Livable Cities

“How can the cities of the future be livable” – it is a big question for such a small group of experts. We were six, flown into Singapore from all over the world, for a week of intense thinking and collaboration. Isocarp, the International Society of City and Regional Planners, organized the gathering in the form of a UPAT, an Urban Planning Advisory Team. These teams normally deliver strategic planning advice to cities, but our meeting was to focus on livable cities in general, and to come up with recommendations on how the cities of the future can be livable.

Our client was Philips, more specifically the Think Tank on Livable Cities established by the Philips Center for Health and Wellbeing. Philips joins Siemens, IBM and other large companies focusing some of its innovation capacity on how future cities can be green, smart, sustainable or livable. The terminology depends on who is talking, but the trend seems clear: the future is urban, and technology companies are increasingly keen to contribute to the innovation of the city’s systems and workings.

Jeremy Dawkins, an Australian planner currently based in Sydney, led the team and Martin Dubbeling, a Dutch planner specialized in sustainable planning issues, was the rapporteur and Awais Piracha, Nadia Nilina, Antonia Cornaro and myself completed the team. Paco Perez contributed the Isocarp perspective.

the team left to right: Martin Dubbeling, Jeremy Dawkins, Awais Piracha, Antonia Cornaro, Nadia Nilina

For me personally, the link to Philips was an added benefit. I grew up in Eindhoven, the hometown of Philips and my father worked for the company for 43 years. The Philips van der Willegen Study Fund paid for my education as an urban designer, so it was an opportunity to pay back some of the urban intelligence the company enabled me to acquire.

the humble beginnings of Philips - Eindhoven

It was an interesting week of discussions, and very rewarding to take the time out to discuss such crucial but generic issue. I am not sure if we found ‘the’ answer to the question. The team is compiling a magazine style report to summarize the findings. That will be available on-line in a matter of weeks. As a preview – some of our thoughts:

Livable City Lens

The team investigated the challenges of the urban spectrum in relation to concepts of livability. We discussed the attributes and characteristics of livable cities at various levels and in a range of different contexts. Our conclusion was that it is not possible, or even desirable to produce a closed and worldwide definition of the term “livable”. Livable is a combination of ingredients that changes over time and depends on culture, history, development stage, geographical conditions etc. Its attributes and characteristics form a ‘tag cloud’ rather than a closed definition. Therefore, the team has applied ‘livable city’ as a lens – something to look through, allowing focusing on specific aspects of urbanization.

Focus on Non-city Rapidly Urbanizing Region

At the start of our considerations were two trends: rapid urbanization and an ageing population. The team concludes that, to a large extent, these developments are seen in different types of cities, in different geographic places. We discuss these as ‘archetypes’:

‘non-city rapidly urbanizing regions’: The places where rapid urban development is taking place are not, and will not become, ‘cities’ in the classical sense of the word; they are large regions of urban tissue – places that look like cities, but that have a significantly different scale. The characters, problems and expectations of these urban regions are in some respects different than anything we know so far.

'mature cities’: Many of the cities in Europe, North America, Russia and Japan are entering a new phase in their development. Instead of continued growth they are now facing stability, stagnation or even a reduction of population, combined with an increasingly ageing population. This poses challenges that are new for their planning authorities – how to manage ‘decline’ with instruments which are designed for growth.

There are all sorts of mix forms, and even combinations of the above into one urban region, but the team decided to highlight livability issues of the rapidly urbanizing regions as a focus of the UPAT.

More to follow..

definition of urban design at Singapore's urban info center