Moving Beyond "Urbanist"
It's Time to Reassess a Tired Label
I’ve always lived in cities. But that doesn’t necessarily make me an “urbanist,” much less an “urbanizer.”
I began to be called an “urbanist” after my fifth book, Straphanger: Saving Ourselves and Our Cities from the Automobile was published in 2012. I didn’t bother objecting to the label. I’d spent much of my writing career roaming the cities of the world. In my twenties, thirties, and well into my forties, I was fascinated by urbanity and urban history. And it was great fun to wander Bogotá, or Siena, or Osaka, Time Out guide in hand, discovering the many ways in which humans have learned to live together in close proximity.
I came to agree with one of the great urban thinkers of the 20th century, Lewis Mumford, who wrote, “With language itself, [the city] remains humanity's greatest work of art.”
I don’t have a degree in urbanism; very few of the soi-disant urbanists out there have any such qualification. (In French urbaniste is a synonym for “city-planner.”) It seemed to me that, at a time when just about everybody was an urbanite—well over 80% of Canadians live in cities and metro areas—anybody who’d ever had a bus pass could lay claim to the title.
Still, I didn’t flinch when I was introduced as an “urbanist” when I did speaking gigs. (I still get asked to do them, in fact—and I generally accept.) After all, I had ideas about cities. Here was my standard spiel:
Half the earth’s population already lives in cities; by 2050, the proportion will be closer to three-quarters. What’s more, the rate is accelerating: the earth’s cities now grow by 1.5 million people a week, which means a city with the population of New York is now added to the planet every two months. By mid-century, the earth’s population is likely to reach 10 billion—and 6.4 billion of us will be urbanites.
Managing this growth will be the great challenge of the 21st century. If we get cities right—if we build human communities that foster harmony, prosperity, and civilization—we’ve gone a long way to getting the future of the species right.
Right now, we are blowing it, badly. In North America, we spent much of the twentieth century ripping apart the traditional city. Partly to blame was the modernist ideology that called for the separation of functions, dividing our cities into zones of commerce, residence, and employment—malls, suburbs, and office parks—separated by vast expanses of asphalt. Partly to blame were government policies that undermined urban neighborhoods, and made it all too easy to opt for a house in the ’burbs, accessible by freeway and off-ramp. Mostly to blame, though, was the private automobile—a machine that ingeniously appeals to the atomistic desire for autonomy, while having the effect of an atom bomb on the fabric of traditional communities.
The basic idea was: We’re living in an urbanizing world. If more of us are going to be living in cities, it’s incumbent upon us to get the process of urbanization right. Then I’d show slides of traffic-hobbled cities around the world—Moscow, Jakarta, Delhi, Lagos—and explain that private automobiles simply weren’t going to fit into the megacities of the future. What we needed to plan for was not urban freeways, but transit networks, as well as such sustainable forms of transportation as bicycles, and get to work building walkable (and rollable, for those otherly-abled) neighborhoods.
And there were, and are, many good things to be said about urbanization. The process is actually putting a brake on population growth; urbanites tend to have fewer children than rural dwellers (much of this comes from the fact that women have greater access to education in cities, and educated women have fewer kids). Japan, one of the most urbanized nations on earth (93% !) has a birthrate so low that it is losing population; China, Latin America and most of Europe are now well below the 2.1 births per woman needed to replace population. I championed the message conveyed by such books as Green Metropolis, in which David Owen argued that city dwellers—Manhattanites, in his book—were lower emitters, per capita, than people who lived outside the city, mostly because they lived in apartments (more efficient to heat) and used transit or walked rather than buzzing around the landscape in SUVs, pick-ups, and cars.
Here was my rationale: if the global population was indeed going to continue to rise, at least until mid-century (after that, many demographers predict a plateau), let us manage the process intelligently. Electric trains, trams, and buses—not more cars! More parks, as well as vertical and rooftop gardens—green the city! Compact, walkable neighborhoods with middle-density (3-5 storey) developments—not more sub- and ex-urban hellscapes!
All of that still makes sense to me, and I’ll continue to advocate for getting the city-building, and city-retrofitting, process right. But I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the label “urbanist,” because though I recognized urbanization as a trend—indeed, a full-blown, 21st-century megatrend—I never swallowed the idea that it was inevitable. More and more, in fact, I’m starting believe it’s not always a desirable process.
As a start, let’s challenge the shibboleth that urbanization is good for the climate, because people who live in cities consume less energy. This turns out to be true in highly developed economies. Rural, suburban, and exurban life in the United States and Canada is fantastically energy profligate (all the trucks, cars, and heating oil needed to keep people in standalone homes from being isolated and freezing). When a person moves to the city on this continent, their carbon emissions generally do decrease. Urbanization in Africa and Asia—and that is where most urbanization is happening—is a different story.
Here is the always brutally direct Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba energy expert, on the subject:
There is no doubt about the consequence of urbanization for energy consumption; living in cities requires substantial increases in per capita provision of energy even in the absence of heavy industries or large ports: the fossil fuels and electricity required to sustain a person who moved to one of Asia’s new growing cities can be easily an order of magnitude higher than the meager amounts of biomass fuels used in the village of her birth to cook and (if need be) to heat a room. (Smil, Energy and Civilization, 2017, p. 355.)
(Of course, there are other reasons for a woman, or anyone, to move to a city: access to education and better work; but what’s good for the individual isn’t necessarily good for the biosphere.)
There’s a case to be made, of course, that urbanization in Asia and Africa is a way to save the wilds; but it certainly isn’t sparing the atmosphere.
Interestingly enough, my own shift in attitude began when I crawled out of the sustainable transportation silo I’d been occupying for most of the 2010s. It was accelerated by the pandemic, which saw many people I know and respect moving out of the city for the country or small towns—opting out of urbanization. As I began to work on another book (The Lost Supper, which has just been published), I started to get out of town, and talk to the people who provide the food that keeps city-dwellers alive: farmers, food producers, livestock-keepers, orchardists, pastoralists. And believe me, the world looks a lot different when it’s viewed from their eyes.
Urbanist is a silo I’m tired of occupying, and a rut I’m finding increasingly wearisome to plow. (The agricultural metaphors are deliberate.) One thing’s for sure: if I’ve occasionally qualified as an urbanist, I’m not, and have never been, an “urbanizer.” I don’t believe a massively urban planet is a consummation devoutly to be wished for; in fact, there are good reasons to roundly fear it. Urbanization might be happening; but it doesn’t have to happen.
I’ll walk you through the development of my thought in next week’s dispatch. It involves the intersection of food, cities, and transportation, and my disbelief, and revulsion at, the vision that some eco-modernists have for humanity’s near future.