MEGACITIES are dinosaurs: the future lies with smaller, smarter cities
clustered in 鈥渁rchipelagos鈥� across densely populated, semiurban landscapes. As
governments deliberated on how to make megacities more habitable, urban planners
charted a new vision of the future.
Delegates at the Habitat II conference argued that the largest cities, from
Los Angeles to Lagos, will contract, while the new urban archipelagos will each
contain up to 200 million people by the second half of the next century. 鈥淭hey
will be yin-yang areas, neither truly urban nor rural,鈥� said K. C. Leong, a
Malaysian urban planner.
Planners are still inventing names for the phenomenon鈥攁mong the
favourites are polycentric urban areas, periurban zones and core regions. But
giant semiurban conglomerates are already a reality. Silicon Valley in
California and the satellite cities around Tokyo were cited by delegates. The
real revolution, they predicted, will take place in the heavily populated and
rapidly urbanising countries of the developing world. 鈥淚ndonesian planners
foresee a polycentric zone stretching from Jakarta for a thousand kilometres
across the north side of Java and housing 120 million people,鈥� said Leong.
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Brazil鈥檚 two megacities, Rio de Janeiro and S茫o Paulo, are already
contracting as companies flee pollution, gridlock and powerful trade unions.
S茫o Paulo has lost 2 million people in the past decade. A dense network
of smaller cities is developing instead, said David Satterthwaite of the
International Institute for Environment and Development in London. The same is
happening elsewhere. Planners once predicted that Calcutta would house 40
million people by now. But its population has stuck at 12 million, while a rash
of new cities is forming across West Bengal.
Urban archipelagos can also stretch across international borders. 鈥淎 large
proportion of Hong Kong鈥檚 manufacturing production is now relocated in southern
Guangdong [in China],鈥� said Satterthwaite. And some urban planners think even
bigger. Fu-chen Lo, a Taiwanese planner now working at the UN University鈥檚
Institute of Advanced Studies in Tokyo, foresaw an 鈥渦rban corridor鈥� stretching
from Tokyo through Korea to Tianjin and Beijing in China, a distance of more
than 2000 kilometres, linked by tunnels beneath the sea.
The twin drives behind the growth of polycentric urban zones are roads and
telecommunications. Both, said Josef Konvitz, an urban specialist with the OECD
in Paris, mean that 鈥渁ccessibility is no longer the privilege of a few cities鈥�.
Ports and the infrastructure of a traditional city no longer exert such a strong
pull on employers, he argued. Instead, congestion and pollution are driving them
away.
But some wondered how far this process would go. 鈥淭he city is and always has
been the focus for processing and exchanging information,鈥� said Nicola De
Michelis, Konvitz鈥檚 OECD colleague. 鈥淣obody knows how information technology
will influence the way people and firms use space.鈥�
