I want one day to return to being soil in my city. And I want to do that with some pride.
Pride that this place is and was a reflection of something meaningful. Pride that in my city’s very soul reflected through its design, through its materiality, through its functionality is held in my DNA, my realities, my hopes, my dreams and yours also.
I do not want to be a mere statistic in my city, and nor do I wish for you to be. I want to be in, of and for my city. I want my city to be me, and I want my city to be you.
I’ve spent decades thinking about and working on cities, mainly in Africa but also around the world, aiming to improve their management, planning, and functionality, to make them smarter. However, I am increasingly convinced that the real task is to make cities fundamentally better. We do indeed need a revolution because this is not just a task in continuity. We need some actual disruption in the course.
What is it about cities, that I advocate and speak for and try to understand better as an urbanist, that makes them a mere necessary evil for millions of urban dwellers around the world? What are they elevating and what on earth are they hiding?
The question of what cities hide is one that I have thought of often and perhaps the answer lies in this. Where is the spirit and culture in our cities? Where is the space for ritual in our cities? Where are spaces for innocence and play in our cities?
I have visited immigrant districts in almost every European city I have been to, to see how they live. And they’re always there, somewhere… You just have to ask, where are the others? Where are the aliens in our cities?
I have seen informality in the global south go from being a non-existent irrelevant fact to being an over theorized fad, changing nothing either way. Where are the economically and socially disenfranchised in our cities?
I have seen parks and other public spaces designed to keep undesirables and hang abouts out of them.
I have seen the most expensive and best endowed parts of the city failing to do the bare minimum to ensuring inclusion of differently abled people.
So where are the lessers, the moneyless, the homeless, the jobless, the genderless? Our cities hide a lot and primarily they hide difference.
We need a change from a city order that is no longer serving us, so what is it that needs to be revolutionized?
There are three elements that we could consider for our revolution as a start: changing imagination, changing inclusion and changing institutions.
IMAGINATION
Regarding imagination, why do cities look the same everywhere? What is it that makes cities good cities? Is it their fossilized histories? Is it monumentalize legacies of power and capital? Is it architectural? Is it the human and non-human inhabitants? The rivers, the mountains, the desert, the animals, the insects. What makes a city good, resilient, sustainable, proud?
Imagination is an expression of place, of time, of constituencies. Its authenticity, aspiration, possibility. It is a kind of magic that has to happen in a situated and social way with a creative vision of its own.
But the question of whose imagination a city invites and permits and supports is the first area where we have to focus in this revolution. Because there is a globalized idea of cities that would have us monocrop cities everywhere, making them all the same kind of shiny singular rendering of a smart city, which is exclusive, which is hostile, which is irrelevant.
INCLUSION
My second question is why do cities hide and exclude certain actors?
We have a contemporary discourse that has appropriated the idea of inclusion to suggest that it is an end, that we can from above create a so-called inclusive city, within a dominant paradigm. But this, I think, is a lie.
It is a lie because the process of city making has long been exclusively left to the power, vision and expertise of a few, repeatedly reproducing places that have neither the capacity nor the intent to include all of that the urban holds.
Participation in city-making is reserved for some rather than for everyone, even for anyone. Inclusion means much more.
Inclusion has to reclaim the rights for many urban actors, including indigenous and new communities, not just the occupants and consumers in cities. Otherwise, we will end up with very angry places, where people, nature and spirits feel alienated, and respond with anger because those places are not home.
INSTITUTIONS
Institutions have often been described as the rules of the game. And, indeed, they are. Cities are places of both explicit and hidden contradictions. Their logic is what keeps them on their trajectory, and it can be very opaque and difficult to notice or even question. Often, this becomes a surprise for both, their victims, and their executioners.
Cities can really be an illusion of safe habitat, of thirst, quenching of pleasure, of prosperity, and of community, while generally being structured to meet these, but only in small doses, and serving particular actors in a very hierarchical game, where the dice is loaded and the rules are stacked the way that cities work: their laws, their regulations, and their norms, all codified in their architectures.
Guarded by the gatekeepers, they will always ensure that the city idea sustains as a property market that grows, recycles, and sometimes hides capital that sustains and reproduces the status quo. Hopes and dreams are kept alive, but the rules of the game are kept intact as they are there in order to keep this social hierarchy intact. They are all complicit. We gentrify cities because the “haves” matter more than the “have nots”. There are pervasive hierarchies, and we must question them.
So in order for cities to become more than brutal real estate ventures protected by the state, the rule book must to be questioned. Unfortunately, this transversality is yet an illusion for many of our institutions.
What would it look like if we invited new roles and relationships in the state and in the capital? Could capital support endogenous novelty and could the state co-govern with civic actors? I’m calling for a revolution against an order of hidden people, hidden agendas and hidden logics; against cities as the expansive real estate of a few, rather than places of freedom; against cities as places of consumption and conformity rather than of creativity and diversity; against cities as a formula rather than cities as a beautiful mosaic.
I am asking us to reject cities as places of monochromatic misery rather than places of mystery and hope.
The revolution towards cities as radically hospitable and responsive, offering us the opportunity to question our own selves, our own rules and our own practices as urban dwellers, as urban practitioners, as urban leaders, as proud ancestors.
TECHNOLOGY
There is a technological dimension to a new urban contract, but it extends well beyond just digital tools.
The fact is that technology’s democratization allows people to act and participate without needing permission, often outpacing the regulator or the state’s capacity to regulate or even understand developments in real time. Too much effort goes into holding governments accountable instead of investing our energy, creativity in tech towards directly solving problems. We should recognize that problem solving extends well beyond the state.
Over the years I´ve seen how cities, especially in the Global South, often grow informally, with people shaping their environments naturally and outside formal planning. This informal energy, though sometimes problematic, demonstrates real creativity and resilience. The real challenge is how to engage with the dynamic creative force in the most effective way because while technology opens up the participation, bureaucratic and political reality tends to slow decision-making.
So the real issue here is power, and having a clear vision of who benefits from widespread involvement, and who prefer control to drive progress.