Review: Cities Are Good For You, by Leo Hollis

Mike Childs

11 June 2013

Cities are our destiny and the future is great.

That's the unashamedly optimistic view Leo Hollis expresses in his book Cities Are Good For You. But his glass-half-full tour of world cities also exposes the many challenges cities face in the 21^st century. In fact he could as easily have called his book 'Making cities green - the mother of all challenges'.

Hollis says humanity stands at a tipping point between disaster and survival, and the city is the fulcrum on which our future balances. With more than half of people living in cities already, and three-quarters projected to do so by 2050, this is undoubtedly true.

If we can't make our cities more sustainable they could easily become our coffin rather than our ark, he says. Reject the grumbles of the skeptical and naysayers, we can make cities great. Spot on, Mr Hollis.

But let's not underestimate the scale of the challenges.

Street democracy versus big brother

Cities are living places, Hollis observes. They're made up of human interactions - on the street, in cafes, in workplaces, in parks, and increasingly via digital communications. These interactions are critical to human well-being, he says, and a vibrant street becomes "a self-organising public space", democratising and mediating the behaviour of the city. In making this claim Hollis draws on the volunteer-led clean-up operations after the riots in London, Manchester and elsewhere.

But he laments that this is consistently ignored by city planners and politicians. Instead we see planners squeezing pedestrians into narrow paths to provide space for cars. Parks and green spaces are sold for property development - such as inspired the protests in Turkey. And across the world cities have opted for big brother-style policing, via vast networks of CCTV monitoring.

Global beauty parade versus nurturing neighbourhoods

Cities are locked in battle to win a global race, Hollis says. He reports from his visit to rapidly-growing Bangalore which is specialising in ICT, and from cities desperately trying to mimic Bilbao as creative centres. In the UK we have David Cameron launching Tech City to cash in on creative businesses starting up near London's Old Street and utilise the infrastructure from the 2012 Olympics.

Hollis feels deeply uncomfortable about this preoccupation with global competition and attracting a creative "cadre of supermobile storm troopers" to turn a city around. 

He rightly sees that not every city can be Bilbao and that a city's creativity is better built from the bottom up. Hollis could also have pointed to the dangers of becoming a one-industry town, as cities such as Detroit discovered when the US car industry crashed.

Yet across the world cities are fixated on a global beauty parade to attract transnational organisations. It's a race that some will win, but the majority will lose.  

Right to the city versus extreme inequalities

Inequalities within cities are extreme and growing. Hollis reports from his time in Chile and his visit to Pudahuel shanty town; on the Hukou system in China that creates a "whole class of illegal workers, who have no rights or papers, ready to be exploited by the factories"; and from Dharavi in Mumbai where the most expensive house in the world coexists with slums that have virtually no sanitation.

Despite fine words, cities are failing to reduce inequalities.

The need for living cities

Hollis demands that cities be managed and designed as living cities.

These would be places that recognise the needs of people for interaction, shared green space, sunlight. Places that learn from the organisations of complex communities in nature, such as bees, ants and termites. Places where sharing and community initiatives are the norm. Places that are shaped by people for people and not by bureaucrats for businesses. Places where women can find equality. Places where innovation can flourish and consumption be made sustainable. Places where walking, cycling and efficient public transport get priority access to road space.

This vision is what our Big Ideas Change the World project is referring to as Living Cities.

Challenges can be overcome.

The challenges in meeting Hollis's aspiration for the city are immense. But they are challenges that must, and can, be met.

He is wrong to say cities are good for us. They're not - yet. But with the right will they could be. And this is the message of Hollis's book. It's well worth a read.

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