Can a successful city be in crisis? Edward Glaeser, an American economist from Harvard University, proclaimed in his book The Triumph of the City how the success of cities, whether new or old, has occurred mainly because they are configured as large theme parks. They attract entrepreneurs, talent, and investors and are generators of growth, opportunities, and progress. Their hegemony has less to do with their urban design or their buildings—although physical infrastructures are important—but rather the great lever of their success lies in the binomial of human capital and productivity.
No matter how much energy and resources we put into large urban renewal projects, cities are not made up of buildings, streets, and avenues. Their main capital is people, and in the post-industrial world and the knowledge society, those cities capable of training, attracting, and retaining talent will be in a better position to be integrated into the new global value chains. But despite their great success, successful cities suffer from some pathologies that seriously compromise their future. Large urban constructions last for centuries, but urban populations are fluid because they are based on human interaction and subject to the dynamics of a world that changes very quickly and generates unwanted impacts.
Cities are like living organisms: dynamic and changing; a great center of socialization, innovation, and consumption that generates a large market for products and services, but also inequalities that must be managed with vision and determination. Cities have focused their development, vitality, and growth precisely on change and movement. The more movement, the more infrastructure, more resources, and more people are needed to satisfy their needs. However, we have already reached, some time ago, the limit of a growth model that is not only environmentally unsustainable but also socially, putting at risk the very notion of progress and coexistence, while generating disaffection and anxiety in the face of an uncertain future.
The journalist Jorge Dioni López in his book El malestar de las ciudades (The Discomfort of Cities), thoroughly dissects the contradictions and limits of this new urban economy of movement. Modernity is characterized by both physical and intellectual movement and, along with innovation, is closely linked to wealth, prosperity, and growth. It is a form of progress linked to the globalization of the economy in a large global geographical process of connection, distribution, and consumption. Movement and consumption conquer practically everything, changing the physiognomy and personality of our cities. These are being designed and configured in such a way that it is no longer possible to traverse or enjoy them without consuming, whether you are a resident or a visitor, indistinctly. We have created a new economy based on a form of urban ideology: the urbanism of movement and consumption that favors, among others, mass tourism or gentrification. An urban model that is beginning to show clear signs of exhaustion and has a high destabilizing potential politically and socially.
Cities, and especially their residents, show signs of fatigue and anger. This economy of movement is already generating evident discomfort in large groups within the city, as well as significant negative impacts that need to be addressed. Some of these impacts of this city model are already unsustainable from the point of view of sustainability, as well as for people's health and quality of life. But even these impacts go much further and jeopardize coexistence among the different actors interacting in the city. Problems emerge that affect mobility, the overcrowding and gentrification of certain neighborhoods, the increase in housing prices, or the perception of poor quality of public services such as cleaning, to give some examples. There are clear signs of growing political and social discontent linked to the cost of living, resources, and geography, and these signs must be addressed.
We have an example of this in one of the global reference cities like New York. The most liberal city in the U.S. could have a socialist mayor supported by the middle classes who are forced into social mobility as a result of the increasing cost of living in the city. Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old politician who masters social media and promises strong measures in favor of the working classes, is the favorite to be the new mayor of the city and break the status quo of the Democratic Party. The increase in housing prices is one of the main factors, but also the price of energy, food, transport, or leisure. Problems that could well describe any of our capitals. And it is precisely these middle and popular classes, which occupied a central political, social, and economic place, are moving towards the geographical and political peripheries, being fertile ground for left-wing and far-right populisms.
Reality challenges us to rethink many of the urban forms and activities as we have done them until nowNobody has the solution. There are no simple answers to a highly complex problem. We need a new synthesis that allows us to understand, empathize, and act decisively to change this trend and ensure that cities continue to generate a virtuous circle of opportunities for people and businesses while addressing social and environmental urgencies. Our cities face the need to redesign some of their traditional dynamics that are more from the 20th century than from the current era, designing new smart specialization strategies and reconfiguring themselves into learning communities. Both public and corporate policies must focus as quickly as possible on an economy that guarantees efficient and possible economic activity, as well as sustainability and social and territorial equity in densely urbanized, populated, and visited territories.
It is, in short, about designing new forms of value generation that allow us to continue attracting economic activity and talent, to insert ourselves into new global value chains, but to do so by reconfiguring ourselves into pleasant, cohesive, and healthy territories to live, invest, study, or work in, where it is truly possible to exercise the right to the city. A synthesis in which one must distrust those who have simplistic and miraculous solutions such as deregulation and low taxes proposed by some conservative sectors, as well as avoid the simplism of degrowth proclamations without real and possible alternatives.
Cities have traditionally been the territories where great innovations develop and face enormous challenges that call on them to reinvent themselves to confront old and new problems. One of them is housing, and it is unacceptable that in cities like Barcelona, the central and most representative parties do not agree on mitigating one of the city's most pressing problems, seeking viable alternatives to the obligation for real estate developers to allocate 30% of homes in new constructions or major renovations to affordable rental or protected housing. The measure, implemented in 2018, although well-intentioned and seeking to guarantee a percentage of social housing in the city, has proven to be a failure. Alternatives must be sought by attacking the problem without getting entangled in other fiscal debates that only prevent agreement. A little more rigor and responsibility would be required.
In short, reality challenges us to rethink many of the urban forms and activities as we have done them until now. It requires a (r)evolution of our cities to design new policies that allow them to continue being places to develop our life projects, that is, to live, work, enjoy, consume and relate in a responsible, safe, healthy and sustainable way. A not easy exercise for which it will be necessary to weave new city consensuses and reconfigure again the main public policies and economic and social activity. A (r)evolution of the concept of city that must be based mainly on three great vectors of progress: the articulation of a true metropolization of the territories; taking advantage of the potential of digital transformation and new technologies to be faster and more efficient; and reconfiguring economic and social policies so that they continue to generate opportunities for progress for all while facing the climate emergency. The diagnosis is more or less clear, what is missing is collective responsibility to face it.