Cities Are Good For You - The Genius of the Metropolis
Not sure that this book lives up to its name. In the beginning, from a historical perspective Hollis makes his point - cities are what drove the innovation and change starting with the Renaissance and moving up to modern times. As he wanders through his other chapters though, it's not clear even from his own narrative that cities are still proving good for us. In chapters looking at some of the modern metropolises, mostly located in the developing world, despite his positive spin, some of the problems with infrastructure, services, pollution, overcrowding, social and economic exclusion, and transportation start to look pretty overwhelming and not particularly good for you or anyone else. It's not clear that we can actually get the better of many of these problems.
His chapter on Dharavi, the large slum in Mumbai, is interesting. Some of the people he interviews suggest the problem is not the slum itself, but the fact that it doesn't conform to western notions of what a city is. Interesting point. The other perspective is to see the slum as the place where the growing problems of large metropolises have already fully manifested themselves. I suppose you could redefine "slum" to make it a more positive or differentiated concept but if this is the future of the redefined city, I'm not sure it's one I'm interested in, or that I would define as "good for you."
The other topic Hollis seems to avoid is the effect of global corporate culture on cities and their decline. Where global corporate culture appears is in his discussion of Dharavi and the fact that it is wedged between a modern international airport and a new global corporate business development. He does make the point that the corporate citizens can come in and out of Mumbai without ever having contact with the Dharavi India, but he doesn't explore the link between those two universes and how the one feeds of the other. Another place he mentions corporate culture is in the Korean free trade zone developed on an island off their cost, a planned community built by and for large global corporations - his only critique is that he's not sure if this top down model of city design will really make people happy.
He does have some interesting sources to follow up on though:
Geoffrey West - complexity theory and its relation to cities
William H. Whyte - The Organization Man - the rise of corporate culture from the 50s on
- The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
- City: Rediscovering the Centre
Robert Putnam - Bowling Alone
Henri Lefebvre - Existentialism (a philosopher who gave it up to become a cabby, but still wrote books)
- La Droit de la ville
Jane Jacobs - Dark Ages Ahead
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