From Cruel to Caring: Putting the Human Back at the Center of Our Cities
We are all familiar with the not-too-distant past. For the longest time, we have endured the structural and systemic problems that defined our society — pollution, climate change, resource depletion, conflicts, homelessness, unemployment, and poverty. Catch a glimpse of our cities and you’ll find how frayed our urban fabric has become. The manifestations of blight, congestion, environmental degradation, and social injustice have started to characterize our cities. And in one fell swoop, the COVID-19 pandemic happened. This black swan disrupted our lives and reversed the supposed advances we’ve made, if any.
We may have not really done much to eradicate the woes of our society long before the pandemic descended upon us. Worse, they only became more widespread and amplified as newer challenges were exposed by a fatal, far-reaching pandemic. Despite being in the era of sustainable development, our agenda of addressing the chronic problems persisting in our cities must be critically reexamined and reimagined.
First, we must collectively agree that urbanization in itself should redound to the common good, and must not trample on the rights of the least advantaged and the vulnerable. Our attempt to rethink urbanization must also set the conditions to prioritize the planetary and social boundaries to achieve and localize progress in our cities that can be felt by everyone. Our long game must be answerable to the rudiments of an inclusive society and balanced ecology where a safe space for humanity can flourish.
We can still reconfigure our cities: There’s a basketcase of solutions that we can adopt and an arsenal of strategies we can employ to make this happen. Chief of them is homing in on the perverse inequality constricting our cities. We need to increase our housing stocks and improve their affordability and accessibility. Safe and secure housing is a social equalizer and a touchstone for livability in many great cities across the globe. Let us also build high-performance and climate-smart buildings designed to efficiently use fewer resources — like energy, carbon and water — if we want to significantly reduce environmental pressures.
We should create equitable opportunities to move around in cities. In essence, our mobility must lead to positive economic stimuli, social cohesion, and environmental preservation. We should give people the ability to meet most of their everyday needs within a short walk, cycle or local public transport travel from their home. Ideally, our cities should become efficiently connected and highly mobile in which no one takes longer than 15 to 20 minutes to get to their place of work or school, and access essential services. To operationalize this, we must design flexible and compact neighborhoods with inclusive streets and barrier-free spaces. Streets designed to prioritize motorized transport is an obsolete and unsustainable model that must be quashed in a post-pandemic world. Generous greenspaces are an imperative and must be considered as public health investments from the get-go. As we move forward to rethinking our cities, let’s also bring food closer to our homes by creating long-term advocacy on innovating agricultural systems and supply chains in the urban context — think of rooftop hydroponics and containerized gardening.
As we increase urban resilience, we need to embrace digital transformation by delivering improved services through technology and data. We need to spur better integration of essential services and provisions through wired and wireless digital infrastructure. With the help of artificial intelligence, robotics, blockchain, and Big Data, we can potentially deter the spread of epidemics and survive catastrophic events.
In the world’s highly urbanized regions, we have seen exemplary initiatives and innovative approaches to usher in urban change. In the Philippines, unprecedented bike lane networks, rationalized traffic schemes, and reorganized public transport systems have unfolded. Smart ICT infrastructure to support its economy through a national framework is encouraged by Vietnam. In Bangladesh and Nepal, women are pioneering ways to harness mobile technology to solve their local community issues. India, an economic behemoth, is masterminding a framework on climate-smart cities. All of these add up to create just, welcoming, and inclusive built environments that level the playing field for the urban citizenry.
Reshaping the urban environment may require more than our combined dreams and aspirations. We have to deal with the many complexities and wicked problems that preclude us from attaining long-term urban sustainability. We have to put the users at the very center and develop empathy to better understand the needs of those who are normally excluded in pivotal decision-making.
The discourse on the urban future that we want must emanate from the wider cross-section of our society, and it should become everybody’s personal agenda.
