World Cities Day

By Sina Gösele

Cities fascinate us.
They never sleep. They always change.
They make us feel lost. They make us feel home.
They make us invisible. They make us feel great.

“Cities and human settlements are places we live, share, create, build and dream together.  Let us use good design to make them sustainable, inclusive and prosperous
for all.” Ban Ki-moon

Since the industrial revolution cities continue to attract new humans. This brings new challenges to city planners and architects. How can cities be integrative? How does a park have to be designed to make pedestrians feel safe? How can cities be kept clean? How does a sustainable city look like? Where do trash bins and benches make sense? How does a city have to look like, so physically disabled people can move independently? How can cities be attractive to young and old people at the same time? Well, where can we built night clubs without disturbing the neighborhood? How can a city be home to so many different people with different life styles?

DEsigned to Live Together

The World Cities Day wants to put spotlight on urbanization and questions like these, so the international community discusses and cooperates together. Urbanization is a topic that touches half of the population since 50% of us live in urban areas. While it is mostly seen as a huge problem, well-done urbanization has advantages, too, on economic, social and environmental development.

The UN proposes five ways how cities can be designed for all to live together

• Planned not only to generate jobs and opportunities, but also help build socially integrated, livable, open neighborhoods.
• Planning residential areas with different possibilities in terms of typology and price enables residents from different backgrounds and income levels to live together.
• Designing through participative processes helps people come together around shared goals and visions, and promotes everyone’s equal access to services, jobs and opportunities.
• Designing compact, denser cities reduces the over exploitation of natural resources, and facilitates common living by enabling equal access to land, food and water for all.
• Designing public spaces, parks, playgrounds, streets with pedestrian space and commercial activities help create a vibrant public life for all residents.
  

In the case of integrative urbanization, Paris shows us how not to do it. Many people around the world associate the Eiffel tower and romanticism with Paris however most of them have never seen the “banlieue”, the suburbs of Paris. The mission to integrate the low-income population with cheap living space failed miserably. The banlieue has become a ghetto for the poor and unwanted and created a social separation of the population. Those, who cannot afford the horrendous rent have to live on the sideline of the society in concrete buildings. The city planners realized their mistake too late and now, they struggle to change the suburbs into a more human neighborhood.

Fortunately, sustainbale urbanization is part of the newly adapted Sustainable Development Goals. By 2030, the target is to give access to safe and affordable housing and furthermore, to upgrade slums. Moreover, sustainable transport systems are going to be furthered in order to guarantee affordable access for all.

Make people around you aware of the celebration of #CitiesDay and share this post!

Sources:
http://www.un.org/en/events/citiesday/citiestogether.shtml
http://www.un.org/en/events/citiesday/2015/sgmessage.shtml
http://urbanoctober.org/index.asp
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/focussdgs.html
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/geld/integration-pariser-banlieues-wie-man-es-nicht-machen-sollte-1.347616