 68 per cent of China’s economic output. While it is often assumed that this rise is due solely to manufacturing, China’s cultural creative industry is in fact growing faster than the annual GDP. In 2007 GDP in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen grew by 12.3 per cent, 13.3 per cent and 15 per cent respectively, while the creative industry of these three cities increased by 19.4 per cent, 22.8 per cent and 25.9 per cent. Part of this is a result of a government-driven attempt to develop ‘creative clusters’, cultural quarters within existing cities, just like Tech City.

This, in turn, produces a positive feedback loop, the creativity encouraging more innovation, resulting in a vibrant art scene that is becoming increasingly popular as well as a ready market. Between 1996 and 2001 the number of registered patents from these cities – one way of auditing the creativity of a metropolis – rose by 400 per cent. In 2008 Beijing was producing as many patents as Seattle, home of Microsoft, while Shanghai has become as creative as Toronto. Just as in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, China’s new industrial power is inspiring a real cultural revolution. Some observers, such as Richard Florida, have commented that it might take up to twenty years before China produces its first Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. But twenty years is not actually that far away; it suggests that the seeds have already been planted.

Shanghai offers a mixed picture of what the future of urbanism might look like. It is just one example of the explosion of urban China and how an authoritarian government is attempting to manage its economic transformation through the city. While the growth of Shanghai, Beijing and Wuhan are well known, it is also going on in places we rarely hear about. In 1970 there were 200 cities in China; today there are over 700, over 160 with a population of more than 1 million; in the US there are only nine, and four in the UK. Will the sheer force of numbers change the way the city works?

The rebirth of Shanghai since the 1980s has been a sustained period of ‘creative destruction’ – the city has not just grown beyond its traditional boundaries, it has been razed to the ground and rebuilt at the same time. In the 1990s more people in Shanghai were displaced, their homes destroyed and rebuilt, than over thirty years in the whole of the US; between 1992 and 2004 this amounted to 925 million square feet. It was also claimed that half of the world’s cranes can be found in the Pudong District, which has become the new city centre.

It was in the Pudong District, in the former rice fields to the east of the Huangpu river, that the authorities first dreamed of a modern city in the 1980s; it was even renamed ‘the head of the dragon’ by President Deng Xiaoping himself. From this discarded agricultural land a new city was to be born, divided into the Jinqiao Export Processing Zone, the Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone and, most important of all, the Lujiazui Financial and Trade District as well as a deep-water port leading to the Yangzte river to take the goods manufactured in the factories of the city to the rest of the world.

Of these districts, Lujiazui would be the centrepiece of the metropolis, a ‘golden zone’ dedicated to capital. It was decided therefore that just as the marketplace was being opened up to foreign investors, so the district itself should be put into the hands of foreign designers. At first a team of French planners led by Joseph Belmont, who was instrumental in the Grands Projets of Mitterrand in the 1980s, were consulted, while the plans of local designers were ignored by Shanghai mayor Zhu Rongji. Yet the authorities did not want to hand over plans to a single office; rather they wished to maintain control of the reins while also attracting international attention and expertise.

Belmont then delivered a list of eight super-architects who were invited to participate in a consultancy: Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, Norman Foster, Kazua Shinohara and four others: Richard Rogers, Toyo Ito, Dominique Perrault and Massimiliano Fuksas who, in May 1992, were the only ones flown over to the site – which was already being prepared by demolition experts – and asked to submit proposals. But rather than adopting one single plan, the authorities took the best of each design and mixed them – in effect, celebrating the symbols of the mega-city without deciding on an urban philosophy to bring all the parts together.

Lujiazui is not exactly a city but a forest of icons to business, heralded by the completion of the Pearl of the Orient, the broadcasting tower that stands on a promontory of the river. Appearing like the Eiffel Tower adapted for the TV cartoon Futurama, and designed by a team from the local Shanghai East China Institute of Architectural Design, the Pearl was the first skyscraper that broke the skyline in 1993, standing 1,535 feet tall. Since then, the district has become a laboratory for urban experimentation, not just in towering architecture but also infrastructure that is sorely tested as it copes with the rapidly growing numbers of cars in the city. In addition the underground subway system currently has a capacity of 1.4 million people a day, but plans are afoot to increase this by 500 per cent. Shanghai also boasts the fastest train system in the world, built to connect the centre with the ever-expanding periphery.

Shanghai is an example – like Dubai – of building a global city from scratch. There is nothing organic or unplanned about any of this. Take, for example, Century Avenue, which begins at the Pearl TV tower and then runs 3 miles to the east. At its outset, the Hong Kong architect Tao Ho had warned that the planners should be careful not to be seduced by the notion of modern urbanism as purely a collection of tall buildings; and yet the Shanghai designers did just that. As a result, rather than an impressive, bustling urban centre, the main thoroughfare of the city is a combination of a Texan expressway with the hubristic hauteur of a Parisian rue de Rivoli.

The results are plain to see. Despite the warnings, the city authorities wanted their route to be ‘one metre wider than the Champs-Elyses’17 and a showcase of impressive skyscrapers. But the plans never developed the packed density of Manhattan, the thrilling juxtaposition of lively streets and business district: the sense that here the whole world was coming together to do a deal. Instead, the buildings are ordered and divided by broad public spaces where no one is in a hurry and which are virtually empty throughout the day. The buildings do not scale into the air because of the intense competition for space within the district but because each developer wants an instant icon. The Avenue itself is 330 feet across, and includes an eight-lane road, four bicycle lanes and pavements so wide that gardens and public art have been added to give some sense of a human scale.

Century Avenue is the opposite of Jane Jacobs’s Hudson Street, and perhaps it will never gain the complexity required truly to become a city; many even question whether instead it is a suburban industrial park planted within an urban centre. One might also wonder whether this was a different type of urbanism, a new Chinese model, and its strangeness is only the result of looking at it through western eyes. But what of the people?

As real estate became increasingly expensive within Shanghai, the housing market boomed alongside the business market. From the 1990s many people were moved out of their traditional houses in the urban centre to make way for office blocks and as a result were rehoused in new tenements and flats. Rather than living in houses, people are now living on top of each other, so that nearly 50 per cent of the total population live in space that covers only 5 per cent of the land in the city. Yet as the populations continued to grow, even these towers did not respond to the rising demand. In 1980 there were 121 buildings at a height of over eight storeys; by 2005 this number had increased to 10,045. This new style of vertical living also had an impact on the way people interacted, as the life on the street needed to be replaced by new public spaces.

Since 1999, Shanghai has grown at the astonishing rate of 20 million square metres every year, and part of this has included a spread outwards as the city sprawled in all directions. One of these schemes, launched in 2006, was to build a whole new city and nine new towns on Shanghai’s outskirts, with a combined population of 5.4 million. These new settlements are to be connected to the centre through a high-speed rail link. In addition, a further sixty new towns with a population of 50,000 each are to be planned and built within the next decade.

As they formulated the One City, Nine Towns project, the planners wanted to confirm Shanghai’s new status as a global city within the designs themselves. And as a result the plans for each of the nine towns were handed over to a foreign designer, commissioned to bring their own native urbanism to the project. Therefore Thames Town in Songjiang New City, 40 kilometres from the centre, is a model English Tudor village, with cobbled streets and red telephone boxes. The architects, Atkins Design, claimed that the borough crammed ‘500 years of British architecture into a five-year construction project’.18 The Disney theme continues and is brought to stark relief in the German town, Anting, close to Shanghai International Automobile City, where the Volkswagon factory and Formula 1 track can be found, and was designed by Albert Speer, the son of Hitler’s favourite architect. The Swedish town, Luodian, is close to the Volvo factory, and is based on a very idiosyncratic interpretation of the Nordic style, even appropriating the iconic mermaid statue from Copenhagen. There are also Spanish, Dutch, Italian and American-themed settlements.

Yet the massive development of housing highlights some of the problems of Shanghai’s urban miracle. While the shape of One City, Nine Towns has been painstakingly plotted by the designers, it has been built by speculators and there have been a number of noticeable failures. In Anting, few of the houses face east–west, as is Chinese tradition. There is still no regular train service to Thames Town and so the settlement is usually empty, except at the weekend when people come to take photos. Often the foreign planners failed to communicate adequately with the local developers, and low skills and poor-quality materials mean that many of the buildings are showing stress even before the project is completed. The Dutch architects even walked away in exasperation.

Is this the future? While we watch the economic rise of China in awe, there are perhaps other scales that we need to measure. For there seems to be no sense of how one should behave in these hybrid, hyper-modern citadels. Shanghai seems to be a mega-city in its building schemes, massive infrastructure and population, but has it become complex enough to herald a new way of urban living? The Chinese have a word, suzhu, to promote all the good qualities expected of the new citizen. But how do we define this ‘quality’ needed to thrive in the metropolis?

This rapid transformation of urban life is something that the west has not seen since the nineteenth century with the exponential growth of industrial cities such as Manchester and Chicago. In my suburban street in London, I am living in the dying glow of this historic moment. Despite a constant churn of new building and improved infrastructure, it is unlikely London or New York will ever expand and change as they once did. But sometimes it takes time for a community to adapt to the changes around it.

Looking out of my window at the houses across the road, they would probably not seem out of place in Thames Town. They are neatly constructed, appropriating the historic signatures of Tudor architecture but with twentieth-century materials. When they were first developed they were built to attract the new middle classes who desired space and a domestic haven a short train’s commuting distance from the office. The outward designs signalled the first golden age of England – the land of Elizabeth I, Shakespeare and Sir Francis Drake – in the hope of reviving the nation’s self-confidence in the face of a disconcertingly changing world. In contrast, Shanghai does not raid the past to applaud its own continuity, culture and significance; rather it takes the world and makes it both modern and local.

Yet it cannot appropriate the ballet of the streets. The houses along my street, despite their architectural uniformity, are a home for the world, and as families move in and out, some residents die and new tenants arrive, we have slowly developed a way of living together – a code of conduct that includes weak ties, neighbourliness and the cultivation of a certain amount of trust. We notice when a family has builders and scaffolding goes up around the outside of the house. We hold parcels for each other if the postman comes and someone is out. My children go and play with the children of other families. In June 2012 some neighbours organised a Jubilee party, the road was blocked at both ends and a long table placed down the centre where tea was served for everybody. It is these small things that we do for each other that keeps the city alive. These new communities – the appropriations of the One City, Nine Towns scheme, just as much as the burgeoning mega-cities and mega-regions – have to find their own dance that fits the rhythms of the time and particular genius of place. In exactly the same manner, I have to listen to the changing steps of the performance outside my own front door and adjust accordingly.

This is the heart of the relationship between the place called home and the wider global changes that are transforming the city: they are not two different worlds, beyond touch, but are intricately connected. Today what happens in faraway places has an impact on our streets. The ways that cities work make us part of a larger network, and this should encourage us to be citizens rather than to resign from participation.