How viable are purpose-built cities?

By PETER MUIRURI

Smart cities built from scratch have been hailed as the future of urban settlement.

Here, everything works by the clock. Clean and spacious streets with little traffic. No roadside parking as the cities have well designed underground parking. Immaculate towers rise from the ground and hug the sky. Elaborate recycling of garbage and grey water – the very epitome of green living. 

Many of us can only envision such. However, some leading master builders in the world are casting a dark shadow over such top-down mode of city construction.

Adam Greenfield, author of Against the Smart City, was quoted by BBC’s online edition saying such smart settlements are “achingly pretentious, and perhaps less successful than most”.

No guarantee

He added that the prospects of building such a city from scratch may be appealing, but is no guarantee of long-term fit for the future.

Greenfield gives the example of Palmanova in Italy built in 1593. It was described by one American professor, Edward Wallace Jr, as one of “the numerous planned cities that look intriguing on paper but were not especially successful as livable spaces”.

The city proved so unpopular that criminals willing to move in were offered official pardons.

The BBC report says the problem with the newly designed smart cities lies in the disconnect between the people designing them and those who have to stay there.

The report cites a British architectural firm that started work on the new city of Masdar in the desert near Abu Dhabi but shelved a below-ground cooling system.

Experts interviewed by the BBC stated that to be successful, “it’s more important that cities are free to evolve as needed than follow a fixed plan of a master builder.”

In short, our cities will largely remain the same — the traditional social space for people to interact and work.

— Additional information from www.bbc.com