And cities can be smaller in more ways than just their population size. How you define ‘smallest’ and how you define ‘city’ results in some unusual answers to this question:

What is the smallest city in the world? 

Ten of the least-populated cities in the world

Ngerulmud, Palau

Assigned its status as the capital city of the Pacific Island nation of Palau in 2006, Ngerulmud may well be the least-populated city in the world. In fact, it’s possible that no-one lives there – population statistics are not recorded for the city alone. Ngerulmud is located in the state of Melekeok, which has a known total population of 318 people.

Hum, Croatia

Built as a city in the 11th century, medieval Hum is today home to only 30 people. Looking to escape the buzz of a megacity? There’s probably no better option than Hum which, despite its tiny population, is still home to some urban staples – a restaurant, churches, city walls and a city gate (crucial!), and an elected municipal council.

Adamstown, Pitcairn Islands

The Pitcairn Islands are located in the southern Pacific Ocean and have a population of only 49 people. That makes the islands the least-populated jurisdiction on the planet and home to the world’s least-populated capital city, in which all 49 of the island’s residents live. Almost all residents descend from the crew of the HMS Bounty – a British merchant vessel that settled on the islands in 1790.

Greenwood, British Columbia, Canada

Canada’s least-populated city and one of the least-populated cities in the world, Greenwood drew crowds in the 1800s on the hunt for gold. People weren’t quite that lucky, instead striking copper – the city’s most successful export. Despite its population declining to a little over 700 people, Greenwood retains its historical city status.

Hamilton, Bermuda

The tightly defined boundaries of Hamilton, Bermuda, means the city is only home to 849 people. That makes it one of the least-populated capital cities in the world. The city was founded in 1790, incorporated in 1793, became capital in 1815, yet only become an official city in 1897. Bermuda itself is home to 63,000 people.

Vatican City, Vatican

The world’s smallest fully independent nation state as well as one of the world’s least-populated cities, the Vatican City has a population of around 1,000 people. Looking for a new passport? You don’t need to have been born in the Vatican to become a citizen. In fact, most of its residents weren’t due to the city having no hospital. If you’re female, the odds aren’t in your favour – only 5.5% of the Vatican’s citizens are female.  

St David’s, Wales, United Kingdom

St David’s is located in Pembrokeshire, Wales – one of the four constituent countries of the United Kingdom. Assigned city status in the 12th century, St David’s is Wales and the UK’s least-populated city, with approximately 1,800 residents.

St Asaph, Wales, United Kingdom

Our second Welsh entry on the list, St Asaph used to be just an ordinary town in Denbighshire, Wales. When Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her Diamond Jubilee in 2012, she decided to assign city status to three UK towns, and St Asaph got lucky. All 3,500 residents now consider themselves city-dwellers. 

Norton City, Virginia, USA

Norton City is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Originally known as Prince’s Flats, the settlement was renamed after then-head of the railroad, Eckstein Norton, to attract investment, industry and citizens. Initial success as a hub for the timber trade was not sustained, and today the city has a population of only 3,687 people. 

BONUS! Maza, North Dakota, USA: the former least-populated city in the USA

At 20 square kilometres (8 square miles) and a population of five (yes, five), Maza was both the least-populated city in the USA and its least densely populated city. The reason for the past tense? Despite its foundation as a city back in 1893, Maza’s city status was dissolved in 2002.

The smallest cities in the world by geographical area

Vatican City

Though a historic walled enclave surrounded entirely by the city of Rome, the Vatican City only became an independent city-state in 1929. Vatican City is back again on this list as it is only 0.44 square kilometres in size (0.17 square miles).

Monaco City, Monaco

The capital city of the micro-city-state of Monaco, Monaco City itself is a mere 0.196491 square kilometres (0.075866 square miles) in size. The nation of Monaco is not that much bigger, coming in at only 2.08 square kilometres (0.80 square miles).

Funafuti, Tuvalu

Capital city of the island nation of Tuvalu, Funafuti is home to 60% of the island’s population, as well as its port facilities and city government. The city stretches across a mere 2.4 square kilometres (0.9 square miles).

Gibraltar

City and British Overseas Territory, Gibraltar stretches across a mere 6.8 square kilometres (2.6 square miles), much of which is taken up by ‘The Rock’ – a large, mountainous nature reserve with sides so steep it renders development unviable.

Yaren, Nauru

Yaren is potentially an impostor in this list, being the de facto, rather than formal, capital city of Naura – an island country and microstate in the Central Pacific. The total area of the country is 21 square kilometres (8.1 square miles), much of which is taken up by Yaren.

BONUS CONTENT! Other ‘smallest’ cities in the world

Jericho, West Bank: the lowest city

Jericho is a Palestinian city in the West Bank and, at 258m (846ft) below sea level, the lowest city in the world. One of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, archeologists have found evidence of inhabitation dating back 11,000 years. Its 20,000 residents benefit from a cable car as a form of transportation, connecting the region to the peak of the Mount of Temptation, which is home to a Greek Orthodox monastery and some fantastic panoramic views.

Bo, Sierra Leone: the shortest city name

Though often referred to locally as Bo Town, Sierra Leone’s second largest city is officially called Bo, making it the shortest city name in the world. The town is said to be named after the generosity of its people, with the story being that a past elephant killing drew people from surrounding villages to receive a share. The hunter spent many days saying “bo-lor,”as he distributed it, which translates as both “this is yours” and “this is Bo”. Over 230,000 people now call the city home. 

City of London, England: a small city within a city

At 1,583 square kilometres (611 square miles) and almost 9 million residents, London is no small city. But within London lies the City of London, known locally as the City or the Square Mile. During the Medieval period, the City of London was pretty much all of London, but as London grew the City of London’s boundaries remained the same. To this day, it still has city status in its own right, with its own Mayor and police force, despite only being 2.9 square kilometres (1.12 square miles) in size

Photos: Yang Jing, Chris Czermak, Michael Mrozek.

The post The Smallest Cities in the World (And Some Surprise Bonus Cities) appeared first on This Big City.

You may also find some headscratchers here, and some things that make you laugh. For those times when someone else’s words are what you need, this post pulls together the best quotes:

• Urban planning
• Futuristic cities
• Jane Jacobs quotes
• Suburbia
• Architecture
• Gentrification
• Life in the city
• Building community
• Urban sustainability and nature
• Art and creative practice
• Transport

Quotes about urban planning

“It is difficult to design a place that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.”

William H. Whyte

Source: Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown

“We need to draw lines in the ground and say, ‘The concrete stops here.’ That forces people to build in and up, rather than out – and there’s nothing wrong with high, dense urban environments as long as they’re planned correctly. They can be extremely livable. They tend to require less transportation, fewer sewer lines, fewer power lines, fewer roads, and more tightly packed structures, which in and of themselves are more energy efficient.”

Patrick Moore

By Patrick Moore: Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout and Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom

“I’ve often though that if our zoning boards could be put in charge of botanists, of zoologists and geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than when we leave it to the engineers.”

William O. Douglas

About William O. Douglas: Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas

“Don’t focus so much on single buildings as fabric. If fabric is lost, we have a few heroic buildings in parking lots.”

Stephen Mouzon

By Stephen Mouzon: The Original Green: Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability

“Stop texting me saying you’re having a city planning emergency. There’s no such thing as a city planning emergency.”

Mark Brendanawicz, Parks and Recreation

Watch Parks and Recreation on Amazon Prime

“The mark of a great city isn’t how it treats its special places – everybody does that right – but how it treats its ordinary ones.”

Aaron M. Renn

By Aaron M. Renn: The Urban State of Mind: Meditations on the City

“Urbanism works when it creates a journey as desirable as the destination.”

Paul Goldberger

Source: 101 Things I Learned in Urban Design School

“We need more insurgency in the city in order to break unsustainable and privatizing patterns of urban development.” 

Jeffrey Hou

By Jeffrey Hou: City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy and Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia

“Neither cities nor places in them are unordered, unplanned; the question is only whose order, whose planning, for what purpose?”

Peter Marcuse

“We don’t want a plan based on land uses. We want a plan based on experiences. Who visits downtown to see land uses?”

Mitchell Silver

Source: Urban Memory in City Transitions: The Significance of Place in Mind

“Growth is inevitable and desirable, but destruction of community character is not. The question is not whether your part of the world is going to change. The question is how.”

Edward T. McMahon

Source: The City in Need: Urban Resilience and City Management in Disruptive Disease Outbreak Events

Quotes about futuristic cities and the future of urban planning

“A smart city is a city where humans, trees, birds and other animals can grow with all their glories, imperfections, freedom, and creativity. They are not just cities of technology but cities of love, life, beauty, dignity, freedom and equality.”

Amit Ray

Source: The Srinagar Smart City

“I thought digital technology would eventually reverse urbanisation, and so far that hasn’t happened. But people always overestimate how much will change in the next three years, and underestimate how much will change over the next ten years.”

Bill Gates

By Bill Gates: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need and How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“The last great technological advancement that reshaped cities was the automobile (some might argue it was the elevator). In both cases, these technologies reshaped the physical aspects of living in cities – how far a person could travel or how high a building could climb. But the fundamentals of how cities worked remained the same. What’s different about the information age that has been ushered in by personal computers, mobile phones and the Internet is its ability to reshape the social organization of cities and empower everyday citizens with the knowledge and tools to actively participate in the policy, planning and management of cities.”

Christian Madera

Source: Me++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City

“A smart city is all about building connections which transcend geography—something more deep-rooted and emotional. Better infrastructure is an integral part of building smart cities, but first comes building awareness about existing resources and then preparing for easier accessibility and navigation.”

Vaibhav Belgaonkar

Quotes about urban planning by Jane Jacobs

“Why do planners fix on the block and ignore the street? The answer lies in a short cut in their analytical techniques. After planners have mapped building conditions, uses, vacancies, and assessed valuations, block by block, they combine the data for each block, because this is the simplest way to summarize it, and characterize the block by appropriate legends. No matter how individual the street, the data for each side of the street in each block is combined with data for the other three sides of its block. The street is statistically sunk without a trace.”

Jane Jacobs

“The second mode [to deal with unsafe cities] is to take refuge in vehicles. This is the technique practiced in the big wild-animal reservations of Africa, where tourists are warned to leave their cars under no circumstances until they reach a lodge. It is also the technique practiced in Los Angeles.” 

Jane Jacobs

“There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”

Jane Jacobs

“Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.”

Jane Jacobs

Source: The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Quotes about suburbia

“I’ve got no dark secrets, I wasn’t beaten up, my parents were kind to me and there was a low crime rate where we lived. Maybe that’s where the comedy comes from, as some sort of reaction to the safe, boring suburbs.”

Will Ferrell

“The two elements of the suburban pattern that cause the greatest problems are the extreme separation of uses and the vast distances between things.”

James Howard Kunstler

Source: The Geography of Nowhere

“The modern city is probably the most unlovely and artificial site this planet affords. The ultimate solution is to abandon it. We shall solve the City Problem by leaving the city.”

Henry Ford

“Defining sprawl is a little bit like defining pornography. You know it when you see it.”

Ellen Dunham-Jones

By Ellen Dunham-Jones: Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges

“I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new is ever going to happen again… The future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.” 

J. G. Ballard

By J. G. Ballard: Concrete Island and The Drowned World

“People here can’t realize there are poor people in the world. They can’t think about the needs of other people.” 

Bill Owens

Source: Suburbia

“What’s bad about sprawl is not its uniformity but that it is uniformly bad.”

James Howard Kunstler

By James Howard Kunstler: The Geography of Nowhere

Quotes about architecture

“Architecture is, and always will be concerned, roughly speaking, with carefully balancing horizontal things on top of vertical things.” 

Reyner Banham

Source: Archigram: Architecture without Architecture

“We Japanese do not perceive our small, one-room spaces as something that’s been forced upon us.”

Makoto Yokomizo

About Japanese architecture: Contemporary Japanese Architecture: Tracing the Next Generation

“For the majority of individuals the necessities of life are the same. It is therefore logical and consistent with an economic approach to satisfy these homogenous needs uniformly and consistently. Hence it is not justifiable for each house to have a different floor plan, a different shape, different building materials, and a different ‘style.’ To do this is to practice waste and to put a false emphasis on individuality.” 

Walter Gropius

About Walter Gropius: Bauhaus. Updated Edition

“We’re moving from a generation who gave little thought as to the built environment and accepted housing that was neither pleasant to look at, nor to live in or around, to a new century where there’s a real desire for housing that’s affordable, flexible, and places community at the heart of its thinking. For architects and the public it’s an enticing prospect.” 

Will Gompertz

By Will Gompertz: Think Like an Artist: . . . and Lead a More Creative, Productive Life

“My friends have asked me why I don’t patent my low-cost houses, but they’ve completely missed the point. I actually want my designs to be copied. I want Indonesian society to rethink its attitudes towards urban architecture.” 

Ahmad Djuhara

About Indonesian architecture: New Indonesian House

“I am of the opinion that architecture should exist quietly with nature, never opposing it. I am positive that a choice between these alternatives no longer applies. Architecture and nature should be integrated. Both should be part of our daily life.”

Yasuhiro Yamashita

Quotes about gentrification and urban planning

“Gentrification, at its deepest level, is really about reorienting the purpose of cities away from being spaces that provide for the poor and middle classes and toward being spaces that generate capital for the rich.”

Peter Moskowitz

Source: How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

“Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.”

Sarah Schulman

Source: The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“Cities are gentrified by the following types of people in sequence: first the risk-oblivious (artists), then the risk-aware (developers), finally the risk adverse (dentists from New Jersey).”

Bill Kraus

Source: Welcome to Braggsville

“We must work together to ensure the equitable distribution of wealth, opportunity, and power in our society.”

Nelson Mandela

“The physical characteristics of walls are not decisive as to their meaning. Rather, the key question is: Who is on which side of the wall? Does the wall perpetuate power, or defend against it? Does it reinforce domination, or shield vulnerability? Does it strengthen hierarchical relationships among people, or does it pave the way towards greater equality?”

Peter Marcuse

Source: Ephemeral Urbanism: Does Permanence Matter?

“Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two. One the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.”

Plato

Source: The Republic

Quotes about life in the city

“If you can tell a man by his shoes, you can tell a city by its pavements, and London’s indicate a fractured, shambolic, careless body politic.” 

Rowan Moore

By Rowan Moore: Why We Build and Slow-Burn City

“Men living in the most densely populated areas of Sweden, for instance, are at a 68 percent higher risk of being admitted for psychosis – often the first sign of schizophrenia – than those who live in the countryside. For women the risk is 77 percent higher. Something about city living seems to spark the harrowing delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized thinking characteristic of a schizophrenic break.”

Ethan Watters

Source: Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the Western Mind

“Every city has a sex and an age which has nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine, So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties, in love with an older woman.”

John Berger

By John Berger: Ways of Seeing and Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

“Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.”

Rupert Brooke

Source: Remotely-Sensed Cities

“The one thing that all great cities have in common is that they are all different.”

Cate Blanchett

“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?”

Ayn Rand

Source: Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film

“Typically we don’t think of cities as being particularly extreme environments, but few places on earth get as hot as a rooftop or as dry as the corner of a heated living room.” 

Adam Rogers

“Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality.”

Roman Payne

“For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home.”

Simon Van Booy

“Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.”

Walter Benjamin

Source: Walter Benjamin: 1938-1940 v. 4: Selected Writings

“All cities are mad but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful but the beauty is grim.”

Christopher Morley

Source: The Routledge Companion to Environmental Ethics

Quotes about building community and urban planning

“How do we slow down what matters the most and speed up what benefits change and progress? We don’t want to impede progress, but we are seeking reconnection to ourselves, to each other, and with the world.” 

John Maeda

By John Maeda: The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)

“Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”

George Burns

Source: Social happiness: Theory into Policy and Practice

“When you look at a city, it’s like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.”

Hugh Newell Jacobson

Source: Designing America: Creating Urban Identity: A Primer on Improving U.S. Cities for a Changing Future Using the Project Approach to the Design and Financing of the Spaces Between Buildings

“We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.”

Jonathan Raban

Source: The Freedom of the City

“They can print statistics and count the population in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people.”

Graham Green

Source: A Few Streets, a Few People: Photographs from the Havana Neighbourhood of Cayo Hueso

“Everyone claims to want a city, but no one here wants city living. City living by its definition is crowded. It is tolerant of other people. It is dependant on a sophisticated population that makes a hundreds compromises daily so that they can benefit from the collective energy that a city generates.”

Robert N. Davis

“An increasing number of middle and high-income groups have looked to security measures, such as cameras, fences, walls and gates, to separate themselves from other people in the city. These physical measures, in combination with hired guards, replace the ‘older’ social control mechanisms, which are based on social cohesion within the community.” 

Peer Smets

By Peer Smets: Mobilities and Neighbourhood Belonging in Cities and Suburbs

“A city’s environment is shaped not only by people who have an important influence, but by everyone who lives or works there.”

Robert Cowan

Source: Theories and Models of Urbanization: Geography, Economics and Computing Sciences

“The city shows the good and evil in human nature in excess. It is this fact, more than any other, which justifies the view that would make of the city a laboratory or clinic in which human nature and social processes may be most conveniently and profitably studied.”

Robert E. Park

By Robert E. Park: The City

“A city is simply a passel of people, packed in a pot like pickles.”

David Detzert

Source: Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War

Quotes about sustainability, nature and urban planning

“City growth has caused climate change, but that growth is also what’s going to get us out of it.” 

Matthew Kahn

Source: The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics

“One thing is sure. The earth is now more cultivated and developed than ever before. There is more farming with pure force, swamps are drying up, and cities are springing up on unprecedented scale. We’ve become a burden to our planet. Resources are becoming scarce, and soon nature will no longer be able to satisfy our needs.” 

Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus, Roman theologian, 200 AD

Source: Massive Change: A Manifesto for the Future of Global Design

“If the earth was an apartment, we wouldn’t be getting our security deposit back.”

Jim Shubert

“Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a finite planet is either mad, or an economist.”

David Attenborough

Source: Food or War

“To be young and aware is to know you’re being lied to; to know that a bright green future is possible; to know that we can reimagine the world, rebuild our cities, redesign our lives, retool our factories, distribute innovation and creativity and all live in a world that is not only better than the alternative, but much better than the world we have now.”

Alex Steffen

By Alex Steffen: Carbon Zero: Imagining Cities That Can Save the Planet

“Urbanization has lured more people to bustling metropolises, but precious little thought has been given to what happens when these cities fail. Over time, the underlying systems and processes of civilization – from lead mining to offshore drilling to car commuting – slowly poison us. Power grids brown out, the climate heats up, and industrial accidents ravage ecosystems and cities alike. For all the famed cities with thousands of years of continuity – Paris, London, Cairo, Athens, Rome, Istanbul – most cities just stop.” 

Ben Paynter

“In a future that portends stronger and more-frequent hurricanes striking North America’s Atlantic coast, ferocious winds will pummel tall, unsteady structures. Some will topple, knocking down others. Like a gap in the forest when a giant tree falls, new growth will rush in. Gradually, the asphalt jungle will give way to a real one.” 

Alan Weisman

Source: The World Without Us

“The smallest patch of green to arrest the monotony of asphalt is as important to the value of real estate as streets, sewers and convenient shopping.”

James Felt

“Cities and human settlements are part of the environment and have been for a long time now. Wilderness is a cultural artifact of the environmental movement – an artifact worth defending – but the idea that our landscape has not been used by humans is old thinking.”

Hank Dittmar

By Hank Dittmar: DIY City: The Collective Power of Small Actions

“Urbanization, one of humankind’s most successful and ambitious programs, is the triumph of the unnatural over the natural, the grid over the organic… Underway on a scale never before witnessed, one side effect of urbanization is the liberation of vast depopulated territories for the efficient production of ‘nature’.” 

Bruce Mau

Source: Massive Change: A Manifesto for the Future of Global Design

“Living around trees is less green than living around concrete. The next time you want to fight for nature, leave Walden Pond alone and start pushing for denser development in downtown.”

Edward Glaeser

By Edward Glaeser: Triumph of the City: How Urban Spaces Make Us Human and Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation

“Bringing nature back into the city is a way to deal with urban sprawl. If cities feel a little more natural, people like to live there rather than moving out and dividing up another piece of land that shouldn’t be touched.”

Stone Gossard

“If you love nature, stay the heck away from it. Live in a city, the denser the better.”

Jeff Speck

By Jeff Speck: Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

Quotes about art, creative practice and the city

“The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn urban forms condition mind.”

Lewis Mumford

By Lewis Mumford: The Culture of Cities and The Story of Utopias

“When creative people gather together, it attracts other young creative people. If you look at demographics, the downtown area is much younger than it was a few years ago. There’s this competition that’s good. It isn’t about making art anymore. It’s about making good art.” 

Courtney Hammond

“Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”

Banksy

Source: Banksy Completed

“The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”

Lewis Mumford

Source: Philosophy and the City: Classic to Contemporary Writings

“As an artificial world, the city should be so in the best sense: made by art, shaped for human purposes.”

Kevin Lynch

“Art is an evolutionary act. The shape of art and its role in society is constantly changing. At no point is art static. There are no rules.”

Raymond Salvatore Harmon

Source: Bomb: A Manifesto Of Art Terrorism

“In the end, or society will be defined not only by what we create, but what we refuse to destroy.”

John Sawhill

Quotes about transport and urban planning

A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.

Bill Vaughan

“What if we chose to live close enough to work and the grocery store that we didn’t need gas at all? What if we chose to reject gas as a necessity, therefore placing the power back in our own hands? The only real freedom is freedom from want. Let’s stop wanting gasoline.” 

Sierra Elizabeth

“The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.”

Lewis Mumford

Source: Beyond Mobility: Planning Cities for People and Places

“If you demolish the whole city for the flow of traffic, what destination for that traffic would be left?”

Marc van Woudenberg

“Parking is a narcotic and ought to be a controlled substance. It is addictive and one can never have enough.”

Victor Dover

Source: The High Cost of Free Parking

Life is a journey, but don’t worry, you’ll find a parking spot at the end.

Isaac Asimov

“Adding lanes to solve traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to solve obesity.”

Glen Hemistra

Source: Green Engineering: Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Design

“Planning of the automobile city focuses on saving time. Planning for the accessible city, on the other hand, focuses on time well spent.”

Robert Cevero

Source: The High Cost of Free Parking

“Life is like a 10-speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.”

Charles M. Schulz

By Charles M. Schulz: The Bumper Book of Peanuts: Snoopy and Friends

“Cycling is possibly the greatest and most pleasurable form of transport ever invented. It is like walking only with one-tenth of the effort. Ride through a city and you can understand its geography in a way that no motorist, contained by one-way signs and traffic jams, will ever be able to. It truly is one of the greatest feelings of freedom once can have in a metropolitan environment. Amazingly, you can feel this free in a modern city.”

Daniel Pemberton

Source: The Book of Idle Pleasures

“It’s amazing how I’m able to ride around on a bike. People kind of see it’s me but since I’m on a bike, they think, ‘No, it’s not her.’ And by the time they realize it’s me, I’m already gone.” 

Beyoncé

“Cycling starts to become as much a way of life and a philosophy as it does a form of transport. It spreads from work to weekends to holidays. They nominate themselves for sponsored rides and charity marathons. They stop thinking in miles and start thinking in kilometres. Almost by mistake, they find themselves in possession of a whole fleet of bikes: one for work, one for speed, one for the wet, one for annoying other people who know about bikes. They arrive at work early every day now, radiant with sweat and self-satisfaction. At home, they talk about getting rid of the car. In the evenings, they admire their newly altered profile in the mirror; the helmet hair, the buns of steel, the bloody knees.”

Bella Bathurst

Source: The Bicycle Book

“We are realising that if you have people walk and bicycle more, you have a more lively, more liveable, more attractive, more safe, more sustainable and more healthy city. And what are you waiting for?”

Jan Gehl

Source: Bike Nation: How Cycling Can Save the World

“I’m not a big fan of capitalism or business, but it’s pretty obvious that if we build a beautiful system of bike boulevards, bicyclists will come to ride them by the tens of thousands. When they do, they spend a lot of money and keep a lot of our local economy going.” 

Chris Carlsson

“A protected bicycle lane in a city in a developing country is a powerful symbol, showing that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is as important as one in a $30,000 car.”

Enrique Peñalosa

By Enrique Peñalosa: Ciudad, Igualdad, Felicidad

“Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to cycle and he will realize fishing is stupid and boring.”

Desmond Tutu

Photo: Matheus Bertelli.

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Malta secured its independence from the United Kingdom in 1964 and, today, is Europe’s most densely populated country. Along with 144 other nations, Malta is a signatory to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Refugee Convention, which was established to protect people displaced from their countries due to issues of war, persecution or disaster.

Signed in 1951, the Convention sets out refugee rights, including safe asylum and ‘at least the same rights and basic help as any other foreigner.’ Recommendations that refugees are treated like nationals as much as possible includes a requirement of non-discrimination in paid and self employment. But in Malta in 2015, the conventions of the Convention were put to the test.

What caused the 2015 refugee crisis in Malta?

In 2015, political change in regions to the south and east of Europe contributed to a mass movement of people, with refugees primarily of Middle Eastern and African origin arriving in the European Union (EU) via land and sea. Due to the geographical origin of this event, Malta and other EU border states in the south and south-east experienced a high number of refugees and, with EU law mandating asylum applications at the country of entry, more complex logistical demands.  

Though the European refugee crisis is widely seen as having started in 2015, its timeline is viewed differently in Malta. The number of asylum seekers arriving by boat peaked in 2008, and between 2009 and 2013 Malta received the highest number of asylum seekers compared to its population—20.1 per 1,000 people compared to the EU average of 2.9. This can be attributed to its sea border with Tunisia and Libya and proximity to other countries experiencing upheaval from the anti-government uprisings known as the Arab Spring.

How did Maltese media report on migration & refugees?

Despite what Ethical Journalism Network refers to as a ‘vibrant media landscape’, a sensationalistic reporting approach to the refugee crisis in Malta was evident. Use of the term ‘illegal immigrants’, rather than refugees or asylum seekers, was widespread – language which is specifically designed to dehumanise refugees and build negative perceptions.

This dehumanisation went beyond the media, being evident in Maltese government policy. Malta is the only EU state to have automatically detained irregular immigrants on arrival, against international human rights laws and the norms, principles and rights of refugees outlined in the Refugee Convention. Vessels of Non-Governmental Organisations intended to help refugees at sea were stopped from docking and stopped from leaving Malta had they been able to dock.

The impact of Malta’s geographical location

While Malta’s geographical location resulted in the arrival of refugees, it is this location which underpins much of the country’s economic advantage, being close to continental Europe, the Middle East and Northern Africa. Yet Malta faces economic challenges due to its low population size. The Maltese Ministry of Labor, arguing that these challenges can be resolved by immigration, stated in 2018 that 30,000 foreign workers were needed over four years to meet their economic growth targets. With minimal reading between the lines, a lack of enthusiasm for this target could be seen within the comments of Clyde Caruana, chair of a Ministry of Labor initiative, who stated that ‘really and truly we do not have any other choice’. This view towards immigrant workers of any qualification or social status may partly explain a lack of willingness to welcome refugees and support them with a right to work.

It is somewhat ironic that the Maltese government has a stated need for foreign workers to achieve economic growth targets and a policy of detainment which denies the right to work to people from other countries. Malta, however, is not alone in its lack of support for the UNHCR’s refugee work rights, with over 20 countries placing restrictions on it and 12 treating it as aspirational. If work is indeed important for the successful integration of refugees into new cultures, these restrictions could be seen as a deliberate effort to reduce integration, and thus the attractiveness of Malta as a destination or longer-term home. This evaluation is supported by the views of Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, justifying his government’s policies based on a need to ‘attract people who do certain kinds of work’.

Did Malta Have the Most Refugees?

Despite critique of its approaches, Malta acted within the framework of its own legislation, albeit in a grey area where much of it contradicts the Refugee Convention it signed up to. Additionally, an implication of flexibility is suggested within the Convention due to it acknowledging the right to work as potentially unworkable if the number of refugees is too high. This could reasonably be argued to be the case in Malta with its highest-per-capita refugee levels. Unhelpfully, the convention notes the figure of half a million refugees as their benchmark—which indeed would be very high in a small country like Malta. By avoiding per-capita clarity, the issue can be harnessed for local interpretation. While this may have been deliberate—flexibility is common within international agreements—critique is difficult when the terms have been presented in such a way.

Malta’s influence on EU migration policy 

Malta is a small peripheral state, with those circumstances seeing it disproportionately challenged by the arrival of mass refugees. However, while initially finding itself as a gatekeeper for an EU-wide issue, Malta has since ended up in a position of power to influence EU-wide migration policy. Alongside efforts to fortify external EU borders, reducing the entry of asylum seekers, controversial agreements with countries such as Turkey, Sudan and Eritrea have been entered into, effectively outsourcing immigration control and blocking the movements of people in need.

Though Malta is a signatory to the Refugee Convention, legislation and attitudes in the country can be seen as contradictory to the Convention’s values. The scale of the challenges associated with the EU refugee crisis may have resulted in a scenario where Malta has effectively prototyped an EU-wide political and cultural status where positive refugee relations are endorsed in theory but not in practice. 

Photos: Wikimedia and Wikimedia

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Known as virtual restaurants, ghost kitchens or dark kitchens (a term coined in 2015), this hospitality-meets-technology concept swiftly gathered a crowd of critics, spooked by predictions of the demise of both the hospitality sector and the character of cities. That was a lot of concern for something pitched by its originators as, somewhat unsurprisingly, advantageous for everyone. So what’s happened in the five years since?

Dark kitchens: Better for everyone?

There were, apparently, many benefits associated with operating dark kitchens:

• Cheaper to set up than a full restaurant.
• Requiring less kitchen space and fewer staff, and cheaper to run as a result.
• Less stress for business owners due to the dark kitchen aggregator picking up some operational requirements.
• Reduced friction from couriers accessing the location (avoiding the conflict that traditional restaurants experience with courier access).
• New markets for products.
• A wider range of delivery food offerings for consumers.
• Improved experiences for those dining in traditional restaurants by removing or reducing the amount of delivery orders.

Another stated benefit of dark kitchens was the ease of finding a workable location to operate from. Setting up a formal restaurant requires consideration for a range of factors, including footfall, cost of rent or leases, permissions and operating costs. It also benefits from a sprinkling of romance – a love for producing and serving people good food. For dark kitchens, the amount of people in your delivery radius plus access to basic utilities is pretty much all there is to it. I’m not qualified to comment on the romance factor, but some of the location descriptions found during research for this blog post suggest it’s not super high:

• “A piece of wasteland”
• “A windowless industrial shed in a car park”
• “A shipping container on a small space of land between two building ends”

The downsides of dark kitchens

Other developments in the last five years suggest there are downsides beyond the charm of dismal locations. The main challenges faced by dark kitchen tenants and operators have been:

• Difficulty securing viable planning permission.
• Criticism of poor food hygiene and other standards.
• A barrage of complaints from neighbours.

In each case, dark kitchen tenants and operators have been butting up against the systems that have maintained a degree of consistency and predictability for people – a stability that is the opposite of the disruption that tech firms like Deliveroo are so fond of.

However, further disruption in the food delivery space seems inevitable, including its knock-on impact to the places where hospitality businesses operate. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in people spending more money on delivery food, but as restrictions subsided, spending on delivery food hasn’t. The dark kitchen was on the up before COVID, but the pandemic turbocharged it. Its market value is expected to climb from US$56.7 billion in 2021 to $112.5 billion by 2027.

Disrupting the dark kitchen

Innovation is already well underway within the core boundaries of the dark kitchen concept and, once again, it is proving controversial. Open up your food delivery app of choice and you will likely find plenty of options. Some brand names you know, and some places you’ve visited in person. You’re also likely to see some unfamiliar names. Some of those will be ‘virtual brands’ operating out of the kitchens of existing restaurants. It’s not so much dark kitchens, but dark, or virtual, brands.

Virtual brands have been pitched as an opportunity for businesses to:

• Trial new concepts at lower risk.
• Meet changing market demands without undermining their core offering.
• Generate revenue from underutilised kitchen space.

However, this virtual approach to branding has been criticised for misleading consumers by suggesting they are buying from a smaller business and, in some cases, actually selling identical products under different brand names.

Aspects of the virtual brands concept make it more appealing than a dark kitchen. Hospitality businesses already have the necessary physical infrastructure in place and, in many cases, are not fully utilising it. Launching virtual brands alongside their core business creates the opportunity to operate with more agility, taking a wider offering online when they are able to meet demand, and generating more revenue than they would have otherwise.

This has been met with some enthusiasm by hospitality tech businesses. French startup Not So Dark recently pivoted from a physical dark kitchen operating model to a virtual brands setup when they raised US$80 million in Series B funding.

While disruption is the favoured term of the tech sector, many forget the obvious: disruption is disruptive, and a two-way street. Radical new approaches to infrastructure require capital, no matter how terrible the location. This reality saw Not So Dark move towards a business model that bypassed physical infrastructure, instead focusing on developing not only effective digital infrastructure but a family of food brands that existing kitchens can simply connect into, cook pre-developed menus using existing assets.

The dark kitchen spectrum

Many hospitality businesses today face challenging commercial realities. Heritage brands have weathered multiple storms to find themselves operating in a world of different consumer demands and tastes. Multi-brand kitchens are increasingly seen as an inevitability, and a requirement for success as a hospitality business.

The dark kitchen is approaching its tenth birthday. It’s already gone through many changes, but it remains a young concept. There will be more change to come. When thinking about the dark kitchen today, it’s better to think of it as a spectrum, with some typical approaches:

• The single dark kitchen: One operator, taking advantage of the benefits of the dark kitchen operating style.
• Shared dark kitchen: A dark kitchen owned by an aggregator like Deliveroo, where businesses work alongside each other, shipping food from the same location.
• Collection dark kitchens: Either a single or shared dark kitchen where customers can also collect their food orders.
• Virtual brands, developed by restaurants: Businesses that develop virtual brands to prepare and dispatch from the existing kitchens of their core brand.
• Virtual brands developed by brand aggregators: Virtual brands developed entirely by aggregators, like Not So Dark, prepared and dispatched from existing kitchens of their clients.

The hospitality sector and our cities have both been changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. While this was happening, the dark kitchen concept grew up and evolved, and secured the confidence of the tech sector. It failed, so far, to kill off hospitality as we once knew it. Indeed, hospitality, the tech sector and cities are all synonymous with change, albeit often with varying degrees of enthusiasm and consent. Right now, the dark kitchen doesn’t seem to be much more than a new type of change in two sectors (and one form of human settlement – the city) known for change.

Photo: Carl Campbell

The post Dark Kitchens: What Next for Tech’s Favourite Food-Based Method of Urban Disruption? appeared first on This Big City.

September 19th was not a typical public holiday, however. As the day of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, it was slotted in to the public holiday schedule at the last minute, topping up an already bumper year of days off after an earlier bonus for the Platinum Jubilee. This meant England and Wales enjoyed 10 public holidays, up from their usual 8 (Scotland and Northern Ireland got even more, enjoying 11 instead of 9, and 12 instead of 10, respectively).

While this public holiday was far from usual, the act of closing on public holidays was a normal occurrence for this south London food bank. Yet the response to what could have been a fairly ordinary announcement was described by MyLondon as “outrage”, with feedback along the lines of:

“Why does the queen’s funeral mean you need to stop providing food for people?”

And:

“Nothing like stopping the most vulnerable from being able to access food on a day when millions in taxpayers’ money is being spent.”

So what went wrong? I’m going to take a substantial detour here, entirely bypassing the ethical point of whether it was appropriate or not for this service to close and instead look at the flaws in their statement.

Saying the wrong thing

The statement shared by the food bank was short and simple, but it featured a core error that acted as the trigger for the outrage that followed:

Our condolences go out to the Royal family at this sad time. All food bank hubs will be closed on Monday 19th September due to funeral. We will reopen from Tuesday 20th Sept.

While true that the decision to close was ultimately a result of the funeral, this food bank had a long precedent of closing on public holidays. In reality, they were closing because it was a public holiday, and they wanted their volunteers to have a day off. By neglecting to make this point, the stage was set for disgruntled members of the public to share entirely valid concerns.

They’d represented the situation incorrectly, and made it seem worse than it was.

Not giving enough information

The role food banks play in society has become increasingly critical. Yet food banks are not government services. They are often community-run, stocked with donated goods and kept going by donated time.

The message delivered failed to do a couple of things. Firstly, there was insufficient consideration for the public perception of their significance. Secondly, they neglected to consider any potential lack of knowledge of the way they operate. As a result, the statement lacked substance and clarity, denying those receiving the message the opportunity to understand the situation fully.

By leaving important context out, the seeds for confusion were sown.

Failing to reflect their culture

Everything an organisation and its representatives say or do is a reflection of its culture. The deliberate and undeliberate things we see and hear offer valuable insights into what people and organisations are really like.

In this case, those behind the food bank’s statement failed to consider something pretty critical: they exist to help the most needy in society. Those people were not even mentioned in the statement itself and – even worse – the focus of the attention was someone literally in the opposite scenario of those they serve.

Failing to understand sentiment

Looking to make an out-of-the-ordinary statement? Do some research first. Have a quick Google and take a look at the messages and responses shared by similar organisations – it may well give you the insight you need to frame your message appropriately, changing the approach you originally intended to take.

Had this London food bank done this themselves, they would have found simmering public frustration with the decisions of some organisations to close, and the expense and level of attention being dedicated to the Queen’s funeral.

Drafting a statement benefits from an understanding of ‘the mood’. It’s basically the room you are walking in to, the room you need to read in order to deliver a message that lands.

That information could have given them food for thought.

Image courtesy of Nico Smit

The post The Communications Failings Behind That London Food Bank Closure Outrage appeared first on This Big City.

But recent developments in London suggest we may have found the limit of this equation.

Five years have passed since I walked down Siemens Brothers Way, and nine since the street was inaugurated. It was an exciting time, for some, in this unloved pocket of the English capital. A Green Enterprise District had been declared, aiming to create a low-carbon economy and regenerate an area a few kilometres further east than Canary Wharf (an area that, let’s be honest, was already a bit further east than the sort of people of interest to a Green Enterprise District truly wanted to go).

One of the organisations that bought in to this project was my then-employer Siemens, building a technologically advanced flagship pavilion accredited with some of the most prestigious sustainability certifications in the world. It was a genuinely enriching space to work from. And naturally, this multi-million-pound development required an access street. And yes, that street required a name.

The Siemens brothers were German entrepreneurs born in the 1800s and, if the press releases are to be believed, the company they founded went on to make its mark on the history of the London docklands. But the thing with making history is you don’t always know if you actually are making it, even if you and those around you feel, at the time, that you definitely are. The Green Enterprise District ended up largely going nowhere, with few additional big names attracted to get on board. Most of the subsequent development of the area was residential, accelerated by advancing plans for a nearby Crossrail station.

Ownership of the pavilion eventually changed, its original tenants went on to depart, and its status at the time of publication is the capital’s next city hall (once conversion challenges are overcome). So was history made? I’d argue not.

Others agree. Earlier this year, a new name was selected for Siemens Brothers Way, after community consultation and a public vote: Kamal Chunchie Way.

Kamal Chunchie was a race relations pioneer from Sri Lanka, known for founding the Coloured Men’s Institute for sailors, dock workers, and residents of London’s Royal Docks in 1926.

Both street names have meaning, and both could be justified, albeit in radically different ways. This name change therefore tells us something significant: streets are an asset – a permanent asset. Naming rights, on the other hand, come with a fixed term. Even if that wasn’t the formal case in this scenario, it ended up being its truth.

A street has depth of meaning and social significance. A street could have been walked down by your great-great-great grandparents – and it could be walked down by your great-great-great grandchildren. Unlike stadiums and bike hire schemes, streets are tangible parts of what it means and how it feels to be a citizen of a city. They’re a shared part of our lived experience, and street names need to be meaningful in order to reflect that.

The treatment of Kamal Chunchie Way did not meet the standard required for something as significant as a street. For some of those involved, that penny has already dropped, and London’s Royal Docks defined a new street-naming process as a result of the re-naming exercise:

Six principles that came out of the workshops will guide names given to new public spaces in the area over the next 20 years: Inspire pride in people and place. Represent the underrepresented. Create catchy and curious names. Tell stories on the streets. Celebrate the ordinary. Co-create and add colour.

People’s vote to decide new street address

History is bumpy, and when taking a step back to consider the complex and traumatic events that have triggered street name changes elsewhere, this corporate-naming-rights misstep seems pretty insignificant. But a street is not insignificant to those who experience it. Like most assets in today’s cities, street names are valuable, but the naming process demands different evaluations, and different participants, to that of a stadium or bike hire scheme.

After a bit of a false start, I hope that all who walk down Kamal Chunchie Way have a positive and enriching experience.

Image: Kevin Grieve

The post What’s in a Name? The London Street Showing the Limit of Naming Rights to Urban Infrastructure appeared first on This Big City.

For me, this is a straightforward question: it isn’t. Those of us in the creative industries would benefit from embracing that up front, proceeding to do what we do with a consciousness of complexity. So why is creativity alone not enough for the transformation of urban design and planning?

Creativity is One Layer of the Urban Experience

The experience of urban creativity – at least, in its most traditional sense – is something that typically exists on the surface. It’s the innovative public transport app informed by data, which itself couldn’t exist without the physical infrastructure being there to begin with. It’s the temporary urban intervention happening in a centuries-old street that has been shaped over time by slow and complex planning processes.

None of this is necessarily bad. When I wrote about digital transformation in the planning system in April, I shared:

A foundational challenge is that the pace of planning is slower – something which is not a problem to overcome, but an important characteristic.

Joe Peach, Shaping Digital First Community Consultation in Scotland

This is a point that also applies when thinking about creativity and urban transformation. People in the creative industries have a lot to bring to the city, and the city can benefit from this creative layer. But a consciousness of other industries, specialisms, and mindsets matters, because those things are critical layers of the urban experience too. Being aware of these layers, and how they work together, is crucial if transformation is the goal.

Creativity Can be Destructive, With or Without Intent

In February 2020 I wrote about the rent gap theory and Marvila – a district in Lisbon. To its north, west and south, you’ll find wealthier, more expensive areas. To its east, the Atlantic Ocean. Marvila is an area where rents are lower than they could be, with a population made up, in part, of people who once lived in informal housing and those pushed out of other areas due to the impact of gentrification on rent prices.

The City Government, conscious of Marvila’s differing social and economic circumstances, turned to creativity to benefit the area. Artists were selected by the City and commissioned to paint murals on the blocks. Tourist buses now visit the neighbourhood for the first time, stopping off to see the street art.

The true intent of this may be as simple as window dressing – using creativity to improve the cultural and economic fortunes of a neighbourhood. It could also be a City seeing untapped economic potential, with an ultimate disregard for those impacted by accelerated gentrification. Whatever the truth, people in the creative industries benefit from proceeding critically, with a consciousness that their practice is not positive by default. Transformation has many potential outcomes, introducing a need to ask:

• Who is benefiting from this attempt at urban transformation?
• Who is behind the initiative and what are their stated and unstated goals?
• How does this situation align with my motivations?

Urban Transformation is Good, Realism is Better

My home city of Edinburgh was once blessed with an extensive rail network. After much of this closed, kilometres of former rail routes were turned into pedestrian and cyclist paths. Due to the city’s terrain, stretches of these paths pass underground, with some receiving insufficient maintenance in the years that followed their conversion.

Poorly maintained underground tunnels for pedestrians and cyclists can feel dangerous, be dangerous, and have a negative impact on the spaces surrounding them. The Colinton Tunnel Project was set up to overcome these issues, turning to local creative practitioners to paint the entire length of the tunnel (as well as investing in improved lighting – a crucial non-creative layer!)

One artist involved in the project told the BBC News:

“It’s only a millimetre of paint but it completely changes its story. This is the narrative now for Colinton. It is putting this place on the map.”

Chris Rutterford, Muralist, Colinton Tunnel Project, Source: BBC News

Transformation is a lofty goal, at any scale. But is it genuinely necessary to transform an entire city, or an entire industry? Is improvement of one place or one thing acceptable? It is certainly more achievable.

Learnings

So what does this mean for creative practitioners in and on the fringes of urban development? If you are part of the creative industries and urban transformation is your goal, I encourage you to:

• Embrace the skills you have for developing creative ideas, and be willing to look beyond the traditional boundaries of your specialisms.
• Improve, or develop, your ability to bridge the gap between your own creative practice and the other specialisms that are an equally important part of the city experience.
• Be willing to work with those of different specialisms to you, accepting this means different mindsets, different motivations, different goals and different requirements.
• Be critical and be nimble. The rules changes, circumstances change, society changes, and goals change. No one stakeholder has all the answers.

Turning ideas into impact requires collaborative creativity. That means grasping the conflicts typical of cross-sector collaboration and working through them to get to the other side. No genuine urban transformation is possible without it.

Photo: Volkan Olmez, Edinburgh Tourist

The post What People in the Creative Industries Need to Know About Urban Transformation appeared first on This Big City.

Change is normal in planning. Its emergence as a state function largely occurred across the the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, albeit initially following a top-down approach, without community engagement. The impact of World War II on the wider built environment, and housing supply specifically, is often seen as the point where this approach began to change, accelerated by the citizen aspirations for improved quality of life witnessed during the 1960s. Today, the act of involving people in planning and its decision-making processes – community engagement – is considered a key component of democratic planning systems. 

Change is also normal in Scotland’s planning system. Planning powers were devolved in 1997, and community engagement with planning has been a stated Scottish Government priority since then. The Scottish planning systems categorises applications as local, major or national, with the hierarchy intended to structure the role of local inputs, amongst other things. For larger developments – those categorised as major or national – a period of pre-application consultation (PAC) is required. As part of this, developers are obliged to undertake community consultation which until April 2020 was mandated through legislation to be an in-person, public event.

Though this recent change to digital consultation was reactionary, other disruptive changes have been more deliberate. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 gave rural agricultural crofting communities purchase rights without owner’s consent; made compulsory purchase possible for community groups interested in abandoned and neglected land; and, gave groups interested in other land the opportunity secure the right to buy it should it become available. Future changes indicated by the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019 include a requirement for planning authorities to invite communities to prepare Local Place Plans, and a proposal that local authorities pursue infrastructure levies, applying charges to planning permissions to fund infrastructure of community value.

Broadband and 4G connectivity is another Scottish Government priority, something which is fortunate for those instructed to pursue web-based engagement alternatives during this period of change. In December 2017, the ‘biggest public investment ever made in a single UK broadband project’ was announced, aiming to provide broadband of at least 30Mbps to every premises. However, while initially aimed to be achieved by 2021, current timelines suggest that Scotland’s southern and central regions will be served by this programme by 2023, with a later unspecified date for the country’s more sparsely populated northern regions. A separate programme is in place to address lack of 4G connectivity in some, but not all, parts of the country.

Regular internet use in increasing for every age group in the UK, sitting at 99% for those aged 16-34 since at least 2015. A prioritisation of digital approaches in Scottish Government programmes is therefore unsurprising. This includes a digital first service standard (DFSS), practiced in central government services since 2016. The principle of the DFSS is for digital government services to be so good that all who can use them, prefer to use them. For those who cannot use them, an equivalent offline service is available. The DFSS is therefore not a solely digital approach, but an approach which means that services are designed primarily to be undertaken digitally, with non-digital equivalents available. 

Aspects of the Scottish planning system already follow this approach. An online portal for planning and building standards applications was launched in 2016 and, at the time of writing, 95% of planning applications are made through it. Yet despite this, PAC’s default is an in-person process, exempt from the DFSS due to it not being a central government service. Though this is arguably justifiable, these circumstances seem mainly to demonstrate a willingness to allow administrative circumstances to dictate the approach taken.

Like the rest of the UK, Scotland’s planning system is plan-led. Decisions on planning permission are triggered when those interested in undertaking developments commence planning processes. Today’s planning in Scotland is a multi-stakeholder process, with aspirations that public participation processes are a manifestation of citizen values. For PAC this means that, while the Scottish Government can and does mandate community consultation values and requirements, the process itself is initiated, undertaken and reported on by developers, with engagement outcomes demonstrated to government when a planning application is made. PAC, while an integral part of planning, is operationally and conceptually different to the central government services shaped by the DFSS.

As Scotland reaches the 1 year anniversary of an unintended and supposedly temporary change, a clear opportunity exists to reshape community consultation, delivering a process optimised for the world we live in today. With one year of experience to refer to, as well as five years from the DFSS, detailing the key considerations for digital first community consultation is easier now than it would have been at the time this temporary measure was swiftly introduced.

Five Principles for Digital First Community Consultation

1. Digital Inclusion Is About More Than Infrastructure

Inclusive planning is driven by a desire to shape a built environment representative of its citizens. Community consultation is synonymous with this approach, though in-person engagement can be imperfect due to an operational style that suits those with time and motivation, and a feedback process more welcoming for the dominant social groups most used to being heard. The concept of ‘inclusion’ can be controversial, with some stakeholders suggesting it implies one group granting access – something which could then be revoked.

If planning is a process which responds to social change, technological change could be considered a continuation of past conceptual approaches, even if the resulting outcomes are more tangible in nature. Concern in the Scottish Government about insufficient innovation in planning suggests digital is the direction of travel:

Citizens, on the other hand, started realising this potential a long time ago, spending years learning about digital engagement simply by using Web 2.0 technologies – tools associated with the second stage of the internet’s development where dynamic content and online conversation are the norm. While not all agree that this change has benefited society, planning’s need to evolve in line with societal trends is more important than universal agreement on whether those trends are positive.

In Good Services, Lou Downe shares that ‘regardless of how your service is consumed, the internet is where your users start’. This corresponds with the regular internet usage statistics in the UK and further suggests that both internet reach and internet use are important for understanding digital inclusion. For Scotland, the opportunity of reaching remote areas through digital first community consultation is attractive, yet it is also these areas that are more likely to be without fast or reliable methods of connectivity. Inclusion is therefore not just about infrastructure reach and internet use, but also quality of methods of connectivity.

A consciousness of other challenges, such as computer literacy, hardware access, and economic or social circumstances that result in people being digitally disconnected, is also crucial. Citizens can have superfast broadband to their building, but no connection in their home. They can be online but lack appropriate hardware. They can have hardware but not know how to use it. Inclusion is complex. However, technological progress is now so embedded in society that a cultural shift has occurred, shaping expectations of service delivery. A consciousness of the challenges associated with inclusion in digital first community consultation is crucial, but as a way of informing appropriate solutions, not further delaying digital first methodologies.

2. Meaningfulness Is Context Specific

Meaningful engagement is a stated Scottish Government expectation of community consultation. This is explained as a process where communications are two-way in nature, and where citizen inputs are analysed and reflected in applications. Yet the reality for the concept of meaningfulness is that it is personal, and shaped by a project’s circumstances. Context is key for meaningfulness, making it reasonable to suggest that the requirements for a digital process would be different to an in-person one. 

As with in-person consultation, representation matters if planning is to facilitate the creation of a built environment that reflects its citizens. Networking gives citizens the opportunity to connect with other stakeholders and be part of two-way communications. And engagement makes it possible for views to be shared, heard, analysed, and incorporated.

Digital meaningfulness must therefore avoid being passive in nature. However, it also has to respond in a way that reflects its context. There is a known potential for lack of civility online, and for a loss of nuance. Yet there is also potential for reaching more people, generating a wider basis of opinion and a quantity of responses that enables a different type of evaluation. Consideration for how inputs have been influenced by the context matters, but so does an evaluative approach which embraces the positives of the circumstances.

Being digital first is therefore not just about timing. It is about applying digital first thinking at all stages, from how inputs are evaluated to how services are delivered. A precedent exists for services mimicking the non-digital when they launch in a new format – think Apple’s faux-leather design approach during the iPhone’s earlier years – and a risk exists where current in-person community consultation processes are duplicated digitally, ticking the box of digital engagement but not genuinely following digital first thinking, nor responding appropriately to the context. Digital first means reflecting context and truly prioritising digital methods in delivery, engagement and evaluation.

3. Digitalisation is Already Happening for All Stakeholders

In Scotland, over 94% of properties have access to internet with speeds over 30mbps. 2019 figures from the UK’s Office of National Statistics show that only 7.5% of adults in the UK have never used the internet – a number that has been decreasing every year (though data is not available for Scotland alone). While evident that advances are being made with broadband and 4G infrastructure, an urban/rural divide remains. Similarly, though regular internet use among UK adults is increasing, adults who are elderly and/or disabled are less likely to be regular internet users.

It could be considered a statement of the obvious to suggest that it is rational to tailor consultation methods to the approaches valued by those you are trying to engage with. Despite lack of universal progress, digital needs to at least be a core engagement option. As neatly summarised by one participant during a recent event on digitalisation in planning:

It is going to become more and more weird that anything across planning isn’t digital, with public expectation going the digital direction.

Service Designer, Digitising the Future of Environmental Impact Assessment

Digital expectations are also experienced by developers – those responsible for submitting planning applications. Developer frustrations about pre-COVID pre-application consultation include that it is too formulaic, too simple, and doesn’t go far enough. Others have effectively already gone digital first with community consultation, albeit for projects outside of PAC processes.

Lastly, the Scottish Government itself long ago concluded that digital first methods are viable for their own services, reaching that conclusion with consideration for infrastructure reach and usage trends. Though the infrastructural and social conditions are demonstrably not in place for community consultation to be digital only, a digital first approach does not claim nor aim to be digital only, just digital first.

4. Be Ready for a Culture Clash

With PAC a multi-stakeholder process, you can expect different expectations from all involved. The likely introduction of an additional stakeholder for delivery of digital consultation methods further complicates this. Though Scottish planning has ‘iterated’ at various stages of its existence, iteration in the world of digital services occurs at a different pace – far more rapid than is typical of the democratic and consultative norms of planning. A foundational challenge is therefore that the pace of planning is slower – something which is not a problem to overcome, but an important characteristic.

A risk exists of lack of compatibility between the iterative working approaches of the technology sector and a lack of genuine fluency in such methods among developers and government, with a potential worst-case scenario where the platforms used for consultation dictate the shape of the engagement itself.

While there is value in the familiar, those in the tech sector argue for digital services that harness technological characteristics rather than replicating in-person processes. It is possible, however, that early digital innovations in community consultation would be better served by pursuing a path of recreating non-digital methods – a web 1.0 approach – before becoming more representative of the technological platform they inhabit – a web 2.0 approach.

The requirements of PAC as currently established by government are not intended to accommodate regular iteration. Any compromises – one direction or another – would inevitably impact the experience of undertaking PAC, potentially failing to match the expectations of citizens or any other stakeholder.

A hypothetical risk is that democratic planning and digital services cannot be cohesively aligned, with the resulting compromises meaning that the benefits of digital engagement are not fully realised. However, this seems like an unlikely stumbling block. While government stakeholders could not realistically be expected to deploy the same working fluency in technological innovation as someone in that sector, that target is not actually required. It is not a Government requirement to detail how iteration and innovation should be practiced, just that the core requirements impacting these things are clear.

5. Substantive Change to Standards is Needed

The Scottish Government’s operation of DFSS since 2016, albeit on central government services, suggests that achieving a new equilibrium is possible. However, the approach required for the community consultation in PAC would involve additional changes to the structures which shape the specifics of the digital first approach due to its multi-stakeholder operations.

Guidance would be needed to address issues related to data sharing and ownership, timing and duration of consultations, and requirements for managing the iteration of consultation. With this process being multi-stakeholder, the most crucial change would be clarity – ensuring each player understands their role, where their responsibility sits and – perhaps most importantly – where it stops.

The government says to developers you must engage, you must demonstrate this as part of your planning application, and there are certain requirements. Yes there are things that have to be done, but it’s up to the developer to demonstrate they have done a sufficient job of engaging with people, getting their views and taking them into account. The role of the government is to be clear what someone needs to do, what are the requirements that need to be met, and how they should be met. But without, ideally, being too prescriptive.

Head of Consultation

Even within a mandated digital first approach, guidelines could retain flexibility, or indeed not. It can be required that developers use specific methods, applications or approaches that have been evaluated and approved by those responsible in government, offering citizens familiar opportunities for online engagement, and potential for more readily comparable data. Flexibility, on the other hand, means potential for innovation, experimentation, and context-specific engagements. A choice would need to be made. In both cases, clarity on data ownership is essential.

Digital engagements offer an opportunity to operate on a different timescale, both with the consultations themselves and the analysis of data afterwards. A valuable opportunity exists within the activities that happen outside of the community consultation, potentially informing future engagements or planning more widely. Harnessing that opportunity would require sufficient clarity about the timing expectations of digital first community consultation.

Recommendations for Scottish Planning

• Digital first community consultation should begin early in the engagement process: This affords time for meaningful discussion, data generation, and evaluation, which could then influence resulting non-digital methods such as a later, second in-person PAC engagement.
• It should run over a longer period of time: Rather than mimicking in-person processes and running a short consultation, digital first PAC benefits from being able to run for longer, including during and after in-person elements, acting as a community hub for project engagements.
• Relevant demographic information should be monitored: Understanding whether participants are representative of their communities requires information to be asked for and received. The process of requesting this information, if undertaken appropriately, demonstrates to users that representation is valued.
• Multiple engagement methods, including remote and offline options, should be practiced: Offering different feedback methods, varying in medium, duration, and privacy, provides options reflective of the range of engagement preferences in a community. Remote, offline options introduces broader appeal, including for those without internet access.
• Inputs should be evaluated and presented at a later-stage, in-person PAC event: Beginning at an early stage, before an in-person component, offers the opportunity to analyse initial inputs and use those findings to introduce additional value to a later in-person PAC stage.
• Technical capabilities and stakeholder expectations should inform iteration: As societal trends and technological capacity of hardware and software evolves, digital first PAC approaches should change too, offering a sufficiently responsive service.
• Digital first service standard criteria specific to the PAC working approach need to be developed: PAC operates differently to central government services. The digital first criteria deployed for central government services would not be suitable and a modified digital first framework specifically for PAC would be needed.

Photo: Ross Sneddon

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Le Corbusier grew up in a Swiss town – the heart of the then-critical watchmaking industry – that was rebuilt on a grid plan after being partially destroyed by fire. Howard spent his early years in central London, studying in a boarding school in the surrounding countryside while his family remained in the city due to access to employment. Le Corbusier would go on to argue for grid-like cities which functioned like clockwork, and Howard would promote the benefits of developments on the fringes of a city.

Le Corbusier: Rebooting the City

Le Corbusier advocated building up not out, proposing cities of skyscrapers in support of a population density goal of 1,200 people per acre. He believed that existing city regions should be demolished and rebuilt in support of this approach, rebooting a city’s core while retaining the handful of built environment elements he endorsed.

Le Corbusier believed that cities should be fast-moving, connected spaces, ensuring people and goods could get from one place to another quickly and efficiently. Grid-like design elements in the street layout, transport infrastructure and building design represented his belief that nature should be overcome by the simplicity and efficiency of technology and modernity. He practiced a pro-car mindset, proposing wide highways alongside dedicated space for other modes.

Le Corbusier’s designs were provocative, something he was fully aware of. Enjoying the attention and profile generated by his provocations, many of his ideas were created merely as reputational boosts, something he saw as essential for ensuring the realisation of the more practical ideas he had planned for real-world adoption. Le Corbusier’s vision was that of a hyper-mobile, connected and efficient city – a city in an open-armed embrace of capitalism.

Considered by some to be a feminist, Le Corbusier designed for the provision of nurseries and argued for homes that were machines for living, supposedly motivated by freeing women from the responsibilities of managing the home. However, when considering his other values, it is more likely that a belief in capitalism and the role of urban citizens in facilitating economic growth was a bigger motivator.

Howard: The Anti-City

Howard believed in in the opportunities associated with building new developments outside existing city regions. He planned for towns where populations were capped at 32,000, seeing this as a method to overcome what he perceived to be issues related to density in general, not just density in industrialised cities. While not specifically against demolition, he saw it as unachievable, proposing moderate, low-density radial garden cities instead.

Howard’s aspiration was for regions which were self-sufficient in both food production and employment from industry, and considered rapid connections with other nearby areas to be of limited importance. He did, however, propose train-based travel connections to the inner city region. Howard believed that developments should mimic natural forms, deploying circular shapes and curved lines in street design. The prominent role of green space in his proposals reflected a belief in the importance of being close to nature. His developments were car free, expecting citizens to navigate the streets on foot, by bike, or by horse and cart. This, however, is likely to be based on the fact that private car ownership was not a major phenomenon at the time of his work.

Unlike Le Corbusier, Howard was primarily motivated by impact on the ground, and his proposals were socialism, rather than capitalism, orientated. His initial proposals for garden cities included co-operative ownership models, and he planned to provide housing and employment for everyone – with disabled people and those facing addiction challenges specifically accommodated.

Conceptual Similarities

Both Le Corbusier and Howard placed an emphasis on the role of green space in creating better futures, with Howard’s designs including large central parks, green belts between streets, and individual gardens for each home. Le Corbusier’s designs, perhaps best-known for skyscrapers and wide highways, planned for buildings to only take up 5% of land, with the spaces surrounding them including parks and leisure facilities.

Both practiced compartmentalisation, or zoning, in their methods. Howard planned towns with industrial areas located on the periphery, separate from housing. He proposed designated spaces for parks and retail. Le Corbusier also intended for industry to be separate from housing but went even further, advocating for zones within buildings. Ground floors were designed for parking, laundromats, and cleaning facilities, with kindergartens to be based on top floors (zoning out parental responsibilities). He proposed separate transit routes depending on whether someone was navigating the city by foot, bike, public transport or private vehicle.

Both Le Corbusier and Howard believed in the importance of horizontality in their projects, despite the differences in the urban forms they proposed. Le Corbusier saw the horizontal level in his skyscrapers as essential for the formation of communities, with ‘streets in the sky’ a famous goal associated with his vision. For Howard, his plan for car-free streets was as much about facilitating community-building as it was ensuring active travel, expecting neighbours to meet each other as they navigated his moderate towns.

Both also aimed for widespread adoption of their ideas. Howard’s designs were intended for repetition around a central city region, essentially forming numerous garden cities on the edges of a bigger city. Le Corbusier’s grid-like urban plan and box-like buildings were intended to be transplanted onto any city, regardless of their geographical form or culture. This top-down approach to urban planning, driven by a personal belief in what was right for society, was not as successful as either hoped for. Both saw projects completed where they were disappointed with the outcomes. Howard described Letchworth Garden City – the first realisation of his garden city concept – as a “poky experiment” and Le Corbusier considered Chandigarh – a new city in India built to his plans – to be a disappointment, undermined by compromise and collaboration with other stakeholders. This is unlikely to seem surprising to today’s readers. Engagement with the views of others, collaboration, and – crucially – compromise are all essential in urban planning, as they are in many professions. A lack of willingness to accept that reality was unlikely to result in satisfaction with the outcomes of their work.

Photo: Anthony Reungère

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In 1944, early proponent Friedrich von Hayek argued that neoliberalism increased personal freedom and stopped what he saw as the inevitable evolution from government intervention to totalitarian state control. Neoliberalism was framed as a revolution of thought, with practically every social and economic issue having a solution in the market. A reengineered state was proposed, existing to support and facilitate market demands, with governments intervening in only the few cases unaddressable by market forces. Despite initial resistance, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan became neoliberal cheerleaders in the West. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Union soon followed.

In a neoliberal world, cities compete for investment, jobs, residents and visitors, aiming to attract firms through advantageous regulatory and financial environments. The London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) is an early example of this. East London was experiencing economic decline due to the impact of containerisation and the resulting outward shift of docklands, with the LDDC born to tackle the economic and social issues left behind. An Enterprise Zone of reduced regulation and lower financial obligations was key to the proposals, upon which Canary Wharf was to be built and a second financial centre for London formed.

The neoliberal city has seen urban spectacle thrive, with mega events like the Olympics being used to attract and move capital. Starchitecture – where a well-known architect designs a landmark building – has been frequently deployed. Public-private partnerships have become the norm, with governments turning to the private sector to finance, implement and run urban infrastructure, attributed to the benefits of efficiency and specialisation. Neoliberalism has also changed the dynamic of public space.

In Canary Wharf, public spaces look like an ordinary part of the fabric of a city district but are in fact privately run, meaning participants can be asked to leave or barred entirely, based on the motivations of the operator. Further up the river, the current home of London’s City Hall – the literal physical manifestation of the city’s democracy – sits on private land where protests are forbidden.

None of this seems to match the ideas supposedly at the core of neoliberalism, where free movement of capital meant personal freedoms improved too. Yet the resulting prioritisation of the financial elements of societal function suggests that neoliberalism is can be inhumanely about economic logic, with nuanced and non-financial human considerations ignored.

There’s no better illustration of this than Thatcher’s notorious Right to Buy scheme, pitched as an opportunity for social housing tenants to buy their homes at a discounted rate. The resulting funds went straight to central government, leaving local authorities with a reduced social housing stock and no financial means to meet citizen needs the market couldn’t address. Today’s UK has longer social housing waiting lists, more private landlords, higher private rents, higher house prices, and more people who are homeless.

With neoliberalism playing a dominant role in the financialisation of the city and society, resistance unsurprisingly exists – and in various forms. In 1968, Henri Lefebvre argued for a “right to the city”, criticising the perceived dominance of capitalism. He argued that citizens should stand up for the rights they desired, and form sufficient support to win them. Though not particularly impactful at the time, the concept has been picked up by social movements in the last decade, albeit with minimal success once again.

It is more common for today’s resistance to skew more towards tinkering around the edges. Ambitious and seemingly non-neoliberal legislation has been introduced in Scotland in recent years, with small-scale agricultural crofting communities being given the legal right to buy the land they work on without the owner’s consent. This form of compulsory purchase is quite radical but, to date, the two communities who have used it deployed it as a tool to negotiate a market-based sale, to which the land owner agreed.

While ideas that go against market logic are often deemed unworkable in the neoliberal world we live in, they can perhaps be used as leverage for positive outcomes. Maybe we are all neoliberals now, and we are finding innovative new ways to hack the system.

Photos: Ryan Tang and Fred Rivett

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