Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Anthony Arnove: I think this question has been very powerfully answered recently by Mike Davis in his book “Planet of Slums”, where he discusses the growth of mega cities, the growth of cities that involve dispossession on a scale that really rivals the period of enclosures in the early stages of development of capitalism in terms of the degree of transformation in people’s circumstances, as millions upon millions of people are being forced to move into cities to seek employment because the basis of their lives in agricultural society, agricultural economies has been shattered by the process of globalization. The process is leading to huge uprootments of human populations with health and social consequences that we are only beginning to understand, but which Mike Davis very effectively describes in “Planet of Slums”. And really, what he documents is the injustice of this process, the human causes of this process and raises a specter of very serious consequences. The fact that these trends really ultimately are not sustainable and that to counter them we’ll require really ultimately revolutionary change. So, the future of the city will depend on whether or not that change is brought about, whether or not we can begin to challenge these processes of uprootment and dispossession being brought about by capitalist globalization and start rationally planning our living arrangements, our cities, our relationship to the environment, our relationship to one another, how we determine what is produced and how it is produced, and those kinds of questions will ultimately determine the future of the city.

by Anthony Arnove

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Anuradha Koirala: The future of the city lies in the hands of a caretaker in a good manner. So I think it should be in a good manner and a caretaker be chosen during the elections so that they can really make they very well [inaudible] who could manage the city.

by Anuradha Koirala

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Anuradha Mittal: I think for me if there is to be a future for the cities, cities will need to be self-sufficient. Let me give you an example. For example, instead of your private vacant parking lots, you would have urban gardens, where cities will be focused on growing food to meet the needs of the community, to be self-sufficient instead of depending on a model where the food flies in from different parts of the world. And if we don’t do things like that, instead of cities we will just have urban sprawl. We would have ecological disasters. We would have economic pitfalls. We would have not communities but fragmented societies living together.

by Anuradha Mittal

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Ashok Gangadean: Good question. When you say the future of the city, I think what is -- for me that is what is the future of culture? Because our cities reflect our cultural state, which also reflect our mentality and mode of consciousness. And if we are going to move into a sustainable culture based on global consciousness and global spirituality, what is that? That is the awakened awareness in which we recognize our deep connectivity with our entire ecology and with nature and with each other. And to humanize the sacred space in which we live. So the question in my mind that this provokes is are -- do our cities now represent this integral holistic humanized consciousness? Or are the alienated spaces, artificial spaces that interrupt and block our full human flow and capacity to relate to one another in fully humanized ways? That’s what architecture and the design of our environments and the Feng Shui of our energies around us in our furnishings and all of the settings of our life matters. Are we cut off from nature? Are we blocked off from one another? Or are they open spaces that encourage the meeting of people and the blossoming of whole human beings in integral spaces. So, to me if our sustainable culture of global consciousness must come, it will be a radical rethinking of our environment, in our physical environment. And the arrangement of our living spaces and our shared institutional spaces, all of these will have to be renovated. For example, in the present classroom we have rows of chairs facing the front. That in a way breaks the dialogue connection between people. So if you are going to enter dialogue, you need to renovate the space, so people can meet and face each other. That’s just an example of a reshaping of the space in which we live to encourage human meeting and human flourishing. So let’s imagine what a city will be like if it’s modeled in this kind of integral holistic consciousness.

by Ashok Gangadean

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Audrey Kitagawa: The city will become a huge repository of mass migrations of people coming in from the rural areas to be able to find work. As such, to the extent that the municipalities are not able to accommodate the increasing influx of people into the cities, you will find areas of growing slums and problems that that may bring, including homelessness, people living on the streets, children living on the streets, and to the extent that municipalities do not have the finances to be able to keep their cities in good condition, you will see decaying cities. But I think that the mass migrations that we have seen taking place to cities also gives these governments and municipalities notice that they should be planning now to be able to understand how they will be able to accommodate the growing influx of people. All of these global challenges will take planning, organization, and a great deal of responsibility to be able to sit down now and not defer or delay the planning that must be undertaken to the future that is already upon us.

by Audrey Kitagawa

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Avi Primor: A secret - so far cities grow and become larger. It seems to be that this will continue. But I am not really aware of this because I assume that humans will have better life-qualifications over the years. The richer they are, the more developed they become, the more the industry, technology and especially the high tech precede, humans will want to have more comfort and higher life qualities and by and by they will recognise that high life quality does not neccessarily mean the big cities, but small cities too. Therefore we still need a improving transport sector so that people not living in the cities or even more far away still have the chance to profit from the city. This is just a technical question because we will develop as we always want to improve our life-quality and this does not absolutely mean that we all have to live in metropoles or "carrer cities".

by Avi Primor

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Benjamin Fahrer: Which city? Australia? We’re talking about all cities, I guess? The city has its own kind of entity. You step into a city, it doesn’t matter where it is in the world, he’s in Berlin; you’re in San Francisco, you’re in Rome, Milano, you’re in Dubai. What is the future of these cities? And the future is up in the air, really, because we have an opportunity to help shift these futures of the city by those who live in the city, by all these people behind me? They have the opportunity to really shape the future of the city, by how they interact. And really, the designers of the cities, those who are currently designing and working with design have an incredible opportunity because the way that the city functions, form follows function. The way a city is designed, the way it function is dependent upon those who designed it. And if we have people who are not in tune with the natural order of things and the balance, or not taking on some ethical and practical principles, will get bad design that then will lead to destruction in some ways of the city by, and not being very functional, and not allowing for the natural flows to happen that can then be regenerative and build upon themselves. If we have a bad design that is, that doesn’t allow for the energies to flow and doesn’t allow for change to evolve and things to happen in the city that could be beneficial for it and allow for these people to be more interactive with their city. Then the city will have somewhat of a tragic fate. I don’t live in the city. I live in the country with my beautiful wife Gabriel, my goats, and my chickens. What will be the fate of the countryside, if the city collapses? If the city collapses, what will be the fate of the countryside? As those people, huge populations go out to the country.

by Benjamin Fahrer

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Benson Venegas: This is a very interesting question. The city came to stay. This is the answear. 50 years ago much more people lived in rural areas then in cities. But obviously we perceive a new organisation of the population in the world. The future tendency will be a bigger concentration of population in the cities because in the cities will be more services for the development of people, e. g. sanitary services, transport services, financial and economical services. All these services will be concentrated in the metropolis and they will advantage the development of the individuals. So the future of the cities is very amply. Perhaps it is our challenge to foresee the growth of the cities and to foresee the influence which the societies will have concerning the environment, concerning the handling of polluted water and the use of natural or material resources for construction. This should be considered in the processes of plannification in order to create cities that help to develop and that don’t limit or lead to impoverishment in rural areas or to bigger influences on the environment.

by Benson Venegas

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Bianca Jagger: Answertext will be available soon.

by Bianca Jagger

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Bill Joy: The futures of cities is that most people are going to live in them. We’ll pass very soon in this century a situation where more than half the people are living in cities. Cities offer marvelous cultural possibilities because you have people dense enough that you can create a diversity of experiences. It’s kind of boring by comparison to be in a small town. But of course being in the country is wonderful too and that’s one of the wonderful things about the internet because you can see and experience cultural activities that are going on at a distance sort of through the net and have those kinds of experiences. But there’s still nothing in my experience like being in a city, being able to walk, people in cities have smaller ecological footprints. It’s great to see that the Chinese in their industrialization are working real hard on building greener cities and reinventing the cities so that they’re more walkable, they’re more pedestrian friendly, blocking off cars, blocking off motorcycles in the center of cities. These are all really good things. One scary thing about cities is the threat of terrorism because people are more densely populated, somebody with a political agenda can obviously do more damage and more psychological and physical damage in a city. How we deal with this I don’t completely know but the cities are so valuable to our spirits that I’m very optimistic about the futures of the cities as great places to live.

by Bill Joy

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Bora Cosic: In many places cities spread and thru it lost there existents as such, even the whole planet earth is getting lost in that spreading of the city. I hope that cities won’t get to cover whole forests, mountains and seas. However even huge cities can developed by organizing of there small communities. I have my small city in beautiful Fasanenplatz which is a part of bigger city Charlottenburg and this all is only a part of Berlin.

by Bora Cosic

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Brian J. Weller: What is the future of the city? Well, it doesn’t have one if it doesn’t radically change. So let’s see, the future of the city. I’d like to talk about one key area here and it’s got to do basically with trees. Just first a couple of facts. If you’re familiar with the term “ecological footprint” which is how heavily or how lightly human society is treading on the natural ecology or the world. This fact will give you some insight here. If you look at the ecological footprint of London, you would need a land area 120 times its size to supply all of London’s consumption needs. This was from the Executive Summary of the 1995 Study from the International Institute for Environment and Development. So, cities must become sustainable if they’ve got a future. So, let’s talk about trees. Fruit trees and vegetable gardens which were planted in Atlanta, Georgia have increased – or dropped really the temperature levels in that city. What they discovered from the initial NASA photographs was that the loss of trees in Atlanta, Georgia had made the city temperatures rise between 5 and 8 degrees. Restoring trees has an incredible impact, so let’s talk a little bit about that. We’ve got to restore urban forests; 100 trees can remove the equivalent of 5 tons of carbon dioxide and 1,000 pounds of pollutants year by year. It includes Sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide, ozone and carbon monoxide. With a sufficient number of trees, we can cut air conditioning costs and uses. In fact in California, they’ve estimated that 50 million new trees would eliminate the need for seven new 100 megawatt power plants. A hundred mature trees can capture 250,000 gallons of rain water every year. In San Antonio, Texas, they’ve increased tree cover from 27 percent to 35 percent to reduce storm water runoff rather than build a $200 million water facility. So, what is the future of cities? Cities have to become green; grow trees, build a garden. It’s more than just like you know improving signs of human health, which it also does by the way through better oxygen and just the “green” which is right in the middle of the light spectrum. Green in the middle which is the most restful frequency for the eye; so green-green, trees-trees.

by Brian J. Weller

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Catherine David: This question is a litlle bit massive and it seems to me as if it is not anymore the era of Corbus, “le Corbusier” and the question should probably be modified in what is the future of the city. Today, we know that there are different models. We know well that there is a desire, a need, a pleasure to live in cities and that the apocalyptic plan is probably not completely up to date and today we should probably be interested in different cities and stop to get tired because of so called programmatic examples. Today, we do not talk a lot about contemporary circumstances; we talk about the urban history and of cities like [….…]. I seems as if peculiar challenges are demanded and until the prove of the opposite, things do not go that wrong. By not that wrong, I understand that there are more than 20 million people in one city and that gets more and more asphalted but this is in my opinion a question of cultural living together. The numerous inhabitants of a city that were originally not well adapted to live together like this, get used to it and manage to profit from urban services that are not that bad. In other words, we should not be that apocalyptic but we should pay a little bit more attention to urban usages and system, as well as to local projects. Once again, if we stop to talk of Los Angeles and New York and if we begin to get interested in other modes, the situation and the solutions will not seem as desperate as people want to tell us.

by Catherine David

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

China Keitetsi: Answertext will be available soon.

by China Keitetsi

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Constantin von Barloewen: Today we experience a growing urbanization of the world population which has increased dramatically over the past decades, exponentially in Sao Paulo, in Mexico City, in Nairobi, in Cairo, in Calcutta, in Tokyo, everywhere. A growing migration into cities, a growing urbanization, in thirty to forty years the percentage of urbanized people will have increased even more dramatically. This is the condition. As far as architecture is concerned, it is hard to keep up with this pace and to master the situation. The leading architects must not only renounce artful decorations, but they have to create an architecture that is humane, that also considers the green sector as a lung, as a mental guarantor. But the mercantile and competition-oriented forms of architecture are more and more common, I am thinking of the skyscrapers in Malaysia, in Kuala Lumpur, where there are competitions for the highest skyscrapers, which are not humane at all, which are only an expression of megalomania and a striving for power, also by the peripheral states which want to become just like the industrial states. I am thinking of China which builds nothing but skyscrapers in Shanghai, which has torn down the entire ancient architecture, I am thinking of Beijing. The image of the city is changing dramatically and the authentic architecture disappears and is replaced by an absolutely inhuman architecture of skyscrapers and by housing estates that are not worthy of a human being. In this respect architecture has to reconstruct a lot in the following years in order to be able to design and organize a more human form of this urbanization of the world population. This is a great challenge. There are models, such as Oscar Niemeyer has tried in Brasilia in the sixties. And Roberto Burle Marx, the great landscape architect, the greatest in the twentieth century, a Brazilian, has tried to create green spaces, to lay emphasis on a green soul, a green sector. There always are futuristic attempts and constructions, but mostly they are to the disadvantage of human beings and technology dominates once more.

by Constantin von Barloewen

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Dedi Baron: Answertext will be available soon.

by Dedi Baron

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Donato Bayu Bay Bumacas: Well, talking about cities, if cities are not well managed, they will end up a dark city definitely. However, if cities are well managed with a design in such a way that pollutions will be handled properly, crimes will be handled properly, and economic needs is being provided properly. And there is no reason where cities can become a temporary paradise for human beings. And we have only seen cities which are becoming a sin-city and a dark-city because it is not being well managed; and we know cities who are also developing because they were able to manage the pollution, the crimes which are going on. And, as I said, the future of those cities will be a temporary paradise for human beings. That is the future of the city.

by Donato Bayu Bay Bumacas

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Dritëro Kasapi:

by Dritëro Kasapi

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Eddie Glaude: I can only answer that question within the context of the United States. The future of the city is uncertain in the U.S. it seems to me. We have not had in recent election cycles a definitive urban policy articulated. We see that urban spaces have struggled for their tax bases as communities in outlying areas seek incorporation and separation from urban spaces so they don’t have to be held responsible for those citizens who are in some significant way marginalized and locked out. In those urban areas where we do see substantial integration among populations in the U.S. in the city it’s taking the form of gentrification where we see white citizens, for example, coming back to places like Washington D.C. and Baltimore and Philadelphia in the U.S. and buying up property at low rates as property taxes rise, pushing residence who have been in these urban areas for awhile out, so basically what we are seeing now is in a lot of places urban dwellers are not even able to afford to live in these spaces any longer. So part of what we see is a policy of neglect, at least in the United States on the national level. And we see a kind of xenophobic patterns taking place in how populations interact. All the while we see hyper-segregation in these cities, where we see hyper-concentrations of poverty, where black and brown children and adults men and women are living where there is no work. We see the influx of middle class white Americans coming in, buying up property, shooting up the property tax rate again and pushing folk out. What I’m basically saying is that I don’t know what the future of the American city holds because I’m not quite sure Americans value the city anymore.

by Eddie Glaude