Draft for Comment: 8-9-14

Reframing the Urban Future:

Dynamics, Imbalances, and Possibilities
By Michael A. Cohen1
Prologue:
The world is moving at dizzying speed, with changing temperatures, intensifying
rainstorms and searing droughts, 100 million international refugees on the move each year,
fleeing violence and misery in the hope of new opportunities, trillions of dollars exchanged each
day, 160 new urban residents each minute, 20th century borders in the Middle East reverting to
a new caliphate in Mesopotamia, disturbing reminders of the Cold War in Ukraine, new
expressions of barbarity through the actions of Boko Haram in Nigeria, returning outbreaks of
old diseases amidst fears of new, incurable threats, and accusations of surveillance and
interference suggesting that what was unknowable is now captured information
The increased density and pace of movement and change, however, has not generated a
symmetric increase in global or national governance capacity. Many global and national
problems remain inadequately addressed, either from lack of political will or political
consensus. Political debates about technical facts suggest that deeper institutional problems lie
beneath public controversies.
Yet even as levels of anxiety increase, the world continues to experience unprecedented
economic growth and improvements in human welfare, stretching back over the last several

Professor of International Affairs, The New School, New York. The author wishes to acknowledge the insightful
comments and suggestions of Robert Buckley, Maria Carrizosa, Margarita Gutman, William Morrish, Alexis
Obernauer, Lena Simet, and Laura Wainer.

decades. The global financial crisis may have slowed down these positive trends, but it has not
dramatically reversed the progress made in poverty reduction and improved access to services.
More than 800 million people watched the World Cup final game in Brazil, cheering and crying
over the results. The paradox of simultaneity of these processes and events is confounding and
limits our ability to think holistically and coherently at the same time.
In this context, looking ahead is both risky and instructive. Extrapolating current conditions
and perceived trends into the short, medium, or long term, however defined, has frequently
been undermined by unexpected moments of rupture of current patterns, conflicts, and new
discoveries. Yet the political demands of leadership, responsible management, and popular
imagination all insist that thinking ahead is necessary, even if the conclusions and warnings
from those efforts are frequently minimized or simply ignored by decision-makers and the
public. Repeatedly asserting the exceptional character of the present moment, its urgencies,
and newly discovered insights does not change the fact that our understanding of the present is
imperfect, limited, and frequently distorted, while our ability to accurately anticipate the future
is over-estimated by professionals who are frequently unable to perceive information and
signals from other arenas, to see what has been called the footprints of the future. 2 We are
prisoners within the limits of our understanding and perception.
Today, in mid-2014, is no exception. Globalization and the growth of the information
society over the last generation have increased the complexity and diversity of human
experience, but most importantly our awareness of it. Our calendars show that in the coming
next two years a significant set of activities and anniversaries will occur which together might
2

Margarita Gutman, Buenos Aires: El Poder de Anticipacion: Imagenes itinerants del future metropolitan en el
primer Centenario, (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Infinito, 2011)

be a hinge moment, a turning point. In this period, in many arenas, new directions will be
debated and adopted. A partial and very incomplete list includes the following:
The adoption of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals to address structural
issues of sustainable development and inequality,
Key global negotiations on the increasingly urgent problem of climate change,
The 2016 Habitat III conference to hold a global discussion on the future of cities,
The 2016 UN global summit on drugs and their impacts,
Presidential elections in key countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia,
A presidential election in 2016 in the United States, with intense debate about the
objectives of social policy, the role of government, and the role of the U.S. in the world,
The 50th anniversary of the U.S. Voting Rights Act and a reassessment of progress made
for equal opportunity and social justice.
We are entering a period of decisions, filled with opportunity and expectation. How we
respond depends to a large degree on how we frame the questions we wish to debate and how
we assess the criteria for collectively assessing our alternatives.

Introduction
This paper examines the urban future in terms of the existence of a set of dynamics and
imbalances which threaten the continued productivity and welfare of urban populations in rich
and poor countries. While there have been debates about whether globalization has led to a
convergence between rich and poor countries, or even a convergence between cities in rich

and poor countries,3 there is little debate that the dynamics within cities in terms of growing
inequality in income and opportunity, the deterioration of physical infrastructure, the growing
demand for employment, and the discontent of youth and other groups, among many other
issues, have been shared in both rich and poor countries.
We are seeing that parallel and intersecting dynamics are creating increasing differences
between the quality of life of different categories of urban residents. Intra-urban inequality is
not only a social problem but is also undermining economic productivity.4 The weakness of
urban institutions and the refusal of national governments to take urban issues seriously are
having dangerous consequences for the future. The irony of this situation is that cities may be a
problem, but they are also the solution to many global and national dilemmas. It is difficult to
imagine sustaining levels of human welfare at a global level without productive, equitable
cities.
This paper is divided into the following sections:

Setting the Stage

The Need for an Integrating Framework

Urban Dynamics and Imbalances

Possibilities for Remedy

Michael A. Cohen, The Hypothesis of Urban Convergence: Are Cities in the North and South Becoming More Alike in
an Age of Globalization? in Cohen, Michael A., Blair Ruble, Joseph Tulchin, and Allison Garland, eds. Preparing the
Urban Future: Global Pressures and Local Forces, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)
4

Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, (New York: Norton, 2012)

Setting the Stage:

Despite their growing economic and demographic importance in both rich and poor
countries, the role of cities is neither widely understood nor recognized in global official and
public debates. Six hundred cities now account for about 60 percent of global GDP,5 yet cities
do not appear in the global discussions of the G20, they did not appear in the national stimulus
packages following the global economic crisis of 2008, they have only recently been linked to
climate change, and their attention in the media is not consistent or urgent. Nonetheless, every
day there are media reports demonstrating the fragility of urban life: infrastructure failures,
accidents, citizen protests, financial collapse, and increasingly, the interaction between weather
patterns and cities, whether in Bangkok, Jakarta, or New York. Discussions of employment are
stuck at the macro-economic level and are not focused on the fact that jobs must be created in
cities where the potential for multiplying effects are highest due to their demographic and
spatial advantages. Paradoxically, youth unemployment in Spain has reached 60 percent even
though the OECD reports that the Spanish economy is on the rebound. All of this suggests the
urgent need to reframe the global debate and to place urban areas on the agenda for debate
and action.
In this context, the emphasis on urban inequality as the theme of the UN Habitat World
Urban Forum in Medellin, Colombia in April 2014 was very timely. It marked growing
international awareness that intra-urban inequality has become a central problem in all
countries and that absolute poverty has diminished in numbers in most countries, even though
the proliferation of slums and growth of population without adequate water and sanitation

McKinsey Global Institute, The Urban World: Mapping the Economic Power of Cities, 2011

seems to increase. The visibility of inequality is also beginning to raise up the eyes of
professionals and urban residents alike from the level of individual concerns such as housing to
broader urban economic and social realities of which they are a part and which deeply
condition their lives.
Nevertheless, there were few new ideas generated at the World Urban Forum which
pointed to new policies, initiatives, and actions which could contribute to the resolution of
urban inequality. Particularly noteworthy was the relative lack of connection made between
cities and the urgent macro-level issues of inequality and economic growth which face most
countries at this time. The growing impact of these macro level phenomena demonstrates the
intensifying interdependencies between macro and micro levels, a largely ignored subject in
global urban policy discussions. The exception to the latter has been climate change where the
urban contribution to the problem is only now becoming more understood. Nonetheless, any
visitor to the World Urban Forum was struck by the diversity of concerns, interests, and
capacities of the 25,000 people who participated. Urban issues seem to be multiple, but they
lack a core of fundamental premises and axioms.

The Need for an Integrating Analytic Framework:

The multiplicity and diversity of current urban problems suggests there is a need to remind
ourselves of some of the underlying premises and analytical foundations of urban phenomena.
The central policy problem of the city is what is the frame for urban action? Is it possible to
undertake action at the city level? Or is the city simply an amalgam of individual sectors for
action, such as housing, employment, or infrastructure? Is the city only one of many scales at
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which action can occur? Or is city scale closely interdependent with global, national, regional,
and local scales? Posing these questions reminds us of the unresolved theoretical and practical
debates which these issues raise. Nonetheless, the need to respond to these questions is
urgent if current challenges are to be addressed.
The recent publication of Thomas Pikettys Capital in the 21st Century6 and the widespread
discussion of its argument about inequality have focused global attention on the relation
between the rate of growth of private wealth and the rate of national economic growth. Piketty
argues that when the first is faster than the second there is growing concentration of wealth
and inequality. This attention to the relation of two processes is very important and helpful for
understanding urban phenomena as well. For example, infrastructure supply is only significant
in relation to the existence of demand. Rents are important in relation to income. The city is
ultimately a world of multiples factors and processes in which these relations tell us whether
the present is in balance or not. Pikettys analysis, discussed later in this paper, also has an
important urban component which might be described as the growing gap between private and
public wealth, suggesting serious urban imbalances which are already affecting many aspects of
urban life in both rich and poor countries.
Understanding the city, however, is much more complicated than the economy alone,
because there are so many simultaneous individual factors and processes occurring. To
understand this simultaneity we need simplifying frameworks to understand which of these
multiple relations are more important than others and, critically, which of these relations, if out
of balance, are amenable to remedy through policy, investment, or other forms of citizen

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013)

action. Put differently, are these technical problems or political problems, a question discussed
later?
For the purpose of this paper, urban areas can be analytically understood as consisting of
six components: geographies, ecologies, economies, cultures, institutions, and technologies.
Each is described in turn below:

Geographies are the spatial arrangements in which demographic groups settle,

including

their

density,

scale,

concentrations,

centralities,

hierarchies,

segregation, location, and boundaries.

Ecologies are the natural physical and biological environments and systems in
which these geographies are located, including their natural resources such as
land, water, air, and biomass, among others. They also include the built
environment as it evolves and interacts with natural systems.

Economies are the modes of production, consumption, and distribution of goods

and services generated through combinations of land, labor, capital, and
technology, and include investment, savings, expenditures as well as their
multiplying effects and externalities.

Cultures are the systems of values which guide individual and social behavior.

Institutions are patterns of organized behavior which persist through time.

Technologies are the modes of solving problems through infrastructure such as

water supply, electric power, or transportation, or through services such as
health, education, communications, or information.

Each of these components is dynamic and not static. They are changing in themselves
and in relation to one another. These dynamics of change result in new patterns of well-being
for people, new patterns of behavior and resource use, and new opportunities and risk. For
example, studies of the de-densification of urban areas over the last several decades
demonstrate that demographic growth and spatial growth seem to go together. 7 Yet less dense
urban areas will bring increased infrastructure costs, worsen mobility, and consume agricultural
land. At the same time there is a literature on spatial justice, asserting that there are unjust
geographies which have harmful impacts on specific categories of people, for example pushing
the poor to live in dangerous areas far from access to employment or basic services.8 Or
alternatively, one can think of environmental justice, whereby the ecologies in which people
live receive unfair environmental impacts.9
Another example is the attention given to the geography of jobs, analyzed by Enrico
Moretti for the United States,10 where he argues that there are shifts of employment in
manufacturing and services from city to city, based on local attributes and potential. He
concludes quite clearly that some cities will be winners and others losers in the competition
for jobs and investment. This is a good example of the congruence of geography and economy,
with the results producing predictable effects on local environments, tax bases, and the ability
of public institutions to function.
The cumulative effects of these dynamics on the various layers of the city are welldemonstrated in the collapse of Detroit, where it is difficult to discern what would be an
7

Shlomo Angel, Making Room for a Planet of Cities, Cambridge: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2011)
Ed Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, (London: Routledge, 2010)
9
Robert Bullard, The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution. (San Francisco:
Sierra Club Books, 2005)
10
Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs, Houghton and Mifflin, 2013)
8

effective entry point to generating growth of employment. This example, however, is only one.
A 1998 study by George Galster in over 100 US cities demonstrated that changes in the interest
rate for housing resulted in a series of cascading effects on the real estate market, on housing
quality, on neighborhoods, and the economic and racial/ethnic composition of neighborhoods.
This cumulative causation in effect operates across the six components described above.
Thinking about these components or levels, or perhaps screens in a geographic information
system, this brings us back to the central question raised earlier in this paper: what is the frame
for urban action? We can understand interdependence and even patterns of causation, but it is
far more challenging to assert and successfully defend an argument that one of the
components is the essential entry point.
This search for the most effective entry point reminds me of the observation made by Larry
Summers in the 1990s that the best development investment was female education, because it
had effects on both the numerator and denominator of the per capita income calculation. On
the side of the numerator female education prepared women to enter the labor market and
thus to earn more income, while at the same time reducing the denominator by reducing
fertility and the number of children in each family. The challenge for cities is to find entry
points which generate multipliers and positive externalities.

Urban Dynamics and Imbalances

With these analytical categories and issues in mind, it is possible to identify a set of urban
dynamic trends which seem to be occurring at the present time. They are presented below
under three headings: inequality, economic growth, and climate change:
10

Inequality

An accelerating and sustained concentration of urban private wealth and a worsening of

urban inequality, as suggested by Thomas Piketty, complementing earlier work by
Joseph Stiglitz 11 and others.

A growing gap between private and public wealth, leading to an increase in the adoption
of private urban solutions in cities in both rich and poor countries such as gated
communities, private education, private security, and private transport. 12

A growing gap in the investment in the human capital of the rich and the poor in cities in
all countries.

Growing informality in urban economies, with the faster rate of informal sector job
creation than in the formal sector.

The continued financial depreciation and physical deterioration of public infrastructure

including roads, bridges, water supply, sewerage, drainage, lighting, and others through
the absence of adequate expenditures for operations and maintenance. 13

Growing manifestation of racial, ethnic, and class disparities in income, wealth, and
opportunities, leading to competition and conflict between groups seeking upward
mobility within cities.14

11

Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, (New York: Norton, 2011)

Maristella Svampa, Los Que Ganaron, (Buenos Aires: 2001), Edward Blakely and Mary Snyder, Fortress America:
gated Communities in the United States, (Washington: Brookings, 1995)
13
Center for the Urban Future, Caution Ahead: Overdue Investments for New Yorks Aging Infrastructure, (New
York: CUF, 2014)
14
Rebecca Tippett, Avis Jones-Deweever, Maya Rockeymoore, Darrick Hamilton, and William Darity Jr., Beyond
Broke: Why Closing the Racial Wealth Gap is a Priority for National Economic Security, ( Center for Global Policy
Solutions and Duke University, May 2014)
12

11

The deterioration of the quality of public goods as reflected in air pollution,

groundwater pollution, and solid waste management.

Continued demographic growth of urban areas in developing countries, particularly in

secondary centers and peri-urban areas of large cities.15 This is accompanied by still
extremely high fertility in developing countries resulting from slower economic growth,
adding to the youth bulge and high youth unemployment in many countries. 16

The deterioration of housing conditions and the growth of slums resulting from housing
policies unable to keep up with demand for affordable low-cost housing solutions. 17

The expansion of urban areas, increasing the spatial scale of urban areas and thus
increasing the costs of providing fixed infrastructure such as roads, water supply,
sewerage, and drainage.18

Increased spatial scale also implies a qualitative change in urban form, with increasing
costs of mobility and reduced access to employment and services. 19

Economic Growth

A slowing down of macro-economic growth in most countries since 2008 implies slower

growth of the 70% share of GDP coming from urban areas. The productivity and
contribution of cities to national economic welfare cannot be taken for granted.

15

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2014 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects,
(New York: United Nations, July 2014)
16
George Martine, Jose Eustaquio Alves, and Suzana Cavenaghi, Urbanization and Fertility Decline: Cashing in on
Structural Change, (London: International Institute for Environment and Development, December 2013)
17
Robert Buckley, Alissa Chisholm, and Lena Simet, Bloomberg and Piketty in a New York City Renaissance, (New
York: New School, 2014)
18
Shlomo Angel, op.cit.
19
Alain Bertaud, The Formation of Urban Spatial Structures: Markets vs. Design, (NYU: Urban Program, 2014)

12

The weakening financial strength of local governments beyond major cities as a result of

undependable inter-governmental financial flows from financially-strapped national

governments and the slow growth of the size of effective municipal tax bases.
Climate Change
Over 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from cities and cities are most at
risk due to impacts of climate change as they concentrate global wealth and
increasingly vulnerable populations20.

Together, these dynamic trends suggest that in the future cities will become more
unequal, less productive in terms of the need for increasing amounts of infrastructure, larger in
population with greater demand for essential services, more spread out in terms of urban form,
increasingly difficult and expensive to provision, and at high-risk to climate change impacts.
Historically urban policy communities and civil society organizations have not worked on how
these various dynamics interact and what kinds of outcomes are likely. Yet seeing their linkages
to global and national problems is critical for building a political understanding that they must
be addressed on an urgent basis.

Possibilities for Remedy

A productive search for remedies must begin with some clarity about whether the
solutions to these issues are primarily technical or whether they are fundamentally political in
the sense that status quo practices reflect the political and economic interests of different
20

Rosenzweig, C., Solecki, W., Hammer, S., and Mehrotra, S. (2011). Climate Change and Cities, Cambridge
University Press.

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constituencies. The answer to this question is that these issues are both technical and political,
but the feasibility of any technical remedies depends heavily on political acceptance. In this
sense, any campaign for reframing requires not just technical analysis of the causes and
remedies to problems, but also specific strategies for political action and advocacy.
It is in this light that both the Habitat III process and substantive agenda itself should be
shaped in response to these dynamics:

First, the Habitat III process and events should link intra-urban inequality to national
patterns of inequality. Unless urban policies affecting housing affordability,
infrastructure access, and residential segregation are addressed, it is clear that the
systematic increases in inequality pointed to by Pikettys landmark study will intensify.
Governments across the world are beginning to recognize the housing-inequality nexus
and some (Brazil, China, Ethiopia, France, India, Indonesia, and Mexico) have recently
initiated or undertaken basic reforms of their billion dollar housing programs.21 It is
clear, however, that the design of housing programs in both industrialized and
developing countries in the past has had a significant impact on patterns of inclusion
and exclusion in cities. Many examples illustrate these impacts, such as the Pruitt-Igoe
housing project in St. Louis which was considered unfixable and thus was destroyed, or
the crime-ridden Habitat de Loyers Moderes housing mostly immigrants in the banlieues

21

With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and
Urban Policy of The New School in New York will be convening experts and policy-makers from across the world in
Bellagio in October 2014 to examine how the rapid expansion and reformulation of these programs can be most
effectively structured.

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of Paris, or the neighborhood known as Fort Apache in Buenos Aires because of its
violent history.22

Secondly, additional work is urgently needed to inform the Habitat III process to specify
the linkages between cities, employment, and equitable macroeconomic growth as
raised by Piketty. Earlier work such as Urban Policy and Economic Development: An
Agenda for the 1990s (1991) by Michael Cohen23, or Urbanization and Growth (2008),
co-edited by Nobel Laureate Michael Spence, Patricia Annez, and Robert Buckley 24, as
well as in research in Buenos Aires on intra-urban inequality and in Lagos on the
productivity of medium-scale enterprises demonstrate these linkages.25 The fact that 70
percent of GDP comes from cities and that 60 percent of global GDP comes from 600
cities must become a globally recognized reality.26

Thirdly, the Habitat III processes and events must help the world recognize the
important role that cities can play in the climate change and green agendas. The greater
density and use of shared fixed capital in cities, particularly in the developed world, are
almost certainly among the central instruments to reduce the environmental
degradation at the root of climate change. We believe the notion of urban ecologies

22

We have learned from the Design and Development Project, a collaborative inter-disciplinary research project, a
collaboration between Milano and the Parsons School of Design with the School of Architecture, Design, and Urban
Planning and the School of Social Sciences in University of Buenos Aires and the International Design Institute of
Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok has illustrated these interactions very dramatically in Buenos Aires and
Bangkok.
23
Michael Cohen, Urban Policy and Economic Development: An Agenda for the 1990s, (Washington: The World
Bank, 1991)
24
Michael Spence, Patricia Annez, and Robert Buckley, eds., Urbanization and Growth, (Washington: The
Commission on Economic Growth, 2008)
25
Michael Cohen and Dario Debowicz, The Five Cities of Buenos Aires: An Inquiry into Poverty and Inequality,
UNESCO, 2004, and Alex Anas and Kyu-Sik Lee, Infrastructure Investment and Productivity: The Case of Nigerian
Manufacturing: A Framework for Policy Study, The Review of Urban and Regional Development Studies, Vol. 1,
No. 2, July 1989
26
McKinsey Global Institute, op.cit.

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should be central to this discussion as a way to root other urban phenomena in local
places. Ironically, the global sharing of scientific information, the expansion of
ubiquitous computing technologies sensors, and social media networks are generating a
planetary picture of climate change and the green agenda which is profoundly more
complex than what we assumed over the last 20 years. Climate change does not affect
every city the same way, and therefore standard solutions cannot be used to mitigate
adverse climate impacts. Appreciating the particularity of local geography, history,
culture and ecology is a key to setting the foundations of equitable and sustainable
cities.
The green agenda is more than is more than this one color, representing the vast nonhuman or natural environment. Since the Rio Summit in 1992, we have learned the green
agenda is in actual fact a social, cultural, and natural system of interdependent ecologies that
define the basic social and environmental foundation of stable cities and vitality of everyday
civil society. If cities do not become more environmentally-conscious, improving public
transport and energy efficiency, the prospects for improvement are greatly reduced. Unless
cities become even more proactive in their efforts to achieve green objectives, it is possible that
the world will have to lose a city, as almost occurred with Super Storm Sandy in New York,
before serious action is taken. Climate change, including sea level rise and extreme weather
events are undermining aging infrastructure systems. The share of the worlds population at
increasing risk is growing.
Stepping back from the city level and assessing these exogenous phenomena, it is apparent
that there is a narrowing of what has been called the envelope of regularity in terms of
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natural climate impacts, with less predictable weather patterns and greater stresses on
infrastructure. In 2013-2014, this accounts for the growing number of urban infrastructure
failures in the northeast of the United States, with water main breaks, collapsing sewers, and
failed power systems. Secondly there is strong evidence that there is acceleration of the pace of
these ecological changes.27 The pace of change itself, as reflected in the frequency and severity
of these events, has thus become a major threat to the capacity of public institutions to assess
change, to adopt remedial measures, and to mobilize the financial and human resources to
implement the remedies.
All of the above raises the question of the sustainability of current imbalances, i.e. whether
one is speaking of increased pressures or intensity of occupation of land, demand for services,
or inadequacy of income. How long are these unresolved problems able to persist? How do we
assess the risks of infrastructure failure or other calamities? Should we expect more and more
frequent failures? What are the thresholds when these problems become too complicated to
manage? Infrastructure networks may be considered too big to fail, but they will fail if
remedial measures are not taken to assure continued operation. Given the diversity of
situations across cities, we should also be asking whether the same thresholds appear in all
cities or whether the vulnerability of different economics, ecologies, environments, and
institutions vary from place to place.
Final Remark
The objective of this paper has been to raise issues and questions in order to provoke
debate and action. Most importantly, it is asking how are we framing urban issues? Does our

27

William Morrish, Urban Ecologies, unpublished paper, (New York: 2014)

17

normal language and conceptual framework allow us to convey the urgency, complexity, and
significance of the issues we need to address?

18