february-2012

THIS PAGE
Ashok Bhalotra
and his
Rotterdam office
FACING PAGE
The City of the
Sun in
Heerhugowaard
the mayor asked if I had sunstroke
aft er I’d made my presentation. In India
too, I had to work hard to convince
people about sustainable energy. How
did I do it? Not by talking about climate
change, nobody understands that.
Instead, I reminded people of how as
kids they started a fi re using a
magnifying glass — everyone’s done
that, and it gets you thinking about the
power of the sun and how it can be used
to heat and cool a house. You have to
appeal to people’s imagination.”
Imagination is certainly needed to
understand the rapid urbanisation of the
human race. In 1800, only 2% of us lived
in cities. Now, more than half of us do,
and that percentage is rising steeply.
Th e World Bank estimates that
almost 200,000 people move to the city
every day. In developing countries, 60
million new urbanites arrive every year,
and in the next decade, many African
and Asian cities will double in size.
By 2015, there will be 23 cities on
42 Holland Herald
earth with more than 10 million people,
and 19 will be in developing nations.
What all this might mean is the
subject of a dramatic growth in urban
studies and in projects ranging from the
UN’s Habitat Programme to the LSE’s
(London School of Economics) Urban
Age think-tank.
But it hasn’t always been this way,
says Bhalotra. “Urban planning has been
historically isolated from the political,
economic and social agenda,” he says.
“It needs to be connected, but there
has been a strong anti-city sentiment,
people were stuck in some kind of
pastoral dream.”
As Europe industrialised in the 18th
century, the expanding city was seen as
debased. Th e philosopher Rousseau
summed it up when he gravely
announced, “Cities are the abyss of the
human species.”
Th e industrialists who made their
money from urban factories were quick
to move out of town to country estates,
while their workers were left to languish
in inner-city slums.
By the 20th century, planners were in
a form of mass urban denial, building
‘garden cities’ and suburbs that tried to
replicate some imagined village ideal,
partly fuelled by the rapid rise of
personal car ownership.
But harsh economic realities are
ending the reign of suburbia, as
Canadian urban planner Ken Greenberg
confi rms in his book, Walking Home:
Th e Life and Lessons of a City Builder.
“Th e inevitable rise of the oil price —
20% here in Canada last year — is a
game changer,” he says.
“Th ere’s a huge realisation that we’ve
massively underinvested in public
transit, and cities everywhere are being
equipped for bicycles.”
Th ere’s a growing awareness that
future city planning departments will no
longer be able to aff ord to give the traffi c
engineer free rein.
“Public transport has to be there from
the beginning,” says Bhalotra, whose