Cities, citizens, and civilization
Federico Mayor
Federico Mayor
The words city, citizens and civilization
have the same root. A citizen was originally a person who had the right to live in
a city and who, by exercising rights and fulfilling duties like every other citizen,
helped build a civilization.
In 1995, UNESCO
created a Cities for Peace Prize to pay tribute to city governments which have succeeded
in “strengthening social solidarity, improving living conditions in troubled neighbourhoods
and developing genuine urban harmony”. Every two years, five cities, each from a
different world region, are thus recognized.
The governance of cities has become a vital issue of our time and UNESCO’s
Management of Social Transformation (MOST) programme, launched in 1994, includes
studies of change in urban settings which are reported back to city officials. UNESCO
believes that cities, and especially mega-cities, are the laboratory of a new age
where the future of humanity will be decided.
Most of the world’s population will be concentrated in cities by the beginning of
the next century, and the percentage of people living in urban areas will have just
about doubled between 1950 and 2015. The numbers of city-dwellers will have increased
fivefold over the same period, and the number of people living in cities of over
a million will have grown more than eightfold. This dizzying rate of urbanization,
which is going on as headlong as ever in most poor countries, upsets the natural
equilibrium and the checks and balances which have always operated up until now.
Cities consume enormous amounts of energy, exhaust water supplies, and devour food
and materials. In exchange, they pour out sewage and pollution. Their physical environment
is worn out because it can no longer provide the input or absorb the output. And
city governments are exhausted by trying—when they see fit and when they are able—to
respond to the basic needs of citizens by providing such things as housing, running
water, sewers, lighting and proper roads. They often prove just as powerless—or indifferent—to
use for the benefit of the whole community the surplus energy and problem-solving
ingenuity which citizens have. Yet this tremendous vitality is the basis of the dynamic
development of so many cities today.
Between pressure from below and paralysis at the top, the city has become a microcosm
of the future of our civilization. It is in cities where lies the greatest danger
of a shattered society where people think only of themselves. Unless we create links
between all its inhabitants, the unity of a city bursts apart. It breaks up into
countless groups which develop along the lines of class, race, culture and religion.
Such ghettos cannot come together to form a genuine whole. On the contrary, the way
they close off from each other, sometimes involving physically defending themselves
against other parts of the city, creates a kind of urban apartheid.
The words city, citizens and civilization have the same root. A citizen was originally
a person who had the right to live in a city and who, by exercising rights and fulfilling
duties like every other citizen, helped build a civilization. This means that the
humanization of cities is crucial for the future of all of us. And it is not an impossible
dream. There are plenty of examples, in the North, South, East and West, where it
has taken shape.
But the price is the creation of a city administration in which people can play a
full part and which is based on a revival of true citizenship. Only in this way will
the city serve its inhabitants by using the creative capacities of everyone—men and
women, young and old, rich and poor.
