Big Thoughts For A New Era

After 10,000 years, we have reached a quorum. A few months ago, a baby was born in Dhaka or a migrant arrived in Lagos, and we became a predominately urban species. Fifty percent of the world’s 3.2 billion people now live in cities. That percentage will rise to 75 by 2050 as the world’s total population increases by nearly one-third. Humanity may take generations to appreciate the enormity of this occasion, but The Endless City is looking ahead, attempting to identify the challenges of this new era and foment new ways of thinking before things get out of hand, whether in the extralegal slums of the developing world, the stagnant cores of Europe, or the gloaming into which all cities continue to sprawl. 

Success depends on understanding the “connections between transport and social justice, between public space and tolerance, and between good governance and good cities.” Failure will mean strife, poverty and marginalization for billions. The Endless City would seem an audacious undertaking except that it, like cities themselves, is a collective enterprise. Edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, it derives credibility from the Urban Age Project, a series of conferences sponsored by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank, and represents a semblance of consensus among thousands of (mostlyn Western) experts. It’s a vaguely suspicious — even arrogant — provenance, but perhaps an appropriate one under the circumstances.

As an object, The Endless City is no less enormous than its topic. Better suited for the coffee table than the bedside table, its 500 pages comprise both banal analysis and remarkable insights into the global archipelago where the world’s wealth, power and cultural production reside. Through an even-handed slate of essays, photo essays, graphics and portentous trivia, Burdett and Sudjic argue that, henceforth, history will be indistinguishable from urban history: The global economy is an urban economy; global politics are urban politics; cities, not countries, are the “organizing units of the new global order.”

Six chapters are devoted to disparate case-study cities — New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin — that illustrate the trends of the “urban age.” Each provides plenty of fodder for grand theorizing, but ultimately, they only reinforce the sense that every city is sui generis. Comparative analysis of cities within a single region might be useful, but it’s unclear exactly how Shanghai can learn from Berlin.

The second half of The Endless City assumes a more general perspective, with 14 essays by luminaries such as Richard Sennett, Rem Koolhas, Saskia Sassen and Enrique Peñalosa, who expound everything from office space to climate change. Though disjointed and sometimes redundant, these essays, taken as a whole, effectively argue that no one urban problem is subordinate to any other. (The customary academic bombast, neologisms and malapropisms, however — “linkages,” “typology,” “intervention,” “morphology,” “densification,” etc. — obscure the overall message.)

The Endless City concludes with a manifesto for a new “agenda that must empower people, with more integrated and transformative programs and policies, through a heightened awareness of the physical ‘place’, with a realignment of politics and an infusion of new partners.” Those partners include universities, corporations, designers, political leaders and other “city builders [who] cut across disciplines.” Who will assume the mantle of philosopher-king and how they will make sense of such “complex and interdependent” challenges remains to be seen. If the founding residents of Çatal Hüyük and Jericho could see us now, they would surely wish us good luck and godspeed. We’re going to need it.