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Worldwide, urbanization has been growing for decades. While this may look the same as it has been, something happens when this range of people cluster together in a region. More and more are becoming more than an urbanized "built up" area, but splitting off into a polycentric but interdependant post-metropolis. As a city becomes a sprawling metropolitan region, there is not a downtown business district with an outer ring of suburbia as many cities had, obviously so in the 1960s through 1990s. Regional cities have existed for centuries but were few - Rome, London, Amsterdam, Cairo, Ur. A difference now is the percentage of human population now clustered in such centres. There are now 400 cities worldwide with over a million people each that are in this category of being a city-region. His main thrust is that supercities are not structurally or socially what they were, or what they were once understood to be. He spoke starting with the historical of the process of urbanization -- country people coming to the city for opportunity, that process shifting to city people leaving the city and to the city being refilled by new intracity and into city immigration of immigrants, homeless or yuppies. Diverse communities in regional cities are cheek by jowl, patterns of movement arranged into clusters, nodes, circles of movement. People have allegiances of citizenship like transnationals, loyal to where they come from, the neighbourhood/city node/part of town and the overall city they pay their taxes to. But beyond the diversity that comes in, being in diversity spawns subsets of diversity and innovation. Urbanization, globalization cause contact between individuals that can spur each other on to new ideas, new niches, new economic development, further development. In simple terms, if you get enough people together, you will meet not just someone who thinks like you and who absolutely doesn't but entire groups who do and can develop from one another. People who were unique individuals can find and found communities of like minds and create resources for further specialization, or cleaving of society, fermenting revolution if that is the way consensus runs. He pointed out the quote from Jane Jacobs in 1969 when she summarized her book The Economy of Cities, "Without cities we would all be poor". This contact between people of highly parallel thinking and of extremely diverse and conflicting worldviews can create human cultural development. Much depends, he added on local reaction and conditions. In areas such as Paris, there is ghettoization and an attempt to suppress diversity and segregate difference. Barcelona which had no "outsiders" to speak of 10 years ago, is now 10% immigrant and a model of it working. Toyko, in that emptied downtown, responded to its own density by transforming the downtown into a hub of culture where no one lives but everyone goes. Depending on the exact synergy that develops, results can be quite distinct. He remarked that the first world, in non-welfare states, can start to ressemble the 3rd world. At the same time the urbanization process in the 3rd world causes it to grow to be more like the opportunities of the cities of prosperous "1st world". LA has responded to its own metropolisness with some cross-pollinization, but also with gated communities, private utopias and, extreme difference between rich and poor. They have an estimated 220,000 homeless and 360,000 more living in other people's backyard garages with no amenities. Others hot-bed hotel rooms with groups taking a room by shifts so that they cooperative stay in "one rental home", of sorts by alternately renting a room. These and other squatter settlements add up to about 750,000 people unhoused or underhoused. Instead of a city accepting the people of the wider world, the wider world is in the heterogeneity of the people, sparking whatever tinder is in the box: music, politics, arts, justice, diversion or division. Human capability is put under an intensifying lens. Related Links: Art-e-Fact's issue on Globalization, which included an article was Soja. | ||||
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