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Leaders vow to make cities more livable for citizens

The 2nd World Cities Summit concluded late Wednesday with renewed awareness among experts, practitioners and city leaders, that any policy or plan made for cities should be done for the sake of the community

Damar Harsanto (The Jakarta Post)
Singapore
Fri, July 2, 2010

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Leaders vow to make cities more livable for citizens

T

he 2nd World Cities Summit concluded late Wednesday with renewed awareness among experts, practitioners and city leaders, that any policy or plan made for cities should be done for the sake of the community.

The central theme of the summit was how to make cities more inhabitable for people and families.

“The question is how [in developing cities] we can create dense urban settlements that are appropriate for families. What we’ve seen is the opposite,” said urban planning scholar Joel Kotkin, author The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.

The trend in big cities is high-density apartments that are not geared toward residents of multiple generations, Kotkin said.

Apartments are not a friendly environment for families or the elderly, because most are inhabited by singles and couples who don’t have children, he said.

“We’ve seen people move to smaller cities to raise their families in better conditions,” said Kotkin, an urban futurist from Chapman University, California.

Echoing similar concerns, the president and CEO of the Asia Society, Vishakha N. Desai, lamented that most mega-cities in Asia were putting too much stress on the development of infrastructure, while sidelining the need to preserve local cultures.

“Culture, which includes traditions, behaviors and the quality and lifestyle of the people is distressingly missing from the development of cities in Asia,” Desai said.

A balanced approach to city development that included culture would give cities more soul, she said.

Most major cities across the globe are facing unprecedented challenges resulting from urbanization and increased urban populations. United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said urban populations had grown rapidly from 220 million to 2.8 billion during the course of the 20th century.

It has estimated this trend will continue this century with more than half of the world’s population living in towns and cities. By 2030 this figure will swell to almost 5 billion, with urban growth concentrated in Africa and Asia.

While mega-cities have captured public attention, most of the new growth will occur in smaller towns and cities, which have fewer resources to respond to the magnitude of the change.

Dieter Salomon, the mayor of Freiburg, Germany, said city administrations large and small needed to strive to live up to residents’ expectations.

Administrations needed to learn from past mistakes to better address the needs of their residents, Salomon said.

Meanwhile, Melbourne Mayor Robert Doyle underlined the importance of strong leadership to transform cities.

Doyle said city mayors sometimes needed to take right but unpopular actions in anticipating future needs of residents in rapidly growing cities.

At least 50 mayors, governors and city leaders came to share ideas and best practices at the inaugural Mayors’ Forum during the four-day summit, besides the more than 2,000 participating delegates, including urban scholars, practitioners and businesspeople.

Singapore Minister of National Development Mah Bow Tan said the most important objective of the summit was to find ways to build more livable cities for the community.

“We need to have an integrated approach involving all key stakeholders to ensure the proper alignment of interests,” he said.

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