TRIALOG 100

A Journal for Planning and Building in the Third World

1 / 2009

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Die 100. Ausgabe von TRIALOG

Issue no. 100 of TRIALOG

regte zu einer Vielzahl von Titelseitenentwürfen an. Allein 6 Skizzen, teils hier wiedergegeben, stammen aus der Feder von Bernd D. Ciecior-Cicerón, Gründungsmitglied und seit den ersten Heften TRIALOG stets eng verbunden. Das Jubiläum von TRIALOG war auch Anlass für eine farbige Sonderbeilage „25 Jahre TRIALOG“ in der Mitte dieses Heftes und weitere Zeichnungen des gleichen Grafikers – wie auf der Umschlagrückseite. Sollte die Sonderbeilage in Ihrem Exemplar fehlen, so kann sie nachbestellt werden – wir haben in begrenztem Umfang Extradrucke vorrätig.

encouraged the drafting of quite a number of cover designs. Six of them – partly presented on this page – are from the pen of Bernd D. CieciorCicerón, founding member and closely linked to TRIALOG since the initial issues. In celebration of the special occasion of the jubilee of TRIALOG, this issue includes a colourful supplement entitled "25 Years TRIALOG" as well as other drawings by the forenamed graphic artist – like the illustration on the back cover. If the special supplement is missing from your copy of TRIALOG, it can be ordered – we have a limited number of extra copies in stock.

Das Editorial auf Seite 4 und 5 bezieht sich nicht nur auf das Thema des Heftes, sondern reflektiert die 25-jährige Geschichte von TRIALOG. Für die verspätete Fertigstellung des Heftes möchten wir uns bei allen Lesern entschuldigen, und wir hoffen, dass die 'Extras' Sie für das Warten entschädigen!

The editorial on pages 4 and 5 refers not only to the topic of this volume, but also reflects on the 25-year history of TRIALOG. We apologize to our readers for the late completion of this issue and hope that the “special extras” compensate a bit for the long wait.

Bernd D. Ciecior-Cicerón

TRIALOG 100

Zeitschrift für das Planen und Bauen in der Dritten Welt

Urban Visions Volume Editors: Kosta Mathéy, Klaus Teschner

1 / 2009

Inhalt / Table of contents 04

Editorial

06

José Chong

12

Shanti Pillai

15 19

TRIALOG 100 I/2009

Scenarios for the Future Riding with Rajendran Our Global Challenges: Can Cities Take us Beyond Asymetric War and Environmental Violence? Saskia Sassen

Space City Lars Reuterswärd

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Speculating on the Urban Future: Thinking Beyond the Global Economic Crisis Michael Cohen

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Peter Marcuse

26

Clare Short

28

Mario Coyula

36

Octavio Tapia Rodríguez

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Antanas Mockus

An Urban Vision – Space and Social Relations Urban Realities – 25 years from now Vivir la Habana: del día a día a la futurología La Identidad de la Ciudad Jóvenes: cinco maneras de ser ciudadanos del mundo

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Thesen zur zukünftigen Stadtentwicklungspolitik in der Internationalen Entwicklungszusammenarbeit

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Consultancies of the Future: From Aid to Profit Sharing

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In-between Green – A Recreational Network for Mumbai’s Citizens Sabrina Kleinenhammans

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Aktuelles / News

61

Neue Bücher / Book Reviews

Jörg Haas, Rene Peter Hohmann

Florian Steinberg

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Editorial Torn Hopes and Urban Visions When TRIALOG was founded by a handful of young academics some 25 years ago, we were used to conceiving the globe as three worlds. In spite of being in the middle of the so-called "lost decade" of the 1980s, our efforts for a better future were directed towards the Third World, which had liberated itself from colonisers or national dictators by means of glorious revolutions – some of them had even defeated the army of the world’s most powerful nation, the US. On their way towards the future, they enjoyed the privilege of being free to choose the best achievements of the West and the East, both of whom did everything possible to demonstrate that their respective economic doctrine was more humane than the other. New and promising urban theories were evolving, like that of Castells' urban social movements, which still permitted a certain naivety in expecting the urban poor to spontaneously stand up against the rich, self-nominated elites and prepare the way towards more justice on our globe. Theories and social discourse were advanced by means of a few key books that all colleagues were well aware of and a few conferences which, given their infrequency at the time, could easily attract an important selection of the acknowledged leaders of thought. In this époque, the colleagues behind TRIALOG not only enjoyed a more relaxed professional workload at the universities – which permitted us to produce every issue of our journal regularly at the end of each calendar quarter, thus provoking comments about German punctuality among our colleagues abroad – but also allowed us to organise a well-received international conference at least every other year. Even without the help of the still nonexistent internet, these events attracted between 100 and 400 people. The last one, addressing the revitalisation of historic urban centres, was celebrated in Havana, Cuba, in 1997; the participants from over 40 nations certainly contributed to its international character. A preceding TRIALOG conference on appropriate building technologies took place in the Reichstag building in Berlin in 1987, and our guest Octavio Tapia – also one of the authors in this journal issue – provoked

Dialogue between the generations: Amos R ­ apoport from the US and Ana Chavez from Costa Rica at the ­TRIALOG Jubilee Conference 2010. Photo: Silvia Matuk

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the audience with his urban vision of a Berlin without the wall in a distant future. Three years later this vision was to become reality, and with it the concept of the Third World necessarily started to crumble. Globalisation was to transfer many aspects of the developing world to the North, and the new thriving Asian economies, with their rocketing urbanisation rates, began to turn Europe into a sort of hinterland. Needless to say, most of the makers and supporters of TRIALOG also now spend large portions of every year in distant parts of the globe. It is charming news that now, 25 years after the appearance of the first issue, TRIALOG is still being conceived, edited (though with slightly less regularity), printed and read by and with a stable number of supporters – and subscribers. To celebrate this achievement, another – and more modest – congress was organised in Darmstadt in January 2010. A good number of first-day members participated, joining a young and vivid international crowd consisting mostly of students in the advanced master courses in urban studies directed by TRIALOG members at universities in Dortmund, Frankfurt, and Darmstadt. Thus, the story of TRIALOG shows once again that staying power is the key to success in international cooperation and development work. Urban Visions – For another 25 Years Long before conceiving the conference, the makers of TRIALOG had started discussing the theme to choose for our jubilee edition, the 100th issue. An obvious and spontaneous suggestion was a review and analysis of global urban and housing issues of the past 25 years. Due to our activist roots, however, we decided instead to ask our friends and supporters to brainstorm about possible – and even better: impossible – developments that might occur over the 25 years to come. Most authors chose to reflect on the more likely developments. The mistake is ours: we should have asked for fantasies stretching at least 200 years ahead. Given the current pace of technical and social change, even projections such as those will probably be overtaken by reality within only 10 or 20 years. Our 100th issue begins with a short survey on urban utopias as they have been formulated in the past, presented by José Chong. In her essay "Riding with Rajendran", Shanti Pillai speculates on the outcomes of current and future processes of urbanisation on the coastal strip between Chennai and Chandigarh, where she was born. Based on the hypothesis that cities traditionally have had a capacity to neutralise military conflicts by incorporating them into a civil context, Saskia Sassen questions whether the same is possible for the imminent ecological tensions and violent social clashes. Lars Reuterswärd – co-organiser of some early TRIALOG conferences in the 1980s – reports on little-known advances to establish permanent human settlements in space and argues that the same technologies might become a necessity for mankind to survive on a polluted planet Earth in the future. Michael Cohen is concerned about the imminent importation of Third World living standards into economically declining North American cities. Following on from this, Peter Marcuse reflects on the challenge for social bridging between disassociated groups in a city environment. Clare Short refers as well to the impacts of globalisation on cities with the expectation that, once exploitation levels have reached extreme dimensions, social uprising – or the pure fear of it – will eventually propel the overdue redistribution of material resources in society. In spite of all the efforts and achievements in renovating and revitalising old Havana, the difficult economic situation as well as the mere size of the problems make it hard to believe in a flourishing future for the

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TRIALOG 100 I/2009

Cuban capital within the next 25 years. Mario Coyula still recognises some signs for hope and suggests a decentralised and self-financed local development with small and thoughtful interventions based on more autonomy for local stakeholders’ initiatives. Octavio Tapia outlines the importance of a city’s identity. He calls for a new urban pact to foster care in urban spaces in order to enable better social interaction. Related to this, many cities are experiencing growing levels of violence – certainly one of the key challenges for urban management in the coming years. Antanas Mockus evokes a civic hedonism able to overcome cynical attitudes against laws and customs currently en vogue among young people. In view of the evolving needs of a predominantly urbanised world, Jörg Haas and Rene Hohmann plead for a change of paradigms in development cooperation with more emphasis on urban resilience, violence prevention, and distributive justice. Institutions offering consultancy services for local governments and projects currently financed by international development agencies will probably have to redefine their roles and income strategies with joint ventures and profit sharing agreements, suggests Florian ­Steinberg. In line with such practical proposals for an urban future, Sabrina Kleinenhammans presents her winning contribution to an interna-

tional urban design competition: a pre-emptive land-holding strategy for Mumbai which creates a cohesive network of public open spaces. While editing this current issue, we had to realise that too many among us have lost the courage and fantasy to radically imagine a significantly better future and to develop truly alternative visions, dreams, and utopias – preconditions for ever arriving at a better world. This observation and the experience of the past decades remind us of some basic wisdom: • Never trust fashionable mainstream approaches claiming to provide a solution for all places and circumstances. • Never stop asking why or presenting un-discussed alternatives; there is always more than one solution to any problem. • Enjoy developing new and optimistic visions and do not forget that quite a number of visions must be generated in order for one of them to become reality. Kosta Mathéy

Klaus Teschner

Vergangene Hoffnungen und neue Visionen für die Städte Als TRIALOG vor 25 Jahren von einer Handvoll junger Akademiker gegründet wurde, richtete sich unser Engagement für eine bessere Zukunft auf die “Dritte Welt”, deren Völker sich vielfach gerade von Kolonialmächten und Diktatoren befreit hatten. Auf ihrem Weg in die Zukunft genossen sie das Privileg, zwischen den Errungenschaften des Westens und des Ostens wählen zu können. Vielversprechende Theorien zur Stadt entwickelten sich, wie etwa Castell’s Beiträge zu städtischen Sozialbewegungen. Sie boten noch Raum für die naïve Hoffnung auf einen spontanen Aufstand der städtischen Armen gegen die selbsternannten Eliten, was dann den Weg bereiten würde für mehr Gerechtigkeit in der Welt. Die hinter TRIALOG stehenden Kollegen genossen damals weniger Arbeitslast an den Universitäten, was die püktliche vierteljährliche Produktion neuer Nummern von TRIALOG erlaubte und zudem ermöglichte, einmal pro Jahr eine internationale Konferenz auszurichten. Selbst ohne Internet kamen dabei regelmäßig 100 bis 400 Leute zusammen. 1987, bei der TRIALOG- Konferenz zu angemessenen Bautechniken im Berliner Reichstag, provozierte unser Gast Octavio Tapia die Zuhörer mit seiner urbanen Vision für ein Berlin in ferner Zukunft – ohne Mauer. Drei Jahre später war diese Vision Wirklichkeit und damit begann der Begriff Dritte Welt zu bröckeln. Die Globalisierung brachte Aspekte der “Entwicklungsländer” in den Norden und angesichts der boomenden Wirtschaftsmächte in Asien beginnt Europa heute zu einer Art Hinterland zu werden. Es versteht sich von selbst, das auch die meisten der Macher und Unterstützer von TRIALOG ganze Monate des Jahres an den verschiedensten Stellen der Erde verbringen. Über 25 Jahre nach dem Erscheinen der ersten Ausgabe wird TRIALOG immer noch konzipiert und herausgegeben (mit etwas geringerer Pünktlichkeit), wird es immer noch gedruckt und gelesen von einer stabilen Anzahl von Unterstützern und Abonnenten. Um diesen Erfolg zu feiern, fand im Januar 2010 in Darmstadt eine weitere, etwas bescheidenere Konferenz statt. Viele TRIALOG-Mitglieder der ersten Stunde vermischten sich hier mit einer jungen und lebendigen Teilnehmerschaft – meist Studierende der von langjährigen TRIALOG-Mitgliedern geleiteten Masterkurse zu Stadtentwicklung in Dortmund, Frankfurt und Darmstadt. Die Geschichte von TRIALOG zeigt so wieder einmal: in der internationalen Kooperation und Entwicklungszusammenarbeit ist langer Atem der Schlüssel zum Erfolg. Urbane Visionen – für die nächsten 25 Jahre Bei der Auswahl des Themas für die Jubiläumsausgabe 100 schien es zunächst naheliegend, auf die weltweiten Stadt- und Wohnbauentwicklungen der letzten 25 Jahre zurückzuschauen sowie sie zu analysieren. Mit Blick auf unseren eher aktivistischen Hintergrund entschieden wir uns jedoch dafür, unsere Freunde und Unterstützer zu einem Brainstorming einzuladen über mögliche – oder besser noch – unmöglich erscheinende Realitäten der nächsten 25 Jahre. Die meisten Autoren zogen es vor, über naheliegendere Zukünfe zu reflektieren. Der Fehler liegt bei uns: wir hätten nach

TRIALOG 100 I/2009

mindestens einer 200 Jahres-Perspektive fragen sollen. Angesichts der heutigen Rasanz des technischen und sozialen Wandels könnten selbst solche Phantasien in nur 10 oder 20 Jahren von der Wirklichkeit überholt werden. TRIALOG 100 beginnt mit einem Überblick von José Chong über urbane Utopien der Vergangenheit, mit eher persönlichen Reflektionen von Shanti Pillai über die Verstädterung der Küste bei Chennai, Überlegungen von Saskia Sassen zu konfliktüberwindenden Qualitäten der großen Städte sowie Gedanken von Lars Reuterswärd, dass geschlossene Systeme zum Überleben im Weltraum auch für die städtische Zukunft auf einem verseuchten Planeten relevant werden könnten. Michael Cohen befürchtet Dritte Welt-Verhältnisse in zunehmend verfallenden US-Städten, Peter Marcuse betont die Notwendigkeit sozialer Brückenschläge zwischen segregierten Stadtbewohnern während Clare Short hofft, dass aufgestaute soziale Gegensätze sowie Revolten schließlich zur Umverteilung zwingen werden, wie einst in Europa. Sich auf kleine Hoffungszeichen beziehend entwirft Mario Coyula eine selbstbestimmte Entwicklungsperpektive für die Zukunft von Havanna. Octavio Tapia betont die Bedeutung von Stadtidentitäten für die Bewohner während Antanas Mockus auf die Überwindung von jugendlichen Rechtfertigungen für das Ignorieren von Normen und Gesetzen baut. Jörg Haas und Rene Hohmann plädieren für eine die Verstädterung Ernst nehmende Entwicklungspolitik mit Fokus auf Risiken, Gewaltprävention und Verteilungsgerechtigkeit, Florian Steinberg sieht die Zukunft der Beratungsdienste in joint ventures oder Abkommen zur Gewinnbeteiligung und schließlich präsentiert S ­ abrina Kleinenhammans einen praktischen Vorschlag zur Sicherung von Freiflächen in Mumbai. Bei der Zusammenstellung dieser Ausgabe wurde uns bewusst, dass zu viele unter uns längst den Mut und die Phantasie verloren haben, sich eine radikal andere und substantiell bessere städtische Zukunft vorzustellen und um wahrhaft alternative Visionen, Träume und Utopien zu entwickeln – eine Vorbedingung, um jemals eine bessere Welt zu erreichen. Diese Beobachtung und die Erfahrung der letzten Jahrzehnte rufen uns folgende grundlegende Weisheiten ins Gedächtnis: • Trau niemals modischen Mainstream-Ansätzen, die von sich beanspruchen, eine Lösung für alle Orte und Situationen zu bieten. • Hör niemals auf zu fragen “warum” und frage stets, welche Alternativen nicht diskutiert werden. Es gibt immer mehr als eine Lösung für ein Problem. • Entwickle lustvoll neue und optimistische Zukunftsentwürfe und vergiss nicht, dass eine Vielzahl von Visionen geschaffen werden muss, damit eine davon Wirklichkeit werden kann. Kosta Mathéy

Klaus Teschner

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Scenarios for the Future José Chong Zukunftsszenarien Ausgehend von der These, dass sich die Zukunft der Städte aus ihrer Vergangenheit und der Gegenwart heraus entwickelt, teilt José Chong seinen Beitrag in drei Abschnitte. Zukunftsvisionen der Vergangenheit lassen abschätzen, wie groß die Kluft zwischen gutem Gespür und purer Spinnerei klaffen kann. Bei frühen Stadtvisionen, wie Thomas More’s ‚Utopia‘, galt das Interesse der Suche nach der idealen Stadt. Mit der industriellen Revolution entwickelte sich in den Zukunftsentwürfen der Glaube an eine segensreiche Allmacht der Maschine – ein Irrtum, dem sowohl Le Corbusier wie die Archigram Gruppe um Peter Cook verfielen. In der heutigen Gegenwart, die zumindest quantitativ von einer Dominanz des Urbanen geprägt ist, löst sich das ‚Stadtgefühl‘ gleichzeitig und zunehmend auf: virtuelle Welten im Internet, simulierte Reisen per Google Earth, aber auch echte Heimatlosigkeit und die vom Klimawandel erzwungene Ökologisierung der Städte verschieben unseren Wahrnehmungshorizont weit über die Stadtgrenzen des momentanen Aufenthaltsortes hinaus. Der Frage nach der Zukunft kann man sich in (mindestens) zweierlei Arten nähern. Eine intellektuelle Vorgehensweise übt sich beispielsweise im Durchspielen alternativer Szenarien, wie es u.a. die UN versucht mit (a1) der Annahme weiteren ökonomischen Wachstums, welches mehr Überschuss produziert und damit die Abnahme von ökonomischen und sozialen Differenzen ermöglicht. Szenario (a2) setzt eher auf Regionalisierung, eigenständige Kulturen und eine teilweise Abwendung von der Konsumwirtschaft. Damit verschärfen sich zugleich global die sozialen Unterschiede. Szenario (b1) dagegen zielt auf eine Limitierung des ökonomischen Wachstums durch intelligente Technologien und eine damit verbundene soziale Nivellierung. Szenario (b2) schließlich beschreibt die umfassend nachhaltige Stadt – weniger Bevölkerungs- und Wirtschaftswachstum, soziale Gerechtigkeit mit regionalen Charakteristika und die Ergreifung aller notwendigen Maßnahmen zur Bekämpfung des Klimawandels. Solange jedoch die Szenarien reine Gedankenakrobatik bleiben und nicht in Handlungsstrategien münden, sind sie zumindest für Planer von geringem Nutzen. Interessanter, im Kontext dieses Visionen-Heftes, sind da eher bildhafte Projektionen, die Chong ebenfalls aus der Literatur und der Kinematografie ableitet: Die intelligente Stadt (z.B. Nicos Komninos); die kreative Stadt (Maurizio Carta); Skycar City (Frank Lloyd Wright, der Film ‚The 5th Element‘); die erneuerbare Stadt (Peter Dröge) – das wären greifbare ‚Patterns‘. Wie bei Utopia von More muss eine Vision über das Ziel hinausschießen, um den Weg zu verdeutlichen.

Introduction How are the cities of the future going to be? This is one of the most difficult questions that you can ask an urban planner. Despite the projections and scenarios presented by a great number of researchers, thinkers, philosophers, writers, etc., no one can give us a definitive answer to this transcendental question. Future is uncertainty. It is something that doesn’t exist yet; the future is defined by the actions and decisions that we make every day. Consequently, it is always changing. Past, present and future are interconnected but not necessarily in a linear way. Despite the fact that the future doesn’t exist as a reality, it is built by the addition of material and immaterial factors that have occurred and are occurring now. At the same time that I am writing this text or you are reading this ­article, something is happening that will change our future. Nowadays, our sense of belonging to one unique world is stronger because all the actions that occur in one place of the globe can have positive or negative effects in another faraway place. At the moment, climate change is an important topic in the media. Everyone can see the consequences of human behavior in the last century. We

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are facing the results of the actions or decisions of our former leaders. In 1987, the United Nations published the report “Our Common Future”, which introduced the word “Sustainability” to the political arena. It was a very important effort to think about how our actions would impact on the future generations. After that sustainability became a common word in all the aspects of our daily life. We are living in a time of increasing and rapid changes. For the first time in human history, more than 50% of the world population lives in urban areas. The small and medium cities are growing fast and represent the 91% of the increase of urban population, with a great percentage of this population living in slum areas. By 2100, the United Nations estimates that nearly 80% of the world population will be living in cities and that the total population will be around 10 billion people. Nevertheless, nobody can really predict for certain how the future is going to be. ¨Complexity Science¨, ¨Chaos Theory¨ and ¨Fractal Geometry¨ are concepts that we are starting to hear more about. These new ways of seeing the world are generating important changes in the Sciences. New generations of architects and planners are discussing how to integrate these new ways to see the universe and the actual development of the city.

TRIALOG 100 I/2009

a machine to live. Therefore, in his ideal city, all functions were divided. Vehicular and pedestrian circulations were separated into different levels. Housing, work, commerce and entertainment were each located in their own specific area. The new city had to consider enough space for the new mode of transport: the private car. Brasilia is an example of the application of Le Corbusier´s modern principles in urbanism. It was necessary for ideas, concepts, imagination and fundamentally, political support, to all come together, in order to build the new capital, Brasilia (1960). It is an example of the utopian socialist city. Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, the designer team, tried to avoid class segregation; however, they didn’t accomplish that goal.

The present article explores the idea of the city of the future. To do this, I divided the text into three main parts: Past, Present and Future. In the first part, I will present a few utopias from the last century. It will provide us with some images of the way of thinking of that time. In the second part, I will describe some characteristics of what is happening nowadays in our society. Finally, in the last part, I will write about some possible scenarios of the cities in the future.

Past. Urban utopias. Oxford dictionary defines utopia as an imaginary perfect place or state of things. The word had its origin in the title of the book written by Sir Thomas More in 1516. Utopia was the name of a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean that possesses a perfect socio-politico legal system. The word comes from the Greek: “ou”(not) + “topos” (place). The word utopia has an intended contradiction in its meaning because Thomas More thought that such an ideal community cannot exist. The urban utopias of the last century are remarkable cases studies to analyze. They were ideal cities in a specific moment of history. Despite the fact that they did not exist, these utopias lead us or even force us to imagine possibilities of the future. Whether presented as text or as images, it gives us an idea of the variety of thinking on this topic. They were trying to answer the question that we are facing now. How will the cities be in the next century? Many of these thinkers considered the influence of new technology in shaping the cities of the future. Amazing images like La Citta Nuova of Antonio Sant’Elia (1914) captured the imagination of people (figure 1). In his drawings, Sant’Elia presented a very dense and multilayered city. His architecture of the future was represented by monumental skyscrapers with exposed elevators and structures. If we compare his drawings with contemporary cities, we will see some similarities in the morphology of skyscrapers today. An example of this is the Lloyds tower designed by Richard Rogers in London. The analogies between the city and the machine were most manifest in Le Corbusier´s book “Towards a New Architecture” (1923). He proposed that the city must be

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Figure 1: Urban Utopia ‘Citta Nuova’ by Antonio Sant’Elia, 1914

In 1964, Peter Cook and Archigram presented the PlugIn City (figure 2). The principal characteristic was the flexibility of the structures within the city. The city was considered a system with a continual process of transformation. The urban structure consists of different layers in which the various daily activities take place. The lifespan of the different urban functions could be calculated. They proposed that the city´s foundation would last 40 years whereas the rest of the system, such as the railway, shops, and offices were thought to change more frequently. Flexibility is a key idea in this concept. The radical images of Archigram inspired a new generation of architects. Centre Pompidou in the historic neighborhood in Paris looks similar to the buildings in Plug-In City images. Reality and Utopia have a very strong relationship. Reality is built based on the superposition of the ideas and dreams of all the citizens that live in the city. It is important to recognize the value of Utopia as media for communication of the possibilities about the future. Sometimes those ideas can be materialized or they can change our behavior. The power of imagination can transform the morphology of our urban settlement. We have to learn how to interpret our contemporary society because it is there that the seeds of the future can be found.

Present. What is going on? To know about the future, it is necessary to think about what is happening in the world today. There are some unprecedented characteristics that are defining our lifestyle. One of them is the development of information technology (IT) and the incredible velocity with which it has grown. The quantity of information that is available from a computer connected to the Internet is almost infinite. Google is currently working on a project in partnership with the most important libraries in the world, with a goal to generate a database of all the human knowledge contained in publications from these libraries´ collections. With the completion of this project, the possibility to have access to the vast majority of books that have been written in human history may not be that far off. Virtual space is becoming more important every day. The number of hours that we spend in front of our computer has increased in recent years. We use it not only for work, but also for communication and entertainment. Virtual communities have grown worldwide, allowing the interaction between people with the same interests. The ¨avatar¨ is a representation of individuals in the virtual world. One can invent one´s own ¨avatar¨ to have whichever

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characteristics that one desires. Everything is possible when we do not need to face reality. However, some web pages have allowed the over exposition of our real lives. Facebook with 350 millions of users is an interesting case to be analyzed. This web page can facilitate the communication with our social networks. This site has become so popular so much so that it is common to hear Facebook users say that nothing is official until it is published on Facebook. The ¨status updates¨ function allows individuals to share mundane to important details of their lives with other users. Today, smart phone technology allows us to be constantly connected to cyberspace. These new technological gadgets, which are usually provided with Global Positioning Systems (GPS), have modified the way with which we move in the city. The coupling of mobile and GPS technology has generated very creative applications. Today, city plans can be downloaded onto our cell phones, and our locations on the earth determined by satellites with accuracy. This can be very helpful in cities with chaotic networks of roads and highways or where we do not have any landmarks with which to orientate our way to our destination. One can imagine the scenario where we will no longer need any urban references to move within the city. We can trust in the GPS and by guide by a technological gadget connected to a satellite 20000 kilometers away from the earth’s surface. This, combined with proximity sensors has the potential for the creation of a new generation of cars that can be driven automatically in the future. It will definitively change our way to drive or be driven in the city. Road networks will be transformed significantly. The efficiency in the use of the space of the road will be better.

Climate change is another important aspect that is part of the agenda in all Nation States. Diverse urban landscapes are facing diverse impacts of rising sea levels and global temperatures. In the Netherlands, almost 50 % of the ground surface is below sea level. In South America, the snow of the Andes is melting in at a very dramatic rate. However, cities continue to depend on this water source for their survival. Today, natural disasters are occurring more frequently due to climate change. El Niño’s natural cycle of warming ocean waters has become more frequent and more extreme in recent years. Because of the new challenges brought about by climate change, risk management is now an indispensable analysis that needs to be incorporated into the urban planning process. Cities have to deal with this rapid climate change and adapt to survive in face of the increasing threat from “natural” disasters. We only have to know that the world is changing very fast. New technologies, communication, interaction and arts are redefining the way we see the world. Those who grew up with black and white television will in a few years be watching holographic television. We have to be aware of these changes, because it will define our future life.

Future(s)

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Figure 2: Peter Cook and Archigram, Plug-in City, 1964. Study – Overhead view, 1964. Print off ink on tracing drawing with added color, 40 1/8 x 28 3/8”. Courtesy of Archigram Archives.

This section is divided in two parts, Scenarios and Possible Cities. Part 1: Scenarios

Mobility between countries has increased. New geopolitical arrangements at the regional level such as the European Union or Mercosur have softened borders and facilitated this increase in mobility between different cities. Citizens are no longer affiliated only to their nation states. It is common to see people living in one country but working in another. The emergence of new low cost flight companies has further encouraged this process. These low cost carriers often offer cheap tickets at prices that are a fraction of what it used to cost to travel those routes. The world is becoming more interconnected and the time to move from one city to another is reducing

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significantly. The question now arises, what defines the real population of a city? There are some examples like San Francisco or Frankfurt, where the daytime population is significantly higher compared to the actual resident population living within the city. This daytime population consists of commuters who only go to the city to work but return to sleep in small settlements within the wider region. City and Region are mixed together and the boundaries between them are disappearing.

International experts are working to determine the effects of today’s human lifestyle on the future. “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was jointly established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to assess the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change” (IPCC, 2000:V). Countless reports, papers, methodologies and guidelines about this important issue have been generated, including the IPCC’s Special Reports in Emission Scenarios (SRES). These scenarios provide useful information about climatic and environmental consequences of greenhouses emission. The SRES provide significant information to researches and decisions makers. “Four different narrative storylines were developed to describe consistently the relationships between emission driving forces and their evolution and add context for the scenario quantification. Each storyline represents different demographic, social, economic, technological, and environmental developments, which may be viewed positively by some people and negatively by others.” (IPCC, 2000:3)

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The time frame of the SRES projections is 2100 and the four possible scenarios presented in the SRES report can help to supply a better understanding of the importance of the decisions that we make today. The stories cover a wide future characteristic illustrating demographic change, economic development and technological advancements. Below are the four storylines and their characteristic from the SRES.

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Figure 3: The famous motion picture Metropolis – inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register - was the most expensive silent movie ever produced. Dated 1927 and directed by Fritz Lang , it extrapolates the negative aspects of contemporary cities into a futuristic urban vision and criticizes inhumane living conditions of the workers in a crude capitalist environment. Poster design: Schulz Neudamm, 1926.

¨The A1 storyline and scenario family describes a future world of very rapid economic growth, global population that peaks in mid-century and declines thereafter, and the rapid introduction of new and more efficient technologies. Major underlying themes are convergence among regions, capacity building, and increased cultural and social interactions, with a substantial reduction in regional differences in per capita income.” (IPCC, 2000:3) “The A2 storyline and scenario family describes a very heterogeneous world. The underlying theme is self-reliance and preservation of local identities. Fertility patterns across regions converge very slowly, which results in continuously increasing global population. Economic development is primarily regionally oriented and per capita economic growth and technological change are more fragmented and slower than in other storylines.” (IPCC, 2000:4) “The B1 storyline and scenario family describes a convergent world with the same global population that peaks in midcentury and declines thereafter, as in the A1 storyline, but with rapid changes in economic structures toward a service and information economy, with reductions in material intensity, and the introduction of clean and resource-efficient technologies. The emphasis is on global solutions to economic, social, and environmental sustainability, including improved equity, but without additional climate initiatives.” (IPCC, 2000:4) The B2 storyline and scenario family describes a world in which the emphasis is on local solutions to economic, social, and environmental sustainability. It is a world with continuously increasing global population at a rate lower than A2, intermediate levels of economic development, and less rapid and more diverse technological change than in the B1 and A1 storylines. While the scenario is also oriented toward environmental protection and social equity, it focuses on local and regional levels.” (IPCC, 2000:4) In general, this methodology can provide us with an idea of the possible scenarios of the future. It is an interesting approach that helps us to visualize how the present decisions will be manifested in the future. Scenarios can be a tool to increase awareness and can be used by policy makers to develop adequate policies. The question is: How to invent stories that can lead us to a better future? Part 2: Possible Cities Italo Calvino, in his book “The Invisible Cities” describes a series of amazing cities created in his imagination but that represent the reality of the urban agglomerations. We can see many characteristics of real cities in his imaginary environments. Architects and urban planners, with their ideas and projects, create new images of possible cities. How will the city of the future be?

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Intelligent City Can a city be intelligent? Nanotechnology is the scientific discipline that has galvanized the most importance advances in science recently. It is related to study the atomic and molecular scale. The developing of new materials, such as new technologies in computer processors, is one of many possible applications. With this help, scientists are pursuing the creation of Artificial Intelligence. “There are three basic components of an intelligent city; (1) the island of innovation formed by a community of people, production, exchange and other activities, (2) the virtual innovation system which excludes knowledge management tools on the one hand, and the IT system for online provision of information and innovation services in the other hand, and (3) the connection between the real and virtual innovation system, in other words, the use of the latter by the island’s scientific community. These elements relate to both spaces, the real and virtual, and connecting them together creates a new real-virtual innovation system.” (KOMNINOS, 2002: 201)

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1 MRDRV is an Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape design studio. More information www.MVRDV.nl

2 Limits to Growth is one of the most well known environmental books written with around 30 million copies in more than 30 translations.

Nicos Komninos gave us his view about the components of an intelligent city. Innovation and the possibility to gain access to IT systems are defining characteristics. The city provides the space (physical and virtual) to create a community with the capability to innovate and create knowledge. The integration of IT systems and the use of resulting communication capabilities will create global interconnectivity. Can the city be the place to develop innovation? What kind of spaces does the city need for innovation to occur? Can an inorganic organism like the city develop intelligence organically? “The programming of the city makes it possible to create an open structure for activities and potential human relationships, which are those that foster social interaction and thus, in the best cases, a change of scale in the city´s social relations and economic activity, which is ultimately what creates an urban consciousness or intelligence.“ (GUALLART, 2008:67) The Intelligent City and its use of virtual communication technologies cannot replace the physical existence of someone in a physical space. This is why cities remain important in the future. We need cities with complex programs that allow social interaction. Public spaces are the places where the population can meet and interact. The urban structure of cities needs to allow for the development of mechanisms to adapt to problems.

Creative City The city is the place of knowledge production that gives us all the facilities to be more interconnected and allows for creativity. The city will be the place of physical and virtual encounters. The flows of information will be constant and it will permit to foster progress and innovation. Creativity emerges in diverse environments or extreme situations. The city is the perfect scenario for the interaction between people of different backgrounds and cultures; these contrasts generate the potential for creativity. “A creative city, therefore, feeds upon the fertile interaction between Culture, Communication and Cooperation, essential resources for city councils, planners, architects and designers since they represent the very pinnacle of their work, an indispensable guide towards innovation and quality production, balancing free enterprise and initiative and contributing to the overall happiness of the communities they seek to serve.” (CARTA, 2007: 13)

Maurizio Carta summarizes the city competiveness in 3Cs: Culture, Communication and Cooperation. Culture refers to the city identity – that which is particular in its history that can be a source of creativity. Culture is a competitive resource that can be exploited. Communication is the ability to divulge information and involve citizens in real time. For that it is necessary to use available technology. If communication is effective it will reduce the time spent traveling within the city and ultimately allow for time spent generating a livelier city. Cooperation is the tolerance that we need in this global and multicultural world. One mechanism to do that is to join together in common goals and outcomes. A city needs to increase its capacity to mobilize the population to look for their future. “The city of the future will be a city of culture, a city generating new culture: the creative cities of the twenty-first century will be capable of competing on the international scenario by optimizing and promoting their own individual cultural identities, attracting a class of creatives and generating new sustainable futures.” (CARTA, 2007: 5)

Skycar City Science fiction movies such as Fritz Lang´s Metropolis (1927) (see figure 3) or Ridley Scott´s Blade Runner (1982) show us a dark way to see the built environment of the future. More recent movies such as The 5th Element (1997) present scenes of very dense cities where the inhabitants can move using vehicles capable of flight (figure 4). This idea is not new. There are many expressions of the fascinating idea of everyone having their own flying device. It will bring the full freedom of the 3rd mobility. It will change completely our preconception about the city. Planning will be no longer an exercise of two-dimensional zoning. Architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright in his project ­ roadacre City (figure 5) proposed a private air transporB tation system with communication capability between different parts of the city. More recently MVRDV1 (2007) explored this possibility in his book Skycar City. “Liberated from the confines of the groundplane, the advantages and potentials of a sky-based circulation infrastructure transform the notion of commuting and moving throughout the city. This paradigm shift also utterly revamps the way in which our cities evolve and grow.” (MVRDV/UWM, 2007:29)

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Figure 4: The 5th Element, a science fiction film set in the 23rd century, directed by Luc Besson (1997), is about defending Earth from an impending attack of pure evil and destruction.

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generation of electricity from our buildings. Despite the fact that for many regions of the world these new technologies are quite expensive, every year the prices are becoming more accessible. “… the geography of the Renewable city is fluid, networked to allow for supply redundancy, ubiquitously supplied and consumer controlled. At the individual level, its future infrastructure may soon manifest itself in isolated, stand-alone, even mobile elements that are small enough to perform as intelligent energy jewelry, energetic apparel or energy couture, powering personal information exchange or processing devices.” (DROEGUE, 2006:110)

With the technology that we have at present, it is possible to think that in only a few years the cost of these flying vehicles will be accessible to the general population. The question is whether we want to liberate the ground floor and add the 3rd dimension to our movements in the city. This will subsequently redefine all the functions and images of urban agglomerations. Planners will have to consider the possibility of this scenario. Building façades will change completely. Access can be possible from everywhere. New high-rise buildings will be designed. The car has completely transformed our way of designing and living in the city. The flying car has the power to do that again.

Renewable City A renewable resource is by definition something that can be replaced with natural processes. Time is critically important; fossil fuels are in essence renewable, but not as fast as we currently demand: the anaerobic decomposition of an organism into a mineral fuel takes around 650 million years. Our lifestyle is very dependent of this type of non-renewable source of energy. It has become clear that we cannot continue with this one-source energy model. In 1972, the Club of Rome, a think tank conformed by a diversity of professionals (scientists, economists, business men, civil servants, etc), presented in their book, Limits to Growth2, the results of the modeling of the interactions between the earth and human systems at that time. They used the variables of world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion. Their conclusion was that humanity could not continue with then-current lifestyles because it would result in the collapse of our society. Since then, many scientists have been working to develop new technologies and sources of energy. A great amount of countries have responded by developing different policies to encourage the use of renewable energies. The question is: Can the city itself be renewable? “All forms of renewable energy are placed within a community context: good building design, soporifically known as passive solar; and water, wave wind, solar-thermal. Photovoltaic, biofuel and heat-pumping power.”(DROEGE, 2006:5) Peter Droege explored the above question in his book The Renewable City. He based his reflections in the necessity to utilize different kinds of renewable energies in the city and change its behavior from consumer to producer of energy. This is possible. New technologies allow the

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Cities have to change their mindset about energy consumption. Not only it is about energy generation, it is also about how we can learn to live more efficiently with the energy that we have. The design of the buildings and the layout of the city are very important to this goal. Equally as important is involving people in the planning of the city as fundamental actors of this process. We need a renewable city in all regards. The transformation of the society is essential because if the inhabitants of the city do not change their behavior, the technology alone cannot solve the environmental problems that we are facing. Conclusions The city of the future does not yet exist. It is built in our past actions and is a consequence of the society where we live. Imagination is a fundamental part of the construction of the future. Urban utopias reflect the way of thinking of their societies and how they see the future. Today’s actions are the seeds of future scenarios. The development of technology has changed our cities and the way that the people relate to the world. Communication has become an important issue in this moment; as a result, people are more interconnected.

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Figure 5: Broadacre City is a (built) model of a a suburban city designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935. References IPCC (2000), Emissions scenarios, Summary for Policy makers, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Available under http://www. ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/ spm/sres-en.pdf KOMNINOS, N. (2002) Intelligent cities; Spon Press, London. GUALLART, V. (2008) Geologics. Geography, Information, Architecture; Actar, Barcelona. MVRDV/UWM (2007) Skycar City, A Pre-emptive history; Actar, New York. DROEGE, Peter (2006) The renewable city, a comprehensive guide to an urban evolution; John Wiley & Sons Inc, UK. CARTA, Mauricio (2007) Creative City; Actar, Barcelona. (see also: http://www.unipa. it/~mcarta/) Acknowledgements To all who gave me their own possible city, especially to Kari Smith, Lim HuiLing and Carolina Guimaraes.

Everyone has their own visions of and scenarios about the future of cities. Climate change and sustainability are important topics that humanity has to address in the coming years. These issues are changing all political agendas and the world is more conscious about the importance of solving the environmental problem. Urban professionals must develop new concepts to face rapid urban transformation. The new urban planning demands intelligence and creativity. Planners have a main task for the years to come as there is an increasing need to connect the dots between future technology, the different players and variables of the urban system, and the demands of future citizens. Realizing their decisions have a long term impacts on the livelihood of future generations will help them better forecast and plan a socially just, environmentally safe and economically viable solution to the urban chaos, where sustainability is built in as a norm in everyday life. Formulating a vision is the first step for planning; therefore imagining the unimaginable is necessary for transforming the utopian into reality. Humanity is facing a transcendental moment in its history and the city will be the theater for important changes. It is important to imagine today our own ideal city, should we hope for that dream be the city of the future.

José Luis Chong is a Peruvian architect of Chinese descent. He completed his master's studies in renewable energies, sustainable architecture and urbanism in Spain. Professor of Urban Design, Human Settlements and Architectural Design at Ricardo Palma University and in Sustainability at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú along with his private architectural practice in Lima. He currently is Mundus Urbano Masters student at TU Darmstadt.

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Riding with Rajendran Shanti Pillai Unterwegs mit Rajendran, auf dem Rücksitz dessen Taxis, stellt Shanti Pillai Indiens generische Stadtentwicklung dem Ideal von Auroville gegenüber. Entlang des Weges von der Megametropole Chennai nach Pondicherry beobachtet die Autorin die stadträumlichen Veränderungen der letzten 40 Jahre und wagt von hier aus einen Ausblick in die Zukunft. Dabei reflektiert sie ihre eigene mehrschichtige Rolle als Anhängerin einer utopischen Bewegung, aber auch als Mittelschichtkonsumentin und moderner Globetrotter. Während man sich als Autofahrer in den 70er Jahren die enge Asphaltpiste mit Ochsenkarren und Fußgängern teilen musste, reist man heute auf einer mehrspurigen Mautstrecke. Die einst klar voreinander abgegrenzten Siedlungen verwandeln sich zunehmend in ein zusammenhängendes Siedlungsgefüge und 100 Kilometer lange Bandstädte sind längst keine Spekulation mehr. Nicht nur Marginalgruppen, wie Arme oder Aussteiger, auch neue Mittelklassen finden in der ehemaligen Peripherie eine neue Heimat. Dennoch sollten wir nicht vergessen, so Pillai, dass das Privileg der Absonderung, genauso wie das Privileg des Träumens auf dem Rücksitz, immer ein jähes Ende finden könne. Vielleicht kann dann das entrückte Auroville Lösungen einer besseren Gesellschaft liefern.

It’s easy to slip into a lucid dream when barreling down the East Coast Road that extends along the Bay of Bengal between Chennai and Pondicherry in the state of Tamil Nadu. The visual overload of India’s proverbial colors, density and chaos are compounded when I experience them from the bubble of an air conditioned car, the comforts of which seem so incongruous with the steamy scenes moving quickly past that I can feel ill at ease. Then, the speed of the oncoming traffic and the calm, resolute demeanor of my driver, Rajendran, as he skillfully commits himself to one reckless decision after another, unnervingly underscore my powerlessness in the face of life’s fleeting fragility. No matter how many times I make this journey, I find myself responding to the exertion of the ride by exiting immediate reality and falling into a reverie in which the past, present, and future swirl in a whirlpool of memories alongside fantasies and fears about what is to come.

As the trip begins I remember clearly the ride as a child in the 1970s. This smooth, well-lighted, toll-access express highway did not exist; one rode along a narrow, pot-holed, inland string of asphalt, swerving off into the brush to escape merciless trucks and stupefied cattle. Private vehicles were far between as few families had cars and even fewer had the economic means or the cultural pre-disposition to take off for a weekend getaway or a day of sightseeing. It was quite easy to know when one had entered or exited what was then called Madras (the names of Indian cities were changed subsequently to pre-colonial names). The city had definite limits. Shops and residences, some permanent and others makeshift, ended and green rice fields punctuated by trees and goddess shrines began. Nowadays the urban bustle seems to stretch on uncontrollably southward, practically poking up against the ancient settlement-turned-tourist attraction of Mamallapuram some 60 km away. About 100 km more after that, the once sleepy town of Pondicherry has awakened and stretches its arms northward. Those of us who live in the region occasionally wonder whether we’ll live to see the nightmarish day when Chennai and Pondicherry bleed into one another. It’s not entirely impossible to imagine. The commercial exuberance of what has always been a nation of shopkeepers has reached a frenzy in India in the last few years, including in its fourth largest city. Central areas of Chennai remain home to innumerable, small-scale family businesses of everything from textiles to electrical appliances to vegetables, but increasingly make way for international hotel chains, shiny cell phone showrooms, and gleaming grocery stores full of semi-prepared foods for nuclear households short on time. Corner-store and hole-in-thewall sari and gold shops have in many instances grown into multi-storied giants that monopolize entire blocks, competing only with newly arrived designer boutiques featuring form-fitting and skin baring women’s clothes which only those who move from chauffeured vehicles

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to “safe” environments would dare to wear. Movement along the choked arteries between any of these locations is frustrating enough to turn the calmest of demeanors to road rage and the healthiest of lungs to allergic sneezing or asthmatic coughing. Not far away from all of this are new tracts dutifully designated by corporate-loving politicians and planners as the abodes for internet technology and outsourcing, the glorious engines which have driven the swift economic and social changes. What the engines have also driven are growing populations (and their accompanying goods and services) towards the farther reaches of the city, including down the coastal road. This includes not only the marginalized but also the economically empowered as evidenced by palatial homes on “sea view” plots, movie theaters with plush upholstered seats and amusement parks with oddly familiar names like “Dizzee World.” Surely it would feel even dizzier if more people realized that the heights of this success teeter over a flimsy base of dwindling oil reserves, disappearing industrial metals, and shrinking access to water – the consequences of which all of the young and middle-aged people participating (and not participating) in this process will come to know in their lifetimes. I shift in the backseat of Rajendran’s Indica sedan and exhale. The water part seems most immediately painful to imagine. Even relatively affluent types like me have lived moments in Chennai or Pondicherry when municipal water supplies temporarily stop and buckets have to be back-breakingly hauled up (by family members in some cases, by domestic servants in others) from water-truck services or the nearest street taps. No water for washing, bathing, or flushing a toilet is a no-laughing-matter, and the implications of water scarcity for agricultural and industrial purpose are cause to cry a river. And then, speaking of rivers and other bodies of water, I look to my right. We begin to pass a sea of sand, the vastness of which surely perturbs the managers of the Tamil Nadu Tourist Development Corporation boating attraction located off to my left. I have never seen this reservoir of water so empty as now in 2009. I don’t know what this means exactly, other than that there is not one water bird in sight, but surely it’s an ominous sign of the drought conditions one might expect more of as the summers become even hotter and the monsoons even more unpredictable. Even Rajendran, who passes by here several times a week, says it surprises him. Of course, weather conditions aren’t the only unpredictable variables in the environment. In 2004 this area was devastated by the tsunami, its coastal morphology changed and the lives of thousands of people turned upside down. Efforts to relocate and sustain fishing villages continue, a fact I take note of as we pass a little community living under plastic sheets erected on wooden poles just a stone’s throw from the road. I think about how some people’s lives can be radically bifurcated within minutes, their narratives and aspirations marked by the painful juxtaposition of a “before” and “after,” rather than by the progressive, linear assumptions of ever-expanding wealth and opportunities promoted by the glamorous worlds of media and advertising. As conditions worsen, and more people of all kinds are dragged under by the

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tidal waves of overpopulation, soil erosion, deforestation, and epidemics, not to mention the rip tides of an insecure global marketplace, I wonder how inhabitants will find their lives worth living at all, whether they reside in Chennai or Pondicherry or anywhere in between. But surely it can’t be all doom and gloom. I remind myself of my love of cities, of my commitment to them as privileged spaces for significant cross-cultural collaboration, for enlightened political dialogue and action, for the cultivation of multiple voices who can speak to what it means to be a human being beyond being a consumer. Tossing my plastic cup into a garbage heap as I slide back into the car where Rajendran has pulled next to his favorite tea stall in Marakkanam, I wonder where all this trash goes. I feel my reverie turn once more towards despair for the next 20 kilometers until we reach the beginnings of Pondicherry. By that I don’t mean the official start of the city, but rather what has essentially become the beginnings of Pondicherry in the last five years when the same kind of thing happening up in Chennai began happening down here full throttle. I smile as we slide pass a small road sign which seems to serve no purpose as only those who already know it is there would notice it. Posted at the start of a narrow road nestled between newly erected handicraft shops and eateries, the sign indicates the entrance into Auroville, an international, town-in-the-making where about 2,000 inhabitants from some thirty five countries live with the purpose of realizing human unity and creating some sort of sustainable and harmonious urban society. Although not an ashram, Auroville is founded on the spiritual teachings of the sage Sri Aurobindo and his collaborator, a French woman known to devotees as The Mother. Since neither figure is present today to clarify all that they meant with respect to their complex formulations about human evolution and the attainment of a more perfect collective, endless debates about the interpretation of Auroville’s goals and how best to achieve them are an integral part of life in the community. In light of this and the fact that Auroville was founded only in 1968, it is remarkable how much has been achieved here. Large sections of what had been barren or degraded lands have been revitalized through organic agriculture and what is one of

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somewhat picturesque boardwalk, and the clean orderliness of certain parts of town, the place would seem to have much to offer. Somehow, local entrepreneurs never seem to hit it right and hotels and restaurants are still lacking. It’s for sure that someday they’ll figure it out, however. When they do it’s hard to know what that could signify given that electrical supply is already on overload thanks to unchecked industrial growth and the costly blessing of rising incomes matched with the growing affordability of appliances.

Shanti Pillai holds a PhD with distinction in performance studies from New York University and a MA in Asian Studies from University of California in Berkeley. She has been performing and lecturing throughout New York and in Latin America. She is a regular lecturer at the postgraduate Master’s courses at TU Darmstadt (International Cooperation and Urban Development) and at the Vietnamese German University in Saigon (Urban Development Planning). Contact: All Illustrations drawn by Shuenting Jang , cand arch.TU Darmstadt. Contact:

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the most comprehensive reforestation projects in Asia. Innovative architecture addresses climactic, resource and inter-personal parameters for residential, commercial, and cultural life. Governance, although based upon frequently morphing institutions and often contested by various residents, attempts to actually put into practice ideals of spiritual anarchy which might appeal, if only in principle, to the many frustrated with the limits of other systems. Access to culture and education for both the young and the not-so-young are community priorities. And Tamil villages in the region, while living in an inevitably complex relationship to Auroville, have received benefits of medical care, education and vocational opportunities. Smallin-scale yet dynamic, Auroville aims to become a city of 50,000. For the moment, however, it is hard to know how and when this might be achieved and only the truest of believers might see the attainment of this purpose as a given. Living in a community where one must subscribe to a specific philosophical system is not for everyone. Then, of course, there are those of us who might be able to commit to ideals, yet not be able to commit to living them in a bounded geography. Nevertheless, that there are people in this world willing to dedicate themselves to experimental urban lives which could create new options for people everywhere is certainly an encouraging thing to consider when riding down the East Coast Road. We are now fast closing in on the center of Pondicherry, the proximity of the first main intersection made clear by increased traffic coming to a standstill at various bottlenecks. Years ago I stopped the habit of riding out to the edges of town on my bicycle. To do so now would result in nothing short of mortal danger, and there is no doubt that it will get worse as more people are able to purchase cars. Circulation is particularly congested near temples and marriage halls on auspicious days. More disposable income in the context of a prestige oriented society has converted rituals into major pageants. Family ceremonies and religious holidays are celebrated with more frequency, at more venues, and with unprecedented levels of feasting, gift exchange, and ostentatious displays of piety. For some time this former French colony has tried to earn itself a more important place on the maps of national and international tourists. With its unique architecture, its

Rajendran turns off the road. After a few minutes on streets where urban and village lifestyles cohabitate, I arrive at the gate to a compound of row houses, one of which is mine. The moment I step out of the car and inhale I am reminded of the open canal on the other side of the wall. The municipality still hasn’t brought Pondicherry into the 20th century with a modern sewage system and on a day when the wind blows a certain direction, it smells neither charming nor quaint. I open and close the door of my flat quickly; the canals confer on Pondicherry the status of being a center for filarial fever. Having sent Rajendran on his way, I sit down and look around. My house has looked like this for the past fifteen years and it’s easy for me to envision that it will look this way in another twenty – assuming I resist the urge to buy all the newly available luxury-necessities. But what’s on the outside of the house certainly will not look the same even in five or ten years – with the sure exception of the canals. It’s hard for me to fathom all that could take place and none of it seems positive for me, other residents in the region, or anyone on the planet. But for the moment, comfortable in my easy chair and tired from a journey, it almost seems like it doesn’t matter. Maybe that’s part of the problem, I think, that those of us with the privilege of constructing continuity for the infrastructure of our private lives are not concerned enough with either the crumbling conditions of other’s lives or with the disintegration of our collective spheres.

But that privilege of insularity, like the privilege of dreaming from the backseat, could end any time. In fact, it’s for sure that it will and sooner rather than later. Maybe that will be the day when too many power cuts make too many tropical nights unbearable even in my neighborhood, or when a virus comes knocking at my door. Or when I spend more money on potable water than food. Or it could be the day when the cost of fuel is so high that I can’t afford the airfare to Chennai, or even Rajendran’s taxi to Pondicherry.

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Our Global Challenges: Can Cities Take us Beyond Asymetric War and Environmental Violence? Saskia Sassen Unsere globale Aufgabe: Können Städte assymmetrische Kriege und Umweltgewalt überwinden? Die Erwärmung der Atmosphäre, Energie- und Wasserknappheit und andere Herausforderungen im Umweltsektor machen Städte zu Schlüsselorten, in denen unsere Zukunft entschieden wird. Wenn heute Staaten im Namen nationaler Sicherheit Kriege anzetteln, werden Städte zu bedeutenden Fronten. Gleichzeitig gelangen Städte in den Strudel unterschiedlicher Machtkämpfe als Orte, in denen sich neue Formen der Gewalt manifestieren wie Terroranschläge, Drogenkriege, oder Umweltkatastrophen als Folge politischer wie ökonomischer Fehlentscheidungen. Die gegenwärtige Zerrüttung gewohnter städtischer Ordnungen ist eng verbunden mit der globalen Umformung organisatorischer Strukturen. Städte haben ursprünglich eine immanente Fähigkeit, Konflikte durch Verlagerung in den zivilen Raum zu transformieren. Die Militarisierung von Konflikten war nie eine städtische Option. Im Gegenteil: Städte haben immer dazu tendiert, Spannungen durch Handel und Verhandlung zu zivilisieren. Verlieren in der heutigen Zeit viele Städte ihre Kapazität der Integration und werden zu Zentren sozialer Gegensätze und Ausgrenzung? Sind die Horizonte der künftigen Zivilgesellschaft die gleichen wie diejenigen der traditionellen europäischen Ideale? Beinhalten die neuartigen Bedrohungen bereits diejenigen Bedingungen, welche in der Vergangenheit Städten erlaubt haben, Spannungen im Zivilen aufzulösen? Genauso wie die Urbanisierung von Kriegen sind auch die durch den Klimawandel hervorgerufenen Bedrohungen zu einer dringlichen Agenda für den Wandel unserer Gesellschaft geworden.

Cities have a distinctive capacity to transform conflict into the civic. In contrast, national governments tend to militarize conflict. This does not mean that cities are peaceful spaces. On the contrary, cities have long been sites for conflicts, from war to racisms and religious hatreds. And yet, militarizing conflict is not a particularly urban option: cities have tended to triage conflict through commerce and civic activity. Even more important, the overcoming of urban conflicts has often been the source for an expanded civicness. Today cities are losing this capacity and becoming sites for a whole range of new types of conflicts, such as asymmetric war and ethnic and social “cleansing”. Further, the dense and conflictive spaces of cities overwhelmed by inequality and injustice can become the sites for a variety of secondary, more anomic types of conflicts, from drug wars to the major environmental disasters looming in our immediate futures. All of these challenge that traditional commercial and civic capacity that has allowed cities to avoid war when confronted with conflict, and to incorporate diversities of class, culture, religion, ethnicity. The question I examine here is whether this emergent future of expanding conflicts and racisms contains within it the conditions that have historically allowed cities to transform conflict into the civic. What are the challenges today that are larger than our differences, our hatreds, our intolerance, and our racisms. I do not think it can be what made European cities historically spaces for the making of the civic -- commerce and the fact that the

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powerful found in the city the strategic space for their operations and for their self-representation and projection onto a larger stage. The unsettling of the urban order is part of a larger disassembling of existing organizational logics. This disassembling is also unsettling the logic that assembled territory, authority and rights into the dominant organizational format of our times –the nation-state1. All of this is happening even as national states and cities continue to be major markers of the geopolitical landscape and the material organization of territory. The type of urban order that gave us the open city in Europe, for instance, is still there, but increasingly as mere visual order, and less so as social order. In what follows I first elaborate on dynamics that are altering the familiar urban order and then argue that this is also a moment of challenges which are larger than our differences. Confronting these challenges will require that we transcend those differences. Therein lies a potential for reinventing that capacity of cities to transform conflict into openness rather than war. But it is not going to be the familiar order of the open city and of the civic as we have come to represent it, especially in the European tradition. The Urbanizing of Governance Challenges: Disassembling the National? Some of what are usually understood as global governance challenges are increasingly becoming particularly

1 The emergent landscape I am describing promotes a multiplication of diverse spatio-temporal framings and diverse normative (mini) orders where once the dominant logic was toward producing (grand)unitary national spatial, temporal, and normative framings (2008a: chaps 8 and 9). This proliferation of specialized orders extends even inside the state apparatus. I argue that we can no longer speak of “the” state, and hence of “the” national state versus “the” global order. There is a novel type of segmentation inside the state apparatus, with a growing and increasingly privatized executive branch of government aligned with specific global actors, notwithstanding nationalist speeches, and a hollowing out of the legislature whose effectiveness is at risk of becoming confined to fewer and more domestic matters (2008a: ch 4).

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2 One synthesizing image we might use to capture these dynamics is the movement from centripetal nation state articulation to a centrifugal multiplication of specialized assemblages.

concrete and urgent in cities. They range from environmental questions to the flight from war- refugees from and into cities. This urbanizing of what we have traditionally thought of as national/global challenges is part of a larger disassembling of all-encompassing formats, notably the nation-state and the inter-state system. It could explain why cities are losing older capacities to transform potential conflicts into the civic. In the last two centuries, the traditional foundations for the civic in its European conception has largely been the “civilizing” of bourgeois capitalism; this corresponds to the triumph of liberal democracy as the political system of the bourgeoisie. Today, capitalism is a different formation, and so is the political system of the new global elites. These developments raise a question about what might be the new equivalent of what in the past was the civic. Cities are going to have an increasing prominence given a multiplication of a broad range of partial, often highly specialized or obscure, assemblages of bits of territory, authority and rights once firmly ensconced in national and inter-state institutional frames. These assemblages cut across the binary of inside and outside, ours and theirs, national versus global2. They arise out of, and can inhabit national institutional and territorial settings; they can also arise out of mixes of national and global elements and span the globe in what are largely trans-local geographies connecting multiple subnational spaces. Cities, particularly global and globalizing cities, are a very complex type of this dis- and re-assembling. We can organize the urbanizing of these various challenges along three axis. a) Global warming, energy and water insecurity. These and other environmental challenges are going to make cities frontline spaces. These challenges will tend to remain more diffuse for nation-states and for the state itself. One key reason is the more acute and direct dependence of everyday life in cities on massive infrastructures and on institutional-level supports for most people -- apartment buildings, hospitals, vast sewage systems, water purification systems, vast underground transport

systems, whole electric grids dependent on computerized management vulnerable to breakdowns. We already know that a rise in water levels will flood some of the most densely populated cities in the world. The urgency of some of these challenges goes well beyond lengthy negotiations and multiple international meetings, still the most common form of engagement at the level of national politics and especially international politics. When global warming hits cities it will hit hard and preparedness becomes critical. The new kinds of crises and the ensuing violence will be particularly felt in cities. A major simulation by NASA found that by the fifth day of a breakdown in the computerized systems that manage the electric grid a major city like New York would be in an extreme condition and basically unmanageable through conventional instruments. These challenges are emergent but before we know it they will become concrete and threatening in cities. This contrasts with possibly slower trajectories at the national level. In this sense cities are in the frontline and will have to act on global warming whether national states sign on to international treaties or not. Because of this, many cities have had to develop capabilities to handle these challenges. The air quality emergency in cities such as Tokyo and Los Angeles as long ago as the 1980s is one instance: these cities could not wait until an agreement such as Kyoto might appear, nor could they wait till national governments passed mandatory laws (e.g. for car fuel efficiency and zero emissions). With or without a treaty or law, they had to address air quality urgently. And they did. b) Asymmetric Wars. When national states go to war in the name of national security, nowadays major cities are likely to become a key frontline space. In older wars, large armies needed large open fields or oceans to meet and fight, and these were the frontline spaces. The search for national security is today a source for urban insecurity. We can see this in the so-called War on Terror, whereby the invasion of Iraq became an urban war theater. But we also see the negative impacts of this War in the case of cities that are not even part of the immediate war theater -- the bombings in Madrid, London, Casablanca, Bali, Mumbai, Lahore, and so many others. The traditional

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Figure1: Future Bridge Artist: Hilary Koob-Sassen (www.TheErrorists.com) presented in “When Territory and Time Seap out of the Old Cages.”, Time Marathon, SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, Jan 6, 2009.

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security paradigm based on national state security fails to accommodate this triangulation. What may be good for the protection of the national state apparatus may go at a high (increasingly high) price to major cities and their people. I return to this in the second section of the article. c) Cities also enter the domain of global governance challenges as a site for the enactment of new forms of violence resulting from these various crises. We can foresee a variety of forms of violence that are likely to escape the macro-level normative propositions of good governance. For instance, São Paulo and Rio have seen forms of gang and police violence in the last few years that point to a much larger breakdown than the typically invoked fact of inadequate policing. So do the failures of the powerful US army in Baghdad; to call this anarchy is too general. In terms of global governance questions, one challenge is to push macro-level frames to account for, and factor in the types of stress that arise out of everyday life violence and insecurity in dense spaces. Some of these may eventually feed militarized responses, and this may well be inadequate or escalate the conflict. The question of immigration and the new types of environmental refugees are one particularly acute instance of urban challenges that will require new understandings of the civic. I return to this in the third section of the article. Urban Insecurity: When The City Itself Becomes a Technology for War/Conflict The pursuit of national security has become a source for urban insecurity. This puts the traditional security paradigm based on national state security on its head. What may be good to protect the national state apparatus may go at a high (increasingly high) price to major cities. Since 1998 most terrorist attacks have been in cities. This produces a disturbing map. Access to urban targets is far easier than access to planes for terrorist hijacking or to military installations. The U.S. Department of State’s Annual Report on Global Terrorism allows us to establish that today cities are the key targets for asymmetric attacks, a trend that began before the September 2001 attacks on New York. From 1993 to 2000, cities accounted for 94% of the injuries resulting from all “terrorist attacks” according this Report, and for 61% of the deaths. Secondly, in this period the number of incidents doubled, rising especially sharply after 1998. In contrast, in the 1980s hijacked airplanes accounted for a larger share of terrorist deaths and destruction than they did in the 1990s. The new urban map of war is expansive: it goes far beyond the actual nations involved. The bombings in Madrid, London, Casablanca, Bali, Mumbai, and more, each has its own specifics and can be explained in terms of particular grievances. These are localized actions by local armed groups, acting independently from each other. Yet they are also clearly part of a new kind of multi-sited war –a distributed and variable set of actions that gain larger meaning from a particular conflict with global projection. Asymmetric war found one of its sharpest enactments in the US war on Iraq. The US conventional military aerial bombing took only 6 weeks to destroy the Iraqi army and take over. But then asymmetric war set in, with Baghdad, Mosul, Basra, and other Iraqi cities the sites of conflict. And it has not stopped since. Asymmetric wars are partial,

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intermittent and lack clear endings. There is no armistice to mark their end. They are one indication of how the center no longer holds—whatever the center’s format: the imperial power of a period, the national state, including in powerful countries. A second set of features of contemporary wars, especially evident in the less developed areas, is that they often involve forced urbanization. Contemporary conflicts produce significant population displacement both into and out of cities. In many cases, in African conflicts or in Kosovo, displaced people swell urban populations. At the same time, in contemporary conflicts, the warring bodies avoid battle or direct military confrontation, as Mary Kaldor has described in her work on the new wars. Their main strategy is to control territory through getting rid of people of a different identity (ethnicity, religion, politics). The main tactic is terror – conspicuous massacres and atrocities pushing people to flee.

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Figure 2: Endless City Artist: Hilary Koob-Sassen (www.TheErrorists.com) Endless City. 2008. Original publication in The Endless City, edited by Ricky Burdett, Phaidon Press 2008.

These types of displacement – with ethnic/religious “cleansing” the most virulent form – have a profound impact on the cosmopolitan character of cities. Cities have long had the capacity to bring together people of different classes, ethnicities and religions through commerce, politics, and civic practices. Contemporary conflicts unsettle and weaken this cultural diversity of cities when they lead to forced urbanization or internal displacement. Belfast, Baghdad or Mostar each is at risk of becoming a series of urban ghettoes, with huge implications for infrastructure and the local economy. Baghdad has undergone a deep process of such “cleansing”, a critical component of the (relative) “peace” of the last two years. The systemic equivalent of these types of “cleansing” in the case of very large cities may well be the growing ghettoization of the poor and the rich –albeit in very different types of ghettoes. It leaves the middle classes, rare-

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3 One synthesizing image we might use to capture these dynamics is the movement from centripetal nation state articulation to a centrifugal multiplication of specialized assemblages.

ly the most diverse group in cities, to the task of bringing urbanity to these cities. The risk is that they will supplant traditional urban cosmopolitanisms with narrow defensive attitudes in a world of growing economic insecurity and political powerlessness. Under these conditions also, displacement from countryside to town or within cities becomes a source of insecurity rather than a source of rich diversity.

References

A Challenge Larger Than Our Diferences?

Sassen, Saskia 2008a. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press).

The particularity of the emergent urban landscape is profoundly different from the old European civic tradition, even though Europe’s worldwide imperial projects remixed European traditions with urban cultures that belonged to other histories and geographies.

_________ 2008b. “Neither global nor national: Novel assemblages of territory, authority and rights.” Ethics and Global Politics 1 (nrs.1 and 2): 1-19. _________ 1999. Guests and Aliens: Europe’s Immigrants, Refugees and Colonists. New York: New Press. 1999.

Saskia Sassen is the Lynd Professor of Sociology and member, The Committee on Global Thought, at Columbia University. She is the author of several books, most recently "Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages" (Princeton University Press 2008), and "A Sociology of Globalization" (Norton 2007). She wrote a lead essay in the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture Catalogue.

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It shares with that older time the fact of challenges which are larger than our differences. Therein lies a potential for reinventing that capacity of cities to transform conflict into (at least relative) openness rather than war, as is the case for national governments. But it is not going to be the familiar order of the open city and of the civic as we have come to represent it, especially in the European tradition. My sense is rather that the major challenges that confront cities (and society generally) have increasingly strong feed-back loops that contribute to that disassembling of the old civic urban order. Asymmetric war as discussed earlier is perhaps one of the most acute versions of this dynamic. And so is climate change. Both of these will affect both rich and poor, and addressing them will demand that everybody joins the battle. Further, while sharp economic inequalities, racisms, and religious intolerance have long existed, they are becoming activating political mobilizers in a context where the center no longer holds the way it used to hold – whether the imperial center, the national state, the city’s bourgeoisie. Against the background of a partial disassembling of empires and nation-states, the city emerges as a strategic site for making elements of new, perhaps even more partial orders. Let me elaborate briefly on some general aspects in order to situate the significance of the city as one such assemblage –one of the most complex and potentially history-making. In my larger project (2008a; b) I have identified a vast proliferation of such partial assemblages which re-mix bits of territory, authority, and rights, once ensconced in national institutional frames. Mostly these continue to exist within the nation-state, but this fact in itself entails a partial denationalizing of what was historically constructed as national3. These assemblages are multivalent in the normative sense. For instance, in my interpretation WTO law and the new International Criminal Court are two of the hundreds of such assemblages. Their normative stances are clearly very different. A final point that matters to elaborate the question of the city is that since these novel assemblages are partial and often highly specialized, they tend to be centered in particular utilities and purposes, often with extremely narrow scopes (2008a: chap 5, 8 and 9). To repeat, the normative character of this landscape is, in my reading, multivalent –it ranges from some very good utilities and purposes to some very bad ones, depending on one’s normative stance. Their emergence and proliferation bring several significant consequences even

though this is a partial, not an all-encompassing development. I see in this proliferation of partial assemblages a tendency toward a disaggregating and, in some cases, global redeployment, of constitutive rules once solidly lodged in the nation-state project, one with strong unitary tendencies (2008a: chs 4, 5 and 6). These developments signal the emergence of new types of orderings that can coexist with older orderings, such as the nation state, the interstate system, and the city as part of a hierarchy dominated by the national state. Among these new types of orderings are complex cities which have partly exited that national, state-dominated hierarchy and become part of multi-scalar regional and global networks. The last two decades have seen an increasingly urban articulation of global territory, and an increasing use of urban space to make political claims not only by the citizens of a city’s country, but also by foreigners. Conclusion In this context the city is an enormously significant assemblage because of its far greater complexity, diversity, and enormous internal conflicts and competitions. Rather than the univocal utility logics of WTO law or the ICC, the city forces an elaborating of multiple and conflictive utility logics. But if the city is to survive – not become a mere built up terrain or cement jungle – it will have to find a way to triage at least some of this conflict. It is at this point that the acuteness and overwhelming character of the challenges I described earlier can serve to create conditions where the challenges are bigger and more threatening than the internal conflicts and hatreds. Responding will only work if it is a collective process. We are in it together and we can only overcome it together. Thereby that response can become a new platform for the making of open cities, or at least the equivalent to the traditional civic, the cosmopolitan, and the urbane. All of these features will probably have different formats and contents from the iconic european version. My sense is that the formats and the contents of this new possibility will be so diverse from those traditional experiences of the civic and the cosmopolitan, that we will need a different language to describe them. But these formats and contents may have the power to create the open cities of our future. At a time when the open city is under attack from so many sides, one question we might ask is whether there are challenges we confront in cities that are larger than the hatreds and racisms and inequalities that beset our cities. Yes, both the urbanizing of war and the direct threats to cities from climate change, provide us with powerful agendas for change. The urban consequences of asymmetric war are a major call to stop war, to rethink war as an option. The disarticulation between national security and human security is becoming increasingly visible. And the direct threat of climate change will affect us all, regardless of religion, class, race, whether we are citizens or immigrants. Cities face challenges that are indeed larger than our differences. If we are going to act on these threats we will have to work together, all of us. Could it be that here lies the basis for a new kind of open city, one not so much predicated on the civic as on a new shared urgency?

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Space City Lars Reuterswärd Stadt im Weltraum Stadtneugründungen im Weltall sind nur noch eine Frage der Zeit – die technischen Voraussetzungen sind weitgehend geschaffen. Bei größeren Entfernungen zum Mutterplaneten Erde können Lebensmittel und andere Verbrauchsgüter nicht mehr nachgeliefert werden, sondern eine künstliche Biosphäre muss den irdischen Stoffkreislauf imitieren. Wenn Städte mit geschlossenen Stoffkreisläufen in Weltall denkbar sind, warum nicht auch bei uns zuhause? Wir sind mit allen Kräften dabei, unsere Biosphäre zu zerstören und in Kombination mit fortgeschriebener Bevölkerungsexplosion werden Luft, Wasser und Lebensmittel knapp. Die von anderen Generationen und den Armutsregionen der Welt geborgten Reserven werden erschöpft sein und unser ökologischer Fußabdruck wird zunehmend deckungsgleich werden müssen mit dem individuell bewohnten Territorium. Die für die Siedlungen im Weltall entwickelten Technologien können – zumindest für die privilegierten Eliten – zum Schlüssel für das Überleben in unseren künftigen Städten werden. In a not so distant future, maybe another 25 years, permanent human settlements will be established on the Moon. This is not an end in itself since the Moon will be used as a stepping stone for further human exploration of space. The most likely next step will be to create a human base on the planet Mars.

The Mars settlement will become a small biosphere, mimicking the Earth, since the Earth is a biosphere in itself, with a proven track record. All environmental systems, but one, will have to be designed to be completely closed. Socially, the crew will be unusually confined, and totally depending on good inter-personal relations.

To travel to Mars takes about half a year, and the return the same. Once there, one can return immediately, or stay for some 500 days. This is due the relative positions of Earth and Mars, as they circular the Sun. One cannot return when the distance is too long.

This paper is about what we could learn from space settlements, and in particular what we should transfer back from space to our urban future on Earth. So far, human space flight has been depending on re-supply of food, water, equipment, etc from Earth. However, on the International Space Station, some of the closed systems designed for planets have begun to be tried. But on Earth, we live as if our resources were infinite. In my earlier life as a professor in architecture at Lund University, we developed a close cooperation with NASA, the US Space Agency, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, The University of Houston, and Rice University. The idea was simple – how can systems and architecture for space be “designed”, with the astronauts in the centre and life fully supported by Advanced Life Support Systems?

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Figure1: Rotating city in space, illustration published in Home Magazine. From: Utopia, Campus-Verlag, Munich, 1992.

One can broadly say that a biosphere depends on three closed-loop environmental systems; water, oxygencarbon dioxide, molecules and minerals, and one open - energy. The first three systems have to be closed, since the distance makes it impossible to supply more than one set of matter. It is simply too expensive to re-supply – and transport time makes it very impractical. In space, you have to live with what you have. In a sense, just like on Planet Earth, although we tend to neglect this here at home. With this in mind, NASA has conducted and commissioned research and engineering development on the closing of these systems, and has built a number of highfidelity space settlements in Houston, and manned them for up to three months so far.

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Figure 2: Space City source: www.freewebs.com/ vizionpics/SpaceCity.JPG

To begin with water, in a closed environment, as in the test facilities at Johnson Space Center, it has been possible to achieve a close to 100% re-cycling of water. This includes urine, of course, but also from breathing, and perspiration, etc. And the equipment is in the size of a small refrigerator. To close the oxygen-carbon dioxide loop, one needs to combine humans with biomass growth. Astronauts will, at least initially, become “agronauts”. The diet will be vegetarian, and all plants will be grown under super-intensive conditions. To feed a human with this technique, one needs about 100 square meters of farming. This will be done in some of the “rooms” of the space habitat. Farming will be in multi-storey racks, and it will be hydroponic, that is to say no soil is needed, and conditions are carefully optimized and monitored. Water and nutrients will be re-cycled over and over again. As a matter of fact, this farming will create maybe 5 times the oxygen needed. As oxygen in surplus is very corrosive, the issue will be to increase the production of carbon dioxide, quite opposite to how it is on earth these days! To achieve this, human faeces will probably be incinerated. This would kill off bacteria and viruses, and recycle the organic matter safely to the farming. Thus, the same molecules and minerals will be eaten, over and over again. How about energy? Energy is the only open system. Current discourse on Climate Change focuses on how we shall prevent the Earth from warming. We are facing a reduced capacity of our atmosphere to relay back excessive energy to space.

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To simplify, we have two major sources of energy; nuclear, which includes solar energy, and geothermal (which partly comes from radioactive decay). Almost all other sources of energy like oil, coal, biomass, wind and waves, etc., are secondary forms of energy, mainly generated from radioactive reactions, and the Earth’s hot core. So in space, solar energy, and radioactive reactions will be used. How about leap-frogging? That would mean jumping the linear systems, and instead adapt the closed-loop Advanced Life Support Systems developed for space, to low-cost urban systems? Is this vision really realistic? I think so, as for example rose farming in Kenya is rapidly being converted to hydrophonic farming. Roses are grown in huge greenhouses where excessive levels of oxygen concentrations are balanced with carbon dioxide found underground, and held a constant optimal temperature by geothermal energy from the volcanic underground, in the Naivasha area, for example. Water and nutrients are recycled over and over again. Compact water recycling systems are beginning to be used at the International Space Station, on submarines, and in some remote tourist locations. Solar energy systems are being developed, and cost is reduced continually. Biogas is increasingly being produced from human residues, as in Hammarby Sjostad in Stockholm, to propel public transport. But what about the social dimension? In space, we learn that the greatest risk for failure is not technical – it is social. If the crew cannot get along, failure is a fact. Just as

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on Earth, as a matter of fact. Governance for equity is a pre-condition for sustainability. It is very likely that the urban population on Earth will double in the coming 30-40 years. We shall have to house and feed another 3 billion persons. Almost all of them will live in urban places belonging to what we today refer to as “developing countries”. They will be born and live in towns and cities where water scarcity is already a problem, energy is in short supply, and where urban, low-tech agriculture is soon dominating over rural farming.

Eventually, we will have to move on conceptually from sustainability and resilience, to re-generation. After all, Planet Earth was at the beginning quite a hostile place. Over millions of years, nature has transformed it into the most beautiful and habitable of all known planets. The systems of Nature are designed to leave more and better behind, not just to sustain itself. That is the way forward in my Vision for an Urban Planet Earth!

One way out of this is to promote education for all, based on science and research, and creative engineering and design, on the creation of more sustainable cities. We must change the current international emphasis on “retorofitting/upgrading” of existing cities and urban systems, to the development of advanced life support systems for the many. It can be done – just think of how mobile telephones and the internet have changed the information world quite recently? In Kenya, one of three now has a mobile unit. What is needed is similar revolutions in the environmental systems for the “three billion yet unborn, in the un-built cities”

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By the way – welcome to the UN Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010! Our theme is “Better City, Better Life”.

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Figure 3: Urban visions toolkit: city and nature, soil, air, water, energy, aesthetics, disaster-protecting mother Gaia. Illustration: Bernd D. Ciecior-Cicerón

Figure 4: Author’s selfportrait. Lars Reuterswärd, 2009

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Unless governance of these urban areas is not radically improved, and sustainable urban systems introduced, that cull the linear environmental systems, the future will generate much inequality, slums, and conflict. And climate change.

The cooperation with NASA on space habitats is now continued by Chalmers University of Technology. Students and teachers pursue these studies, and more urban ideas and designs will be brought back to Planet Earth. An international research center on Urban Futures was recently established there. Many more are needed world-wide.

Lars Reuterswärd A Swedish national, Dr. Lars Reuterswärd is Director of Global Division, UN-HABITAT, since 2003. His reponsibilities also include the coordination for the UN Exhibition and Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010. The theme is ”Better City, Better Life”. Dr. Reuterswärd earned a Ph.D. in Architecture from Lund University in 1984, and is there Professor of Architecture since 1986 (on leave). In 1979 Dr. Reuterswärd founded the Lund Committee on Habitat Studies. In 1977-82 he was Research Officer at SAREC/Sida, Stockholm. Contact:

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Speculating on the Urban Future: Thinking Beyond the Global Economic Crisis Michael Cohen Vermutungen über die städtische Zukunft - jenseits der Weltwirtschaftskrise Die jüngste Immobilienkrise in den USA hatte weltweite Auswirkungen auf Leben und Überleben in den Städten der ganzen Welt, die - einst als Zentren von Kultur und Fortschritt gepriesen - sich zunehmend und in jeder Hinsicht zu Orten einer kumulativen Anlagerung von Verarmung entwickeln. Der US-amerikanische Ökonom George Galster hat in einer Untersuchung von über 100 amerikanischen Städten herausgefunden, wie schon ein leichter ökonomischer Abwärtstrend eine ganze Kettenreaktion von Verelendungsprozessen in Gang setzten kann. Dies beginnt typischerweise mit einer Flaute im Immobilienmarkt, setzt sich in der Verslumung von Stadtvierteln fort, generiert somit weniger (Grund-) Steuereinkommen, begünstigt Bildungsdefizite, und provoziert Kriminalität sowie Gewalt insbesondere bei Jugendlichen…. Schnellwachsende Städte sind stärker betroffen als andere. Die Erkenntnis aus solch offensichtlich plausiblen Szenarien verpflichten geradezu, Visionen über nachhaltigere Siedlungsstrategien zu entwerfen und letztendlich auch konkret anzugehen.

Speculating about the future must inevitably begin with an assessment of the present: where are we, how did we get here, and what is the direction of change that we expect? Writing about the urban future in 2009 therefore requires appreciating the scale of urban change before the global economic crisis and then taking stock of the crisis and its impacts on cities. In 2008 the world’s population became more than half urban, with an expected 2 billion more urban residents in the next two decades. More than a billion people currently live in slums in cities in developing countries and the majority of the anticipated growth will also be urban poor. The “planet of slums” described by Mike Davis and dozens of international reports and studies portrays slums as loci of cumulative disadvantages – lack of infrastructure, social services, and decent housing; high insecurity, from both crime and lack of tenure; low incomes and low assets, and spaces of despair.

countries it points towards more informal employment with low job security, low and intermittent wages, and outside formal labor protection.

2. Impact on Distribution of Income: Studies in Latin America show that when macro-economic growth goes up in the region, everyone goes up; but when it goes down, the poor go deeper and stay longer. This process means that there is a widening of the income and opportunity gap between the rich and poor, with a resulting dramatic worsening of the income distribution, particularly in cities. This process has been observed in Brazil and Mexico. Recent studies in the United States also show that once people lose their jobs they never fully recover their previous income levels. This has a particular impact on older people and what is now being called “the marginal middle class”.

3. Increase in Urban Poverty: The global economic crisis exacerbates this situation. Ten specific urban impacts of the crisis and their longer-term consequences are presented below:

1. Impact on Urban Economic Structure: As evident in many cities around the world, the reduction of global finance and credit is reducing investment, savings, and consumption, and urban employment. This is reducing the aggregate demand for goods and services and resulting in a contraction of urban economies, from Buenos Aires to New York, from Istanbul to Bangkok.

This will accentuate income inequality as well as increase urban poverty. With fewer employment and income earning opportunities, more households have fallen below the poverty line. Millions of middle income households in California have lost their homes to the immediate cause of the crisis – the sub-prime mortgage issue – and are living in tent cities without adequate water supply and sanitation. Unemployment numbers are going up all over the world, with sectors such as construction which absorbs much low skill urban labor sharply contracting.

4. Increased Rural to Urban Migration: This process is shifting the composition of urban economic activity away from manufacturing, particularly for goods such as cars and other consumer durables such as furniture, towards less expensive services. Fewer purchases also mean a reduction in the repair industry, marketing, and advertising. In many cities in developing

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Reduced demand for goods and services has also extended to commodities being exported by developing countries, including many agricultural products such as soya, wheat, sugar, and rice. As the demand for commodities drop prices, so does rural employment, a process

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which pushes rural populations off the land and into cities. The result is an increase in rural to urban migration, thereby giving a further impetus to already considerable urban demographic growth. One dramatic example has been heightened ethnic tension in Xinjiang Province in China resulting from dropping commodity prices for rural producers and more competition for jobs in urban areas.

5. Food and Energy Crises: While food and energy prices are dropping, the problem is nevertheless that people do not have the income to pay for them. The result is a growing nutritional crisis in cities in developing countries. Prices are up relative to income. Millions of people can no longer afford decent nutrition.

6. Reduced Production, Trade, and Consumption will Reduce Tax Revenues: Contracting urban economies generate fewer tax revenues for public institutions. This means that cities in general are experiencing a financial crisis at the local level, both because they are not receiving expected financial transfers from the national government and because they are unable to raise the local revenue they need. Cities in effect have entered periods of fiscal austerity and adjustment, but not one created by the Washington Consensus. The loss of tax revenues has multiple impacts including the need to service debt in lieu of funding other services including safety nets.

7. Reduced Tax Revenues will Lead to Reduced Social Expenditures: This reduction includes the financing of essential public infrastructure and services, from municipal water supply and sanitation to primary health care and education. Growing numbers of urban residents are not receiving the basic services they need. Failure to meet basic needs now can increase costs in the future.

8. At the Municipal Level, there is More Deferred Maintenance, thereby Increasing the Risk of Infrastructure Failure. Lack of maintenance means growing risks of system failures. The levees of New Orleans broke, the highway bridge in Minneapolis collapsed, and other less spectacular infrastructure failures are happening every day. Infrastructure failure threatens environmental quality and also makes it more difficult for individuals, communities, and companies to incur additional costs to curb emissions, reduce energy and waste streams in the medium to longer term. This crisis is “anti-green”, despite out heightened awareness of sea level crisis and climate change.

9. More Slums, Less Linked Infrastructure and More Informality: Weaker Urban Governance The result for urban form, considering the projected increases in urban population in developing countries, will be more slums, unlinked to infrastructure networks, more informality, less urban citizenship with increasing numbers people living within, but not connected to legal urban jurisdictions, hence more problems of urban governance.

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10. Cumulative Changes in the Urban Scene: All of these impacts can be understood also with the lens of what has been described as patterns of cumulative causation by the U.S. urban economist, George Galster, in a study of over 100 cities in the US in the late 1990s. When interest rates rose, a whole set of cascading impacts followed, including less investment in housing, neighborhoods, lower property taxes, lower school performance, and more crime in neighborhoods which affects children and teenagers. Unexpected impacts follow, particularly in highly differentiated and rapidly growing cities. Many elements of this somewhat dystopic vision of the urban future are already evident in cities around the world, in both rich and poor countries. The intersection of the dynamics of the global economy with the expected large scale demographic growth of cities in developing countries increases vulnerability of all kinds. It also underlines the need for new ways of urban living and makes the argument for seriously, not just rhetorically considering sustainability all the more compelling and urgent. We live in an urban age, but above all, we must understand that we live in a condition of increased vulnerability. Cities may offer opportunity and possibility, but also heightened risk. All of this begs for more evaluation of these trends and mechanisms so that policies and programs can be more effective in averting these problems and alleviating their worst consequences.

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Figure 1: Informal settlement and unfinished housing estate in Luanda, Angola, 2010. Photo: K. Teschner

Michael Cohen PhD, is Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Graduate Program in International Affairs, The New School, New York. 1972 to 1999 he had a distinguished career at the World Bank and was responsible for much of the urban policy development of the Bank over that period. He also is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Panel on Urban Dynamics. Contact:

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An Urban Vision – Space and Social Relations Peter Marcuse Eine urbane Vision – Raum und soziale Beziehungen Die Begriffe 'Stadt' und 'Urban' haben nur bedingt miteinander zu tun. 'Stadt' identifziert gemeinhin ein bestimmtes Territorium, welches sich in einer Generation möglicherweise überhaupt nicht ändert. 'Urban' ist eng verknüpft mit der Nutzung des Raums und mit den Beziehungen der Bewohner untereinander und ist keineswegs homogen im Territorium Stadt. Die Form und Qualität des 'Urbanen' hat sich in der jüngeren Vergangenheit ganz wesentlich verändert, und nicht unbedingt zum Besseren. Soziale Gegensätze werden sich künftig weiter dramatisch zuspitzen und unsere Herausforderung für die kommenden 25 Jahre wird sein, diesen Prozess zu stoppen oder besser noch umzukehren. Mögliche Ansätze für eine solche Wende sind durchaus erkennbar – ebenso wie die Perfektionierung von Mechanismen zur Verhinderung derselben.

Figure 1: Plenary assembly at the Social Urban Forum, Rio de Janeiro, March 2010.

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“Urban issues?” Twenty-five years from now, we may have finally gotten clear on what we mean by “urban issues:” “Urban issues” mean very different things to different people; a presidential advisor in the United States in a recent election campaign was asked why his candidate didn’t have an urban platform, and responded, “certainly we have an urban platform, we’re in favor of welfare reform and more police to provide security on the streets.” But even for those of us having a broader view of the urban, there is often a misleading confusion of terms. Perhaps, in twenty-five years, we will have: 1) agreed on what we mean by “city” and “urban,” and 2) we will have stopped accepting the process of urban agglomeration as it now exists as something inevitable and out of control and begun realizing the changes in social, political, and economic arrangements needed to produce the spaces we actually want. We now use the term “city” in a whole variety of different ways: as designation of a particular bounded legal juris-

diction, an area with a specific high density of residences or of built structures, an organic entity that can be an actor, a place where poverty is concentrated, a node in variously defined networks of production, consumption, communication, interchange, - or a place having a specific “urban” character. But then we define “urban” in many different ways too: urban places are those with specific characteristics, stimulating communication (and of various different kinds), diverse, tolerant, mixing (some) uses, having open and accessible public spaces, being under (more or less) democratic control, allowing/requiring a greater role for the public and the public sector. The confusion hurts us today, and is particularly problematic for the kind of trialog that Trialog hopes to foster. "Cities" can mean very different things in different contexts, and specifically can obscure differences between the global north and the global south, and within each as well. In particular, viewing "cities" as organic wholes, making generalizations about the future of "cities,” can be misleading. All cities, no matter how defined, in the present historical period, are composed of different areas located in proximity to each other and in complex interrelations with each other: cities of the poor, of the very rich, of factory owners and of factory workers, cities where the informal economy is predominant and where global finance builds its skyscrapers, enclaves of the upper middle class and ghettos of the excluded. What will happen in the next twenty-five years then depends on what happens to each of these parts of “the city,” and concretely on how the conflicts and tensions between and among them are resolved. If the present relationships among them, in which some have more power and others are made subservient to them, in which some exploit others, some benefit and others lose not because of different abilities but because of different wealth, if those relationships are continued, we will have further divided (or quartered) cities, with gleaming high-rises and barely tolerable living conditions for others. The gap between rich and poor, the degree of effective segregation, levels of exploitation of the global south by the dominant interests in the global north, and manipulations and restrictions on democratic governance, have

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increased. Unless relationships of power in the city – and at national and international levels – change, there is no reason to believe that these social relations will change. The possibilities of repression of movements for change are increasing, and their limits are not yet in sight. Even the ultimate form of repression, warfare, gives no sign of disappearing from the face of the earth, and levels of incarceration, their only slightly tamer urban equivalent, are rising. However, those movements for change are also increasing in strength and understanding, even more in the south than in the north. The growing demand for the Right to the City is evidence, as is its pursuit at the national and international levels. If the struggle for that right in fact becomes victorious, one might begin to imagine what a city 25 years from now would be like. Not in its physical appearance; technological developments are inherently unpredictable, and besides decisions as to the desired physical forms will be being made by people not yet out of school, and should be left in their hands. Socially, however, changes in the role and exercise of power in the direction of social justice will necessarily mean an expansion of the democratic character of governance. One model might well be that pioneered by the city of Porto Alegre in its handling of participatory budgeting, and potentially applicable to all forms of decision-making in cities. It might involve open participatory assemblies organized along two lines: geographic and interest – thus neighborhood-level assemblies of residents, and sectoral assemblies dealing with housing, employment, recreation, education, culture, etc. A tiered structure in which the two lines meet for discussion and setting of priorities would then resolves differences, and an elected representative body, perhaps constituted by neighborhood and sectoral grass-roots bodies, would supervise implementation. The realistic potential of such a political arrangement cannot be realized without concomitant changes at the economic level, and in two critical areas. First, the profitoriented market cannot be allowed to be the determinant of the what happens in the city. Specifically, the use of land needs to be governed by decisions as to its optimum use, not its optimum exchange value. Socialization of the ownership of land is one clear path pursuit of such a goal might follow. Strong public, governmental controls, such as several countries such as Brazil are experimenting with today, effectively implemented with power residing in users rather than profit-oriented private owners, shows other possibilities. The relation at the global level between the rich and the poor, rich country interests and poorer countries interests, must also change. The wealth accumulated in the richer countries, significantly garnered from the resources of the poorer, must be shared (returned) to the poorer. Not simply as charity; the mechanisms by which that wealth was acquired (again based on relations of power) must be obliterated. At the same time, the experiences, traditions, understandings, developed in the poorer countries much be understood and applied in the richer. International institutions and international accords will thus be major factors in determining what happens in cities around the world in 25 years.

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What cities will be like in 25 years will depend on the outcomes of struggles during those 25 years. The potentials are immense, but so are the dangers. If relations of power are changed, inequality is reduced, exploitation successfully attacked, we may have cities in which the kind of "urbanity" which Henri Lefebvre, progressive urbanists, and probably most readers of Trialog appreciate, is the defining characteristic.

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Figure 2: Kibera informal settlement in Nairobi – members of local initiative (Soweto Forum) fighting for the right to stay put.

All photos: K. Teschner

The chances of achieving such beneficial results, however, is reduced when we implicitly succumb to the thinking that inequality is inevitable, that present conditions are the results of outside and immutable forces, such as, in the global south, “population pressures” (meaning rural to urban migration), limited government resources, “uncoordinated actors” (all treated as equivalent "stakeholders"), “rules that may appear unjust,” “mal-functioning urban land markets.” If change over the next twenty-five years is only that which can be accomplished by adapting to such an image of the world, then the world will not change much, and urban issues will remain in twenty-five years much what they are today. If, on the other hand, the understanding becomes more wide-spread that inequality and poverty and divisions in cities and skewed urbanity are the results of social arrangements in which different groups have different interests, that conflict among them produces the results we have today, that a different resolution of those conflicts is needed – if, in other words, it becomes clear that a significant redistribution of resources, and therefore of power, is necessary to deal with the urban issues of injustice, inequality, poverty, environmental damage, and their consequences, then there might be significant differences in how people in all cities will live in the future. To achieve that result, poor people must indeed be helped to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but that is hardly sufficient, given the distribution of boots and bootstraps in most societies. Self-help is important, and the resources that poor people have and the abilities they can bring to the fray should not be underestimated, but it is ultimately the struggles that, organized in social movements, they lead that will determine which urban issues are resolved in the next twenty-five years and for whom they are resolved. Trialog, and the work its readers do, can sharpen the focus that will permit that to happen.

Peter Marcuse PhD. Lawyer, Professor of Urban Planning, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York, numerous publications, conference presentations, articles, lectures on gentrification, housing policies, urban planning, globalization. Member of International Advisory Group, Housing Studies, 1986-1997, Co-editor of City Limits 1985-1994; editorial Advisory Board, Hagar: International Social Science Review, 2000 onwards.

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Urban Realities – 25 years from now Clare Short Städtische Realitäten – heute in 25 Jahren Die globale und rapide Verstädterung ist Tatsache und diverse Indizien – wie Wirtschaftswachstum oder die Kapazität der Städte als Auffangbecken für überzählige Landbevölkerung – deuten auf vorwiegend positive Qualitäten dieser Entwicklung. Dennoch versuchen die Mehrzahl der Politiker wie Entwicklungsorganisationen, die Verstädterung einzudämmen, was latent mit den für die Eliten traumatischen Erfahrungen in der industriellen Revolution in Verbindung gebracht werden kann. Damals mochte die konzentrierte Macht der Armen in den Städten Revolutionen auszulösen, Arbeitsbedingungen in den Fabriken zu vermenschlichen und den menschenverachtenden Frühkapitalismus zur sozialen Markwirtschaft umzuwandeln. Gegenwärtig erleben wir wieder ein Aufklaffen der Diskrepanz zwischen Arm und Reich. Es kann nicht mehr lange dauern, bis die Masse der 'Verlierer' – insbesondere in den Wachstumskontinenten Asien und Afrika – wieder so übermächtig wird, dass sie, wie schon einmal, eine gerechtere Verteilung der Ressourcen und Deckung der Grundbedürfnisse durchzusetzen in der Lage ist.

Figure 1: Housing in different contexts. Illustration: Bernd D. Ciecior-Cicerón

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Presently, the world is urbanizing rapidly and most of the population increase is carried by the poor. 25 years from now, poverty will be an overwhelmingly urban phenomenon. Many people believe that urban growth is the result of migration from rural areas – but this assumption is wrong. In fact, only one third of urban growth is due to migration, and this is primarily directed towards smaller cities; the rest is caused by population growth and the extension of city boundaries.

Most developing countries’ governments are biased against urbanisation. On a global level, from 1996 to 2007, the proportion of governments taking measures to reduce immigration into urban areas rose from 45 to 65 per cent according to a UN survey. In Africa alone, the percentage rose from 54 to 78 per cent. Similarly, most development agencies show little concern for urbanisation – a deeply dysfunctional approach. We have ample evidence that cities tend to generate economic growth. On a different agenda we should also take into account that it is easier in urban areas to put in place policies to alleviate climate crisis, foster human development by providing educational and health care facilities, to develop new markets for agricultural products and to absorb surplus peasant populations that would otherwise subdivide agricultural land in rural areas. These are some of the benefits of urbanisation that are generally undervalued. This hostility to urbanisation can at least partly be explained by the elite's fear of the urban poor and the growth of urban slums. Perhaps those who run development agencies carry a buried memory of the power of the urban poor. At times of British industrialization, the enclosure of land and waged labour in the factories generated massive migration flow into the cities with their slums marked by immense squalor. There was a lack of clean water and sanitation, child labour, exploitation and ill health. The urban poor may have been as poor as they were in the countryside, but they have more power. Proximity and large numbers are an indicated precondition for riots. In the history of Europe’s industrialisation the urban poor repeatedly threatened revolution and political organisation. They created trade unions in order to negotiate decent conditions at work and they agitated for the right to vote so that they could demand decent housing, education and health care. It was the power of

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the organized urban poor, combined with the elite’s fear of the spread of disease, riot and revolution, that civilised capitalism and gave birth to the welfare state. It is interesting, even exciting, to speculate on possible social dynamics propelled by urbanisation in Africa and South Asia. A possible response to the growth of urban slums by the elites will be the kind of social exclusion that we have seen in Latin America and the Caribbean in recent times. There, the elite's hostility towards the poor and the indifference to their poverty may explain the complete failure to adequately plan for the growth of cities, to provide land and services to all citizens. This neglect forced the urban poor to create their own solutions and institutions, outside of government systems.

Some economists, such as Ethan B Kapstein , argue that urbanisation is the key to the impressive economic development in Africa over the past decade. He considers a marked shift from rural to urban life to be the engine for economic development due to the coupling of goods and ideas with capital. He also believes that African urbanisation forces people of different tribes and languages to interact intensively, which does not occur in rural settings. Politics will move beyond the patrimonial reward systems that used to constrain the development of African leadership. African and Asian societies will experience important transformations over the next 25 years. The growth of urban populations will not be halted whatever the policies of exclusion and neglect that governments may try to implement. What they might manage, at best, is to impede an economic advance that should come with urbanisation if they get their policies wrong. In Latin America and the Caribbean, decades of deliberate exclusion of the poor contributed to high levels of crime and violence which affected whole cities and regions. Social democratic governments in Chile and Brazil are working to repair the damage to development that their countries have suffered. It remains an open question which route the unavoidable urban transformations will take over the next 25 years. According to current trends, we would have to be pessimistic and envisage even more social division and exclusion, corruption and neglect. Unfortunately, there are currently few reasons for optimism in respect of the empowerment of the urban poor. But all the arguments for progress and the strength that this concentration could bring to the poor may create new forces. If we can learn from history in order to prepare for the future, a renewed fear of disease, riots and revolution may open the arena for negotiating the distribution of resources and thus reverse the widening gap between the haves and not haves, even on a global scale.

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Figure 2: Bairro Rocinho, Rio de Janeiro, 2010. Photo: K. Teschner Figure 4: Zumbi de Palomares squatt, Rio de Janeiro, 2010. Photo: K. Teschner

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Organised crime tends to thrive in these conditions. Without planned provision for urban expansion, the urban poor, displaying enormous energy and creativity resources, settle themselves near waste dumps, alongside railway lines, on steep hillsides, flood plains and pavements. These efforts are regularly met with eviction and demolition of the self-built settlements by local authorities and frequently their basic needs are only provided for through corruption.

Clare Short is a British politician and is currently the Independent Labour Member of Parliament for Birmingham Ladywood. She was Secretary of State for International Development in the government from 1997 until her resignation in 2003. Since 2006, Ms Short has been a member of the Policy Advisory Board of Cities Alliance, which is an alliance of the World Bank, UN–HABITAT, local government and development partners committed to meeting the UN target to develop cities without slums.

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Vivir la Habana: del día a día a la futurología Mario Coyula Experiencing Havana: from everyday life to futurology Hasty changes such as those that have occurred in the global balance of power over the past decades are also detrimental for cities. Stagnation, however, can be just as damaging. According to Gerardo Mosquera, the city of Havana is going to collapse if nothing changes and, in the case of the opposite, it will be demolished. As Tomasi di Lampedusa puts it, "To ensure that everything stays, everything has to change." Havana has largely maintained its architectural heritage—by neglect. The city is dense, compact, and low; the dilapidated mansions of the once widespread middle class now house common people fighting for subsistence. Had the 1959 Cuban Revolution not occurred, the Malecón would now be lined with luxury residential towers, the city ruled by cars, the centre full of the skyscrapers of multinational firms and banks, and only a few, singular historical buildings would still be standing. The poor neighbourhoods to the south of the centre would be overflowing with low budget tourists, bars, casinos, bordellos, and the entire city would be surrounded by a rapidly growing, amorphous zone of self-constructed settlements housing those cast out from the city centre. Is this the future of Havana? Could the future faced by the city nonetheless also be similar to this projected image even if the presently existing framework conditions hardly change? Going by current projections, the centre is going to continue to degenerate, collapse, and be replaced by precarious structures that cannot offer any opposition to the ever-stronger hurricanes. Then, this tumble-down centre is going to be encircled by a periphery of ugly one-storey structures that are going to grow and improve through self-initiative. The most attractive areas such as the Malecón, the Prado, the Vedado or Miramar are going to become exclusive islands of the new rich. Likewise, enclaves for the political elite and foreign businesspeople are going to grow far away from the socially troubled neighbourhoods and the city is going to become more auto-orientated. Prostitution, violence and drug use are going to increase, as is the need for security, fences, barriers, etc. At the same time, the ruralisation of the capital city is going to increase as livestock and agriculture replace the urban greenery, parks and growing number of once-paved surfaces. As the economic reforms increase, even more exclusive shopping centres and enclaves (such as Monte Bareto) are going to arise. The free access to the coast is going to become ever-more privatised as investments in the interest of foreigners and local officials increase. The land market is going to develop and the city is going to expand eastwards, with additional car tunnels appearing beneath the bay. But even with projections like these, there are still existing possibilities for a sustainable improvement of the city—for example, in the upgrading of poorly utilised areas around the bay as well as the attractive boulevards of the centre and/or Barrio de Colón. The author imagines small but sensitive interventions including penthouses and residential streets à la Amsterdam that set timely limits to the increasing auto traffic. Positive approaches like this could be given a stronger position if the state-owned enterprises and district administrators were earmarked more autonomy and structures for self-financed local development such as the Oficina del Historiador (Office of the Historian), headed by Eusebio Leal, were increased. This would enable the requirement of social and structural compensatory measures from investors; private capital would be mobilised for small-scale, social and landmark-sensitive improvements. The revenues from this valorisation of the city—in conjunction with the international credits—would be used for the comprehensive modernisation of the infrastructure and for a user-friendly transportation system that would keep car-use in check. The city would once again remember its strengths—in particularly the well-qualified population—and develop a post-industrial economy with a focus on software, biotechnology, medical technology, design, telecommunications, fashion, culture, etc. Fifty years ago, Havana ceded its role as the hub between North and South America to Miami—but now the possibility exists of a mutually beneficial coexistence.

Mario Coyula

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Se están produciendo aceleradamente grandes cambios ambientales, culturales, económicos, tecnológicos y políticos a escala del planeta. Muchos de esos cambios parecen ir para mal, después que el precario balance mundial se ha perdido bajo el signo ambivalente de la globalización, el derrumbe de un socialismo que se decía real y duró lo mismo que la vida de una persona, y el dominio absoluto de la más grande potencia de todos los tiempos --ahora también golpeada por la crisis financiera mundial que allá comenzó, erosionando en su base la ilusión de un crecimiento económico indefinido. Ello se une a la emergencia de colosos que entran con retraso al mundo desarrollado y quieren quemar etapas a riesgo de repetir los mismos errores que otros cometieron antes

y ahora repudian. Si los cambios apresurados pueden lastimar irreversiblemente a las ciudades, la resistencia al cambio puede ser igualmente dañina y conducir al estancamiento y aún la involución. En el caso de La Habana, el crítico cubano Gerardo Mosquera sintetizó una disyuntiva igualmente dramática: si nada cambia, la ciudad se cae; y si cambia, la tumban. Más cínica pero menos apocalíptica es la salida que ofrecía el personaje de Tomasi di Lampedusa en El Gatopardo: para que todo siga como está, es necesario que todo cambie. Una característica de La Habana es su pluralidad. La capital no tiene un solo centro, sino varios, conformados durante un proceso de crecimiento que no se produjo por

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sustitución sino por adición. Aún dentro del antiguo recinto amurallado, tampoco hay una plaza mayor, sino un sistema de plazas con funciones y formas diferentes. Al crecer, la ciudad absorbió varios pequeños pueblos que la rodeaban, y que en parte han conservado su carácter. Independientemente de tener una buena cantidad de edificaciones y sitios muy valiosos de épocas distintas, la importancia de La Habana está en una gran masa construida --muy coherente y con un buen nivel de diseño y construcción-- que se correspondía con una clase media baja muy extensa antes de la revolución de 1959. Ese fondo, sin embargo, se encuentra muy deteriorado, sobrepoblado y distorsionado. La Habana que es, y la que pudo ser ¿Cómo será La Habana del futuro? Esa pregunta obliga a caracterizar a La Habana actual –una ciudad preservada por omisión, baja, densa, compacta, con un valioso pero deteriorado fondo construido y una intensa animación humana que no se corresponde con la pertinaz precariedad de su base económica. Se han producido cambios en la imagen urbana y los patrones de uso del espacio público, derivados de la escasez crónica, la aparición de nuevos modelos pacotilleros de éxito, la circulación de dos monedas y la búsqueda de una subsistencia elemental, a veces a expensas de valores éticos tradicionales. Pensar en el futuro también obliga a especular sobre el futuro del pasado: ¿cómo sería hoy La Habana de no haber triunfado la Revolución de 1959? Quizás no muy diferente en lo esencial a como la proyectaba el Plan Piloto de Sert y Wiener en 1955-58: una gran capital de tres millones de habitantes, definitivamente distanciada respecto a las otras ciudades cubanas; dominada por el auto privado; con el Malecón bloqueado por una pared casi continua de edificios altos y con una isla artificial al frente; y el centro histórico convertido en un cascarón eviscerado, terciarizado y seguramente gentrificado, donde el patrimonio histórico hubiera quedado reducido a unos cuantos edificios antiguos singulares. La Habana sería una ciudad todavía más norteamericana que en los años Cincuenta: por un lado torres anónimas de oficinas de grandes corporaciones e instituciones financieras, y grandes cadenas comerciales transnacionales. Los condominios de lujo en altura ocuparían los sitios mejores, aislados de la población que se mueve a nivel del suelo; y los repartos elegantes serían cada vez más alejados, segregados y dispersos. Estas intervenciones se habrían extendido casi exclusivamente a lo largo del litoral, aumentando la diferencia con la ciudad del sur, La Habana profunda del ciudadano de a pie.

Havanna erleben: vom Alltag zur Zukunftsforschung Hastige Änderungen, wie die im globalen Mächtegleichgewicht der letzten Jahrzehnte, sind auch für Städte schädlich. Ebenso schädlich kann jedoch der Stillstand sein. Für Havanna gilt, nach Gerardo Mosquera, dass die Stadt einstürzt, wenn sich nichts ändert und dass sie im anderen Fall abgerissen wird. Oder, nach Tomasi di Lampedusa: „Damit alles bleibt, wie es ist, muss sich alles ändern.“ Havanna hat sein Bauerbe großteils erhalten – durch Nichtstun. Havanna ist dicht, kompakt, niedrig, mit heruntergekommenen Prachtvillen der einst breiten Mittelschicht, in denen jetzt einfache Leute um ihr Auskommen kämpfen. Ohne die Revolution von 1959 wäre der Malecón heute gesäumt von Luxuswohntürmen, die Stadt wäre vom Auto beherrscht, das Zentrum voller Hochhäuser der Multis und Banken, mit nur noch einzelnen historischen Bauten. Die armen Stadtteile im Süden des Zentrums wären überschwemmt von low budget Touristen, Bars, Casinos, Bordellen und die gesamte Stadt wäre umgeben von einem schnell wachsenden, amorphen Gürtel von Selbstbausiedlungen, der die aus der Innenstadt Ausgestoßenen aufnimmt. Ist dies die Zukunft von Havanna? Könnte das, was der Stadt bevorsteht, nicht auch dann diesem Bild nahekommen, wenn sich die heutigen Rahmenbedingungen kaum ändern? Unter heutigen Vorzeichen wird das Zentrum weiter degenerieren, zusammenstürzen, durch prekäre Bauten ersetzt werden, die den stärker werdenden Hurrikans nichts entgegensetzen. Dieses zusammenfallende Zentrum wird dann umgeben von einstöckigen hässlichen Bauten in der Peripherie, die in Selbsthilfe wachsen und verbessert werden. An den schönsten Stellen wie dem Malecón, dem Prado, El Vedado oder Miramar entstehen exklusive Inseln der Neureichen. Dazu kommen Enklaven der politischen Elite und der ausländischen Geschäftsleute, fernab der sozialen Problemviertel und immer mehr autoorientiert. Prostitution, Gewalt und Drogenkonsum nehmen zu, genauso wie das Sicherheitsbedürfnis, die Zäune, Absperrungen etc. Gleichzeitig setzt sich die Verländlichung der Hauptstadt fort mit Viehzucht und Ackerbau, die das Stadtgrün ersetzen und die zunehmend nicht mehr asphaltierten Flächen füllen. Mit fortschreitenden ökonomischen Reformen entstehen dann weitere exklusive Einkaufszentren und Enklaven wie Monte Bareto. Der freie Zugang zur Küste wird zunehmend privatisiert mit Investments im gemeinsamen Interesse von Ausländern und einheimischen Funktionären. Der Bodenmarkt wird sich entwickeln und die Stadt nach Osten wachsen, mit weiteren Autotunnels unter der Bucht. Auch unter diesen Vorzeichen ergeben sich jedoch Chancen einer nachhaltigen Verbesserung der Stadt, etwa zur Aufwertung der schlecht genutzten Flächen rund um die Bucht, ebenso wie der Prachtstraßen des Zentrums oder des Barrio de Colón. Der Autor stellt sich kleine, sensible Eingriffe vor, mit Penthouses, Wohnstraßen à la Amsterdam, die dem wachsenden Autoverkehr rechtszeitig Grenzen setzen. Solch positive Ansätze könnten stärkeren Raum bekommen, wenn den Staatsbetrieben und Stadtteilverwaltungen mehr Autonomie zugedacht würde und wenn solche Strukturen zur selbstfinanzierten lokalen Entwicklung, wie die Oficina del Historiador, geleitet von Eusebio Leal, multipliziert würden. Damit könnten Investoren zu sozialen und gestalterischen Ausgleichsmaßnahmen verpflichtet werden. Privatkapital würde für kleinteilige, sozial sowie bauhistorisch sensible Verbesserungen mobilisiert. Die Einnahmen aus dieser Inwertsetzung der Stadt würden – zusammen mit internationalen Krediten – verwandt für die umfassende Modernisierung der Infrastruktur und für benutzerfreundliche Transportsysteme, die das Auto in Schranken verweisen. Die Stadt wird sich wieder besinnen auf ihre Stärken – vor allem die gut qualifizierte Bevölkerung – und eine postindustrielle Ökonomie entwickeln mit dem Fokus auf Software, Biotechnologie, Medizintechnik, Design, Telekommunikation, Mode, Kultur etc. Vor 50 Jahren gab Havanna seine Rolle als Drehscheibe zwischen Nord- und Südamerika an Miami ab – jetzt ergibt sich die Chance auf eine für beide Seiten vorteilhafte Koexistenz.

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Figure 1: Tugurio en Centro Habana / Slum courtyard in central Havana. Photo: K. Mathéy

La mala salud congénita de ese tipo de ciudad dual inundada por turistas baratos quedaría probablemente oculta bajo una cara rutilante de anuncios lumínicos, teatros, galerías de arte, restaurantes, bares, casinos y hoteles de lujo; pero la ciudad estaría rodeada por un creciente cinturón amorfo de asentamientos precarios autoconstruidos adonde irían a parar los excluidos de siempre y los desplazados de los barrios centrales. En resumen, la doble imagen de La Habana sería cada vez más diferente, la ciudad sería más divertida pero menos auténtica, y se parecería más a cualquier otra de su ta-

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La población de la ciudad central se compactaría aún más, mientras que la periferia se extendería de manera amorfa. Aumentaría la tugurización, con más hacinamiento y distorsiones –añadidos y subdivisiones deformantes, casetas en azoteas, locales comerciales precariamente adaptados a vivienda... y antiguas mansiones convertidas en comercios, de manera igualmente improvisada. Aparecerían más vacíos en la trama urbana, producidos por derrumbes y demoliciones, que en su mayoría serán rellenados espontáneamente por vecinos e inmigrantes ilegales, parqueos y construcciones ligeras precarias supuestamente provisionales, que luego se eternizan. Esa masa de construcción-chatarra volaría irremisiblemente con el paso sobre La Habana de un huracán de gran intensidad, cosa que no sucede desde 1944, cuando los edificios altos de La Habana no pasaban de la media docena y eran todos muy masivos, bien construidos y con aberturas pequeñas. Pero aún edificios altos bien hechos de los Cincuenta podrían perder las ventanas o quedar inutilizados por un tiempo al fallar la actual red eléctrica aérea. La mayor violencia y frecuencia en los huracanes tropicales deberá aumentar con el cambio climático. Ello implica revisar las normas de cargas de viento sobre las estructuras y los criterios de diseño urbano y arquitectónico, renunciar al espejismo de modernidad que despiertan los edificios altos en los decisores, reapreciar las ventajas de la manzana baja y compacta de la ciudad central, donde cada edificación se apoya en la vecina; así como eliminar el uso generalizado de cubiertas ligeras --incluyendo, por supuesto, la prohibición total del asbestocemento.

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Figure 2: Modernismo en La Habana – Gloria y Apodaca / Art nouveau façade in Havana.

maño, compartiendo a la vez el glitz y las miserias de las metrópolis del centro y la periferia. Muy probablemente, sus problemas motivarían soluciones que en definitiva los exacerbarían. ¿Cómo puede llegar a ser La Habana? En cualquier caso, el futuro de La Habana en esta primera mitad del siglo XXI pasa por dos grandes incertidumbres. Una es la naturaleza y forma de sus relaciones con los Estados Unidos. En esencia, esto depende de la posibilidad de encontrar una convivencia mutuamente aceptable; con ramificaciones sobre el viejo tema de si es posible sostener una revolución en un solo país, y por cuanto tiempo. Obviamente, esos pronósticos obligan a pensar también en una base económica real y estable, para conservar y revitalizar ese valiosísimo patrimonio construido y humano que inicialmente se levantó sobre el azúcar, y ahora se deslava bajo nuestros pies. Ello pasa, necesariamente, por el empoderamiento efectivo de su población.

1 Maceta es un término aplicado en Cuba a personas que han alcanzado un relativo bienestar económico por medios no siempre claros.

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Una manera de enfrentar el reto de un pronóstico sería especular sobre distintos escenarios, pero es preferible comenzar sobre lo que sucedería asumiendo que en un corto plazo no haya cambios estructurales radicales en el contexto económico y político nacional, y en las relaciones de Cuba con el Mundo. A pesar de lo que pueda parecer a primera vista, el estancamiento actual podría terminar produciendo alteraciones en el tejido urbano no muy diferentes a las de una apertura sumisa al mercado inmobiliario.

También se deben evitar superficies demasiado extensas de ventanas y buscar el confort térmico interior más bien por su buena posición; protegerlas exteriormente de vientos muy fuertes, y construirlas y anclarlas con más calidad. Por supuesto, la envergadura de la tarea escapa a las posibilidades tanto del estado como de la población, con la ironía de que se desperdician recursos en soluciones rápidas que fallarán en el próximo huracán, y generan gastos enormes al evacuar a la población en riesgo, para proteger sus vidas. En un escenario siniestro pero nada irreal, la capital podría acercarse a tomar la forma de atolón, con un anillo externo de construcciones uniplantas feas, pobres y precarias, pero progresivamente solidificado por autoconstrucción; y un cráter central donde estuvo un día la orgullosa metrópoli que todos identificaban como La Habana. Ese proceso coexistiría con focos puntuales de riqueza relativa, que después --permutas por medio, en esa forma encubierta de mercado de la vivienda-- se irían agrupando y convirtiendo en enclaves de macetización1, con una apropiación de los mejores emplazamientos, como el Malecón, Paseo del Prado, El Vedado o Miramar. Este sería el habitat cada vez más diferenciado de los pobres-nuevos-ricos habaneros, con una mezcla confusa de cuentapropistas, agiotistas, ladrones, malversadores, traficantes de influencias, empleados en firmas extranjeras o mixtas, receptores de remesas desde el extranjero, y en general personas con acceso, legal o no, a la moneda fuerte.

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También se conformarían enclaves de elitización, como el ya existente en el Centro de Negocios del Monte Barreto, con hoteles, empresas inmobiliarias mixtas para viviendas de alto estándar --sean compradas o alquiladas, habitadas por extranjeros como por cubanos; en definitiva da igual--, oficinas de corporaciones, agencias bancarias y de pasajes, centros de negocios, y tiendas en moneda fuerte, incluyendo shopping malls con grandes áreas de estacionamiento que desaprovechan suelo y rompen la continuidad de la trama urbana.

las calles, y sopones cocinados en los parterres; complementados por la progresiva desaparición del pavimento en las vías urbanas, en un viaje de regreso a la semilla. Pero esa ruralización coexistirá y se hibridizará con patrones tomados de los marginales urbanos, como ya sucedió con el habla y está pasando con gustos, modas y valores, reflejados y a la vez estimulados por los medios masivos de comunicación y hasta instituciones y proyectos culturales, bajo el aparentemente sano objetivo de conservar el folclor y hacer un arte que refleje la realidad.

Esos enclaves seguirían apareciendo separados de las zonas donde existan problemas sociales; cada vez más lejanos y por lo tanto más dependientes del auto privado, el cual se convertirá en una armadura metálica para proteger a los satisfechos de los ataques de los excluidos. Dentro de ese panorama social, surgirían inevitablemente híbridos: cubanos que trabajan en firmas o se unen a extranjeros, y al elevar su nivel de ingresos y aspiraciones van asumiendo un estilo de vida más o menos acomodado, en un proceso de prueba y error que depende mucho de cuáles serán los modelos de éxito a imitar, millonarios de verdad o pacotilleros.

¿Cambios hacia donde? Algunas aperturas más profundas, pero tardías, en busca de una reanimación de la macroeconomía, podrían reflejarse en la multiplicación de nuevos enclaves suburbanos en moneda dura a la manera del Monte Barreto; y quizás a alguien se le ocurra un mal día la idea de cercarlos y controlar la entrada, para evitar el contagio social y proteger a los usuarios y moradores de esos paraísos artificiales. El acceso libre a la costa se bloqueará aún más, en contra de lo que dispone la Constitución. Edificios y conjuntos inapropiados serían impuestos por la necesidad de obtener ganancias rápidas, donde coincidirían

Figure 3: Casas autoconstruidas en La Habana / Self-built houses in Havana. Photo: K. Mathéy

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A pesar de los esfuerzos del gobierno --dirigidos principalmente a combatir los efectos y no las causas-- aumentaría de hecho la discriminación laboral y la segregación física del hábitat debido al color de la piel, en una ciudad donde la pigmentación más oscura estuvo históricamente asociada con los barrios y tipos de vivienda más pobres, y un menor nivel de instrucción. Irónicamente, esto ha sido una consecuencia impensada de buenas intenciones, ya que la Reforma Urbana hizo propietarios del lugar donde vivían al 87% de los habaneros, pero sin la posibilidad de vender o comprar viviendas, y con muchas restricciones para permutarlas. Eso los ató para siempre al lugar, fuese bueno o malo; y los hizo dueños del problema de mantenerlo, sin tener los medios para ello. En este escenario nacional actual de continuidad sin cambios estructurales, igual sucedería con la marginalidad, estimulada por la dura verdad de que ningún salario alcanza para vivir: habría más prostitutas, ladrones, vagos, buzos de tanques de basura, pordioseros y su variante vergonzante de parqueadores y limpiadores de parabrisas; y podría incrementarse el tráfico y consumo de drogas, un fenómeno desconocido hasta hace veinte años, que llegó asociado con la apertura al turismo en los Noventa. Todo esto haría aumentar la represión policial, e indirectamente la discriminación racial. Seguramente aumentará el actual proceso de enjaulamiento de la ciudad para protegerse de los delincuentes, aunque quizás coexistiendo con fórmulas viejas como los serenos privados, que ya vienen funcionando en algunas zonas puntuales macetizadas. La altura y materiales de las cercas, rejas y tapias se convertirán en símbolos visibles de prestigio social, con las personas más acomodadas debatiéndose entre ocultar o mostrar su patética riqueza. Paralelamente continuaría el proceso de ruralización de la capital, con la sustitución por siembras productivas y crías de animales del ya menguado arbolado urbano y los restos no cementados o cubiertos de lo que un día fueron franjas continuas de jardines frontales a lo largo de las aceras; ranchones de guano con un ubicuo estilo neotaíno, carretones de tiro animal, tractores circulando por

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los intereses de los inversionistas extranjeros con los funcionarios y decisores nacionales. Esos cambios ya estarían posiblemente fuera de control, por no contar con los mecanismos de defensa de la comunidad frente a esas agresiones, como los que una sociedad civil fuerte ha desarrollado gradualmente en otros países. Aparecería finalmente un mercado del suelo, y los altos precios empujarán un desarrollo limitado hacia el este, con edificaciones más bajas y de más alto estándar para una clientela muy distinta a la que habita en los grandes conjuntos habitacionales que se hicieron entre los Setenta y los Noventa. Pero a pesar de su racionalidad --al conseguir un mejor balance geográfico de la ciudad respecto al centro histórico y tradicional--, un desarrollo realmente fuerte hacia el este requiere grandes inversiones infraestructurales en acueducto y alcantarillado, y posiblemente un segundo túnel bajo la Bahía.

Figure 4: Vivir y trabajar en el centro / Living and working in the centre. Photo: E. Schwansee

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Se desarrollarían suelos vacantes o mal utilizados, como los terrenos del antiguo aeropuerto de Ciudad Libertad, conectando con la Playa de Marianao y con el centro tradicional de Marianao a través de las Escuelas de Arte de Cubanacán; y se acometería la revitalización de la franja descaracterizada y subutilizada que rodea al puerto, incluyendo Tallapiedra, Atarés, Regla y Casablanca. Esto

implica un replanteo sobre la vocación del propio puerto, y el traslado de las refinerías de petróleo, mal situadas, anticuadas y contaminadoras. Otro suelo a potenciar son los bordes del tramo final del Río Almendares en lo que fue el Bosque de La Habana, absorbiendo los Jardines de la Tropical. El Malecón se continuaría --desde su actual final a la entrada del túnel de Quinta Avenida-- como una vía peatonal en la ribera derecha. Ello permitiría conformar una nueva fachada para El Vedado, abierta sobre un parque a lo largo del río que sustituya al actual barrio de casuchas El Fanguito. La calle Paseo se prolongaría con su hermosa sección verde central actual por el área de la Plaza de la Revolución, y se continuaría hasta el puerto, dando otra alternativa para llegar a La Habana Vieja además del Malecón –una suerte de Anillo Doble-Cero, con agua en sus dos extremos. El área de la Plaza y sus accesos tendría un desarrollo mixto, subdividiendo el actual espacio indefinido y amorfo en un sistema de plazas menores sombreadas y articuladas; incorporando viviendas para sectores de diferentes ingresos, comercios variados, parque, restaurantes, cafeterías, galerías de arte, hoteles, quizás un museo en el Castillo del Príncipe; y en general actividades que garanticen una animación mayor que la actual función exclusivamente simbólica-administrativa. Ello permitiría conectar mejor la Plaza con la Quinta de los Molinos, Universidad de La Habana, y con el Malecón a través de La Rampa. Será necesario crear barreras submarinas para disipar la energía de las olas antes de que choquen con el muro del Malecón. Eso pudiera combinarse con una extensión hacia el mar del actual paseo, incluyendo quizás una batería de piscinas públicas que estarían a distancia peatonal para más de 200 mil habaneros. Esa extensión protectora puede aprovechar la construcción de un segundo túnel para cruzar la Bahía, que ya se menciona en otra parte de este texto. También será necesario calmar el tránsito rodado por el Malecón y facilitar el cruce seguro de peatones hacia la banda junto al mar. Ello puede combinarse con un re-estudio de la calle San Lázaro entre Prado y Belascoaín, para que asuma parte del tránsito actual del Malecón. Con una nueva sección vial, esa calle puede asimilar edificios nuevos de cierta altura que no pueden admitirse en la primera línea del Malecón tradicional, por su alto valor icónico. El barrio de Colón, donde existen las más altas densidades de población de la capital, tiene además un fondo de viviendas de mala calidad y muy deteriorado. Pero, en cambio, su posición es privilegiada: abriendo por el norte hacia el Malecón tradicional, con su columnata continua de soportales; por el este hacia el hermosísimo Paseo del Prado, que deberá recuperar su antiguo esplendor, y por el oeste hacia la Calle Galiano, donde estuvo la más importante zona comercial del país, ahora muy decaída funcional y visualmente. Esa conservación-renovación del barrio deberá organizarse alrededor de un nuevo espacio público central propio de los residentes. La tradicional ciudadela de la ciudad central consiste en una larga fila de locales a lo largo de un patio común muy estrecho y profundo que además sirve de acceso a las viviendas, con una familia en cada local. Eso trae condiciones muy malas de vivienda, pero estimula la vida social y la cooperación entre vecinos. Un estudio

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de ese tipo de vivienda colectiva puede desembocar en soluciones de apartamentos pequeños tipo estudio, con mejor ventilación y privacidad, muy apropiados para la actual composición demográfica habanera, que cada vez se reduce más. Lo mismo puede hacerse con las ubicuas barbacoas: entrepisos improvisados, generalmente peligrosos y que deforman las fachadas, de pésima calidad constructiva, con mala iluminación y ventilación natural. Pero, bien diseñadas y construidas, pueden convertirse en soluciones duplex que aprovechan los altos puntales de las edificaciones antiguas que predominan en la ciudad central. El barrio de casuchas más grande de Cuba está en las azoteas de centro Habana. Su construcción es muy precaria, afectan las cubiertas y generalmente conectan ilegalmente las descargas de albañales a los drenes pluviales. Pero vivir en las azoteas de la ciudad central es agradable por las brisas y vistas. Bien hechas, esas viviendas, aún si modestas, pueden convertirse en pent-houses. El triángulo formado entre el Malecón, San Lázaro e Infanta, con la Fragua Martiana y los restos del antiguo cementerio Espada al centro, puede ser re-desarrollado hasta convertirse en la extensión natural de su vecina La Rampa. Centro Habana, donde existe una isla de calor, tiene una muy densa red de calles, con poco tránsito actual, sobre todo en el sentido norte-sur. Muchas de esas calles pueden plantarse con árboles que embellezcan, mejoren el ambiente y apoyen la actual apropiación espontánea de las calles por los residentes locales. Esas calles-

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parques, siguiendo el ejemplo del woonerf holandés, se basan en la coexistencia de peatones, niños, ancianos, árboles, vehículos de motor y bicicletas.

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Figure 5: Centro Habana / Central Havana. Photo: K. Mathéy

Los asentamientos periféricos de casuchas autoconstruidas, que en Cuba se llaman barrios insalubres, carecen de una estructura racional, servicios y redes técnicas adecuadas. Sin embargo, ofrecen un ejemplo de viviendacrecedera, ya que empiezan de forma muy precaria y generalmente van mejorando con el tiempo, hasta que abandonan la clasificación inicial. Bien localizados, planeados y conducidos, y con asistencia adecuada, constituyen una vía de solución paralela al problema de la vivienda. Es posible que la aparición gradual de un sector de mercado con gustos algo más refinados traiga el mejoramiento del diseño arquitectónico y la actuación de algún que otro arquitecto de la vanguardia internacional que eleve el rasero y abra expectativas. Quizás finalmente se llegue a repensar la forma de ejercicio –y remuneración-- de la profesión del arquitecto, acercándola a la que ha permitido un pujante movimiento de los artistas plásticos; y se estimule la competencia para que triunfen los mejores a través de concursos accesibles a todos. De continuar el modelo de desarrollo suburbano sin una adecuada respuesta del transporte público masivo, crecerá desmedidamente el uso del auto privado –una tendencia que ya se observa en la economía en moneda

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Figure 6: Cementerio en La Habana – ciudad de vivos y muertos / Cemetery in central Havana. Photo: E. Schwansee

fuerte. Ello traerá más contaminación, demoras y problemas de tránsito; y aumentaría las ya existentes diferencias sociales entre el que se mueve en cuatro ruedas y el que anda sobre sus pies. La ciudad tendrá que resistir una fuerte presión para no malgastar terrenos valiosos en parqueos y en la construcción de monstruosas vías expresas para facilitar el movimiento de autos, mientras la continuidad del tejido urbano quedará irremediablemente rota. Paradójicamente, esas soluciones sólo conseguirán aumentar el número de autos. El interminable Big Dig de Boston, para enterrar esas vías que cortaron a la ciudad y la bloquearon de su frente al agua, es un recordatorio de lo costoso que resulta enmendar después esos errores que ya se repiten irresponsablemente en algunas grandes ciudades asiáticas. Se continuarán construyendo shopping malls climatizados de lata y vidrio espejo que rompen con la coherencia y la imagen urbanas, matan el pequeño comercio de esquina, que fue un centro social espontáneo en la ciudad tradicional; elevan innecesariamente el gasto energético e introducen patrones de vida y consumo ajenos. Mientras tanto, aumentará el deterioro y la calidad de la oferta en la red comercial a lo largo de las calzadas de la ciudad central. Construyendo otro futuro Aún sin producirse avances significativos en la estructura productiva nacional y las relaciones de intercambio internacional, este cuadro podría suavizarse si se revierte la tendencia involutiva a la centralización administrativa

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que ya comenzó a fines del siglo pasado. Ello implica dar una mayor autonomía a las empresas estatales y a los gobiernos locales, tanto en la gestión económica como en los procesos de decisión; así como multiplicar las estructuras corporativas estatales autofinanciadas para el desarrollo local, a la manera de la Oficina del Historiador de La Habana. Hasta ahora, esto ha sido tratado como una excepción, construida alrededor de un individuo excepcional, el carismático Eusebio Leal. Ese enfoque de subordinar las instituciones a la existencia de la persona adecuada debe invertirse, creando un marco económico y jurídico que funcione, y luego aparecerán las personas que las manejen. El proceso revolucionario cubano a mediados del siglo pasado demostró eso, convirtiendo en héroes legendarios a jóvenes desconocidos, profesionales, estudiantes, empleados públicos, dependientes del comercio, taxistas, albañiles, maestros, sastres, campesinos, obreros agrícolas y una ubicua pequeña burguesía provinciana. La lógica aparente de que cuando hay poco es necesario centralizar las decisiones se desploma cuando se invierten los términos, hasta comprender que hay poco debido precisamente a la centralización. Los trabajos de reanimación urbanística que mejoraron la imagen de la capital en los años Sesenta y Setenta podrían reaparecer, para revitalizar visual y funcionalmente espacios públicos claves en zonas centrales. Esos espacios servirían para elevar el rasero de calidad en el diseño y los servicios, además de cumplir su papel tradicional de estructurar al tejido urbano, mejorar el medioambiente,

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añadir valor a los terrenos circundantes, y favorecer el intercambio social entre sectores de población que cada vez se distancian más. La reanimación pudiera irradiar a partir de esos focos a lo largo de los ejes principales que los conectan, y llegar más adelante a internarse en los sectores grises delimitados por esas vías. Sobre esa misma base de autogestión local, se podría utilizar el “convoyaje” a las grandes inversiones, comprometiéndolas a realizar obras de beneficio directo y evidente para la comunidad. Una mejor mezcla social podría lograrse obligando a que un porciento de las viviendas en las nuevas zonas de viviendas de alto estándar y hasta en los propios edificios sea dedicado a casos sociales. Como línea, tanto la vivienda para altos ingresos como las de interés social deberán tener una calidad alta de diseño, independientemente de las diferencias en tamaño y comodidades. También deberá evitarse la concentración de pobres en grandes conjuntos de bloques repetidos que llevarán inevitablemente el estigma de la pobreza y arrastrarán formas previas de vida que no funcionan en edificios grandes de apartamentos. Si empiezan a llegar inversionistas iluminados con una clientela que exija calidad, y con interlocutores cubanos de la misma condición, aparecerán buenos proyectos que marquen hitos. Eso ayudará a impulsar la revitalización de La Habana y la recuperación de los valores culturales en la arquitectura cubana, secuestrada durante varias décadas por los constructores y finalmente por decisores que ni siquiera saben construir. La oferta de vivienda a extranjeros residentes en La Habana, ahora limitada a apartamentos en edificios nuevos, casi siempre con una arquitectura banal, podrá ampliarse con antiguas mansiones deterioradas para ser rehabilitadas por iniciativa privada. Eso puede producir más ingresos y ayudaría a preservar el patrimonio urbano. Estas acciones que La Habana necesita tendrán que montarse sobre una enorme inversión en la modernización y extensión de la infraestructura ingeniera urbana –redes de distribución del agua, electricidad y teléfonos; recolección y tratamiento de albañales; red vial y, especialmente, un transporte público cómodo y eficiente que disuada el uso del auto privado. Es bueno recordar que algo así permitió la impresionante expansión de La Habana inmediatamente después de terminado el dominio colonial español. Esta re-urbanización solamente podrá ser financiada con una combinación de préstamos de organismos internacionales a los que Cuba tendrá inevitablemente acceso un día, unidos a una multitud de pequeños inversionistas que en definitiva son más importantes para hacer ciudad, y que por su propia pequeñez son menos impositivos que los grandes. Pero esa multiplicación de inversionistas solo podrá manejarse por contrapartes cubanas de forma descentralizada. Todo ello deberá complementarse con un potenciamiento real y extendido de la propia población local, para que la mayor cantidad posible llegue a ser capaz de atender a sus propias necesidades de hábitat y servicios. Ello implica puentear sobre el convencional papel al que la globalización neoliberal ha relegado a los países en desarrollo, como suministradores de materia prima y

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mano de obra barata, y receptores de industrias contaminantes. Se trata de encontrar un nuevo modelo de desarrollo que aprovecha el enorme capital humano y la tradicional inventiva cubana para saltar a una economía post-industrial mucho más productiva, como la electrónica y la informática, especialmente la producción de softwares; los servicios médicos, la industria farmacéutica y la biotecnología, las telecomunicaciones, las finanzas, el marketing, el diseño, la moda, la industria del entretenimiento y la cultura, y otros servicios especializados. Se trata, en definitiva, de potenciar la industria del conocimiento, aprovechando el principal recurso que tiene el país: una población instruida y que reacciona pronto a nuevas situaciones. Pero es necesario proteger a ese recurso humano, no sólo de la fuga de talentos ante la falta de oportunidades, sino de la pérdida de valores y la introducción acrítica de estilos de vida que copian dudosos modelos de éxito. La Habana quizás podrá recuperar entonces su papel histórico de cruce obligado de los flujos entre Europa y América, y entre Norte y Suramérica. Esa función de pivote le fue escamoteada por Miami, que medio siglo atrás era un pueblo soñoliento de retirados, al que medio millón de cubanos emigrados convirtieron en una gran ciudad - fea y hostil, pero económicamente pujante. ¿Habrá espacio para una convivencia mutuamente provechosa, aprendiendo cada uno de los errores del otro?

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Figure 7: Renovación en Centro Habana / Renovation work in central Havana. Photo: K. Mathéy

Mario Coyula Cowley (La Habana 1935). Arquitecto, crítico, diseñador urbano. Profesor de Mérito. Premio Nacional de Arquitectura 2001 y de Habitat 2004, ambos por vida y obra. Cuban architect and planner, has been a professor of merit at the Faculty of Architecture of Havana since 1964 and was vice-director of the Group for the Integrated Development of the Capital (GDIC). As a writer, he is author or co-author of eight books, more than 190 articles, prologues, essays and reviews in 21 Cuban and 30 foreign publications. He was awarded the National Prize of Architecture in 2001 and National Habitat Award (2004), both for life-time. 2010, he was visiting scholar in the Mundus Urbano Program at TU Darmstadt. Contact / contacto:

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La Identidad de la Ciudad Octavio Tapia Rodríguez A city with identity The defence and development of a city's identity is the major challenge facing planners in the decades to come. (I refer to the identity for the ordinary citizen, and not to city marketing.) This can be achieved through relatively small interventions – some people like to call them "urban acupuncture". Most cities today mushroom spontaneously, without preparing for the future. Conventional city planning, with its focus on land use regulation, has lost the battle – and for good reasons. But to have no plan at all is not the answer, either. What is needed is a sort of multi-layer planning with at least four dimensions: 1. Normative – most fast-growing cities with predominantly informal construction lack a common reference point, a guidance for long-term functionability; 2. Operational – the plan must be proactive, not restrictive, otherwise it will be ignored; 3. Strategic – beyond strict norms, present development opportunities must be valorised; 4. Practical – rules must be simple, easy to understand, and put into practice without bureaucratic delays. Identity cannot be invented, it must grow. It does so primarily on the local level – but there is also need for a common denominator for the entire city. This calls for a new urban pact: (a) Urban space must be arranged in a polycentric way, embracing both small meeting points as well as great and collective urban projects; (b) Urban forms must facilitate social interaction – they must be on a human scale, in other words; (c) Planning must be inclusive in economic, social, environmental, and cultural terms; (d) Space must be "communicative", generate opinion, be recognizable, and have a personality. Octavio Tapia Rodríguez Ciudadano chileno, arquitecto, planificador, antropólogo urbano, arqueólogo, economista y poeta con una trayectoria remarcable viviendo y trabajando en Chile, Argelia, Francia, Gran Bretaña, España (con Ricardo Bofill), Nicaragua, Bélgica, Austria, EE.UU., Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croacia, Suiza y Gibraltar. De 1979 hasta 1983 era el primer director de planificación urbana de la municipalidad de Managua después de da la revolución sandinista. Chilean citizen, is an architect, planner, urban anthropologist, archeologist, economist and poet with a remarkable working and living experience in Chile, Algeria, France, Britain, Spain (with Ricardo Bofill), Nicaragua, Belgium, Austria, USA, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Switzerland and Gibraltar. 1979-1983 he was the first Director of Urban Planning, Municipality of Managua, after the Sandinista Revolution. Contact / contacto:

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La ciudad debe tener su identidad, en el sentido de que debe ser capaz de: (a) trasmitir esa identidad hacia quienes la viven cotidianamente, crear el sentimiento de “ser de alli”, y (b) hacer ver a los demás sus peculiaridades y sus proyectos, en qué quiere centrar sus esfuerzos, cuales son sus potencialidades, como va a resolver sus problemas.

Pero, ¿cual plan? asistimos desde hace tiempo al desmontaje de la planificación convencional, de la zonificación y de los planes maestros de uso del suelo. Y es obvio que no era el mejor método para cambiar el estado de cosas. El planeamiento de la zonificación, cuya finalidad era organizar la ciudad a largo plazo, no ha sido capaz de adaptarse a estos cambios.

De modo que la aproximación a cada ciudad y su problemática es única y singular, se pueden estudiar y debatir sobre otros ejemplos pero la incidencia de lo local será determinante. Estudiar cada hecho local, desde la perspectiva de quienes la viven, ver tanto las carencias como las potencialidades y construir a partir de ellos.

El planeamiento hay que sustituirlo por la gestión; gestionar no sólo desde la ausencia de plan, sino desde la liberación del uso del suelo. Y en el mejor de los casos gestionar desde programas consensuados a través de una planificación estratégica. Planificación estratégica para la detección de carencias y estrangulamientos, y en la detección e impulso de programas y acciones relacionados con las oportunidades de la ciudad, con los deseos de la gente, que debe introducir - con operatividad - programas sociales y económicos en el planeamiento de la ciudad; y aprovechar su potente capacidad de marketing para ilusionar a los ciudadanos y a los medios de comunicación en torno a esos programas y proyectos, en forma de crear un consenso entre sector publico y privado.

La experiencia “aprendible” y “enseñable” es aquella de la búsqueda de soluciones particulares, las pautas para la ciudad (globalizantes) no aportan visiones para cada caso, resultando una visión de la realidad plana sin matices ni diferenciaciones. Muchas veces responder a las necesidades específicas del lugar es posible desde operaciones mínimas –acupuntura urbana- en contraposición a las grandes inversiones y operaciones exigidas por el marketing urbano. El cambio de imagen de la ciudad no se puede quedar en una postal de la “modernización globalizada”. Se deben pensar cambios para “toda” la población, que siendo menos onerosos y espectaculares otorguen un mayor beneficio a los ciudadanos. La ciudad ha de tener proyectos, que se encadenen en programas públicos innovadores, seductores y que se preocupen de sus auténticos problemas y oportunidades. Y la suma de esos proyectos, será EL PLAN, una apuesta para el futuro organizada desde ahora.

La reforma y transformación de nuestras ciudades necesitan planes. Planes que pueden adoptar la metodología de análisis y consenso de la planificación estratégica, pero planes con contenido propositivo, que han de aunar cuanto menos cuatro características: • Normativos: porque han de expresarse en planos las formas de ocupación del territorio que se desean, los espacios que se han de proteger, los lugares donde centralizar esfuerzos y acciones. En Nicaragua, donde más de dos tercios de la ocupación del espacio se

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hacen al margen de los procesos establecidos legalmente, solo faltaría que se abandonara todo marco de referencia. • Operativos: porque han de servir ya, ahora; con incidencia real sobre la población y el territorio. Proyectos de articulación espacial, proyectos de recuperación del espacio público, proyectos de espacios de afirmación cultural, proyectos de reactivación económica o reinserción social, proyectos ambientales y proyectos de marketing de la propia ciudad. Proyectos posibles, pues se han sumado los esfuerzos sociales de impulso y se han sentado en los compromisos y fórmulas de gestión para su realización. • Estratégicos porque esos proyectos han de servir a los objetivos de la ciudad y se han de apoyar en oportunidades existentes o provocadas. Lo estratégico definido como el territorio de coincidencia de la necesidad y la oportunidad. • Prácticos, sencillos, con las determinaciones precisas y los proyectos claros, sin necesitar de dilatados periodos de redacción y tramitación. Que fijen los espacios y objetivos de actuación y admitan todo tipo de adaptaciones en su propia realización. No es difícil entender así el proyecto de ciudad que es un plan, pero requiere de la existencia de una serie de actitudes sociales y políticas.

tiene una doble fidelidad: con la ciudad heredada y con la ciudad futura. Hay elementos que deben preservarse y “re-usarse”; la innovación es tan necesaria como el dialogo y la complementariedad. Entonces. El actual momento histórico requiere de un nuevo pacto urbano, que se exprese también a partir de un nuevo urbanismo que tenga en cuenta ciertas consideraciones: a) La construcción del territorio como el espacio ciudadano estructurado, policéntrico, discontinuo (para incorporar espacios rurales, verdes, vacíos); por lo tanto un territorio objeto de grandes proyectos urbanos constructores de ciudad, en el cual se dé un debate democrático sobre el escenario de futuro, sobre las localizaciones y sus impactos, sobre las nuevas centralidades y sobre los tejidos urbanos. Sobre un marco físico que proporcione calidad y sentido a sus habitantes. b) La prioridad a las formas urbanas que garanticen la sociabilidad, el espacio público a todas las escalas, la simbología y la identidad ciudadana y barrial, el significado cultural y estético, la memoria colectiva… La ciudad es un producto cultural complejo no reducible a unas cuantas funciones productivas o consumistas. Las infraestructuras urbanas, los servicios, la arquitectura, el diseño de los espacios públicos, la relación entre los edificios y sus entornos… tiene un significado social.

Proyectos que al hacerse realidad permitan una constatación por parte de los ciudadanos: de la ciudad que se busca, la elaboración de proyectos de diferentes tiempos y envergaduras permite comprobar y rectificar las propuestas y modelos de la ciudad. Las escalas del territorio Actuar respondiendo a varios desafíos a la vez: revalorización de los ejes estructurantes de la vida urbana-central; intervenciones acupunturales para mejorar la cualidad de los barrios tradicionales manteniendo mixturas de actividades y vivienda. En la dimensión barrial, que debe concebirse como una actuación estructurante de la ciudad.

Es innovación más que invención, un proceso más que un final, acción más que especulación. Pensar la ciudad

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Die größte Herausforderung für die Planer in den kommenden Jahrzehnten ist die Verteidigung und Herausbildung der Identität einer Stadt. Dies bezieht sich auf die Identität für die einfachen Stadtbürger, nicht auf City Marketing. Und dies kann durch relative kleine Eingriffe erreicht werden – manche nennen das 'urbane Akupunktur'. Heutzutage wuchern die Städte meist spontan, ohne Vorsorge für die Zukunft. Die konventionelle Stadtplanung mit ihrem Fokus auf Regulierung der Flächennutzung hat längst die Schlacht verloren, und das aus gutem Grund. Aber keine Planung zu haben ist auch nicht die Lösung. Nötig wäre eine Art mehrschichtiger Planung, mit mindestens vier Dimensionen: 1. normativ: schnell wachsenden Städten mit hauptsächlich informell erstellten Bauten fehlt meist ein gemeinsamer Bezugspunkt, eine Anleitung zur langfristigen Funktionalität; 2. operational: der Plan muss anregend sein, nicht restriktiv – sonst wird er ignoriert; 3. strategisch: jenseits strikter Normen müssen Entwicklungschancen gewürdigt werden; 4. praktisch: Regeln müssen einfach, leicht verständlich und ohne bürokratische Verzögerungen anwendbar sein. Identität kann nicht erfunden werden, sie muss wachsen. Sie tut dies vor allem auf der lokalen Ebene – aber auch für die ganze Stadt ist ein gemeinsamer Nenner nötig. Dies verlangt nach einem neuen urbanen Abkommen: (a) Der urbane Raum muss polyzentrisch organisiert sein und sowohl kleine Treffpunkte bieten als auch große, gemeinschaftlich nutzbare Stadtprojekte. (b) Die Stadtgestalt muss die soziale Interaktion erleichtern – in anderen Worten ein menschliches Maß aufweisen. (c) Planung muss alle einschließen, unter ökonomischen, sozialen, umweltbezogenen und kulturellen Gesichtspunkten; (d) Räume müssen 'kommunikativ' sein, zu Meinungsäußerungen einladen, wiedererkennbar sein und eine Persönlichkeit besitzen.

La historia, la morfología, las identidades diferenciales de los barrios forman parte del patrimonio de la ciudad y conviene reutilizarlo para favorecer una buena reconversión, es decir, no es preciso destruir las tramas urbanas para incentivar nuevos usos y actividades, hay que preservar los valores culturales propios de cada barrio y sobre todo la diversidad de funciones y de poblaciones residentes. Pensar la ciudad no es empezar de nuevo. Las ciudades son deudoras con su historia, su trama, su arquitectura, sus elementos físicos y simbólicos, su cultura cívica. Incluso con sus planes y proyectos urbanos inconclusos o no realizados. Las ciudades deben establecer un compromiso con su geografía, su emplazamiento, sus recursos naturales. Y con las culturas de sus gentes y de sus barrios. La ciudad son sus paisajes físicos y humanos. Es el espacio que contiene el tiempo.

Eine Stadt mit Identität

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Figure 1: Utopias urbanas alrededor de 1900: andadores móviles, toboganes, caminar sobre los alambres del telégrafo... / urban utopias around 1900: rolling footpaths, tobogans, walking on telegraph wires ...; illustration drawn by Bernd D. Ciecior-Cicerón

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Jóvenes: cinco maneras de ser ciudadanos del mundo Antanas Mockus1 Young people: five types of world citizenship Anonymous life in the city and increased mobility make it ever more difficult to ensure compliance to laws and standards. Particularly among young people, a cynical attitude is growing that is justified with the same argument that the Cynics, the students of Socrates, established for their rejection of the customs and laws of Athens: as "citizens of the world", they were above such constraints and could both make fun of them and provoke their fellow citizens. The cynical handling of laws and norms is expressed in five attitudes that all undermine urban coexistence in different ways: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Choosing to violate the law, because it pays off; Choosing to violate the law out of conviction, because the laws are rejected as unjust; Rigid conformation to the law, requiring repressive enforcement, as the only moral reference; Advocacy of obviously immoral but not illegal practices; and Provocative advocacy of legally established regulations or opportunities that have met cultural rejection.

The most deeply anchored form of violation of the law is that due to conviction: the laws and regulations are unjust or their violation is necessary for the protection of the family or own goods and/or property. Almost every second young person views this as legitimate—the approval here, however, decreases to about one-third with increasing age, as was revealed in a survey in 14 Latin American cities (including Bogotá, México, Belo Horizonte und Caracas). The author, known for his provocative campaigning for tax payments during his tenure as mayor of Bogotá, is committed to a civic hedonism with which these attitudes can be gradually overcome. To start with, the endorsement of law-breaking has to be pushed back in favour of other, less damaging forms of cynicism. This is to be supported at the moral, cultural and legal levels. Next, amoral but legally compliant conduct should transform itself into the explicit support of a culturally unaccepted law-abidance— the ultimate cynical attitude, and one that already innately contains civic hedonism. It favours order and relies on positive sanctions as well as art and awareness to promote institutional and moral change.

Mientras que para los Cínicos la moral está por encima de la ley y la costumbre, para Sócrates no. Si bien Sócrates moría obedeciendo a su moral y a las leyes de su ciudad – Atenas –, unas pocas décadas después algunos de sus discípulos –los Cínicos– se declaraban ciudadanos del mundo y desde un desprendimiento material extremo despreciaban normas, costumbres y valores de su ciudad. El cinismo combina desde entonces un pesimismo sobre las motivaciones de la acción humana, un desprecio consciente por el cumplimiento de normas sociales y el deseo de escandalizar, ya sea diciendo verdades incómodas a quien no quiere oírlas, ya sea burlando costumbres.

1 Agradezco a Diego Cancino, investigador de Corpovisionarios y profesor de la Universidad del Rosario sus comentarios a una versión previa del texto. Agradezco también a Andrea Ramírez, estadística de Corpovisionarios y estudiante de maestría en estudios políticos de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia

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El desarrollo de la ciudad y de la movilidad entre ciudades genera actitud cosmopolita, es decir desprendimiento frente a toda ciudad particular y aspiración a un modo de vida de validez universal. Cada vez más el imperio de la legalidad en las ciudades parece ser una meta difícil de alcanzar. La creciente importancia de las ciudades y su interdependencia favorecen y diversifican opciones cínicas insostenibles o graves sobre todo cuando erosionan la ley, por ejemplo cuando desde el cinismo se acoge la ile-

galidad por sus beneficios materiales o cuando el cinismo ayuda a revestir la ilegalidad de argumentos morales. El proceso de urbanización exacerba, especialmente para los jóvenes, cinco opciones cínicas que ponen en riesgo en grado distinto la sostenibilidad del imperio de la ley en las ciudades: 1) aceptación de la ilegalidad por motivos económicos; 2) aceptación de la ilegalidad por motivos de conciencia o de aprobación social; 3) adhesión a la legalidad como única normatividad relevante, obedecida por lo general por la vía represiva; 4) aprobación cultural de lo legal flagrantemente inmoral (por ejemplo, el sufrimiento del toro en la corrida) y 5) aprobación moral explicita de lo legalmente permitido aunque culturalmente rechazado (por ejemplo, cuando la ley va adelante en la protección de derechos de minorías que la cultura aún no acepta). ¿Cómo superar esas cinco variedades de cinismo o al menos cómo favorecer la transformación de las dos primeras, ilegales, en alguna de las legales?

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Ciudades, jóvenes y cinismo(s) Las ciudades, al diferenciar lo moralmente aceptable de lo culturalmente aceptable (y de lo legalmente aceptable), ayudan a la aparición y diversificación del cinismo. La alta división del trabajo, la interdependencia, el anonimato y otras características de las sociedades urbanas crean o fortalecen, especialmente en los jóvenes, actitudes de escepticismo y ruptura o de conformismo pesimista, temeroso o temerario y a veces netamente agresivo. Se pretende en este artículo usar el enfoque de cultura ciudadana –que parte del reconocimiento de ley (regulación legal), moral (auto-regulación) y cultura (regulación social) como tres sistemas reguladores apuntalados por emociones y a veces divergentes– para comprender mejor esas actitudes. La desobediencia a la ley se explica al menos en parte porque la conciencia individual o el qué dirán actúan a favor de esa desobediencia y lo hacen no tanto a través de razones o intereses sino a través de emociones como las causadas por el rechazo o el reconocimiento social. La presión social y la conciencia personal pueden actuar de manera divergente o convergente. La divergencia entre lo moralmente aceptable y lo culturalmente aceptable da lugar al cinismo: lo ilustran la frugalidad extrema con que vive Diógenes en su vasija de barro, su irrespeto al emperador Alejandro (“Quítate que me tapas el sol que estoy tomando”), las bacanales de comida o masturbación en los templos. ¿Pero puede pensarse como cinismo la aprobación moral y cultural de la ilegalidad? Diógenes había recibido del Oráculo de Delfos dos recomendaciones, la socrática de “Conócete a ti mismo” y la de lejos más enigmática de “Cámbiale el valor a la moneda” (Diógenes le habría ayudado a su padre a falsificar monedas y eso les habría valido el exilio; irónicamente es una actividad ilegal la que desencadena un exilio que motiva una actitud filosófica cosmopolita). ¿Tienen nuestros jóvenes comportamientos cínicos en algún sentido amplio? Al diversificar contextos, códigos de comportamiento y roles la ciudad no sólo incuba o propicia actitudes cínicas, la ciudad diversifica cada vez más los cinismos. Hay territorios para todo y en casi cualquier territorio se puede encontrar argumentos morales para violar la definición cultural de lo apropiado. Esto tal vez permite describir y comprender mejor fenómenos juveniles de rechazo a las costumbres, cierta soberbia moral asociada a la construcción de autonomía, gregarismo pero también afán de originalidad y atracción por actividades riesgosas, sean éstas legales o ilegales. Por otro lado, muchos comportamientos tienen lugar porque el grupo los hace o porque son comúnmente aceptados, admirados y celebrados en la tribu urbana. La ramificación de las rebeldías impide usar los dos conceptos claves en los años 70: alienación y contracultura. Las instituciones encargadas de la socialización, familia, escuela, iglesia, barrio no lograban su cometido, transferir de una generación a otras normas y valores y, por el contrario, las nuevas generaciones no se sentían atraídas por esas normas y valores. El sueño americano, el American Way of Life que había logrado animar a la generación anterior, ya no era atractivo; al revés desataba la crítica radical de hippies y yippies (más radicales). Pero la frustración de las nuevas generaciones desataba desmoralización

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Jugendliche: fünf Arten des Weltbürgertums Anonymes Leben in der Stadt und zunehmende Mobilität machen es immer schwerer, die Einhaltung von Gesetzen und Normen sicherzustellen. Besonders unter Jugendlichen wächst eine zynische Haltung, mit der bereits Sokrates Schüler, die Zyniker, ihre Ablehnung der Sitten und Gesetze Athens begründet hatten: als „Weltbürger“ standen sie über diesen Beschränkungen, konnten sich über sie lustig machen und ihre Mitbürger provozieren. Der zynische Umgang mit Gesetzen und Normen drückt sich in fünf Haltungen aus, die in unterschiedlicher Weise das Zusammenleben in den Städten unterminieren: 1) Option für Gesetzesverstöße, weil sie sich auszahlen; 2) Option für Gesetzesverstöße aus Überzeugung, weil Gesetze als ungerecht abgelehnt werden; 3) Starre Gesetzestreue, die repressiv durchgesetzt werden muss, als einzige moralische Referenz; 4) Befürwortung von offensichtlich unmoralischen, aber nicht verbotenen Praktiken; 5) Provokative Befürwortung gesetzlich festgelegter Bestimmungen oder Möglichkeiten, die kulturell abgelehnt werden. Am tiefsten verankert ist der Gesetzesbruch aus Überzeugung, weil Gesetze und Bestimmungen ungerecht seien oder weil deren Missachtung geboten sei, um Familie und eigene Güter zu schützen. Fast jeder zweite Jugendliche hält das für legitim – mit zunehmendem Alter sinkt die Zustimmung auf etwa ein Drittel, wie eine Umfrage in 14 Städten Lateinamerikas ergab (u.a. Bogotá, México, Belo Horizonte und Caracas). Der Autor, bekannt für sein provokatives Werben für Steuerzahlung in seiner Amtszeit als Bürgermeister von Bogotá, setzt sich für einen staatsbürgerlichen Hedonismus ein, mit dem diese Haltungen schrittweise überwunden werden. Zunächst soll die Befürwortung von Gesetzesverstößen zurückgedrängt werden, zugunsten der anderen, weniger schädlichen Formen des Zynismus. Dies wird auf der moralischen, kulturellen und gesetzlichen Ebene unterstützt. Danach sollen die amoralischen, aber gesetzeskonformen Handlungsweisen sich transformieren zur expliziten Unterstützung einer kulturell nicht akzeptierten Gesetzestreue, der letzten zynischen Haltung, die bereits den staatsbürgerlichen Hedonismus in sich trägt. Dieser findet Gefallen an der Ordnung und setzt auf positive Sanktionen sowie auf Kunst und Bewusstsein, um den institutionellen und moralischen Wandel voranzubringen.

más que rebeldía activa y la rebeldía era más expresión de emociones que lucha sistemáticamente organizada para transformar la sociedad o su economía. No sentir culpa en ciertas situaciones, o no sentir vergüenza, o no sentir temor a las sanciones legales, o no ser sensible al reconocimiento social, pueden ser expresiones de cinismo. Para serlo se necesita que además de la ausencia de la correspondiente emoción, haya conciencia de esa ausencia y evaluación positiva o al menos neutra de esa ausencia. El que sufre por no sentir culpa no es un cínico. En cambio, el que se complace en no sentir culpa, o el que es indiferente a su ausencia, es un cínico. Como lo es quien muestra culpa, temor o vergüenza sin sentirlos efectivamente. El cínico moderno comparte con el cínico antiguo cierto desprecio por las costumbres, por las convenciones sociales y por las normas y por las instituciones encargadas de aplicarlas. El sentido moderno y anglosajón de cínico acentúa el escepticismo sobre la naturaleza humana. Cínico es quien subraya la importancia del auto-interés como motivación central de los demás y pone en entredicho las motivaciones nobles de la conducta humana. Cínico es también quien supone que sus argumentos son superiores a los de los demás o quien se regodea en sus propias emociones sin compartir ni considerar las emociones del otro, todo lo cual dificulta la solidaridad, la cooperación y la convivencia. Cínico significa “sin ilusiones” y “descarado”, sinvergüenza. Según el Webster´s (1989) las dos primeras acepciones de cynic son: 1. “una persona que cree que sólo el auto-interés motiva las acciones humanas y que descree o minimiza actos altruistas o puntos de vista desinteresados. 2. integrante de la secta de filósofos griegos, del cuarto siglo a.C., que creían que la virtud es el único bien, que la esencia de la virtud es el autocontrol y que rendirse a cualquier influencia externa está por debajo de la dignidad humana”.

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2

Para Carter (1999, 67):

En términos de Frédéric Gros (2009, 315-6): “Es así como el decir-verdad de la parrêsia –en tanto que ésta apunta a la transformación del ethos de su interlocutor, conlleva un riesgo para su locutor y se inscribe en una temporalidad de la actualidad– se distingue del decir-verdad de la enseñanza, de la profesía y de la sabiduría”. Para Desmond, la parresia es ejercicio de la libertad de expresión.

“El cinismo es el enemigo de la civilidad: sugiere una profunda desconfianza sobre los motivos de nuestros compañeros de especie, una desconfianza que arruina cualquier proyecto que descansa, como lo hace la civilidad, en confiar en los demás aún cuando en ello hay riesgo. Y de esta manera porque ya no confiamos unos en otros en cambio colocamos nuestra confianza en el lenguaje de los derechos, vago y que ahoga toda conversación”.

3 Más de un especialista termina en el fondo diciendo que él, ante el cierre de otras oportunidades y la urgencia de sus propias necesidades, optaría por los caminos de la ilegalidad, ignorando el hecho de que la mayoría de los jóvenes opta por los caminos de la probidad.

4 Para elaborar las Gráficas 1, 3 y 4 se agregaron las bases de datos de 8 ciudades (Barrancabermeja, Barranquilla, Belo Horizonte, Bogotá, Caracas, Medellín, Ciudad de México D.F., Popayán) y en las preguntas sobre razones para desobedecer la ley cada respuesta afirmativa se desagregó por edad. La pregunta es: “se justifica desobedecer la ley cuando…”

5 Promedio: Bogotá(2001-20032005-2008), Pereira(2005), Cali (2006), Santa Marta(2006), Medellín(2007-2009), Barranquilla(2008), Ciudad de México(2008), Belo Horizonte(2008), Caracas (2009), Popayán (2009), Barrancabermeja (2009)

Según Moliner (1994) cínico: “1. se aplica a los filósofos griegos de la escuela de Antístenes de los que el más destacado es Diógenes y 2. « Desvergonzado. Impúdico. Sinvergüenza ». Se aplica a la persona que comete actos vergonzosos sin ocultarse, y sin sentir vergüenza por ellos”. El cínico –antiguo y moderno– experimenta placer al decir verdades incómodas, verdades que la gente común y corriente no espera oír. Además a veces el cínico, lo que tiene para decir, prefiere decirlo mediante acciones. Palabras y acciones buscan tener resonancia, ser divulgadas, ser recordadas. Cierto sentimiento de superioridad intelectual o moral (o un cierto regodeo en la opción por la diferencia) acompaña este gusto por el escándalo. De palabra u obra el cínico busca escandalizar. Muchas veces pronuncia la verdad incómoda que quiere comunicar a través de gestos y acciones. En términos de Foucault (2009), su “decir verdad” se transforma en una “vida verdadera” y ésta, con los cínicos, se convierte en una “vida otra”, una vida frugal atravesada por un decir verdad que pone en riesgo tanto al que dice como a su relación con el otro, y que los conduce, ya en el marco del cristianismo (que debe bastante al cinismo), hacia una militancia en favor del “mundo otro”, matriz del voluntarismo político moderno. La manera de decir verdad que cultivan los cínicos puede llevar, a mi juicio en cualquiera de los interlocutores o en ambos, a una alteración del modo de insertarse éticamente en el mundo2 . Así como hay libros que le cambian la vida a uno, también hay conversaciones que le cambian el rumbo a uno. Transformar(se) y no congraciarse es el mandato (uno no escoge ser cínico). Así lo que ya era una manera de incomodar –la investigación socrática– cede su lugar a otra manera de incomodar, más contundente. En conjunto, el cinismo clásico pasa de la palabra-gesto que interpela a la oferta de un modo de vida que nos llega ilustrado por cortas sentencias y muchas anécdotas sobre acciones y gestos de Antístenes, Diógenes y sus discípulos. Consideraremos a continuación las cinco opciones cínicas mencionadas al comienzo y los factores urbanos y juveniles que las facilitan para luego considerar cómo el hedonismo cívico (armonía de ley, moral y cultura lograda principalmente por las buenas y por la transformación de la regulación cultural) y la familiarización con los tres usos de las normas –que son obedecerlas, promover su cumplimiento, participar en su transformación– podrían facilitar la superación de las opciones cínicas. Nos preguntaremos si cabe imaginar –antes que una opción anticínica más global– una primera etapa: al menos superar las opciones que implican un respaldo a la ilegalidad.

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Esto implica que hay aspectos del cinismo –el desprendimiento, la opción por la verdad y el decir mediante el hacer– rescatables desde el enfoque de agencia cultural y de cultura ciudadana.

Las cinco opciones cínicas Primera opción cínica: la ilegalidad, un buen negocio El derrumbe del modelo económico socialista, la hegemonía mundial de la economía de mercado, el fin de las grandes narrativas (los grandes relatos históricos que reducían a pocas las opciones humanas –marxismo, liberalismo–), pero también la rápida urbanización, vienen obligando a los jóvenes a definirse vitalmente como receptores de ingresos económicos y consumidores. La publicidad, por un lado, y el ejemplo flagrante de consumos y placeres de los jóvenes más exitosos, por el otro, hacen que la autoimagen, la autoestima, el placer y la vida sexual dependan o parezcan depender cada vez más de esos ingresos y consumos. Dentro de las múltiples opciones que tiene el joven ante sí está el ingreso a la dinámica economía informal (irrespeto de normas de cualquier tipo), específicamente a la economía ilegal y eventualmente a su núcleo, el crimen organizado. La prolongación de la escolaridad facilita la democratización del acceso a la tradición académica que indudablemente da instrumentos potentes para enjuiciar críticamente las tradiciones y el ordenamiento social y económico heredado. Pero esa escolaridad prolongada se asocia, para una fracción creciente de jóvenes, al mismo tiempo a un aplazamiento de su inserción económica y a una ampliación inédita de expectativas. La movilidad social vía educativa es una posibilidad abierta a muchos, pero no a todos. Las expectativas de movilidad pueden encauzarse por la vía ilegal sacrificando el joven 4 o 5 décadas de esperanza de vida a cambio de menos de un lustro o una década de ingresos. Ocurre un auténtico intercambio de vida por dinero. Que debería ser tabú. El anonimato citadino facilita relaciones funcionales especializadas (y esporádicas, si fuere necesario) creando un mercado legal de bienes y servicios legales cada vez más profundo y complejo pero también creando un mercado ilegal de bienes y servicios ilegales. La diversificación de relaciones anónimas facilita que las ilegales se mimeticen en medio de las legales. La ilegalidad tiende a estar presente subrepticiamente en todos los ámbitos, en todos los territorios de la ciudad; pero en muchas ciudades hay territorios explícitamente controlados por la ilegalidad. Sobre todo si el futuro cuenta poco, la comparación de costos y beneficios lleva al joven, visto como actor racional, a escoger el camino de la ilegalidad. Así, lo que al comienzo es una conjetura por contrastar –el que algunos jóvenes se acercan a la ilegalidad motivados exclusivamente por móviles económicos– deviene mundo, configura realidad y gana legitimidad3 . Más complejo aún es cuando se suman varias motivaciones: por ejemplo, beneficio económico más actitud irreverente frente a las normas más deseo de aventura más presión de grupo. Para describir y analizar la posibilidad de este tipo de acción multi-motivada, Jon Elster (2007) acude a una especie de suma vectorial de motivos.

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Gráfica 1- Aceptación de justificaciones para desobedecer la ley. Frecuencias simples Encuesta de Cultura Ciudadana, 8 ciudades (Barrancabermeja, Barranquilla, Belo Horizonte, Bogotá, Caracas, Medellín, México DF, Popayán), Corpovisionarios 2008-2009.4 Fuente: Encuesta de Cultura Ciudadana (ECC)-Corpovisionarios Acceptance of justifications to disobey the law. Frequencies based on the enquiry about Civic Culture (ECC) in 8 Latin American cities including Bogota, Medellin, Caracas, Mexico City and Belo Horizonte. Source: ECC – Corpovisionarios 2008-2009

! Segunda opción cínica: la ilegalidad moral o culturalmente legitimada En este caso (o grupo de casos) la ilegalidad es acogida normativamente, ya sea por regulación cultural –norma social, presión de grupo, conformismo con el comportamiento percibido o atribuido a los demás,– ya sea por

regulación moral –por raciocinio y juicio moral, rebeldía personal, argumentada o emotiva, por placer, o como resistencia justificada o incluso como legítima desobediencia civil. Lo más sagrado de una sociedad puede convertirse en la razón de ser, en la bandera, de sus tendencias más

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Gráfica 2- Cuatro razones para desobedecer la ley: comparación de Bogotá, Medellín, Belo Horizonte, Ciudad de México y promedio de 13 ciudades encuestadas.5 Fuente: ECC- Corpovisionarios Four reasons to disobey the law. Comparison between Bogota, Medellin, Mexico City, Belo Horizonte and the average of 13 investigated cities. Source: ECC – Corpovisionarios 2008-2009

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6 Yopal y Aguazul (2004), Pereira (2005), Cali (2006), Neiva (2006), Santa Marta (2006), Ibagué (2007), Medellín (20072009), Barranquilla (2008), Popayán (2009), Barrancabermeja (2009)

7 Este resultado es consistente con los estudios sobre aversión a la pérdida, Si pierdes 10.000 pesos no te consuelas –como diría el sentido común y la microeconomía– con encontrarte 10.000. Necesitas encontrarte entre 23.000 y 27.000 (en líneas gruesas entre 2 y 3 veces lo perdido).

8 No se incluye la pregunta “Se justifica desobedecer la ley para defender propiedades o bienes” porque esa pregunta se incorporó en el formulario de 2008. La pregunta “Se justifica desobedecer la lay cuando es la única manera de luchar públicamente contra una ley o un régimen injusto” en la encuesta de 2001 y 2003 estaba divida. Las preguntas eran: “Se justifica desobedecer la ley cuando se lucha contra un régimen injusto” y “Se justifica desobedecer la ley cuando se lucha contra una ley injusta”. El resultado que aparece en la gráfica (en Bogotá 2001 y 2003) es el promedio de estas dos respuestas.

9 Para las Gráficas 3 y 4, para cada grupo de edad se promediaron los porcentajes de todas las opciones de respuesta de la pregunta sobre razones para desobedecer la ley. AJDL = (sumatoria de las frecuencias de cada justificación para desobedecer la ley / 11 (número de razones para desobedecer la ley).

autodestructivas (le escuché la idea a Leoluca Orlando, alcalde por dos períodos de Palermo, Sicilia, y famoso por haber desatado un movimiento social contra la mafia siciliana que complementó los notorios resultados de la justicia italiana en los 90). El tratamiento de esta ilegalidad que desvía los valores fundamentales de una sociedad y los pone a su servicio aparentando lo contrario es, según Leoluca, mucho más difícil de combatir que la ilegalidad motivada por dinero. Más policía, más justicia, más cárceles, no bastan. La conexión entre ilegalidad y principales valores de una sociedad plantea retos de diagnóstico y tratamiento. Las encuestas de cultura ciudadana practicadas en México D.F. (2008), en Caracas (2009), en Belo Horizonte (2008), en Bogotá (2001-2003-2008) y en 10 ciudades colombianas más6 , muestran tres razones por cada una de las cuales alrededor de la mitad de la población justificaría desobedecer la ley: si es la única manera de ayudarle a su familia; si es la única manera que queda de luchar pacíficamente contra una ley injusta o un sistema injusto; y si es para defender los bienes. La defensa de los bienes es aceptada como justificación para incumplir la ley por aproximadamente el doble de los que justifican desobedecer la ley cuando hay gran provecho económico. 7 La gráfica 1 muestra cómo en casi todos los casos disminuye con la edad la aceptación de 11 justificaciones para desobedecer la ley. En la leyenda, las 11 justificaciones aparecen ordenadas de mayor a menor según su importancia para los jóvenes de 14 a 19 años. En la gráfica 1 se ve cómo las justificaciones más aceptadas por los jóvenes son, en el agregado de las muestras, las tres mismas de la población en general: familia, justicia y defensa de los bienes. Las justificaciones que más disminuyen con la edad son: impunidad (cae un 54% al pasar de 24.5% en jóvenes de 14 a 19 a 11.2% en personas mayores de 60), antecedente exitoso de otra persona (cae 51%), única manera de alcanzar los propios objetivos (cae 49%) y familia (cae 44%). Las justificaciones que menos varían con la edad son: creencias religiosas (cae 16%), ofensa al honor (29%), injusticia (30%), defensa de bienes (33%).

Para tener una idea de cuánto varían las justificaciones al cambiar de ciudad, en la Gráfica 2 se comparan las cuatro justificaciones más frecuentes en 4 de las ciudades estudiadas con el promedio de las 13 donde se ha hecho la encuesta. Hay que tener en cuenta que las razones para desobedecer la ley en Bogotá han tenido una variación importante durante los últimos 8 años: de 2001 a 2003 la cultura de la legalidad en la capital colombiana aumentó, mientras que de 2003 a 2008 esta cultura disminuyó dramáticamente. De 2001 a 2003 todas las razones para desobedecer la ley disminuyeron el porcentaje de respuesta, de 2003 a 2008 sucedió lo contrario. La razón económica para desobedecer la ley se triplicó de 2003 a 2008. Este hecho se puede notar en la gráfica 3. Nótese que salvo Belo Horizonte en cuanto a una de las justificaciones (gran provecho económico), la variación al cambiar de ciudades es menor que la variación por cambio de grupo de edad. Claro que las ciudades hasta ahora estudiadas son todas latinoamericanas. Falta ver cómo responderían en ciudades europeas. Por otro lado promediar las frecuencias en que se acepta cada una de las 11 justificaciones nos da un cierto sentido de la cultura de la legalidad cuya variación por edad (o por ciudad, o por ciudad y grupo de edad) puede examinarse: ver Gráfica 4.9 En todas las ciudades estudiadas (menos en Belo Horizonte) los jóvenes de 14 -19 años siempre son los que más justifican desobedecer la ley. La tendencia a justificar desobedecer la ley disminuye, en todas las ciudades, a medida que aumenta la edad. (En Belo Horizonte crece al comienzo, de 26% en el grupo 14-19 a 28% en el grupo de 20-24). Las diferencias entre grupos de jóvenes 14-19 de las ocho ciudades son notorias: ver la gráfica 4. Los datos de Bogotá 2001 y sobre todo 2003 fueron sensiblemente mejores pero no son estrictamente comparables. Familia, justicia y defensa de los derechos de propiedad serían los tres valores en torno a los cuales se organiza

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Gráfica 3- Tres razones para desobedecer la ley. “Se justifica desobedecer la ley cuando…” Comparativo Bogotá 2001-2003-20088 Fuente: ECC- Corpovisionarios

Three reasons to disobey the law: "It is justified to disobey the law when . . ." Comparing Bogota 2001, 2003 and 2008. Source: ECC – Corpovisionarios 2008-2009

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Gráfica 4- Aceptación de Justificaciones para Desobedecer la Ley (AJDL). Promedio de las justificaciones a desobedecer la ley desagregado por grupo etario. 2008-200910 . Fuente: ECC- Corpovisionarios Average of justifications to disobey the law in different age groups. Source: ECC – Corpovisionarios 2008-2009

! en las ciudades latinoamericanas estudiadas la aceptación cultural y moral de la ilegalidad por parte de una fracción grande de la población. Esos tres valores no sólo neutralizan los sentimientos de culpa, vergüenza y temor al castigo legal. Los deforman y ponen al servicio de la ilegalidad. La culpa y la vergüenza y el miedo a sanciones promueven ahora la lealtad al crimen. El reconocimiento social, el sentido del deber, recaen ahora sobre el agente de la economía ilegal. Se produce entonces lo que hemos llamado el divorcio entre ley, moral y cultura y que consiste en la aprobación moral y/o cultural de actividades ilegales y la falta de respaldo moral o cultural a las obligaciones legales. Otro ejemplo muy puntual de especialización: ciertos círculos de jóvenes (fuente: programa de Radio Santa Fe, Bogotá, 2008) toman en arriendo revólveres para competir jugando a la ruleta rusa. Los códigos culturales compartidos por los participantes forman en este caso una especie de subcultura dentro de la cual se torna aceptable un comportamiento inmoral e ilegal: exponer a los jóvenes contrincantes a morir o a que sus pares vean derrumbarse su autoestima al no resistir la puesta a prueba de su valentía. La fragmentación y especialización cultural del territorio da para que en la gran ciudad contemporánea haya

escenario para las más diversas opciones vitales. El que la busca, la encuentra.

10/11 Ver nota 9.

Tercera opción cínica: cinismo legalista (basta con hacer cumplir la ley, por lo general por las malas) Una variante del cinismo, que podríamos llamar cinismo legalista, consiste en: i) reconocer como únicas normas válidas y suficientes las legales; ii) aunque en primera persona se reconozca la posibilidad de obedecer la ley (también) por las buenas, se piensa que la ley es obedecida por los demás por las malas. La policía y la justicia son efectivas porque inducen o acrecientan el temor a la sanción legal, multa o cárcel, básicamente. La clave está en la aplicación oportuna de las penas legales; las normas morales o sociales y toda regulación cultural son supervivencias o inventos irrelevantes e inocuos o contraproducentes. La segunda característica de esta opción es en cierto sentido la prolongación de la primera. Hay que aumentar los costos de la desobediencia a la ley, hay que castigar oportunamente las faltas más pequeñas. El joven que escoge esta opción es radicalmente escéptico sobre las otras motivaciones humanas. Cárcel y dinero parecen poderlo todo. Pensar sobre los otros así ayuda a

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Gráfica 5- Aceptación de Justificaciones para Desobedecer la Ley (AJDL). Jóvenes de 14-19 años por ciudad11 Fuente: ECC- Corpovisionarios Acceptance of justifications to disobey the law in one age group (14-19 years) in different cities. Source: ECC – Corpovisionarios 2008-2009

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12 “…hay muchas maniobras psicosociales por las cuales las auto-sanciones morales son selectivamente desconectadas de la conducta inhumana. La desconexión moral puede centrarse en la reestructuración cognitiva de la conducta inhumana en una conducta benigna o valiosa por: justificación moral, esterilización del lenguaje y comparación sesgada; negación de un sentido de agencia personal por dilución o desplazamiento de la responsabilidad; despreciando o minimizando los efectos lesivos de las acciones propias y culpando y deshumanizando a las víctimas” (Bandura, 1999, 193). También la subdivisión de las tareas entre firmas especializadas o la supervisión deficiente o la debilidad de las expresiones de censura social permiten diluir las responsabilidades.

pensar igualmente sobre sí. Con ello se facilita la puesta en acción de los diversos mecanismos de “desconexión moral” (Bandura, 1999)12. Se torna invisible el papel de los sentimientos morales y se obstaculiza la construcción de confianza. La acción colectiva y más aún la vida de organizaciones permanentes (empresas, organizaciones de la sociedad civil, tercer sector) se hacen difíciles ya que priman actitudes de desconfianza y comportamientos de gorrones –al depender toda acción colectiva de un poder centralizado de coerción y coordinación. Al mismo tiempo la gran ciudad es efectivamente el escenario de relaciones cada vez más crudas y crudamente reguladas por la ley y el contrato formal. Ahí se encuentran desde guiones para casi cualquier interacción, hasta

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