The economic progress
of nations has come to be inseparable from the progress of cities. First
comes the great population shift, as farms are abandoned for
high-rises, jobs in the rice fields for jobs on the production lines.
Once you have most of your population in the cities, all kinds of forces
can turbo-charge growth: the faster sharing of knowledge as people see
one another more frequently and their productivity intensifies; envy and
competition, as people look out over air shafts and alleyways and see
their neighbors clawing up the economic ladder and determine to outstrip
them. It happened in Europe and the United States, and it has been the
story of the growth of newer markets in Asia, Latin America and now
Africa.
A History of Future Cities
By Daniel Brook
Norton, 457 pages, $27.95
MATTIAS KLUM/National Geographic Stock
New view Downtown Dubai.
For the
Davos class, the world long since ceased to be one of nations and became
one of cities, seamlessly plumbed together to enable the flow of
high-end capital, both financial and human. An expanding class of the
rich and their service providers can now whoosh to and from Tokyo, São
Paulo, Geneva, London and New York, barely noticing the difference.
It is more useful to think of the
leaders of these cities less as local political hacks than as Doges with
influence far beyond their city walls. When he only headed his own
company, Michael Bloomberg was merely one of the richest businessmen in
the world. With the mayoralty of New York filling his sails, he has
become much more.
In "A History of Future Cities," Daniel
Brook describes the rise of four cities that were designed to thrive far
out on the economic and social frontier: St. Petersburg, Mumbai,
Shanghai and Dubai. They were intended by their planners to be sources
of financial and intellectual rocket fuel, venues for the world's most
ambitious organizations and people. And so they proved to be.
St. Petersburg was the heady fantasy of
Peter the Great (1672-1725), one of the most engaging characters in Mr.
Brook's book. Peter had developed a taste for Western Europe as a
youth, frequenting the taverns of Moscow's German Quarter, an orderly,
elegant pocket of the city whose residents kept up-to-date with European
ideas and technology. It was, Mr. Brook writes, a great contrast to the
"xenophobic, theocratic Russia into which Peter was born." So restless
and curious was Peter, he set off in his mid-20s for Amsterdam, "not as
Peter I, Tsar of All the Russias, but as Peter Mikhailov, a simple
Russian carpenter hoping to augment his skills."
He drank in all that the mighty
Netherlands had to offer and determined to create a Russian port city as
open and innovative as Amsterdam. The great difference between Peter
and the conveyor belt of politicians who travel to Silicon Valley these
days in the hope of re-creating its magic is the scale of ambition.
Peter wanted not just to match the best of Western architecture but to
outdo it. He wanted not just communities of scholars but museums and a
university to rival any in the world. Catherine the Great, later in the
18th century, inherited his addiction to building and pillaged Europe's
art collections to adorn the Winter Palace. "The more you build, the
more you want to build," she said. "It's a sickness somewhat akin to
being addicted to alcohol."
Of course not all great cities are
guided by the hand of despots with cultural aspirations; sometimes it is
the invisible hand of commerce that does most the work. Shanghai and
early Bombay were developed largely to serve the trading interests of
the British. In the mid-19th century, Shanghai was known as the "El
Dorado of the East," an extra-territorial city that drew ambitious men
from all over the world. There were still racial hierarchies, Mr. Brook
tells us, with the whites on top and the Chinese on the bottom, but
Shanghai's great appeal was its social fluidity.
Even while the rest of the Chinese
empire imploded, Shanghai kept busy getting rich. The Shanghai Chinese
who came into contact with the foreigners developed different habits,
ideas and ambitions from the rest of their countrymen. And more than a
century later, when the Communist leadership decided to seed its own
form of Chinese capitalism, Shanghai became its natural greenhouse.
On the Asian Subcontinent, Bombay
Island was a wildly diverse port town that attracted opportunists from
across Asia—even before the British decided to invest heavily in its
development. The Indians in the city were among the most commercially
minded and Westernized in the country, and the most friendly to the
British.
In return, the British, and the city's
mid-19th-century governor, Sir Bartle Frere, decided to create what Mr.
Brook calls a "factory for producing Westernized Indians—people who,
though they still practiced their non-Christian religions and wore their
distinctive fashions, would be English on the inside." In a spirit of
cultural uplift that Peter the Great might have admired, Frere hired the
best architects in London to build a new Bombay, inspired by English
architecture but tailored to the climate of southern India.
All three of these cities—St.
Petersburg, Shanghai and Bombay—suffered while their countries pursued
centralized economic planning. Robbed of their freedom and the oxygen of
unfettered trade, their entrepreneurial spirits went out and with them
their reasons for being. It took dramatic changes at the end of the 20th
century for them to rediscover their footing, or something
approximating it.
St. Petersburg sloughed off its Soviet
name, Leningrad, in 1991, and the city and its people were in the van of
Russia's rush to privatization. The excesses and mismanagement of that
process hit the city hard, and it became a magnet for criminals. But
President Vladimir Putin has scrubbed up the city's historic buildings,
trying to make it the most European of Russia's cities. Today it is
affluent, cultured and elegant but lives under Mr. Putin's peculiar
shadow.
Shanghai's skyline has become the image
of capitalist China. Even Daniel Craig's James Bond had to go there in
"Skyfall," to prove his modernity. But as Mr. Brook notes, Shanghai is a
success that the Chinese government struggles to control. "In its de
facto deal with the central government, Shanghai's economic openness is
contingent upon the authorities keeping the city's cultural and
intellectual life under wraps." When Tom Cruise's "Mission Impossible
III" was shown in China, scenes were cut that showed laundry hanging
from Shanghai buildings. It was inconsistent with the city's image.
Mumbai may generate an outsize share of
India's gross domestic product, given that it accounts for just 2% of
its population, but according to Mr. Brook it is a deeply dysfunctional
place. The rich have turned inward, creating First World colonies for
themselves in a city where clean drinking water remains a privilege
rather than a right. The rich have their special sphere, air-conditioned
and clean, the poor their slums, and there is no sense of community
shared between the two.
In the meantime, Dubai has seized its
moment. Starting in the 1970s and accelerating through the late 1990s,
under the leadership of Sheikh Mohammed, it built extraordinary hotels
and office parks long before there were people to fill them. It
attracted international businesses and universities, offering them sweet
deals to set up branch offices. After 9/11, the investment paid off, as
Dubai became the most important safe haven in the Middle East.
The pleasure in Mr. Brook's unusual
history is in his descriptions of the creation of these cities. The
deeper message, though, is about the tensions such cities create. It
takes an autocrat to design something so ambitious as a city of the
future. But if successful, such a city will chafe under autocracy. You
cannot attract the world's best and brightest and expect them to work
brilliantly in silence.
The built environment of London, Bartle
Frere once noted, "expresses what the people think, feel or mean, and
not what they are told to think, feel or mean." It "grows from within."
We may swoon at the engineering and organizational feats of these new
cities, with their gleaming airports and sleek monorails. But as Mr.
Brook writes: "The true city of the future is not simply the city with
the tallest tower or the most stunning skyline but one that is piloted
by the diverse, worldly, intelligent people it assembles and forges."
For a city truly to succeed, it must allow individuals their freedom as
well.
—Mr. Delves Broughton's latest book is
"The Art of the Sale: Learning From the Masters About the Business of Life."
A version of this article appeared March 9,
2013, on page C7 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with
the headline: The Rise of the Cosmopolis.
