Can big cities be managed?

The challenges in Lagos and Oslo may seem very different, but there are similarities.

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The world’s cities are growing with tremendous force. More than half of the Earth’s population now lives in cities. Many of these cities have tens of millions of inhabitants. These are cities, especially in the south of the world, that we in Norway have hardly heard of.

Such urban growth creates problems for living conditions, health, the environment and politics. Do the nations have any control over such growth?

In today’s urbanized world, it is necessary to problematize the relationship between city and state. Who rules these big cities? Is it the nation state, governments and parliaments and their civil service? Or is urban growth completely out of the nations’ control, left to the initiative of the local population?

Perhaps it is the cities themselves that decide, and are now increasingly taking the reins to steer the right way out of the disaster?

Big cities that grow

Lagos in Nigeria can be an example. Today, the city has somewhere between 25 and 30 million inhabitants, one of the world’s largest cities. Every day 5,000-6,000 new people flock to this city. They are pushed out of poverty and despondency in an impoverished countryside with marginalized agriculture. They are lured into the big city, to work opportunities and dreams of sharing in the prosperity of the new middle class.

They are hardly met by any reception committee at the city border, or by any functioning social services or housing market: They have to find a room or a place between the sheds in an endless slum – find a tin roof, some plastic flakes, a can of water, a bit of dark travel. And preferably someone they know in the village, from the clan or family, someone who can help in a demanding transition.

How have the Nigerian authorities handled this violent pressure on the city? What about the chaos that occurs when electricity is not supplied or has to be tapped illegally, when the traffic queues into the city last three hours every morning and just as long in the evening, when there is no water in the pipes and the sewers are not emptied, when the health system breaks down, when the school is full, when there is no working public transport?

The country’s authorities are doing, as more and more nations with authoritarian or weak leadership: They resign, let the city sail its own sea and build itself a new capital inside the country, in Abuja, free of outcasts and beggars and slums and car queues and tired voters, with new airport and fine motorways.

Lagos continues to be Nigeria’s economic center of gravity, although the state apparatus has largely withdrawn. Lagos is obviously the most dynamic and creative city in Africa. It has considerably stronger economic growth than for the country as a whole, and an innovative, vibrant cultural life, not least in film and music. New businesses are constantly popping up behind flashy signs in backyards and alleyways.

Daily life in the city is increasingly run by informal networks, by neighborhoods that sort themselves out, gangs and clans, groups that organize school projects, sell water from tanks, collect sewage in plastic bags, run small clinics, offer everything you might need from stalls and sellers along the congested roads, and by increasingly corrupt and greedy “slum lords”.

With time and initiative, fragile sheds can be repaired, plastic sheets and tin sheets replaced with concrete blocks and bricks. It works, in a way. Most things can be bought, apart from formal papers on land and houses.

Lagos is probably the world’s most dangerous city to live in. It is not to Lagos that the Ministry of Information in Abuja sends Norwegian journalists and business delegations.

The city’s qualities – who rules?

In Egypt, General and President Abdel Fattah al’Sisi was tired of chaos in Cairo. He is now building a new capital in Wedian City, peacefully out in the desert. Indonesia moves its capital Jakarta from the coast to Nusantara in Java. Malaysia replaces Kuala Lumpur with Putrajaya. Myanmar was dissatisfied with the capital and has built a new one in Nyapyidaw. Kazakhstan has built a brand new capital, Astana, on steppe land to replace Almaty. And Turkmenistan has got Ashkhabad, with newly built skyscrapers clad in Italian marble. This looks good as nation-building and should strengthen an international image.

The growth of big cities continues globally, especially in the south, regardless of wars and pandemics. The 20 largest urban regions in the world, with 10 percent of the world’s population, now account for 53 percent of the world’s economic activity.

The growing large cities or metropolises increasingly form a continuous urban landscape. The suburbs are densified, the network of motorways, train lines, airports and power lines increases, natural areas are cut down and flattened, asphalted and built on, often with expressionless building boxes and warehouse buildings.

Many economists are clear on the advantages of cities, on the strength of the urban economy, for creativity, innovation and growth. They emphasize the cities’ density, mix of functions, short distances between businesses and innovative energy, housing, work, school and leisure activities. The “15-minute city” has become an important premise, both in the south and the north. Urban developers emphasize the city’s mix of public and private, good urban spaces, streets, squares and parks. We know it from our own cities, something we perhaps learned on holiday in the “South” – the joy of sitting out on a square or a wide pavement, perhaps with something to drink and with lots of people and lots of vitality around us. Many people have spent long evenings under shady trees along La Rambla in Barcelona.

The city is shaped from above and below

These urban qualities must be ensured both from above and below. The cities’ necessary infrastructure – roads, water and sewerage – must be built by decision and funding from above. Baron Georges Eugène Hausmann laid out wide boulevards and opened up medieval Paris. In the 1850s, engineer Joseph Bazalgette saved London from the unbearable and health-threatening stench of free-flowing sewage by building pipes for water and sewage and taming the banks of the Thames.

At the time, it was with the necessary big-minded and authoritarian measures from the superior authority. But last century’s city planners shaped completely new cities on the drawing board.

Homes, offices and other work were rationally built out in separate areas, only connected by major motorways. It gave us the American car city and the soulless and antisocial slums and business parks, the great dead ends of urbanization. Atlanta in the USA has the same number of inhabitants as Barcelona, ​​spread over an area ten times as large and has five times as much pollution in the air and water.

The difficult local democracy

I think most cities experience this difficult interplay between management from above and local initiative and self-government from below. In a fairly large city like Oslo, we see it in the City Council’s frustration when the state and county expand the E18 from the west in order to fill the city with far more cars than the municipality itself wants and city life can tolerate.

The challenges in Lagos and Oslo can seem very different. What is common is that visionary measures can be necessary and successful, such as the Oslo Fjord City Plan in the 1980s.

It is necessary to build infrastructure for the slums of Lagos, to deal with the poverty in Mumbai and the floods in Dhaka, the traffic chaos in Bogota and the pandemic in Wuhan. But one disadvantage is that the large, comprehensive projects are often rough and simplistic, they are thought of sector-wise, they tend to be monotonous, monofunctional and standardized, and often create greater social divisions.

A locally based, active democracy is becoming increasingly important in growing large cities. Cities are becoming more complicated, with more sectoral decisions and alienating technology. A local democracy with a mandate and political backing, originating in the district and the local community, is becoming increasingly important for the quality of large cities, for life in streets and quarters, from Oslo to Lagos. Cooperation between cities, across old administrative boundaries on the map, is also becoming increasingly important.

The newly settled millions in Lagos do not expect any superior authority to sort out their challenges. They know they have to deal with it themselves. It is a major challenge for democratic urban development, in the north and in the south – how the management of large cities can simultaneously capture and pass on some of the big city’s most important and attractive small-scale qualities, by utilizing the local community’s own strengths.