The question of peripheries,
is finally almost the majority of the newcomers
who are going to settle down in the cities periphery, so the pressure
will be, not on city-centres, or on the today's existing city,
but on territories which are not urbanised yet, so the natural
territories that surround the cities.
This is the main issue with peripheries.
Then, last issue, widespread mobility,
as we can see, statistics are helping us for that, people are more and more
mobile, they move around more and more, have to cover
more and more distance, often due to the effects of urbanization.
The more the city sets out the world, the more the city extends itself, the more each inhabitant
has to cover, against their will, most
of the time, distances everytime bigger.
So let's start from our urban mutations, let's start from our important issues.
Now we are going to show our big
challenges for the african city of tomorrow.
Challenge number one: the right to the city, the right
for everyone to have a spot in the city.
Challenge number two: the question about climate and environment.
Challenge number three: reduction of mobilities.
Challenge number four: rethink the new forms of democracy.
Here we are, those are the four main challenges for the african city of tomorrow.
The right
to the city, is the issue of land, of accession to the land, and the question is,
just: what are we going to do with those thousands, millions of persons,
who can't have access to the land on a free-market,
and who are at the end of the day the products of the economic system we set up?
This, is a fundamental question, what can we do
with this majority of inhabitants of poor cities?
The second aspect related to the right to the city is, advertising of public space.
Advertising within the meaning of public, and its
corollary that is privatization of a certain number of places.
We see more and more gated
communities, which means that entire streets don't belong anymore
to the public field, the public space, with this noble concept of
advertising, that would allow everyone, or that allows
everyone to move freely, and we are in
a situation in which more and more territories are privatized.
And this is an extremely important question, that we should take
into account in our planification, in the next classes, where we are going
to slowly learn how to plan, but, make sure you keep
in mind that, we have that issue of the right of birthplace.
What can we do with that majority of people
who don't have access to a free property market?
We will have to put them somewhere.
So what to do with this trend of privatization of public spaces?
Second challenge: environmental challenge, this is actually an
energy challenge.
Countries, societies can go in three distinct directions.
The first one, which is to link prosperity to increase
of the quantity of used energy, or useable, per inhabitant.
The more energy I consume, the more prosperous I am.
Second possibility, is to transform, to have the highest return we can get
per inhabitant.
So we are making sure that we use
in the best way as we can, with a high return, energy for each one of us.
And third possibility, third option, is to
reduce, finally, the quantity of energy per inhabitant.
So those choices depend on the States, depend on certain cities,
but depend on the choice of society we are going to make.
We now today that if we keep on consuming more and more, we are going
to extend our ecological footprint, and that we would
tend to reduce more the consumption of energy.
And we also have to take that into account,
as we have on one hand a city that
is more and more spreading out, and that requires in particular
mobilities every time bigger, so an energy
expenditure per inhabitant everytime bigger, while the
sustainability would rather force us to do the contrary.
So nowadays, poor people have to
move more and more often, further and further.
Why?
Because they are going to look for cheap
fields on the periphery, fields that are the only ones
they may be able to occupy, or buy, if they get to
reach this minimum price on the free market of land.
So we are going to increase displacements of people, that makes
the aspect of mobility, I would say the overall
expenditure of the family increase and will play an extremely
important part, and get to situations in which people are sometimes
under house arrest, as they just can't pay their mobility.
If I had to use 99% of my salary just to travel to get
my salary, well it would be more advantageous for me to stay at home without doing anything.
So this is an extreme case, of course, but
more and more often we have to face those issues.
And therefore,
there is a huge lack of social justice, as at the end of the day,
rich people can go everytime faster, those for which
mobility and distances are not a problem, and
poor people, the poorest ones are the ones who suffer from this situation.
A small anecdote is that if we take again Ivan
Illich in energy and equity, the wheel is not
the main invention, but the ball
bearings has allowed the invention
of the bike, and has finally allowed that with
muscular strength, we can move forward much more quickly.
So it has allowed to do much bigger
distances with the same muscular strength than we used to have before.
We should have in mind, when we talk about
regulating, reducing mobilities, that mobility today
creates segregation.
Speed potential allows rich people to go
further and further, faster and faster.
Mobility consumes a lot of energy, no matter what mode of transport we use.
Except for walking and riding a bike which are human muscular
strength, everything works rather with electricity or oil.
And we have to know that, having that
in mind, mobility creates urban sprawl.
Its corollary is that urban sprawl also creates mobility.
So we are in a self-supplying system, and
if we want to regulate or reduce those mobilities,
we have to act for those sprawl issues, on those issues
about energy and on the spatial segregation.
When we talk about redefining the forms of democracy, we
obviously talk about participation, participatory process, increasingly
fashionable in all the cities, even if
we realise today how big the limits of those processes are.
There is a big difference between asking
for advice, and taking a decision all together.
Those participatory processes pose a certain amount of questions and set limits.
The first, is the question about participatory democracy
against a representative
democracy. Who are those people who are not
elected, and who takes part in those processes? This is a question
we have to have in mind, as in a democracy, we have to elect
a certain amount of people, to whom we are giving the power to represent us.
Of course, we are in the case of school, the case
of theoretical figure, but the question of participation is about that.
Who are those people who are invited in the participatory processes?
The second question, is about scale.
Can we use participatory processes in order to negotiate,
manage, imagine, plan the very big infrastructures?
Is it possible to sit all together
around the table to think about big highways within a city?
Does it make sense to ask for advice to absolutely
everybody about those questions of big infrastructures?
Third question is that we realise that
people only react about their own situation.
It is the not in my backyard, the nimby, that we agree with, but not in front of one's own house.
And finally, those participatory processes are a
sum of individual interests, but we never talk,
or rarely, about everyone's interest, of public's interest.
So those different challenges lead us to ask a certain amount of questions.
Which are: which city do we want? For whom?
For what kind of inhabitants? What role should the elites of those city play?
Let's take a fictional example.
In a city that would have twenty or thirty vehicules for 1000 inhabitant,
am I going to create the same type of road or
highway than in cities that would have 500 vehicules for 1 000 inhabitants?
When I create a road, who am I going to favour?
Which population?
Is it for everyone, or is it only for a small
proportion, an elite which has access to
those infrastructures, that can ride way faster
than others?
I am not putting any value judgment,
we only have to wonder for whom are we making the city.
Is it for the highest number?
Or is it for a small one? So which city do we want,
which society do we want, what role do we attribute to all its inhabitants.
And that backtracks on the question of the right to the city,
to the first challenge I was mentioning
earlier, which is what are we doing,
how do we plan a city that could
take into account those tens of millions
people all over the planet that who don't
have access to the land market, because simply,
the smallest parcel is
already too eminently expensive for their economical power?
I leave this question open,
we will come back to it later on in our class.
We talked about the issues, the challenges, some questions.
To conclude, I would like to introduce the question
of the city's reading levels.
When we want to understand phenomenon,
there are three different reading levels.
The first one is the formal and technical one.
It is often
the level of physical planification, networks' level.
The second one, is the social practices level.
At the end, the inhabitants of the city have practices
that define a certain amount of behaviors, and we can,
or we could read the city, and read the spaces
of the city only regarding those social practices.
A beach for example, somewhere on the atlantic coast.
Finally, the third level is the symbolic one.
No more technical questions here, no more
social practices questions, we are
reading questions of representation and picture.
And this level is often less
used, the reading level that we forget
a little bit, but that is extremely important.
This is the position that we take
regarding the others, we have a symbolic position.
So the idea is to ask ourselves when
we try to plan, not only about
the network question, it is not
enough in itself, we still have to figure which
are the practices that people will do on this network, and which
are the imaginary ones and the representations that
will develop around those uses.
And this is only once we have taken into account those three
reading levels that we can truly take
into account all the size of the issue.