The following is an adaptation of the post by the same title appeared in el-oso.net, with a few of my own conclusions. In the original post “oso” explores some of the common patterns in the evolution of cities.
Chapter 1: Make-shift Slums
As Kevin Kelly rightly points out, “every city begins as a slum … a seasonal camp with free-wheeling make-shift expediency.” Cities are founded on economic opportunity, spontaneous slums, and lawless saloons. Eventually gender ratios equal out, churches move in, government takes shape, and urban planning is institutionalized.
Chapter 2: Hegemony Rules
During the transition from slum to civic center some social group usually takes power and dictates policy. It tends to be the ethnic majority though in the case of colonized countries that was almost never the case. In most cities in the United States power lied among the WASP community. Ethnic minorities were pushed out to the edges while the elite built Victorian homes around the downtown business districts and plazas.
Chapter 3: Suburbanization or scalability of the dream
This is the chapter that takes on different manifestations depending on the ethnic and class make-up of a city, but the basic concept is still generally applicable. During WWII in the United States there was an influx of black americans seeking work in urban centers. After WWII four developments (other than blatant racism) led to white flight from urban centers to suburban communities. First was population density. After the war soldiers returned home to urban centers, but those who moved in while they were gone also remained. Then there was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which began the process of desegregating the country’s public schools. White parents felt that their children would receive a lower level of education in a desegregated school, and so they moved to suburbs where neighborhoods and their schools were all white. Third, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 enabled the workday commute from suburb to city center. Lastly, suburban developers had large returns to scale as they could purchase a single large plot of land and build hundreds or even thousands of nearly identical homes.
Chapter 4: Urban Gentrification
While the majority of white Americans from my generation grew up in mostly white suburban neighborhoods, our schools and public institutions became increasingly integrated and multicultural. Television and mass media brought the Cosby Show, The Jeffersons, Fresh Prince, and Family Matters into our living room. And then came hip-hop. All of a sudden there was nothing less cool than to have grown up in the suburbs. Young people from affluent suburbs moved into lower-income urban neighborhoods where they opened coffee shops, art galleries, and cocktail bars. Awkwardness and antagonism between the newly arrived affluent and the established lower-income population were inevitable. In the worst of cases property prices increased and low-income renters were forced to move out to other neighborhoods. However, there has also been an effort by young people across different classes in gentrified neighborhoods to shape a common aesthetic around hip-hop, indie rock, street art, and skateboarding.
Chapter 5: Back to the basics?
For a long time one of the ideas that persisted across many of my posts was that in the future all cities would share a common global culture. I wasn’t predicting the future as much as I was describing what I believe to be the advanced society in which I have the honour to live. With one of the most multicultural societies in the world, Toronto does well in integrating such diversity. But often times the protocol to coexists without incurring into cultural mishaps leaves us with a very superficial relationship. I sense that many more people would want to get closer and more integrated. While it is difficult to predict how cities will continue to evolve, I’m suggesting there is plenty of interest in creating spaces where the spirit of spontaneity, chaos and lawless goodness can favour a far more amenable environment, with smaller communities of people more open to experiment with their relationships. All we need to do is figure out what factors will promote such an environment.
Over the past few hours members of the Tamil community in Toronto blocked one of the main highways connecting downtown with the rest of the city. While I won’t claim any knowledge whatsoever of the situation in Sri Lanka, these demonstrations have me reading as much as I can about the current situation. I thought that was the least I could do, realizing that I live in the same city as 200,000 of them, according to MSNBC.
The protesters had been taking the streets of Toronto at least since January, in most cases in a very organized fashion. Perhaps too organized since I barely noticed them before. But only events like this one get the attention of the masses and quickly echo through the news, blogosphere and twitter-verse, generating an overwhelming voice difficult to ignore. The tools of civil disobedience seemed to have produced the results they were hoping for: attention.
As I got involved into the various streams of people commenting about the event, I realized there were two kinds of people participating in the online debate: the pervasive anonymous comment condemning the act and manifesting hatred for blocking a highway and the opinionated intellectual that has taken a position (for/against) the protests. This got me thinking about the role of a multicultural city like Toronto in the world scene.
Toronto is a diverse city. Over 50% of its inhabitants come from another country. What should the role of a metropolis like this one be in the international context? Is multiculturalism only a marketing tactic to attract more people or should it be a baseline for policy making and government action? On days like today, it feels like no one is prepared to see the big picture, yet I believe that the next few months will see a myriad of causes take the stage as minority groups face the consequences of the current crisis.
In a world that is posed to see radical changes over the next few months, flexing our participatory muscles should not be taken lightly. I’ve always believed that Toronto is among a very small group of cities that model what the future will bring us: a diverse population happily integrated into one very prosper society. Figuring out what our role is in events like this one must be a priority. For now, it seems that our civil role is to amplify the voice of these movements. I say that is good thing. But I suspect this is only the beginning.
You can read President Obama’s inauguration speech at the Huffington Post, but here is one of my favourite passages:
For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
With the ultimate objective of documenting all the cultures of the world in a collection of documentaries, the project Cultures on Film states its mission as:
Diffuse hatred and prejudice through documentary films that expose viewers to unrealized elements of cultures from every country in order to encourage each other to expand our horizons and challenge ourselves to discover the oneness of life and the interdependence of all beings.
One of their current global projects “The Human Experience” focuses on countries that are currently in conflict or poses under-represented cultures in the mainstream media such as Iran, Cuba, Rwanda, Cyprus, Romania, Indonesia and a few others.
Anyone knows of a similar project? Leave a comment.
A few days ago I was paraphrasing philosopher Alain de Botton in my post about the future of the city. A more accurate transcription of his words follows:
True diversity comes from communication and contact [...] if there is no meeting point [the city] is not diverse [... a city] can look superficially very diverse, but if you actually look at the levels of integration and communication and public space and places where very different communities can come together, then all of the sudden [the city] can start looking at lot less diverse.
He was talking about London. Today I came across an article in Spacing magazine that questions the same issues, this time in Toronto. The article “Come Together” by Dale Duncan reports the activities of residents associations in what is known as “immigration gateway communities”. To understand the context, it is important to know some stats about the Toronto population mix:
30% The percentage of all recent immigrants to Canada that live in Toronto.
50% The percentage of Torontonians born outside of Canada
47% The percentage of Torontonians who have a mother tongue other than English or French
Immigration gateway communities is a creative way to label rough neighbourhoods characterized for lack of infrastructure and a high turn-over among their residents as people get out of them as soon as they can afford to do it. While the city has clearly identified 13 priority neighbourhoods, it is their citizens who are making a difference by creating the spaces where people can come together to talk about their needs, frustrations and sometimes even find solutions and have a stronger representation at City Hall.
When people migrate to the big cities assuming the better life style they will find, the reality of these communities -the only areas where they can afford to live in- quickly sinks in. Having travelled from so far away to find these obstacles only emphasizes the gap that exists between social groups. It aggravates the situation as they can see people around them with access to the life style they dream about, but they can’t get to it. For some this gap is an unmanageable trap as access to resources and opportunities becomes increasingly difficult. In the best case scenario the years that it will take a new immigrant to “graduate” from these neighbourhoods into better places will be remembered as a necessary sacrifice to realize the ultimate dream.
A responsible city has to create opportunities for integration. Not only by developing infrastructure that makes “gateway communities” better connected with the productive engine that requires these immigrants, but by creating public spaces that invite all the various social groups within a city to converge… More than two years ago I wrote the post “observe, analyze, generalize” as a tribute to what I was convinced was the quintessential “meeting point” suggested by Alain de Botton. In Toronto we call it Harbourfront Centre.
To be fair with the City of Toronto, there are major plans to improve infrastructure to better connect some of these areas via a new railway system. If only some of these plans could live up to the standards of other major cities with transportation that is not only functionally efficient but a distinctive trademark that makes it as unique as its diversity.
In a passionate defense of real multiculturalism delivered back in 2003 at TED, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis used the wealth of his experiences with some of the most fascinating indigenous cultures of the world to build a powerful argument in favor of the value of cultural diversity:
The world in which we live in does not exist in some absolute sense but is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adapted choices that our lineage made albeit successfully many generations ago. And of course we all share the same adaptive imperative, we are all born, we all bring our children to world, we go through initiation rights, we have to deal with inexplicable separation of death so it shouldn’t surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, we all have art. But what is interesting is the unique cadence of the song, the rhythm of the dance in every culture.
Together the myriad cultures of the world make up a web of spiritual life and culture life that envelops the planet and that is as important to the well being of the planet as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as the biosphere. And you may think of this cultural web of live as being an ethnosphere. You may define the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas and inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness
And presents an alarming picture of its “erosion”:
Just as the biosphere is being severely eroded, so too is the ethnosphere and if anything at a far greater rate: No biologist would dare suggest 50 percent of all species or more of them are on the brink of extinction, because it’s simply not true. And that, the most apocalyptic scenario in the realm of biological diversity scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity and the great indicator of that is language loss.
Blaming not change or technology for the damage to its integrity, but power, he cautions that the model we’ve all grown to accept as our modern society may not be sufficient down the road:
It is humbling to remember that our species is perhaps being around 600,000 years. The Neolithic revolution which gave us agriculture, at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed, the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood, we created hierarchy, specialization, surplus, is only 10,000 years ago. The modern industrial world as we know is barely 300 years old. Now that shallow history doesn’t suggest me we have all the answers for all the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia
His quest for preserving as many cultures as possible, saving their ancient wisdom for the benefit of future generations is certainly in pair with the ideals that keep me going with this project.
While I’ve attempted to provide accurate transcription for the highlights of this talk, take 20 minutes to watch the entire presentation. It is worth it.
Although the Face of Tomorrow project seems to have come to a halt after 2004, the idea that cities assimilate their migrants and eventually their inhabitants mix giving place to new generations of cosmopolitan beings with ancestors from all over the globe is still a powerful one.
The large metropolises of the world are magnets for migrants from all parts of the planet resulting in new mixtures of peoples. What might a typical inhabitant of this new metropolis look like in one or two hundred years if they were to become more integrated?
In Turkey and particularly in Istanbul, situated as it is at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, you can see how this process has been at work over the last thousand years as waves of humanity from Central Asia, Arabia, Greece and Rome have been absorbed. The resulting population is fairly uniform suggesting that if you could combine all the faces in a city right now you would be looking at the future face of that city.
With a larger inventory of faces it would be possible to compare how highly cosmopolitan cities differ from those with a strong hegemony of a predominant culture.
Although the 
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