This is a series of answers by various thinkers from all around the globe who were invited to The Table of Free Voices, a dropping knowledge (the NGO i work for) initiative that took place in Berlin, Germany on September 9th, 2006.

Mohammed Arkoun

It’s a scary future if you think about cities like Mexico City or Cairo, which are approaching 17 million habitants or more. But the infrastructures of these very old cities, especially Cairo, Bombay, Karachi or Jakarta, etc. are still the same as they were at the beginning of the 20th century in some districts. And the actual city policy is far from considering the new problems of urban areas and the pressures on urban areas. The cities are becoming a place of confrontation, a place where the collective memory disintegrates, a place of social ruptures, a place where frustration accumulates, where people backtrack to their individual level or to the level of a group what we fearfully call communitarianism which becomes more and more important in urban areas, and not only in rural areas as it was before.

So there is a problem of a new architecture, problems of urbanism. We have to create urban areas which are a discussion forum of different social classes, a place of common undertakings, a place of parting, a place of active and positive cohabitation instead of being places of panic, places which are divided into dangerous areas and areas of comfort, but of a comfort which is more and more troubled by menaces coming from the surrounding suburbs which are difficult to control as the urban concentrations press down more and more on the governments. Mohammed Arkoun is the Emeritus Professor of the History of Islamic Thought at the Sorbonne and the author of Rethinking Islam.

Abbas Beydoun

After all the sequent questions we come to this question. I can say that the future of the city will be black if the current situation remains as it is. We can not improvisatory predict our future, but we can at least say that the unemployment problem will be bigger, the weather will be more polluted, the power will be less than before, the violence will spread in the suburbs, the minorities will be more aggressive and feel isolated, the social integration will face so many problems and the community will not care for politics and election so the government will dominate everything, which means that the globalized capital will create just one culture and one direction, consequently the people’s intimacy will be removed. The city will look like a garage of cars or depository for machines. The society will gradually lose its memory and concentrate only on daily concerns, and the people will live as slaves for their small needs. They will also become less intelligent, more superficial and more isolated from what is going on in the world. Abbas Beydoun is the author of nine volumes of poetry and the longtime culture editor of Beirut’s Al Safir newspaper.

Monira Rahman

More people, more competition to live life. No place to live. More natural disasters. More floods, earthquakes and losing our precious life because there will be more slums and more contradiction between the rich people and poor people. This rapid urbanization is causing big suffering to have a meaningful life because there’s more competition to have work, there’s more competition for accommodation. There’s more competition for water, sanitation, and more competition for energy. So, there’s more conflict between people then obviously, because then we will see that human being as our opponent because we have to share these resources and if we are not planned and if we are not decentralizing these resources, the facility, obviously, that will cause a big challenge to our future generation. This industrialization needs to be decentralized; the facilities, the job opportunities has to be decentralized; the opportunities to work has to be decentralized; otherwise, we will have a civil war in the city. There will be no place to live. Monira Rahman is the executive director of the Dhaka-based Acid Survivors Foundation, which provides medical and legal support to victims of acid violence.

Susan George

The future of the city seems to be to get bigger. This is the first year, I think, 2006, in history where there are now more people living in cities on the planet than there are people living in the countryside. For centuries, for all of our history, there were far more rural people than urban ones, and now this balance is beginning to change. So, the city is the future, and in the city, it may be a space which is the kind of size which people can manage. I think the future of the city has to be an ecological one. It has to be one in which consciously ecological systems are fostered. A city urban ecosystem, that means parks, yes, it means planting trees, yes. But, it also means putting green where green never was before. Putting green on our facades, putting green on our roofs, using building systems which are much more economical of energy, using new ways of incorporating nature into our systems so that we use the sun much more, and we can feel part of the city. It’s also a community, which is of the size where people can help each other. You could have citywide currencies which could be used by people inside the borders of the city, which could provide an alternative to the national currency, and provide a lot of jobs. This is already a fact in some American cities and elsewhere. It was used in Austria by several thousand people. These are not radical schemes, but they do help to provide employment, and they keep cities together. They keep people working inside the boundaries of the cities. They promote local solutions to local problems. I hope that this is the future of the city because cities can be quite marvelous places. It’s there that we find culture, that we find all sorts of people who make our lives more interesting. It’s there that we find universities like the magnificent one that we are contemplating here as we speak. I love cities, and I think that they could be so much more amenable to human life than they are now. But, for that to happen humans have to realize they’re just part of an ecosystem, and they can help to create that ecosystem. Susan George is the former vice president of ATTAC France, the board chair of the Transnational institute in Amsterdam and the author of Another World Is Possible if…

Mohau Pheko

Look, I think that when I look at African cities because that’s my context, the fact that we have lots of people moving from the rural areas to urban areas, we are seeing a fast pace of urbanization of African cities and we are not prepared and we are ready for this. And so, what we are doing is we are — what we are seeing now are cities that are in decline with huge percentage of slum dwellers moving into the cities and it is perfectly natural for people to move from areas of less economic opportunity to what they perceive to be greater opportunities. First, I think that we need to look at special development in the way that we use our spaces, in the way that we also begin to focus on rural development in particular, not so much that we keep people in rural areas. I mean, I personally would love to live in a rural setting, provided it gives me access to the amenities that a city would have, but also there is a very different quality of life in the rural areas. The opportunity to eat food that is naturally grown, I mean everybody wants that sort of living, so I think that we have to create new rural dwellings and special spaces for example that create rural areas where people can make greater sources of living and improve the quality of life. I think that without that, the future of African cities is a little bit depressing in the sense that we are not dealing with this overwhelming desire of people to come and create new futures for themselves in the cities and the cities are not being expanded to accommodate the new arrivals into our cities, and in essence, we are not creating enough — and adequate social housing for these people to come and live in the city. We are not creating public services in a such a way that they also respond. So, you find high levels of drug use, high levels of violence against women in these communities. Mohau Pheko is the coordinator of the International Gender and Trade Network (GENTA).

Pico Iyer

The city has been taken over by the countryside, which is a way of saying that our model of the future is being taken over by the past. The word urban jungle touches something much more fundamental about the way in which the world of the village is subsuming in the world of the urban settlement. 400,000 people arrive from the countryside in the Rio de Janeiro central bus station every year hoping for a new life in a city that has no space for them and no jobs for them. And where they will end up in one of the many officially designated favelas, some of which I visited recently, have populations of 200,000 people. Bombay, by current projections may be larger than the whole of Italy in the year 2015. Its criminal system is so overloaded that, if a murder was committed tomorrow, at present rates, the case will be heard 250 years from now. The city is being overwhelmed and turned into a battleground for fundamental divisions between people. The world is turning into a global Beirut sometimes. And I think, we often talk about the global village as a way to console the mirage [or] show ourselves because the village is a model in the imagination of a place when people are gathered around the central fire where they share stories and traditions, where there is an order and an order based around a green space. But, in fact, I think the world is turning very quickly into a global city, where everyone is assembling in a single urban agglomeration, and there is no order. I live near Los Angeles and it is the last word, the paradigm of this phenomenon, in which 83 countries and cultures and languages at least vividly and abundantly represented, and yet there is no order in the home. The future of the city is like that of an obese person who will grow bigger and bigger and bigger, and more and more indissolubly wedded to his or her unhealthy habits, to the point, arguably, of explosion or extinction. A self-described “global village on two legs,” Pico Iyer is the author of Global Soul.

Leung Ping-Kwan

When we talk about the future of the city, one of the image that come up will be like the city in a Blade Runner, the film Blade Runner, which is a film with a kind of futuristic depiction of the city – a city is hell. There were all kinds of problems: disease, poverty, affected by all kinds of issues, and it is the result of the people [inaudible]. It was developed into this kind of hell-like scene of a city. But of course on the other hand, we if want a city to have a future that it is necessary to be aware of the problems, where the cities are facing. That is the problem of resources, the problem of unequal distribution of well [inaudible] property, [gangster] problems, global disease, that kind of problems. All these are the kinds of blacklist development, if we cut off the human right. All these would lead to problem of the city, but if we do not want the city to be like to have a hell-like future or if we want the city to have a future then we would see that the way out will be to have more concern with the use of energy, to be more concern with other accessible ways of life, and how to make the city in the modern way to adjust to the programs but also not as a suspension of human life, and to make it more sustainable development with the human faith. To be able to be more tolerant and receptive of different kind of values, and so in order for the city to have a future then it is necessary for people to be aware of others– other different ways of thinking and hopefully with that in mind we can develop a kind of modern and livable city. Leung Ping-Kwan is a poet, translator and cultural critic responsible for introducing Eastern European, Latin American and American underground literature to Chinese readers.

Lesego Rampolokeng

Blade Runner, mutation, synthesizing and a move away from the organic. Plastic. The city’s future is its own erosion, corrosion. The city’s future is one of glance, is one without the touch of life in it, sterility, polluted, concrete, blockhead, locked in like frightfully monstrous, lifeless structures that creep closer and closer and closer until we are all crushed within it. The future of the city, unless there is a total overhaul of it, is one of attempting to take off to the sky, because it is too cramped in here. There is no space in here. The future of the city is one that is death-facing. It is one in which the human soul, in which the animal soul, in which the living creature soul has absolutely no space. What’s the future of the city? Ghostly, deadness, metallic beings attempting to strut and float, but being totally zombified. The future of the city is not a beautiful one. It is one that supposes itself to be about progress, about advancement when it is actually about implosion. The future of the city is dust tumbling down within. That’s the city. Lesego Rampolokeng is a poet who was active in the struggle against Apartheid.

Yang Shaobin

It is possibly as absurd as in American science fiction movies. I think development of the world is likely to be up against very serious problems. Interpersonal relationships may become more abstract. As in animated cartoons, will people become either stupid or righteous? I have no idea. Often compared to Francis Bacon, Yang Shaobin is one of the most influential painters of the contemporary Chinese avant-garde.

Elisabet Sahtouris

The future of the city is a very interesting question because we’re going to have the opportunity to reinvent cities whether we like it or not. Thirteen of the largest 20 cities in the world are at sea level. Global warming is going to force those cities to relocate. Are we going to put them into the same kind of heavy and wasteful infrastructure that they have now? Or are we going to learn to build lean, green, clean cities further uphill? China has a huge project for building a green city for one million people. It’s the largest reinvention of the city on the planet. So it will be an exciting one to follow. I don’t know why China is building this city at sea level off the coast of Shanghai because appropriately it should be further uphill, but I’m sure that China will also build green cities inland and in safer places for, in terms of the coming future. And I hope other countries will follow suit. I know that some of the best talent for building sustainable living infrastructures in the United States is being hired by China and I admire the foresight there even while they’re using up a lot of oil and developing their economy at breakneck pace, they’re also looking into the future and looking into all the energy alternatives and the new ways of building cities and that’s very much to their credit. I would hope that my own country, the United States, would start building green cities very quickly to hold the populations that will have to move from our coastal cities within the next generation or two. And we don’t know how long it will take. The north Atlantic could have a huge tsunami at any time now if the lake the size of Lakes Ontario and Erie together on top of the Greenland ice breaks through floods into the north Atlantic. The climate disasters that are coming up with this oncoming hot age will be huge, will force people out of their homes, will demand that we build new cities. New Orleans is being rebuilt now. Is it being rebuilt as a green, clean city? We have a lot to learn, we have a lot to do and we’re up for the task because we can easily know how to do it and do it. But it’s going to take a great deal of will, a great deal of mass action, a great deal of energy from the young generation to insist that they don’t want to live unsustainably and that they want to build habitats that are sustainable. So the future city can be gorgeous, wonderful, sustainable, fun to live in. Go and design it! And then build it. Elisabet Sahtouris is an evolution biologist, a consultant to the international business community and the UN, and the author of Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution.
Jerry Mander

It’s pretty grim, I think, because if we accept the existence of eco-oil problem, which means that energy price is going to go steadily up even from its present level of what it is today. I don’t know, 75-80 dollars a barrel; is going to go steadily up. And cities’ transportation systems, high-rise systems where people have to power their tall buildings; all of the systems of the cities are very, very, very energy intensive and cannot be sustained. In the future, they’re going to be energy short and cities are going to be very, very difficult places to live. So, I believe that in the future, and we may be talking 20 or 30 years away, there’s going to have to be some kind of a logical transition to communities that are planned for much lower energy use. Cities might still have a role, but not in its current role and they’ll have to be a much more decentralized system of communities. And parts of cities will be liable, but it may be a grim future for cities. But there’s plenty of planning going on among many, many groups for how to manage this transition and I’m optimistic it can be done if people accept the need to do it. Jerry Mander is the founder and president of the International Forum on Globalization and the author of the The Case Against the Global Economy.

Fang Lijun

It depends on human destiny. If human beings are lucky enough to resolve the conflict between supply and demand of energy, we could probably build various fancy cities, which we are dreaming of: rural, high-tech, comfortable or beautiful. If we are out of luck so that we cannot obtain enough energy and food to survive, what may remain is going to be just vacant cities without any human beings. Fang Lijun has been called the leading representative of “Cynical Realism,” the movement in Chinese art that emerged in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Valentina Melnikova

The future of the city could be different. Some people say cities would be higher and higher surrounded by green fields and forests. Other people state cities would gradually look like a village and all small towns would become a large and endless village with middle-size houses and gardens around them. The city is one of many social and economic forms. The development of humankind would make it clear whether people need cities or not. When people use the internet, they don’t need cities anymore and they don’t depend on them. There are technologies which make it possible to manage companies and regulate energy usage using only an internet connection. And the person who fulfills these functions can live everywhere in the world without being dependent on the city. Valentina Melnikova is the head of the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia and the chairwoman of the United People’s Party of Soldiers’ Mothers.

Ervin Laszlo

The future? It means decentralization, reduction of population size, cleaning up pollution, cleaning up waste, creating more livable quarters. In general, mega cities will have to be gradually reduced in size; the countryside will have to be revitalized. The current trend for organization is inhuman and is unsustainable economically, as well as ecologically and, above all, of course, socially. So, the future of the city has to be coming back to reason from the euphoria of seemingly unlimited growth. Dr. Ervin Laszlo is the president of the Club of Budapest, the co-chair of the World Wisdom Council, and the author of The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads and Science and the Akashic Field.

Paul D. Miller

I think the future of the city is about a certain kind of dematerialization of the city. You have to imagine that on one level or another the whole issue of urban congestion and the relationship of physical space, it’s about–the funny thing is that you have to really understand that about 50 to 70 percent of humanity will live in the city in the future. We’re thinking about most of the species; but the congestion that implies will also be related to the information, water supplies, the way people can kind of understand how much all of that is linked. The future of the city is going to be the bulk of our species as we know it; but also it’s going to be about massive, massive, massive divisions economically, socially, politically that are used to create not only how we think of the power dynamics of the city but just how that influences literally the evolution of our species. You can look at beehives, termite hives, all those kinds of creatures that, that congest; and I, regretfully I have a feeling that’s kind of what I think we’re going to end up looking like. But hopefully there will be a green response, which I’m really hoping people think about as a different future, a different way of getting into how you can think of space itself. I mean, when you have congestion like New York or Tokyo or something, it’s the–the sheer volume of information moving around one of those urban center core areas is above and beyond what we can normally think of as how humanity would have lived in any other era. And it’s just going to get more extreme, so space itself is a scarce resource. And one could say that that will also intensify how energy and how information moves between people and moves between cultures, which could be a good thing, so we’ll have to see about that. Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, is the musician behind Optometry, Riddim Warfare, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and the author of Rhythm Science.

Sydney Possuelo

The future of the city, what will be the future which expects us tomorrow? What is the future of the city? I don’t know, these cities, these urban or human concentrations didn’t turn us into happier people. It would be good if we would go back to live in villages or small towns where the citizens know each other and where you can live real urbanity. The big cities themselves are inhuman. They have terrifying aspects but there is a human tendency towards growth and towards urban concentrations. And I don’t think that these big cities have anything which is essentially good. What will become of these cities? Sydney Possuelo is an explorer and ethnographer, who served for decades as head of the Isolated Indigenous Peoples department of Brazil’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI).

Martin Almada

A scenario where the world is shattered by famine, rush, migrations, endless wars and fights, daily insecurity, generalized […], chaos, injustice, no more freedom. The future of cities is not at all promising. It is possible to imagine that cities will become empty, and that people return to the countryside to escape the tensions existing in the big cities until the balance and the human dimension is recovered again. We have to return to the countryside, our origin. And the business of the property companies must finally be stopped in the whole world. Martin Almada is the founder of Paraguay’s Archives of Terror.

Steve Earle

Cities are - the more people there are in the world, the more living in cities becomes necessary. Abandoning cities isn’t even an option because it’s only in cities that you can officially use concepts like public transportation, recycling. It’s much more efficient to - Concentrating people in cities allows us to take care of each other and frees up acreage for food cultivation. The more people there are in the world, the more acres we need to feed them. So urban sprawls are a really, really dangerous waste of resources. We have the technology. We have all of the ideas. We know how to build and we know how to maintain cities that don’t have anywhere near the impact on the environment that our present-day cities do. We just haven’t put the time and the energy, and haven’t attached the urgency to actually doing something about it, and bringing a city that becomes a sustainable environment for human beings. Steve Earle is the award-winning country and rock musician behind Jerusalem and The Revolution Starts Now.

Simon Retallack

Wow, it depends what route we go down. If we carry on as we are, I see a pretty grim future for cities. Cities particularly, of course, because they have huge populations, use up a lot of resources, are sources of a lot of pollution. You just have to talk to anyone who’s been to Beijing recently to tell you about how terrible the air pollution is there; and unless change happens, that sort of problem is going to get a lot worse. I think, on a social front, too, unless change happens I think cities could be nightmare places to live. However, there are a lot of very enlightened city developers, mayors, architects, out there that understand that it’s time we develop cities differently to take into account ecological needs and social needs. And, if we’re clever, we can redesign our cities in a way that puts people at their center, not cars, that puts green spaces all around us, that ensures that we minimize our ecological footprint, that ensures that we build strong communities. But it’s obviously easier to do that when we start building cities or towns from scratch. It takes longer when you’re talking about redesigning existing cities. But if we’re to produce cities that people actually want to live in, we’ve got to do it. Otherwise, people will continue to flee them, and you’ll see urban flight carrying on well into the century, and the danger is then that cities will become empty ghettos where only the poorest people that can’t afford to escape will end up instead of centers that as they have been of innovation, of creativity, of enlightenment. And I think we need to do everything we can to encourage the people that control and lead our cities to think differently about future development so that our cities can become places that we actually enjoy living in with clean air, with green spaces, with places to meet, to feel safe, and to bind our communities together. Simon Retallack is the lead researcher of the International Climate Change Taskforce, a unit of London’s Institute of Public Policy Research.

Andries Botha

The city is an inevitability, given the fact that were are overpopulated. Not only is it an inevitability; it’s perhaps a desirability in many cases, because it presents a wonderful kind of urban crucible. The idol, or the romantic idol of the rural landscape, I regret to say, given the kind of encroachment, is in fact, something of the past. The city presents for all of us, most of us, I should say, a kind of an imaginable place where all sorts of contemporary innovative things take place. It’s the place where we live. You know that is something that’s irreversible. What we should be looking at is how to turn our cities into more sustainable, living organisms. And I think that presents a very interesting challenge for planners and thinkers. We are not and I don’t think we are ever going to - the city is where it’s all at. The city is the future, and we’re not going to be able to escape that. Nor should we. Sculptor Andries Botha served as the National Visual Arts Chairperson of South Africa’s post-Apartheid government.