Finn Jones discusses the growing pains experienced by cities as their populations increase rapidly. Jones notes that while many residents want to limit population growth due to issues like traffic and crowding, their friends who have children will need to move elsewhere to start families. Jones also shares comments from others who have left cities citing lack of privacy, constant noise and smells from neighbors. Modern city planning has attempted to separate and compartmentalize land uses but this has not prevented the problems of density. Going forward, cities must move beyond simplistic planning models and acknowledge the complexity of urban systems and human needs to address quality of life issues and make cities places where people want to live.

1. Page 1
URBAN GROWING PAINS
But the pain is all ours; not the city’s
FINN JONES
I have been attending a lot of political debates and presentations of
late, and I’m interested by the questions that the candidates have had to
respond to. The line of questioning from members of the community
that has me most interested relates to population caps for the city.
Coincidently I was at a social gathering with a group of friends at a very
hip crowded little communal eating spot. You know the kind of spot
that is wedged into an old neighbourhood going through gentrification;
where you can’t get a car park and all the hipsters hang out.
I raised the issue of population and crowding and discussed the
questioning that I had been hearing at the political debates. As I
listened to my friends’ responses to these issues, I was interested to
hear the range of thoughts and the progression of the conversation. In
the end, each of my friends had some misgivings about the effects of
density in their city; whether it was traffic congestion, crowded public
transport and streets, or lack of space. In fact many of them understood
and some agreed with sentiments that I had heard from the community
about a population cap for some cities. Yet all of my friends have lived
in different cities and moved freely about. Most of them have or will
have children; some have three and four - where would they have to go
to start their own families? In fact all of my life I have heard tales of
relatives, friends, or strangers leaving more urbanised areas or cities,
for smaller less urbanised areas or towns and cities:
“You’re never alone; when you reach your door at the end of
the day, chances are you still have to say hello to a doorman
or a neighbor or even end up stuck in an elevator with
someone.”
“I never knew where to look when riding the subway; eye
contact can have so many unintended consequences, and
often it’s too crowded to hold a book or magazine. I used to
pretend to be looking at the ads, but I’d get so sick of seeing
the same ads over and over.”
“If you’re finally alone in your apartment, taking a bath or
something, chances are you can still hear someone, and they
can hear you.”

2. Page 2
“It’s never quiet; the final apartment I lived in, just before
I moved, faced a courtyard and that one had a pleasant
noise level (music lessons from downstairs; laughing children
across the way) but even there I’d sometimes be subjected to
someone’s desire to listen to Metallica for hours on end.
“You’re constantly subjected to smells you wouldn’t choose to
smell if you had the choice: garbage, cigar and marijuana
smoke, other people’s cooking; smells that stay with you your
whole life. One place I lived, I had this next-door neighbor
who would make this fish recipe; just this overwhelmingly
dead salty fish smell.”
“Just getting from one part of the city to another can seem like
traveling to the other side of the moon. Buses and subways are
constantly being re-routed, you have to be aware of service
changes and if you space out for a second, you can find you’re
on an express and you just added an hour to your travel time.”
“Happiness is an inside job - Noise, pollution, social isolation
amidst millions of strangers, traffic, crime rates”
Urban growing pains are not new to us. From our earliest settlements,
human colonies have continued to grow and intensify from villages to
towns, cities, metropolises and megalopolises. The gradual evolution
of colonies from early civilisation through the middle ages could
never be compared with the rapid change experienced as a result of
industrialisation. Industrialisation ushered in dramatic and rapid
change to the size, structure, shape and amenity of human colonies;
as well as altering social, occupation, and economic modalities. So
fast was the pace to migrate to these new centres of employment that
technologies were being invented to fix the problems being caused;
often causing more problems than we solve or solving a certain problem
only to cause another – hence growing pains.
Notwithstanding the expansion of the
global population itself, urbanisation is the
dominant demographic trend of our time. The
rapid increase in world population and the
subsequent urbanisation of that population has
been concentrated in the last half century. It is
estimated that by the start of the 1800’s and the
Industrial Revolution, 3 million of the world’s
1 billion inhabitants resided in towns or urban
areas; with Peking (now Beijing) being the
only city with 1 million people in it. However
since the industrial revolution, transport has
allowed the efficient movement of the world’s
population and has driven the radical rate of
population growth, urban intensification, and
mass human migration to cities has defined the
way humans exist on the planet.

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The 150 million people living in cities in
1900 swelled to 2.9 billion people by 2000.
Meanwhile, the urban share of world population
increased from 10 percent to 46 percent and
in 2007 surpassed the 50 percent. For the first
time in our history, we are an urban species.
Post-industrialisation planning was based
on the 2-dimensional arrangement of use
zones. These relatively simple arrangements
were based on planning tenants of sequenced,
separated and compartmentalised land uses,
that were neatly arranged (in theory) to create
what was believed to be the perfect embodiment
of ordered human colonisation. Unlike the
agglomerated industrialised settlements that
had gone before them post-industrialisation
cities could rely on the automobile.
In order to remedy the urban slums of industrialised cities, city
planners proposed the protection of residential amenity – based on
suburban garden neighbourhoods – through the sequenced and rational
separation from, industry and production, utilities, and commercial
business districts.
Shanghai, China. 1950 - 2013

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Again the size, structure, shape and amenity of human colonies was
changing as cities grew wider taller and more complex. People now
lived in suburbs away from industry, production, and commercial
centres and swept in and out each day between home and work - like
the ebb and flow of a perfectly planned tide. However the vehicle that
promised mobility became progressively less mobile with the growth
of cities and urban populations, leading to congestion and pain or
frustration.
The relentless migration into urban centres, technology, and demand
for efficiency continues to change the size, structure, shape and amenity
of human colonies. The awe inspiring magnitude and rate of change of
contemporary and future cities belies by far the greatest challenge and
difference for global urbanisation. The pressure, impact and change
for humanity wrought by the seemingly unending flood or tsunami
of global human migration into dense urban centres – increasingly
procured to simply billet human production and consumption
collateral - creates the complex interconnected problems that we must
solve for our future prosperity and well-being.
Our theoretical or practical understanding of the urban condition or
system, stands at a decisive moment. Cities the world over face complex
and rapidly evolving challenges, and change, that will continue to
amplify urban growing pains. The plight of cities forces an amplified
challenge for people.
Never before in the history of the planet has a species
experienced such rapid and comprehensive change and
survived let alone proliferated – and through proliferation,
the increased hastening and magnitude of change.
The interconnected issues facing global urbanisation are vast, complex
and multivalent; encompassing human and environment interaction,
natural environment, social order and change, politics, economic
and commercial systems, information and knowledge, human well-
being, urban systems, transportation, and production. No longer can
we imagine that residents flow neatly in and out of urban centres like
a perfect tide, or retreat to perfectly accommodating urban villages
within the midst of metro areas.

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Theoretical and dualistic regulatory frameworks have provided the
Governed basis for the urban agglomeration of all facets of evolving
human life within a defined and measurable spatial realm. Since the
origins of cities, we have been attempting to control the urban matrix -
the environment in which human lives interact with built environment
and technology. It is this control combined with large and rapid urban
agglomeration that causes so much angst – urban growing pains – and
results in current residents wanting to protect aspects of their lifestyle
that they have become accepting of; though most are so very happy to
accept greater variety and opportunities in retail, and places to eat or
culture and the arts. Many just don’t want to have to deal with more,
people, congestion, noise, pollution, competition, and less space.
Historical and indeed current city governance considers cities in terms
of order, sequence, and dualism or monism; the whole theory of city
planning has become rooted in the two-dimensional static - even
desktop - assumptions of patterns and compositions of uses – one plus
one equals two. But one plus one has never equaled two. There are, in
fact, no numbers and no letters. The sheer complexity and plurality
of dynamic urban systems and the constantly evolving and obligatory
human behavioural change in urban habitats is unfathomable to the
ordinary human mind.
All governance systems we’ve put into place are
a mere sketch in the context of the complexity of
life and systems in modern cities. We have tried to
control with forced assumptions, what is too complex
for our simple systems and comprehension. Urban
governance has created a static scale and rules so that
we can imagine or purvey control; yet the scale and
complexity of urban settlements continue to grow
‘organically’, despite the rules and controls – ‘life’
finds a way and perhaps ‘city’ does too; the ‘city’s’
way is machine-like and aligned with economic and
efficiency factors often ambivalent to human needs.

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Modern planning has attempted to codify our urban existence, in
order to structure urban life (including the urban form) for ease of
governance and the predisposition toward right and wrong, opinion
and belief – theory that has certainly contributed to the pain of urban
growth. However the complexity of ‘life’ and urban systems and the
rapid and dynamic urbanisation of the expanding population are at the
heart of urban growing pains.
The rapid changes in technology and our adoption rate are changing
the way we live and our expectation for how we live within our urban
confines. Traditional planning tenants and linear systems based on
today’s largely static information architectures have little relevance in
pluralistic urban environments and offer little by way of creating value
for urban living; in fact they restrict our ability to live as we need, choose,
and evolve, and thus also contribute to our urban growing pains.
Our brains are not shaped or wired to deal with highly
intense urban living…….. just as growing pains inform us
that our muscles and tendons are stretching to try and keep
in proportion to our growing bones.
It is becoming increasingly evident to urban dwellers, whether in an
industrial or a developing country, that there is an inherent conflict
between the human needs and the engineered and codified city. It is
however fair to say that our own behaviours are driving us head-on into
our own problems. City or city centre residents are increasingly living
amongst and between the infrastructure, industry, production, and
commercial centres and services or they are relegated to the disconnect
of the suburban areas. “People” are now seemingly an integral piece
of the urban system or machine - there is no retreat from it at the
end of the workday. The machine cities have been flooded by organic
beings; humans still seeking prospect and indeed refuge. But with their
time and space regulated by the city construct that has little relation to
human needs and sensitivities.
The human condition is suffering in cities – the growing pains are
becoming unbearable for many in big cities, while smaller young cities are
surely experiencing the beginnings of their growing pains. Modern cities
offer little space, place, or time for “oneself”. Mood and mental disorders
are on the rise and spatial intelligence is decreasing. Big cities are making
us unhappy; yet all of our cities seem to be getting bigger and already
intense areas are be redoubled.
City governance continue to examine how
to cram more people into cities or urban
centres. Technology says we can but no one is
asking if we should; if it is actually good for
us as a species? Yet proponents for the city
continue to talk about economic benefit and
economies of scale of human agglomeration,
as if ‘people’ are simply collateral for the urban
and economic constructs based on production
and consumerism.
We can no longer rely on the old tenants of regulation and planning
– with singular solutions neatly arranged into compartmental and
departmental separated rules and solutions that only seem to achieve
greater density in already intense areas, whilst reinforcing the suburban
disconnect and NIMBYism; and delivering cities the world over that
are so alike.

7. Page 7
Future cities, and indeed
today’s cities can no longer be
simply defined by politically
driven governance schemes
that neatly arrange uses
according to a hierarchy
of predetermined or
premeditated patterns
based on broad two-
dimensional desktop
comprehension; rather than
intricate understanding and
willingness to engage with
reality and human needs and
most probably in the case of
Australian cities, wholesale
changes to the suburbs. The
issues facing cities are just far too complex and threaten our quality of
life and the betterment of humanity.
City policies continue to be inward focussed – rarely touching anything
but the low hanging fruit - no matter how much the cities are marketed
as globally focussed. However it can be said that the trend of global
city focus demonstrates that governance schemes and the process of
making city policies bear little acknowledgement of the people let-a-
lone a real identifiable person in the city. These schemes and policies
are as out-dated as typewriters.
My travels take me to cities all over the world, and my work exposes
me to the context and design of each of them. In the big cities I visit,
Shanghai, Beijing, New York, Tokyo, and others you can sense the
burden of the collective population on the city; a tautness of tension
and compression forcing the masses of inhabitants into the cracks
and crevices. All the while, somehow sensing the next wave of city
population is just behind you or in front of you, about to swamp you and
the space around. I observe people walking, riding on public transport,
eating their lunch trying desperately to find a moment of time and
space for themselves. Often I feel sorry for us as a species. I don’t think
our mega-cities and our urban trends represent the ultimate in human
evolution. We can do better.
Cities are now global brands vying for growth in economy and
population that deliver prosperity through services, variety, and choice
for its existing customers (residents) and to attract new customers
(population growth or for the tourism). Like any brand cities must
ensure that the “brand” meets the “pitch” and delivers the customer
experience and satisfaction; rather than simply being designed and
constructed for greatest economy, efficiency, and productivity for the
‘masses’.
FINN JONES
2016
18 Things All Cities Have in Common
— In 1 Map, by FRANK JACOBS