The Anxious City - The Dilemmas of Growth

For the first time in history half the world's population live in cities, yet the celebrations have been distinctly muted.  Rather than advancing civilisation, cities are said to be on "the edge of chaos", and bring out our "lurking paranoia"(1).  Some have claimed the roots of recession are spatial, and that sprawling cities point to a "whole system of economic organization and growth that has reached its limit"(2).  In Broken Britain(3) urban communities are often associated with physical and moral decay. Just-in-time contemporary urban lifestyles are said to threaten the frail systems of a brittle society(4).

So how should we account the sense of exhaustion and limits that have become central features of western discourse on cities?  Anxious and even dystopian views of the city have for some time been prominent in films and in fiction writing. Concerns over mass society are also a well established facet of urban planning. So what, if anything, has changed?  Is the current preoccupation with risks and safety an indication cities are now more dangerous, environmentally degraded, and anti-social places?  Are we vulnerable to new perils, or merely more uncomfortable with the congestion and contestation that are longstanding features of urban life?  

Problems of obesity and mental health are often associated runaway lifestyles in urban settings which lack rules. On the other hand, unhappiness and fear are said to relate to over-regulation - for example through the privatisation of public spaces. So are cities today too dynamic and spiralling out of control? Or do they suffer from a surfeit of controls? Recently the idea of creating resilient cities has grown popular as a means to combat a range of threats from crime and terror to environmental degradation and disease.  Might this be a means to recover a sense of dynamic that allows cities to flourish? Or, given resilience seems to assume that cities are under stress, might it send out the message we are permanently vulnerable?

Speakers:

Professor Jon Coaffee - Chair in Spatial Planning, Centre for Urban and Regional Studies

Richard Williams - Dean of Postgraduate Studies, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Edinburgh.

Penny Lewis – Writer & lecturer Scott Sutherland School of Architecture.

Anna Minton – Journalist, author, Ground Control: Fear and happiness in the twenty-first-century city.

Chair:

Alastair Donald - Urban designer and Convenor, Min-Max-Cities Group.

Read on……

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City Anna Minton – Penguin (25 Jun 2009)

The Everyday Resilience of the City: How Cities Respond to Terrorism and Disaster (New Security Challenges)  Jon Coaffee - Palgrave Macmillan (7 Nov 2008)

The Anxious City Richard Williams- Routledge; (25 Nov 2004)

Salvation by Brick: The Life and Death of British Communities – Penny Lewis in The Future of Community - Dave Clements et al – Pluto Press (20 Oct 2008)

Fear in the Mega-cities - World Social Summit Report 

How Public is Public Space?(pdf) - Dolan Cummings (Blueprint)

Integral Urbanism - Nan Ellin

Resilience: The Next Big Thing - Jamais Cascio

From Risk to Uncertainty - Thomas Homer-Dixon

Fear is Good  - Thomas Homer-Dixon

Sleepless? Stressed? Anxious? Exhausted? – William Leith