An Urban Balancing Act

It would be wonderful if the right to the city were equitable for one and all. If the wealth of public places, access to jobs and privilege of easy mobility were available to everyone, irrespective of social class or income level. If our cities were not enmeshed in tensions between power structures and economic hierarchies, but displayed an altruism that sought to reward everyone in various ways. If the right to the city was not decided by who had power and who did not. But this is not the way the world works. All cities in some form or the other have economic poles; some far starker than others, and between them there’s a mundane middle that sustains both. The nuances of how these poles struggle and negotiate this middle, intentionally, unintentionally or inadvertently, are what the shaping of an affordable or, in turn, unaffordable city is all about.

Unfair City: The Widening Gap Between Two Extremes

Questions such as who should share the public offerings of the city, by what means, and on whose consent, encompass every city. They are difficult questions, as deeply philosophical as political. In the United States for example, over the past few decades, most cities have sprawled – legally – into vast automobile dependent places where only the rich can afford to live and the poor cannot. But there is a bigger irony at work here: these affluent places are fed by highways, malls and job centres, where the less-affluent have to commute long hours for work. In other words, the poor have to pay for more gas and more taxes, which in turn funds more highways that ironically exclude them. As such, the least affordable cities in the United States are born out of a gross disconnect between housing and transportation costs compared to typical household income. The poorest fifth of American families pour more than 40% of their income into owning and maintaining cars. And this economic gap widens further through other social fissures. In Los Angeles, for instance, the subway linking downtown to the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica was in fact delayed for two decades because wealthy residents of Hancock Park and Beverly Hills did not want their community to be directly accessible to the poorer residents of east and south Los Angeles.

Sprawling cities actually turn out to be far less affordable than compact cities with public transit because of their high cost of driving to spread-out locations

As a contentious terrain between two economic extremes, the unaffordable city has various global guises. Singapore today is not only the most expensive city in the world, where the import of chewing gum is banned and where there are fines for irritating people with a musical instrument, but it’s also one whose livability quotient is synonymous with an impeccable cleanliness and urban order. Aberdeen (Scotland) is an almost solely private sector city, boasting the highest concentration of millionaires in the United Kingdom. Paris, which now ranks as the second-most expensive city after Singapore, has rental accommodation at prices so high that modest-paid workers have taken up illegal and substandard rooms, even as the poor and elderly are carted out to the urban edges. In Caracas, Venezuela’s capital and also one of the world’s priciest cities, high inflation rates and chronic food shortages are driving up the average living cost even as gasoline remains cheap. And even though Tokyo is no longer the most expensive city in the world as it was in the ’80s, with the Fukushima disaster prompting a shutdown of all 50 nuclear reactors across Japan, residents are paying more than ever in household electricity bills.

Meanwhile, with nearly 50% of Asia’s and Africa’s populations becoming city dwellers, and more than 75% of Latin America already there, inner city poverty is now the biggest challenge of our time. With infrastructure hardly developing at the same pace as the largest and fastest-growing cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the demographic bulk fueling this growth have to live in temporary shelters and slums, symbolising the other extreme of the unaffordable city. Weak ownership rights to the land leave slum residents economically vulnerable and unable to build safe, sturdy houses and these habitats consequently become easy victims to weather, fire and crime. The lack of safe, clean water means that families often have to buy it at a high price from vendors. Inadequate sanitation and waste disposal means disease and illness means loss of livelihood, leaving families struggling to buy food.

Singapore today is not only the most expensive city in the world... but it’s also one whose livability quotient is synonymous with an impeccable cleanliness and urban order

There is also a deeper environmental consequence to all this: urban poverty endangers the lives of millions of urban residents and simultaneously damages the environment. But environmental degradation continues at an even bigger scale through middle and upper classes’ over-consumption and increasing industrial production, both of which damage natural resources. And even as the poor are denied access to fundamental infrastructure, governments are financially unable or often even refuse to invest in efficient systems. The challenge of the polarised city is as much environmental as it is political, as much about sound governance as efficient management processes and as much about concerns of social justice, as experimental efforts in human psychology.

Towards a Fair City: Transforming the Mundane Middle

How can we make the city more equitable for everyone? How can we help a polarised city feel more balanced? How and where do we begin to bridge the ends of urban inequality? There is no question that the numerous bottom-up practices and campaigns by activist and non-government organisations and their ability to grapple with extreme issues at the bottom of the economic pyramid – poverty, informal economies, social injustice etc. – cannot be underestimated. But the unaffordable city has many other broader, yet more nuanced dimensions as well: rampant sprawl, bad mobility, rising home prices, the looming water crisis, urban pollution, grid-locks, toxicity and the erasure of agrarian landscapes. These issues are equally pressing, for they are destroying the long-term viability of cities for both the rich and poor and everyone in between.

For example, there is a direct relationship between walkability, transit and affordability. Sprawling cities actually turn out to be far less affordable than compact cities with public transit because of their high cost of driving in spread-out locations. New York City and San Francisco have relatively high housing costs, but they also rank among the lowest-cost cities for transportation, because of their relative urban density that facilitates walking and their extensive and heavily-used mass transit networks. In cities with the dire need for bridging polarised extremes, the answer then might actually lie somewhere in between, that is, in transforming the mundane middle of the city and letting it nudge the two extremes together.

Curitiba stands out in this regard. By 1960, this Brazilian city’s population had surged within two decades from 120,000 people to 361,000. Even as planners were contemplating widening roads for more cars, Curitiban architect Jaime Lerner took office as mayor in 1971. He introduced dedicated bus lanes along the city’s main arteries, with stations placed on medians along the routes. The intent was to allow buses to run at speeds comparable to light rail, while dramatically reducing the cost. Lerner made a bargain with private bus operators to partly pay for the creation of the new infrastructure, giving them the vehicles in exchange. With this trade-off in place, the first rapid-bus lanes of Curitiba ended up costing 50 times less than rail. The first line opened in 1974 and, by 1993, with new routes added, it was carrying 1.5 million passengers a day. Today, the Rede Integrada de Transporte has 157 bi-articulated and 29 single-articulated vehicles and is used by 2.3 million passengers of all income levels and class each day, together representing 85% of Curitiba’s population.

Bogota, Columbia, is another compelling case in point. Before Enrique Penalosa became its mayor in 1998, the city was getting technical and planning advice from the Japanese International Co-operation Agency (JICA), and they had prescribed a vast network of freeways to ease the city’s congestion. This is what Penalosa threw away. He hiked gasoline prices and poured revenues into an ambitious agenda putting public space and public transit at the forefront. Inspired by Curitiba, The TransMilenio bus system was introduced and given the best space on the city’s avenues in exclusive lanes, making cars and minibuses secondary. The sleek red look of these buses and the use of high-quality finishes in the bus stations was an additional strategy to boost the status of public transit for one and all. The TransMilenio began to move many people of all income levels so effectively that general commuting time across the city plummeted making things efficient for everyone. Curitiba’s bus rapid transit and Bogota’s TransMilenio not only successfully bridged the economic extremes of their respective cities bringing benefits to all sections of society, but did it at 
a fraction of the cost.

Columbia has two other worthy cases in nudging the rich and poor together in cities with rigid class lines and rampant violence. One is the now famous Ciclovia programme. In 1994, when Enrique Penalosa lost the mayoral seat to Antanas Mockus, his younger brother Guillermo was hired as the commissioner of parks, sports and recreation. He recast the Ciclovia programme that had originally in 1974 barricaded eight miles of roads every Sunday and opened them only to cyclists and pedestrians. Penalosa supersized this concept to more than 60 miles of the city’s major streets. Gradually, more than a million skaters, joggers and strollers began coming out to enjoy this new ‘park’ that was now open to everyone. Less-privileged residents who had no backyards or cars to escape the city, in particular, now had a public space of their own. As a unique experiment in social equitability, the Ciclovia programme closed the gap between the rich and poor who gathered together happily in a common setting.

In the shaping of the affordable city, feeling equal matters as much, or perhaps even more, than actually becoming equal

The other case is Medellin’s visually striking 385-metre-long escalator installed in Comuna Trece, one of the poorest sections of the city. It opened in 2011. The escalator operates on weekdays from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. and on weekends from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. It is busiest in the evening when people return home from work and on weekends the area around the escalators turns into a social space. More than giving the people in Comuna Trece access to the city, the escalators have paved the way for the city and in turn its institutions to gain access to one of its remotest areas. Consequently, it has been easier for the municipality, non-profits, police and housing corporations to improve public services, bring in subsidies for housing improvements, create social programmes for children and young mothers and help the younger demographic resist the temptations of gang involvement. The escalator has not directly ameliorated the Comuna’s physical conditions, or helped it produce higher incomes. And neither has it reduced the city’s overall income inequality.

But for the first time, there is a new sense of pride, dignity and inclusion among the local residents. For the first time, residents of Medellin’s poorest neighbourhoods have felt a real connection to the city and vice versa, giving both a greater sense of belonging. As Charles Montgomery suggests in his book Happy City, the biggest lesson to learn from Medellin is this: In the shaping of the affordable city, feeling equal matters as much, or perhaps even more, than actually becoming equal.

The Ciclovia programme closed the gap between the rich and poor who gathered together happily in a common setting

In Summary

The most significant thing in the cases discussed is that they are neither perfect nor radical. Bogota’s efforts have not directly mitigated the city’s inequalities and the TransMilenio is currently plagued by desperate overcrowding.

But as sincere, practical, conscious efforts towards the making of an equitable city, these experiments have actively redistributed the city’s benefits to make it fairer and more accessible to the largest number of people and within their own specific means. They affirm that by spending resources towards designing cities to be more generous, we can in fact make cities stronger and more resilient. They affirm that striving to help people feel more equal is a very worthy policy goal.

The other important thing is that all these ideas and initiatives have happened without the necessity of guerilla tactics or alternative means; they have emerged as government and municipal initiatives with an intimate understanding of the pulse of their cities and people. If then, as Michel de Certeau has noted, ‘tactics’ are employed by citizens to negotiate daily life in the city, and ‘strategies’ in turn emanate from the state and corporations in the form of government regulation, Bogota’s TransMileneo and Ciclovia, or Medellin’s escalator are lessons in how to blur the boundaries between the two.

From social housing to public transit, from job creation to public space, the struggle to shape the affordable city is the struggle to confront the unfairness wrought by market forces, cultural biases and social pressures and the struggle to answer the fundamental question: Who is the city for?

If, as Enrique Penalosa remarked in his inauguration mayoral speech, only a city that respects human beings can expect citizens to respect the city in return, then shaping the affordable city is a continuous, dedicated campaign towards urban fairness and the place to begin this change is not at the extremes but in between. We must recognise the transformative potential of the mundane middle of our cities and we must believe in this change and act on it. Let’s get to work.