Contributed By Tong Veng Wye | Principal, Arup
Concerted urban planning could maximise the benefits and minimise the costs of cities
Why are cities important?
An oft-cited UN projection is that by 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will reside in cities. That’s just about one generation away.
Photo by Deva Darshan on Unsplash.
Today, some 55% already live in urban areas. This figure underlines the importance of cities to people – their quality of life, experiences of living and working, as well as the potential for growth, are inevitably influenced by what cities offer and provide.
Without cities, there would not be the development of art, literature, or science as we know it. There would not be the invention of steam power and electricity, nor industry and machines, nor the internet. Without cities, it is unlikely there would have been the famed repository and culture bed of knowledge that was the House of Wisdom in medieval Baghdad, nor Shakespeare’s plays, nor would we have astrophysics today giving evidence-based explanations of the universe – plus, of course, plagues, crime, pollution, and dystopia.
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Clearly, with cities being the cradles of human civilisation and the prospect of the vast majority of people living their lives in cities, the quality of cities becomes fundamentally important.
Two aspects of cities
Modern cities have physical infrastructure – roads, rail, water, and sewer pipelines, transmission lines, petrol stations, etc. Naturally, the larger a city’s population, the greater the quantity of physical infrastructure in terms of kilometres of pipelines or the number of petrol stations. However, due to economies of scale, physical infrastructure does not need to be increased in direct proportion to population growth. For instance, studies have shown that if a city population were to double, the number of petrol stations or total length of roads need only increase by about 85% instead of 100%. (see Geoffrey West’s 2017 book, Scale).
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What is more interesting, however, is when it comes to socioeconomic measures like the number of patents and professionals, or wages, GDP, and crime rate in a city, the increase is greater than 100%. Thus, a doubling of city population leads to an increase of about 115% in the number of patents achieved by the city. Agglomeration leads to a ‘superlinear’ increase in socioeconomic output.
But clearly, just growing a city’s population is insufficient by itself. A city has to provide the conditions for people to be mobile, network, and exchange information, services and goods. The two aspects - physical infrastructure and people - are deeply linked. A poorly planned, unliveable city will not facilitate superlinear contributions from its people. People are a city’s essence.
Malaysian cities will continue to grow. How can we address the important link between a city’s physical and communication infrastructure and how that enables its population to thrive and be happy?
One answer is to strategise, plan, develop, and implement city plans in ways that are holistic and in agreement with the way cities are necessarily complex, multi-layered, and integrated. Indeed, it could be argued that a proper, holistically planned city might even enhance positive indicators such as patents and number of professionals while reducing the superlinearity of indicators like crime and poverty and, most important of all, resource and environmental degradation.
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Integrated City Planning
Cities are, by definition, many-sided. There are aspects to do with governance and administration, other aspects to do with transport, infrastructure and land use, and yet others with socioeconomic conditions, resilience, and general liveability – all underpinned by sustainability.
Quite typically there will be departments in a city’s administration that are assigned jurisdictions such as planning, traffic, transport, health, waste management, buildings, drainage, and the like. These jurisdictions do not necessarily work seamlessly and they run the risk of compartmentalisation. Thus, it is unlikely to find, say, an office or department of integrated city planning.
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Governance by jurisdictions is, in various ways, an efficient way of dividing up the many areas and levels of work and managing them adequately. But it can easily happen that the framework that administers by departments extends also into city planning and implementation without an integrated platform.
But the nature of a city is that its many aspects are interlinked. How do we link transport with urban transformation, land use, opportunistic funding, and social housing? How do we establish and implement policies to ensure that transport and related projects comply with UN Sustainable Development Goals and reduce car use? How do we create urban neighbourhoods that are attractive and enhance liveability?
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Clearly, it cannot just be engineers and planners – important though they will be. They will need to be joined by people with knowledge and experience in city economics, urban design and planning, sociologists, and resource planners. Equally, they should also be joined by city advisers and urban designers who can give guidance on, say, the planning of innovation districts and mixed neighbourhoods that attract talent. Or perhaps who will see a cultural advantage to, say, planning for a local partnership with an international design and art museum. Importantly, the team must include sustainable development experts.
Indeed, prior to all this, we would do well to ask in the first instance, what sort of future city vision do we want? In which case, we might involve people whose work and research it is to understand the present and investigate the future and, thence, provide foresight. Foresight and scenario testing would help governments decide on a vision for which strategic advice could be sought from strategy advisers.
Photo by Deva Darshan on Unsplash.
Any aspiring global city cannot properly plan without a strong eye to technological change. But therein lie the pitfalls. Where do we start? What challenges are we really trying to solve? What kind or level of technological planning and enablement do we need for the vision we have? These questions are important because the technologies on offer are beguiling.
It is all too easy to embrace much more than we actually need and, hence, eventually pay more. Technology vendors provide ready-made answers, but would an independent digital consultant who helps to underpin a city master plan be better placed to advise on the appropriate technology and vendors according to a city’s needs and budget?
Photo by Boey Jun Hui on Unsplash.
What about our hot and humid Malaysian weather, which is neither walking nor cycling-friendly? Yet, it is recognised that liveable and attractive cities are often walkable. Is it possible to plan our tropical cities and transport links with attention to walkability and accessibility?
The answer is yes. Environmentally sustainable consultants can model walkways and cycle paths with designed shading and ventilation features that optimise walkable conditions of temperature and humidity. Such considerations can be incorporated into city planning.
Photo by Banusanthar Lohanathan on Unsplash.
Finally, can governing and administrative agencies be supported by capacity-building so that they are coordinated in implementing the objectives of an integrated city master plan? The challenge of able and coordinated implementation of an integrated city plan is not something to be underestimated.
It should be clear by now that cities and their master plans are multi-faceted. They are complex and multi-disciplinary. To be meaningful, their planning and implementation need to be integrated across many jurisdictions and benchmarked against other cities and the future. The inherent multiple dimensions cannot be properly addressed by limited or single-system approaches.
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About the contributor
Tong Veng Wye is a Principal of Arup who has 35 years of experience in the design of residential, industrial and commercial developments. His projects include manufacturing facilities, high rise residential and office buildings, medical facilities, commercial complexes, heritage buildings and housing developments. He works across the firms in Malaysia to develop new businesses, including integrated city planning.
Arup offers integrated city planning globally and has provided this multi-disciplinary skill in cities (such as London, New York, Abu Dhabi, Sydney, Dalian, Seychelles, Leeds, Singapore, Chengdu, Jeddah, and Santander in Spain) throughout the world.
