The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (25 page)

In the industrial era, noted the French philosopher Jacques Ellul, “the techniques of amusement” became “more indispensable to make urban suffering bearable.” By the twentieth century, industrialized mass entertainment—publishing, motion pictures, radio, and television— occupied an ever larger hold on the life of urban dwellers. These media-related businesses also accounted for a growing part of the economy in such key image-producing cities as Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Bombay.
²⁶

By the early twenty-first century, this focus on the cultural industries began to inform economic policies in many urban areas. Instead of working to retain middle-class families and factory jobs or engage in economic competition with the periphery, urban regions placed increased focus on such ephemeral concepts as fashionability, “hipness,” trend, and style as the keys to their survival.

In Rome, Paris, San Francisco, Miami, Montreal, and New York, tourism now stands as one of the largest and most promising industries. The economies of some of the fastest-growing centers, such as Las Vegas or Orlando, rely largely on the staging of “experiences,” complete with uniquely eye-catching architecture and round-the-clock live entertainment.
²⁷

Even in such unlikely places as Manchester, Montreal, and Detroit, political and business leaders hoped that by creating “cool cities,” they might lure gays, bohemians, and young “creatives” to their towns.
²⁸
In some places, the accoutrements of this kind of growth—loft developments, good restaurants, clubs, museums, and a sizable, visible gay and single population—succeeded in reviving once desolate town centers, but hardly with anything remotely reminiscent of their past economic dynamism.
²⁹

Cities in continental Europe—notably Paris, Vienna, and post–cold war Berlin—particularly embraced this reliance on a culturally based economy. Having largely failed to regain its status as a world business center, Berlin now celebrated its bohemian community as its primary economic asset. The city’s relevance was increasingly defined not by the export of goods or services, but by its edgy galleries, unique shops, lively street life, and growing tourist trade.
³⁰

In the twenty-first century, some cities or parts of cities may survive, and even thrive, on such an ephemeral basis and, with the support of their still dominant media industries, market that notion to the wider world. The brief but widely acclaimed rise of urban technology districts—such as New York’s “Silicon Alley” or San Francisco’s “Multimedia Gulch” during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s—even briefly led some to identify hipness and urban edginess as the primary catalyst for information-age growth.
³¹

Both of these districts ultimately shriveled as the Internet industry contracted and then matured, yet the market for new housing continued to grow. This demand came partly from younger professionals, but also from a growing population of older affluents, including those hoping to experience “a more pluralistic way of life.” These modern-day nomads often reside part-time in cities, either to participate in its cultural life or to transact critical business. In some cities—Paris, for one—these occasional urban nomads constitute, by one estimate, one in ten residents.
³²

The rush in many “global cities” to convert old warehouses, factories, and even office buildings into elegant residences suggests the gradual transformation of former urban economic centers into residential resorts. The declining old financial center of lower Manhattan seemed likely to revive not as a technology hub, noted the architectural historian Robert Bruegmann, but as a full- or part-time home for “wealthy cosmopolites wishing to enjoy urban amenities in the elegantly recycled shell of a former business center.”
³³

Over time, however, this form of culturally based growth may not be self-sustaining. In the past, achievement in the arts grew in the wake of economic or political dynamism. Athens first emerged as a bustling great mercantile center and military power before it astounded the world in other fields. The extraordinary cultural production of other great cities, from Alexandria and Kaifeng to Venice, Amsterdam, London, and, in the twentieth century, New York, rested upon a similar nexus between the aesthetic and the mundane.
³⁴

Broader demographic trends also pose severe long-term questions for these cities. The decline in the urban middle-class family—a pattern seen in both the late Roman Empire and eighteenth-century Venice— deprives urban areas of a critical source for economic and social vitality. These problems will be particularly marked in Japan and Europe, where the numbers of young workers are already dropping. Superannuated Japanese cities face increasing difficulties competing with their Chinese counterparts, enriched by the migration of ambitious young families from their vast agricultural hinterlands.
³⁵

Under these circumstances, it is difficult to imagine the continued dominance of the Italian fashion industry or Japan’s preeminence in Asian popular culture as their populations of young people continue to decline.
³⁶
Over time, the economically ascendant cities around the world— Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Shanghai, Beijing, Mumbai, or Bangalore— seem certain to generate their own aesthetically based industries.
³⁷

Finally, the ephemeral city seems likely to face often profound social conflicts. An economy oriented to entertainment, tourism, and “creative” functions is ill suited to provide upward mobility for more than a small slice of its population. Focused largely on boosting culture and constructing spectacular buildings, urban governments may tend to neglect more mundane industries, basic education, or infrastructure. Following such a course, they are likely to evolve ever more into “dual cities,” made up of a cosmopolitan elite and a large class of those, usually at low wages, who service their needs.
³⁸

To avoid the pitfalls of an ephemeral future, cities must emphasize those basic elements long critical to the making of vital commercial places. A busy city must be more than a construct of diversions for essentially nomadic populations; it requires an engaged and committed citizenry with a long-term financial and familial stake in the metropolis. A successful city must be home not only to edgy clubs, museums, and restaurants, but also to specialized industries, small businesses, schools, and neighborhoods capable of regenerating themselves for the next generation.

Over time, no urban system can survive persistent chaos. Successful cities flourish under a strong regime of both law and order. Citizens must feel at least somewhat secure in their persons. They also need to depend on a responsible authority capable of administering contracts and enforcing basic codes of commercial behavior.

Maintaining a strong security regime can do much to revive an urban area. One critical element in the late-twentieth-century revival in some American cities, most notably in New York, can be traced to a significant drop in crime. This was accomplished by the adoption of new policing methods and a widespread determination to make public safety the number one priority of government. Indeed, the 1990s represented arguably the greatest epoch of crime reduction in American history, providing a critical precondition for both the growth of tourism and even a modest demographic rebound in some major cities.
³⁹
Even Los Angeles, following the devastating riots of 1992, managed to curtail crime and then stage a significant economic and demographic recovery.
⁴⁰

Yet even as security concerns in American cities improved, new threats to the urban future surfaced in the developing world.
⁴¹
By the end of the twentieth century, crime in megacities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo had devolved into what one law enforcement official called “urban guerrilla war.” Drug trafficking, gangs, and general lawlessness also infest many parts of Mexico City, Tijuana, San Salvador, and other cities.

Inevitably, such an erosion in basic security undermines city life. Fear of both crime and capricious authority usually also slows the movement of foreign capital, sometimes in favor of safer locations in the suburban periphery. Even in relatively peaceful countries, “kleptocratic” bureaucracies deflect business investment to safer and less congenitally larcenous locales.
⁴²

Perhaps even more insidious are the effects of the polluted environment and growing health-related problems in many cities of the developing world. At least 600 million city residents worldwide lack access to even basic sanitation and medical care; these populations naturally become breeding grounds for deadly infectious diseases, against which neither foreign nationality nor affluence can always immunize.
⁴³
Such threats also drive both indigenous professionals and foreign investors to seek more healthful environments abroad or in secured suburbs.
⁴⁴

The Islamic Middle East poses the most immediate lethal threat to the security of cities globally. Here the familiar woes of developing countries have been exacerbated by enormous social and political dislocations. In trying to adopt Western models of city building during the twentieth century, many Islamic cities weakened traditional bonds of community and neighborhood without replacing them with anything both modern and socially sustainable.

This transformation, suggests the historian Stefano Bianca, “sapped the shaping forces of cultural identity,” leaving behind a population alienated from its increasingly Westernized environment.
⁴⁵
This alienation has been further deepened by political conflicts, most importantly the struggle with an economically and militarily advanced Israel. The aspirations of Islamic, and particularly Arab, cities were perpetually thwarted not only by economic, social, and environmental failures, but also by repeated humiliations on the battlefield.

To a large extent, Islamic societies have also failed to adjust to the cosmopolitan standards necessary to compete in the global economy. Beirut, the Arab city best positioned for cosmopolitan success, foundered because of incessant civil strife and only in the late 1990s began to make any serious efforts to rebuild itself. Other potentially successful Islamic cities such as Tehran and Cairo still lack the social stability or transparent legal system critical for overseas investors. Even the best-run of these countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, still suffer from political and legal systems far more arbitrary than those in the West or in such Asian cities as Singapore, Taipei, Seoul, or Tokyo.
⁴⁶

From this difficult milieu has emerged perhaps the most dangerous threat to the future of modern cities—Islamic terrorism. This phenomenon differed from the radical nationalism associated with writers such as Frantz Fanon. A black psychiatrist from Martinique deeply affected by his experiences during the Algerian war for independence, Fanon saw the struggle of the developing world as “starting a new history of man” that still embraced the urban culture of the West.
⁴⁷
In contrast, the Islamic terrorists regarded the West, and particularly its great cities, as intrinsically evil, exploitative, and un-Islamic.

One Arab scholar has labeled the leaders of the Islamic movement as “angry sons of a failed generation”—the ones who saw the secularist dream of Arab unity dissolve into corruption, poverty, and social chaos. For the most part, their anger has been incubated not in the deserts or small villages, but in such major Islamic cities as Cairo, Jiddah, Karachi, or Kuwait. Some have been longtime residents in such Western urban centers as New York, London, or Hamburg.
⁴⁸

This experience abroad seemed only to deepen their anger against Western cities. As early as 1990, one terrorist, an Egyptian resident in New York, already spoke of “destroying the pillars such as their touristic infrastructure which they are proud of and their high world buildings that they are proud of.”
⁴⁹
Eleven years later, that anger shook the urban world to its foundation.

In the years following the 2001 attack on New York, both individuals and businesses began rethinking the advisability of locating close to prime potential terrorist targets in high-profile, central locations. To the already difficult challenges posed by changing economic and social trends, cities around the world now have to contend with the constant threat of physical obliteration.
⁵⁰

Throughout history, cities have faced many challenges to their prosperity and survival. Even the nature of the most immediate current threat— loosely affiliated marauders rather than states—is not unique. Some of the greatest damage done to cities in history has been inflicted not by organized states, but by nomadic peoples or even small bands of brigands.

Despite such threats, the urban ideal has demonstrated a remarkable resilience. Fear rarely is enough to stop the determined builders of cities. For all the cities that have been ruined permanently by war, pestilence, or natural disaster, many others—including Rome, London, and Tokyo— have been rebuilt, often more than once. Indeed, even amid mounting terrorist threats, city officials and developers in New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, and other major cities continue to plan new office towers and other superlative edifices.
⁵¹

Far more important to the future of cities than constructing new buildings will be the value people place on the urban experience. Great structures or basic physical attributes—location along rivers, oceans, trade routes, attractive green space, or even freeway interchanges—can help start a great city, or aid in its growth, but cannot sustain its long-term success.