Joel Kotkin: "Steden: Heilig, Veilig, Druk"

24 juli 2005    Lees de reacties   

Joel Kotkin, verbonden aan de New America Foundation en auteur van The City: A Global History trekt een historische lijn van de val van het Romeinse rijk naar de dreigingen waaraan moderne westerse metropolen bloot staan. In zijn artikel City Of the Future verwijt Kotkin bestuurders van een aantal mega-steden nog onvoldoende in te zien dat een open en creatieve samenleving, alleen kan gedijen als veiligheid serieus wordt genomen. Criminaliteit ondermijnt het vertrouwen van de bevolking. Met name beter gesitueerden stemmen met de voeten. Deze trend luidt een gelijdelijke neergang in van potentieel rijke steden.

De nieuwste bedreiging is het terrorisme dat voortvloeit uit een jihadistische ideologie. Een ongebreidelde multiculturele politiek in steden die veel islamitische nieuwkomers herbergen, heeft volgens Kotkin mede de voedingsbodem gevormd voor het geweld waar New York, Madrid en Londen mee geconfronteerd werden:

“For decades, immigrants have not been encouraged or expected to accept German, Dutch or British norms, nor have those societies made efforts to integrate the newcomers. Not surprisingly, jihadist agitation has flourished in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Madrid, Berlin and Paris as well as London.”

Als het de bedoeling is waarden als openheid, tolerantie, bewegingsvrijheid en privacy hoog te houden, zullen bestuurders van grootsteden ook onder ogen moeten zien dat soms harde maatregelen geboden zijn:

“They will have to face up to the need for sometimes harsh measures, such as tighter immigration laws, preventive detention and widespread surveillance of suspected terrorists, to protect the urban future.”

Heilig, Veilig, Druk

Uit een interview met Joel Kotkin:

What are the essential characteristics of our great cities?

The three major characteristics of great cities are that they are sacred, safe and busy. Whether Tenochtitlan, New York City, Paris or any other great city of the world, you will find these characteristics.

Being sacred is really the sense that a city is unique, which engenders loyalty and pride. If city leaders and the populace don’t have a sense of passion about where they live, then people will not invest in it. Great cities have had a sense that they were special, and in ancient times this was linked to religion. For example, the name ‘Babylon’ implied that it was the city where the gods resided. Rome was imbued with a sense of history, ancestral connection and certainly a sense of religion. This was true of cities in China and it was true of Tenochtitlan. It’s at the heart of all the great cathedral cities of Europe. This characteristic is the one that perhaps is most easily lost.

A sense of safety is also critical for great cities. When the sense of security is lost, cities dissipate. This has happened in almost every part of the world throughout history. There are, of course, recent examples from the 1950’s and 1960’s in the US, when great cities like St. Louis and Detroit became unsafe. New York City was nearly brought to its knees because it was essentially unsafe. Here in Los Angeles, I don’t think we have recovered completely from the riots of 1992. It was a catastrophic event in the history of this city.

As for being busy, great cities must have flourishing economies. Cities function as mechanisms for upward mobility, particularly for the working and middle classes, and this function cannot be fulfilled without the generation of excess wealth. Otherwise, you end up regulating the wealth producers, and they move to locales that are less regulated. This is as true in California in 2005 as it was in the Middle East in the 14th century and in China in the 19th century. A great city must have a functioning marketplace with all the things that a marketplace needs to function: tolerance, rules, and law and order.