Citiwire.net

For Release Sunday, June 27, 2010
Citiwire.net

ATHENS — Each city is a unique blend of history, culture and architecture. But put three dozen urban planners and scholars from around the globe into one room and you discover that their concerns sound astoundingly similar.

In June I spent three days in Athens with a group of former International Urban Fellows from Johns Hopkins University, holding their annual conference this year in the Greek capital city of almost 4 million. I asked those in attendance — most from Britain and Europe, but others from Mexico, India and Turkey — to pinpoint the biggest problem their city faces.

Despite major differences in history, urban form, customs and governance between their cities and U.S. metros, their answers might easily have come from planners in Atlanta, Cleveland, Charlotte or Chicago.

In the U.S., with our primitive rapid transit, our expensive — and expansive — large-lot suburban neighborhoods and our rapacious appetite for oil-based energy, we’re apt to imagine that other countries’ cities have found more effective solutions to problems that bedevil our urban areas. Europe is like a gigantic, well-planned Portland (though with better French fries), we think, while the U.S. is more like sprawling Phoenix.

But if we assume all that, listening to conference attendees from places such as Rome, Edinburgh, Paris and Bern, Switzerland, is a bit like getting ice water splashed in your face.

Some of the problems they listed and talked about:

• Under-developed or unused infrastructure.
• Mobility and car-focused development.
• Accommodating immigrants and/or different ethnic groups
• Corruption or maladministration
• The difficulty of infill development, compared with growth on the urban edge.
• Gentrification and other housing problems.
• Economic troubles and unemployment.
• Sprawl.
• Lack of regional cooperation or regional governance.

Not everyone listed all those problems, except, sadly, an architect from Calcutta and one from Mexico City who said, in effect, “all of the above.”

Mexico City, an urbanized area of 20 million (or maybe 24 million — apparently even population measures there are contested) suffers from “overpopulation, pollution, sprawl, corruption, etc.” architect Alvaro Arellano Farias responded to my informal survey.

And while cities around the globe are worrying about climate-change-induced sea rise, Mexico City can go them one better. Built upon ancient lakebed drained by the Spanish conquistadors, it is sinking at the rate of an inch a year.

As Arellano described the region’s complicated governance, with four boroughs inside Mexico City, 16 boroughs and a mayor in the Federal District, 41 more municipalities in greater Mexico City, 18 more in the larger urban valley — which is, itself, divided among a federal district and two states — I was attempting to make sure I understood this complexity. “Is there any one …?”

” … In charge?” He laughed ruefully. “No.”

They all compete for economic development. The industrial areas in the state of Hidalgo send their air pollution into Mexico City. But with its sewage disposal going to Hidalgo, the city gets its pollutant revenge.

Unlike Mexico City, France is a place many American planners eye with envy for its compact centers, efficient public transit and strict urban growth boundaries. Yet two Frenchmen, one a planner from the northern region and the other an Athenian architect now living in Paris, complained about greenfield development, the lack of cohesive regional governance “and the usual NIMBY attitudes,” as architect Panos Mantziaras put it.

Although French planning is much stricter and more nationalized than in the U.S., nevertheless, the Paris metro region has 500-some governments. France has 36,000 mayors, more than any other European country. But starting with the next election, a new national law has created a direct elected body for the urbanized area of French cities, said Lille-based planner Jean-Marie Ernecq.

Naturally, for such a regional body to be created, it had to be imposed from above.

Calcutta’s problems probably dwarf those of most other urban areas. “Calcutta is a large exploding metropolos tending to megalopolis,” noted Biplab Sengupta, a professor of planning and architecture in Kharagpur, India. He listed slums, traffic congestion and inadequate physical and social infrastructure.

Yet plenty of other cities grapple with those same problems — so many that a planner can get discouraged. As Mantziaras put it, “You create all kinds of tools to foretell the future — and you never can.”

Georges Prevelakis, a Greek urban planner and professor of geopolitics at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris, described the idealistic goals of the Modernist movement, launched in the 1933 Charter of Athens. It was, he said, an idealism married to a lot of arrogance: “It has been an enormous disappointment. We failed. … Who speaks of trying to contain the growth in cities in Africa?”

Athens’ version of explosive population growth in the mid-20th century created many industrial areas, including land along the ancient Sacred Way, which ran between the city of Eleusis, now a suburban city called Elefsina, to the Acropolis in central Athens. Hellenic Open University Professor Lila Leontidou noted one result — that as runners traced the storied route from Marathon to the Acropolis during the 2004 Olympic Marathon, television viewers around the world saw mile upon mile of undistinguished suburban sprawl until the runners entered the center city.

Like Mexico City and Calcutta, or even Los Angeles or Philadelphia, Athens has urban issues that range far beyond its official municipal boundaries.

Mantziaras spoke with visible affection about growing up in Athens, about yearly birthday parties atop Filopappos hill. “I can close my eyes, and in my mind describe the skyline of the mountains,” he said.

But Athens is in crisis. And in today’s world, to regenerate an urban area one must deal with a city at the supra-urban scale, he said, remembering always that the future of the sprawling industrial and suburban areas is inextricably linked to the historic, tourist-filled center city.

What cities need, said Ernecq, is restored political debate. “We need to have a vision and real political leadership and civic participation.”

That, I’d add, is an important recipe, no matter where in the world you are.

Mary Newsom is an associate editor and opinion writer at the Charlotte Observer, where she writes a weekly column, writes The Naked City blog at www.marynewsom.blogspot.com, and Tweets @marynewsom. Disclosure: Her travel expenses to Athens were paid by the Johns Hopkins University International Urban Fellows Program.

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