Why are they such pinnacles of cultural status? Why do we have a love/hate relationship with cities?Ĭities are very topical. The primary focus to be discussed here is how cities are engaged with in Western culture. These bleak images are smothering centuries-old visions of towns as civilised, sophisticated and gracious-everything we mean by ‘urbane’” Landry, et al. We highlight the squalor, not the vibrancy, the discomfort not the liberation. Cities are seen as unpleasant, noisy, polluted and raw. “But for Western Europeans in the second half of the twentieth century, struggling to create a post-industrial urbanism… Dr Jekyll is losing control of Mr Hyde. City life was once so aspirational, what has changed? As this process of conurbation increases, many societal and cultural battles are starting to take place on this broader stage that includes the city itself – since this is where most of us live. With many studies pointing to a correlation between population size and city density, this trend is only likely to accelerate into the future.
It seems inevitable that by the end of the twenty-first century a universal city, Ecumenopolis, will have come to comprise a world-wide network of hierarchically ordered urban forms enclosing only such tracts of rural landscape as necessary for man’s survival. Paul Wheatley describes global civilization as moving into a third phase of urbanisation – where all cities will effectively merge into one: Others have suggested that we’re now at a point where over 80% of the global population live in cities. 1% of all urban-spaces are larger than 100,000 people but accommodate 63% of the world’s population. For 99 % of the history of humans on earth, there were no cities. We have evolving into an almost exclusively urban ape. This is of importance because where we live influences how we perceive ourselves and how we experience our lives. These are topical disputes as to what our cities should look like, what experiences we should expect from them and who should be controlling this. Cities and urban life are being increasingly discussed in the media, internet and society.
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