'Planet Outskirts': Why Urbanism Isn't What It Used To Be

"Most of what we consider 'cities' -- the inner-urban areas, in the Americas, Europe, Asia and just about everywhere except Africa -- are actually shrinking in population. Urban real-estate is becoming more valuable everywhere. Governments are transforming their urban cores into more livable, more tourist-friendly places -- that is, museums devoted to their former selves -- and this reduces the proportion of people who can live at the centre. The big growth is occurring on the edge, on the outskirts.

We are not very good at talking about these expanses -- which is why we are contnually surprised when they turn our world upside down by delivering us politicians, terrorists, rioters, gangs, cultures, attitudes and images that we weren't expecting."

"While heaps of books and articles are devoted each year to 'cities' and to 'urban' affairs, we have only sent the most tentative probes to explore Planet Outskirts...Part of the problem is that we Westerners tend to think of these places as the suburbs, with their 20th-century images of families moving out of blighted urban tenement houses to buy a big plot of weed-and-feed...But today, the farther outskirts are far more likely to be home to people who arrived from outside -- from the depopulating rural areas in Asia and Eastern Europe and South America, or from other countries. [But] In the official imagination, the outskirts [are] dismissed as sprawl, and words like "dehumanize[d]" and "soulless" applied to them.

In the past week, we've seen a lot of words devoted to the memory of Jane Jacobs, who died on April 25. She was part of a group of thinkers...such as Lewis Mumford and Louis Wirth, who shifted the attention of Western intellectuals and policy-makers back to the urban core...Her 1961 masterpiece The Death and Life of Great American Cities was, in some ways, a prototype of the thinking that 20 years later would come to be known as neo-liberalism.

Whatever you call it, it was a recipe that worked well for inner cities. Throughout Europe and North America, we've spent a lot of money turning our city centres back into attractive, historical places that are pleasant homes for those who can afford to buy houses there. Once again, the great cities are at the centre of our culture and thought.

But despite that renewal -- and in some ways because of it -- what we commonly call cities are no longer the places where people actually live, and they never will be again. Until a new wave of visionaries can apply some imagination to the ever-growing outskirts, rather than simply wishing they'd go away, we will keep finding ourselves shocked and alarmed by what they produce."

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