Key Findings From the Urban Age Cities

The world is experiencing intense urbanisation by the hand of extensive yet uneven processes of growth and expansion. More than half of humanity now lives in cities, and 80 per cent of the Earth’s land surface has come to reflect the influence of city-based human activity. Dominating the urban world is a selective group of dynamic and highly specialized cities, as well as massively urbanised industrial regions.

Like Shanghai, Johannesburg and Mexico City, all the Indian cities featured in this document – Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi and Bangalore – have been following a continuous trajectory of population growth from the start of the twentieth century. In contrast, the cities in the richest, early urbanising countries have seen population growth slow and reverse, although New York and London are now in a new cycle of – relatively slow – growth. Berlin alone amongst the Urban Age cities has experienced a slight decline in the last decades.

In the 1990s, India’s population grew by a dramatic 23%, but this fast growth was outpaced in the main cities. In Delhi the number of residents jumped by 70%, although this was partly due to a boundary change, and Bangalore grew by 38%. Mumbai’s population grew by 21%, falling back slightly on its relative position.

In contrast Kolkata’s population was almost flat, at least by Indian standards, at 4% growth. Projections suggest population growth nationwide will continue but at a reduced rate of 14% to 2010, with growth in Bangalore pull ahead of that in Delhi and other cities.

Mumbai and Kolkata have much longer histories as large cities, than the other Indian cases. Both reached a million population by 1910 and have developed at a similar time as New York, London and Berlin. In contrast, Delhi and Bangalore became large cities much more recently. Delhi reached a million residents by 1950, Bangalore during the 1950s. Mumbai reached ten million by 1990 and Delhi did so by 2000. Kolkata is due to do so by 2020, and it is likely that Bangalore will do so over the next decades.

While there is at least one major agglomeration of several million inhabitants in every world region, a new generation of megacities is rapidly emerging across Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa. The shift to cities is both the product and a catalyst of economic growth.

The challenge ahead is to mobilise the wealth of resources that cities generate to make urbanisation more environmentally sustainable globally, and local urban environments more liveable and inclusive for their rising numbers of residents.

                                            

                                            

   

                                        

Defining the urban extent are multi-dimensional processes of territorial contiguity and functional interdependence. These are seldom in coterminous with administrative boundaries and governmental subdivisions, which in their turn define the extent of public policies and the reach of interventions on specific urban places. Given the policy emphasis of the Urban Age project, we report data and outcomes at the latter administrative level. Nevertheless our analysis is sensitive to the relation between such patterns and the dynamics shaping them at wider scales.

Incomplete urban annexation provides an example. Cities are not always able to incorporate newly developed land into the administrative boundaries drawn around the original cores. Hence their local governments may lack control on suburban and peri-urban growth, generating problems of metropolitan governance. Also, the varying relation between political boundaries and urbanised areas results in different cities appearing to assume more dissimilar urbanisation patterns than they actually do. Boundary-sensitive differences may appear when comparing patterns of land consumption; ratios between built and green areas; local shares of national populations, etc.

Shanghai and on the other end Bangalore and Kolkata constitute the poles where this issue is most evident within the sample of six international and four Indian cities examined. The Shanghai Municipality covers an area of 6,341 km2, which makes it eight times as large as New York City. Included within its boundaries is green and agricultural land, and the Shanghai Municipal Government province exercises the functions of both a city and a province or state. Similar patterns appear at the level of some sub-municipal districts, and Shanghai has no governmental unit focused specifically on its urbanised areas. In contrast, the municipal corporations of Bangalore and Kolkata cover 225 km2 and 187 km2 respectively. Each is similar in size to just one of New York City’s five boroughs. Even the area of Greater Mumbai with 438 km2 is just about half the territorial size of Berlin. Clearly, these boundaries do not include the urbanised area in its entirety. They exclude adjoining residential and business areas that are undoubtedly part of the city as an economic and social unit.

Examples of improving metropolitan relations in the sample include the reinstated governmental framework for Greater London; more cooperative relations between Mexico’s Federal District and the bordering State of Mexico; and the initiative of city-regional coordination between Johannesburg and the other metropolitan areas of Gauteng Province.

These six charts are illustrative indications of how government structures are organised in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, London, Berlin and New York. They are intentionally designed to give a crude impression of how the basic patterns of responsibilities are organised within each of these cities, identifying some of the key functions carried out at central, state and local government level. While they offer a useful comparative overview they are not intended to give an accurate account of the detailed systems of accountability which can only be explained comprehensively on a case-by-case basis.

Variegated density distributions (illustrated here in numbers of people living in a km2) are present in all Urban Age cities – from the relatively dispersed and fl at density diagram of London to the mountainous peaks of high density in Mumbai (one of the densest cities in the world). Bangalore and Kolkata are similarly dense to Mumbai while only some very concentrated parts of central Shanghai and New York come close. Delhi occupies a much larger area, resulting in a lower average but equally high peaks. The ability of Indian cities to accommodate such high numbers of people in relatively confined areas – albeit many are living in substandard conditions – provides a significant point of comparison in the current debate on urban sustainability and the impact of a city’s footprint on energy consumption and climate change.

Mumbai constitutes a category on its own. The territorial constraints of this island city have created unusually high urban densities. Within the city limits, the average density surpasses the mark of 27,000 people per km2 – a figure that rises to well above 50,000 people per km2 (if one only takes the built-up area into account), a level higher than even the highest density peaks in New York City’s borough of Manhattan. Furthermore, it is not rare for the densest neighbourhoods of Mumbai, such as Dharavi, to accommodate as many as 100,000 residents per km2. 

Mexico City has areas of relatively high density, although it does not reach Manhattan-like peaks at its urban core, it rather maintains a homogenous high-density level throughout the entire urbanised area. The two European cities, London and Berlin, show the fl attest density curves but nevertheless achieve a higher overall density than Johannesburg. Characterising the thriving South African metropolis is the low-density monotony of urban sprawl, with large voids in the central areas recently abandoned by residents due to crime and violence.

Cities all over the world need to respond to the demographic and economic pressures that are causing rapid urban growth. The design of city streets, buildings and spaces – their spatial DNA – plays an important role in securing the liveability and flexibility of urban environments that are undergoing intense processes of change. One of the central objectives of the Urban Age project is to produce research that helps to better understand the varying capacity of different street grids and block layouts to accommodate change in a resilient way.

The ‘figure-ground’ images presented here are useful tools to visualise the micro-scale of urban neighbourhoods and understand how buildings and their surroundings succeed or fail in making a continuous and integrated urban whole. They provide a street-level portrayal of the built forms and arrangements of volumes that shape everyday social life in the city. The ten ‘figure-ground’ maps each cover 1 km2, representing buildings in black and open spaces in white.

The spatial structure of the Indian cities reveals an intense and compact arrangement of buildings and structures, containing and compressing the open ‘white’ spaces that constitute the public realm of the city. The central area of Buleshwar Market in Mumbai shows how dense urban blocks are arranged efficiently along main streets and side alleyways.

The juxtaposition of Paharganj in Old Delhi, the formal circular layout of Connaught Place and other twentiethcentury free-standing building blocks makes evident the different spatial logics and scale of this multi-faceted city. The Jayanagar and Bhanashankari districts of Bangalore, surrounding a central park, demonstrate the regularity and fine grain of a well-planned city, while Salt Lake City district in Kolkata, a 1960s redevelopment of former wetlands, reveals a clarity in space and urban structure with housing units arranged along a regular grid.

Characterising New York City’s East Village is a dense, continuous street grid that has adapted to different economic cycles over the last decades. A similar design approach to the arrangement of blocks is used in Mexico City’s northeastern neighbourhoods, which have evolved from popular settlements. Yet one finds a dramatically contrasting barren landscape of relative sparseness in the Hongkou district of Shanghai. In the even more dispersed residential neighbourhoods of Johannesburg, high-security fences and walls usually envelop individual lots. Hence, the urban fabric lacks the continuity found in the crescents and communal gardens of the Notting Hill area of West London, or the tightly packed perimeter housing blocks of central Berlin.

The transport systems of the ten Urban Age cities reflect the specific geographical, historical and political conditions that have shaped their development. Infrastructure development for mass transit, whether metro, trains or buses as well as for private vehicles has had an enormous impact on the patterns of urban growth with long-lasting effects on land use, densities and the residential distribution of different social groups. Urban rail outranks all other forms of travel in terms of its capacity to move vast numbers of passengers throughout a metropolitan region, and its footprint requires relatively small amounts of urban land.

New York, London and Berlin all have an extensive system of urban rail. These cities were able to invest in mass transit earlier on, developing their networks over a century. Berlin’s U- and S-Bahn system extends over 475 km. London’s Underground system measures 408 km in length, and New York’s Subway a total of 390 km. An extensive network of regional rail links these cities and their job markets to their metropolitan regions. Decision-making processes, governance arrangements and administrative boundaries have restricted the development of New York’s Subway to the west, preventing the network to reach areas adjacent to the city’s core.

The extensive London Underground spreads across large areas to the north of the River Thames, due to the limitations of early-twentieth-century technology to surpass the geological constraints present south of the River Thames.

Cities in less economically developed regions have suffered from under-investment, where transport infrastructure has not been able to keep pace with rapid urbanisation. Mexico City was the first twentieth-century megacity to have started building its underground in the late 1960s. Today it operates an efficient yet insufficient 200 km-long network, and a large number of commuters use cars or microbuses to get to work. Some cities are making important infrastructure investment now. Shanghai’s first underground metro line opened only a decade ago. The total length of the current system is 148 km. Another 10 lines are under construction, and the system will expand significantly within a decade. In India, Kolkata opened the first part of its 16.5 km underground line in the early 1980s. While Delhi introduced its system only a few years ago, it currently operates three lines on a 56 km network. Mumbai and Bangalore do not currently have a metro system. However, with 300 km, Mumbai’s suburban rail system is the most extensive on the subcontinent. Transporting more than 6 million passengers each day, it is also one of the busiest rail systems worldwide.

Looking at different ways in which people travel (modal splits) helps us understand how people move in cities. The more compact Indian cities reveal a more sustainable dimension than the other cities as a result of the very high numbers of people who take public transport or walk to work – a direct consequence of the proximity of residential buildings (oft en slums) and offices in these high-density, mixed-use urban environments where distances to work average less than 2 km. In Mumbai walking makes up a massive 55 per cent of all forms of travel, with cars barely making the 5 per cent mark (in Los Angles over 80 per cent of the workforce drives to work).

Average commuting times in Indian cities are low: 28 minutes in Mumbai and 33 minutes in Bangalore, which is less than in New York and London, with both around 40 minutes. In Mexico City and Johannesburg they extend to well over an hour on average, with unacceptably lengthy extremes from the poorer peripheral districts. By far the highest proportion of all motorised journeys in Indian cities takes place by public transport, reaching over 80 per cent in Kolkata. While this number comes close to the highly efficient statistics of Tokyo, where nearly 80 per cent of a 35-million urban region use public transport to get to work, even the most efficient western cities like New York, London and Berlin only manage to reach 50 per cent, 30 per cent and 27 per cent respectively.

Around 40 per cent of midtown residents in New York’s Manhattan walk to work and over 90 per cent of affluent business workers use public transport to go to London’s financial hub. Transport patterns are more complex in the other three rapidly expanding cities of Shanghai, Mexico City and Johannesburg. Although Mexico City counts on a reliable metro system, only 14 per cent of the city’s population use it, while minibus services account for more than half of all trips. In Johannesburg, the majority of new affluent developments rely on the private car, with a fleet of unregulated 12,500 privately run collective taxis taking 20 per cent of low-end commuters to work, oft en in dangerous and unreliable conditions. The share of public transport in Shanghai is rapidly growing, with 23 per cent of daily journeys to work using some form of public transport – rail, metro or bus. While cycling is still prevalent in Shanghai, a city with 9 million bicycles, bans on cycling are being imposed on major city streets ‘to avoid congestion’.

Cities worldwide have become knowledge-based and service oriented economies. Clearly evidencing this transformation is the distribution of employment by economic sector. In all of the Urban Age cities, the service sector employs more than half of the urban labour force. The transition appears the most far reaching in New York and London. Less than ten per cent of the urban labour force of both cities is engaged in industrial activities. Yet, cities are far from becoming monocultural ‘office economies’. In fact, it is only in London that the financial and business services constitute the main employment category. Even in New York, it is ‘other services’ making up almost half of the employment base. This broad category includes a diverse range of urban activities such as personal, social, health, educational and entertainment services.

The reduced employment share of urban manufacturing does not diminish the importance of the sector. Manufacturing firms and urban production complexes still support the leading sectors of a city’s economy, oft en through linkages that are far from apparent. Moreover, at the regional scale manufacturing remains a source of dynamism in and out of itself. Shanghai is a case in point. At the apex of one of the fastest growing metropolitan economies in the world that stretches along the Yangtze River Delta, Shanghai retains an important industrial base.

Various industries employ up to a third of the city’s labour force, making manufacturing one of the pillars of this rapidly expanding economic node of global relevance.

The majority of people in Indian cities work in the services sector, even though the nature of ‘services’ is significantly different between Indian cities and other economies. While Mumbai, for example, has a high rate of 81 per cent in the general services sector, this includes communications, social and personal services as opposed to the business and financial services in other Urban Age cities. Of the Indian cities, Bangalore retains a significant amount of manufacturing with over 43 per cent and even Mumbai still employs 18 per cent of its population in the secondary sector, displaying a similar labour market distribution to Shanghai. The restructuring reflects a national trend whereby Indian cities are jumping to a predominantly service-based urban economy from a largely rural-based economy, side-stepping the protracted process of industrialisation that has affected so many cities of the western world.

Although multi-dimensional, subjective and often difficult to measure, quality of life is a central aspect of a city’s attractiveness. It indicates how well the city serves its residents. Life expectancy constitutes a useful initial indicator for this aspect of urban performance. The ‘age pyramids’ illustrated here further reveal a considerable variety among the Urban Age cities. In Mumbai, Kolkata, and Bangalore, the largest age group are of those in their 20s, reflecting a natural increase element in rapid population growth in the cities in the 1970s, but also the migration of young men to cities. Kolkata has the most mature age pyramid. It is the only Indian city with at least 7 per cent of the population in their 40s, and shows particularly low proportions of under 10s, partly because of a relatively small group in their 20s who are part of the potential parent group, but also perhaps because of a general reduction in fertility in the city. All the Indian cities have more male residents than female. The starkest differences are for the 20-29 age group, reflecting gender imbalance in migration, but in all the cities there are also more boys than girls aged 0-9, suggesting some parental influence over gender or a higher mortality rate for girls. Of the six other cities, the age distribution of Mexico City and Johannesburg comes closest to those of the Indian cities. For this group, average age ranges between 25 for Delhi and 32 for Kolkata. New York, London, Shanghai and Berlin generally have older populations ranging between 36 for New York and 42 for Berlin.

Cities that experienced the fastest growth and reached significant size 50 or more years ago are likely to have been through a period of relative or even absolute economic decline, which may have impacted on life chances. Whatever the economic activity that lead to this growth and the rationale for the city’s role in it, it is likely to have become obsolete over time. The city’s population and skills base may be linked to declining and poorly rewarded employment sectors, associated with lower life expectancy, such as heavy industry or manufacturing in richer countries. In addition, post-industrial decline may have led to out-migration, selectivity removing the economically able and healthy.

This ‘healthy migrant’ thesis explains why in some ‘old’, post-industrial cities life expectancy may be worse than for the nation as a whole. The healthy migrant thesis can also contribute to explaining why cities such as London, which faced population falls but then experienced a recent turnaround, partly through international migration, overall health conditions and life expectancy are better than national averages or what would be expected from residents’ incomes.