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Where is the future for cities?

Covid-19 has profoundly disrupted expectations of the future. There is growing acceptance that times to come may never be how any of us would have imagined as we celebrate the New Year in 2021.

Singapore has historically been built on a willingness and ability to learn from elsewhere and that worldly openness to future possibility is as important as ever in this unexpected present, say the authors.

Singapore has historically been built on a willingness and ability to learn from elsewhere and that worldly openness to future possibility is as important as ever in this unexpected present, say the authors.

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Covid-19 has profoundly disrupted expectations of the future. There is growing acceptance that times to come may never be how any of us would have imagined as we celebrate the New Year in 2021.

In the realm of urban policy and planning, the year 2020 has challenged our assumptions about where better futures lie.

Which places have dealt most effectively and equitably with Covid-19? What lessons have been distilled from those places?

To what extent have progressive initiatives been exported elsewhere?

THE CHANGING GEOGRAPHY OF URBAN FUTURES

For most of the 20th century, people around the world aspired to live and work in places located in the West.

Metropolitan centres such as London and New York retained their allure into the current century as “global city” centres of finance and high-end service economy.

However, Asia has risen to prominence.

The region includes established global cities such as Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore, as well as a host of aspirants looking to emulate their success.

Asia is also a region where problems with the global city model have been exposed.

The quest for global city status can be problematic insofar as it tends to justify public investment in showcase economic infrastructure at the expense of social equity goals.

The recognition of the need to move urban development policy and aspirations beyond attainment of global city status has been on the rise in Asia.

Across the region, new ways of defining the “successful” city of the future are gaining traction.

Many Asian cities, including Singapore, are emphasising principles enshrined in the United Nations’ New Urban Agenda and wider Sustainable Development Goals.

Goal 11 speaks directly to the future city, calling on governments to prioritise making urban habitats “inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”.

Covid-19 appears to have accelerated the shifting regional geography of the future city. Many have observed that responses in Asia have been more effective than in Europe or North America.

International media coverage has given considerable attention to the troubles facing New York City.

Long famed for both extensive global connectivity and intense place-based social interaction, much of New York’s appeal evaporated in lockdown.

Many residents who had the means to leave the city are reported to have moved to less expensive, more spacious and safer places.

Bound up with the question of when — or whether — particular groups of people will return to New York City are much wider issues about urban futures.

Some see Covid-19 as ushering in an era of small town or even rural resurgence, at the expense of high-density city living.

Others take the seemingly insurmountable challenges of high-profile cities in the West as a sign of its demise from having been the leading edge of global urbanism.

It is impossible to predict future urbanisation patterns in the United States or almost anywhere else in the context of ongoing uncertainties.

Covid-19 has, however, made two aspects of ongoing developments very clear.

First, what happens in cities in the US or in the West more widely is not necessarily a portent or harbinger for what will unfold in other parts of the world.

Second, cities in the West do not have all the solutions — to their own problems, let alone those arising in other regions.

Such observations might be welcomed by proponents of a more Asia-centred future.

This is however not the time for generalised or celebratory accounts of a planetary shift from West to East.

Covid-19 has significantly altered the global economic landscape, disrupting supply chains, capital flows and labour mobilities.

The resilience of cities in many countries is being severely tested, including across Asia.

In addition, although it is not hard to find grave urban policy mis-steps in the West, we may identify success stories too.

Helsinki has been cited by the World Bank as a city where longstanding commitment to inclusive development and smart infrastructure has so far enabled a highly effective response to the challenges of Covid-19.

Even those of us who focus on the future of Asian cities need to consider fine-grained variegation in pandemic responses in other regions.  

MODELS FROM UNEXPECTED PLACES

The impact of Covid-19 means that the global map of successful places needs to be redrawn.

That work cannot be left to local policy makers alone. City authorities invariably present their own experiences and track records in ways that downplay less positive sides of the story.

Critical distance is required, either from academics or from multilateral institutions and organisations that anoint city models.

This holds the potential to bring to light good practices in places that have not previously featured in international awards such as Singapore’s biennial Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize.

Back in 2016, the Laureate city for that prize was Medellín in Colombia.

Commended for its urban innovations in realms including public safety and accessibility, Medellín emerged as a global model that few would have anticipated a decade earlier.

Evaluation of Medellín’s ongoing performance in dealing with Covid-19 has been hotly disputed, but that has no bearing on our wider historical point about model cities: Just as urban innovations emerged in unlikely places in the recent past, others await documentation in the very different world of 2020.

Diverse urban experimentation in response to Covid-19 is a rich repository for future city-making everywhere.

In a paper on cities’ policy responses to Covid-19, the OECD notes that urban design and collaborative governance are equally important.

Urban policy areas identified include social distancing, workplace and commuting, vulnerable groups, local service delivery, support to business and digital communication tools.

These areas must form part of updated criteria for assessing the successful city beyond the global city paradigm dominant in pre-Covid-19 times.

For us, the model city in light of Covid-19 is the one which affords equitable life chances — where life chances means both prospects for health and care in the pandemic present, and opportunities for flourishing in plans for any new normal.

Relatedly, we suggest that cities increasingly be evaluated for the extent to which they respect “the right to the city”.

This is a powerful call for equitable access to services and infrastructure for all inhabitants of a city, irrespective of their citizenship or position in the labour market.

Included within the New Urban Agenda that was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2016, the right to the city has assumed even greater significance this year in light of urban inequities exposed by the pandemic.

Wherever superlative cities are identified, it is necessary to examine which cases are contextually specific, and which could be emulated.

That includes consideration of how cities form part of wider national systems which can either enable or inhibit progressive policy initiatives.

Following careful work of contextualisation, comparison and evaluation, it may be possible to chart hopeful futures from some unexpected places.

It is worth recalling that urban policy and governance successes here in Singapore have historically been built on a willingness and ability to learn from elsewhere.

That worldly openness to future possibility is as important as ever in this unexpected present.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Tim Bunnell is director of the Asia Research Institute and professor of geography at the National University of Singapore, where Daniel P S Goh is associate professor of sociology.

Related topics

urban planning governance Covid-19

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