From communities to mega cities
Colombo city: Changing skyline
A city is a conglomeration of places. The assembly of them is often a result of spontaneous evolutions that take place with the location of things, environmental factors, activities and people’s participation in them. Great cities in the world have thus ‘come into being’ through processes of accumulation, abandonment, rejuvenation and reinforcement of spontaneously evolving places as much as the deliberate location and creations of them. While the former is a people-driven everyday process, the latter is what the planners and architects get involved in through their professional practice and skills.
Art of place making
Place-making is thus fundamental to architecture and planning. Yet, most architects and planners do not seem to understand the nuances of the idea nor do they employ such ideas often in making and re-making cities. As the UN in a report titled ‘Place-making and Future of Cities’ has reiterated, through the transformation of public spaces which help build a sense of community, civic identity and culture, cities can be transformed to great places for humanity to flourish.
Indeed, creating functional, meaningful, productive and inclusive cities is perhaps the greatest challenge of this century. In order to achieve those objectives, there are no other ways other than employing the complex processes of place-making and place-enabling.
Transforming cities
to mega cities
Today, many parts of the world’s cities are undergoing dramatic transformations. It is more so in the global south, where more and more people are migrating to the cities and they are expanding rapidly. The culture of a people is enriched when and where they conglomerate; the cities. Rewarding employment, leisure, health-care and education are also among the modern luxuries a city provides more effectively than in other places.
Although cities evolved into ever bigger ones through spontaneous developments in the past against the lamentations of the planners, today the desire is to make cities larger and larger. So much so, that there is now a cry and craving to create mega cities. This is well exemplified by the programmes of many governments in Asia which appear to create cities from scratch.
In China for example, mega cities are being built at an unprecedented scale. China has added 500 million people to cities over the last 35 years. Indeed, there is a perception that the bigger the city, the more productive and better it is. Of these cities built from scratch, at least 12 are sitting empty for people to arrive. The CBS 60 Minutes report exposed the shocking phenomena of ‘Ghost Cities’ where high rises, shopping malls and all the paraphernalia of cities exist, but no people much like their surroundings. In Inner Mongolia, developers built the city of Ordos for one million people. Yet most of it still remains empty.
Cities may be getting larger, but that does not make them better particularly in the developing contexts. Megacities such Kolkata, Mumbai, Manila, Sao Paulo, Lagos and Mexico City, which are all among the top 10 most populous cities in the world, present a great opportunity for large corporate development visionaries who have aspired to fix their mega problems with modern approaches with ultra-expensive hardware. However, it is still a question of how successful these solutions were.
Interestingly, the Sri Lankan government has now embarked on a programme to create what they call a ‘Megapolis’. There may be a general perception that a country without mega cities is somehow lesser than those who have them. Colombo’s Megapolis however is not built-from scratch but aspires to ‘stitch together’ the places that already exist and re-make them. Undeniably, present places will be transformed and it is here that the ideas of ‘place-making’, and ‘place-enabling’ have real relevance. Yet the question is how much importance has been given to these aspects in the proposed Mega City planning and development policies.
New Initiatives and explorations
The Urban Design Program of the Department of Architecture of the University of Moratuwa has been committed to establishing a platform to facilitate the dialogue on issues faced by cities of the world today and network among those who do experiments on Cities, People and Places. It is with this objective that the series of forums on this imperative were conceived and initiated. The first, second and third International Conferences on Cities, People and Places, ICCPP-2013, ICCPP-2014 and ICCPP-2015 were successfully held in October 2013, 2014 and 2015 in Colombo with the presence of a large gathering of local and foreign professionals, academics, researchers, and scientists.
The Urban Design Programme of the Architecture Department’s fourth ICCPP forum, demonstrates two significant developments. First, it is an acknowledgement of the relevance of the conference that cuts across the conventional boundaries of disciplines to spearhead the movement of an interdisciplinary approach to the scientific study of Cities. Second, it demonstrates clearly that the new partnerships established since previous years, have grown to a solid base now culminating in greater solidarity. It has already enabled the foundation of a network through the University of Moratuwa, focused on cities, people and places.
During the past years in Sri Lanka, a number of urban improvement programmes geared mainly through state sector interventions have been implemented in Colombo city. Today we are in a position to revisit these strategies and cases with reference to their successes and failures, positive and negative results. At the same time, some scholars feel that the present government’s mega city plan still has some areas of doubt in terms of its policies, planning approach and implementation strategies. In this context, the focus of the forth forum- ‘Transforming Cities through Place Making – From Communities to Mega Cities’ will be beneficial and relevant to Sri Lanka, through the sharing of experiences in urban design and public realm development programmes and projects by foreign and local presenters at the conference.
| Fourth int’l conference on cities, people and places The Urban Design Program of the Department of Architecture, University of Moratuwa in conjunction with its national and international academic partners will hold its Fourth International Conference on Cities, People & Places from October 30th-31st, 2016 on the theme ‘Transforming Cities through Place Making – From Communities to Mega Cities’at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute in Colombo. ICCPP is the only scientific conference series held on the theme of Cities, Urban Development, Planning and Design in Sri Lanka. Delegates are interested in the subject of Cities, People and Places and are expected to closely examine the ways in which the city exists as a ‘people’s place’ and how each city’s uniqueness is constructed upon the ways in which ‘urban life’ prevails and contributes to the making of places. This international Urban Design conference is aimed at bringing to light the multifaceted complexities of transformations of places. It invites the architects, planners, urban designers, geographers and ordinary people, who should be involved in the creation and transformation of places to interrogate what is happening in their cities, how they transform and if or how architects, planners and urban designers are employing principles of place-making or not. How do communities view the ways in which places evolve and how do they want to participate? How inclusive do the cities become as they evolve or are transformed through planned interventions? How do urban Ghettos come into being and how do we transform them? What are the principles of place-making particularly in the transformation of existing cities and making them bigger-mega cities are some of the questions to be asked. The conference specially welcomes the views of geographers and other social scientists who are usually not associated with cities but indeed have a role to play in the transformation of places in cities. The inauguration ceremony of ICCPP-2016 will be held on October 30th at Sri Lanka Foundation Institute in Colombo. The scientific conference will be held on October 31st at the same venue with many local and international presentations running in three parallel sessions throughout the day. The keynote speakers at this event are Prof. Murray Fraser, Professor of Architecture and Global Culture, The Bartlett School of Architecture, Faculty of the Built Environment in UK, Prof. Miki Desai from India, Prof. J. B. Disanayaka from Sri Lanka, and architect Channa Daswatte from Sri Lanka. This conference is also open for limited pre-registered participants from other disciplines.
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(The writer is attached to the Department of Architecture, University of Moratuwa)