THE MAGNETISM OF CITIES
A sense of social solidarity is the key to creating liveable urban areas in the future, professor Ian Goldin tells
‘CWe can put higher and higher walls around ourselves, and have more and more security guards, but if we want to enjoy our cities, if we want to live in our cities, we have to realise that we’re in them together
ities are a celebration of diversity — if they’re successful.” This is a statement by Ian Goldin, a South African-born economist and professor of globalisation and development at Oxford University.
Goldin’s métier transcends academia. He has written several books, most recently co-authoring with The Economist’s Tom Lee-Devlin Age of the City: Why Our Future will be Won or Lost Together, an exploration of how cities have shaped our past and present, and how they will determine our future. As he writes in the preface, “the battle for our future needs to be fought and won in cities”.
The former Pretoria resident has called a number of cities home and, yes, Oxford carries the designation too. “Because it has a cathedral, it’s defined in
England as a city,” Goldin explains. “So what defines a city is really a rather arbitrary thing, but in the way I talk about it in the book, it’s a big metropolitan area.”
Goldin concedes he “really didn’t like” Oxford as a student. “I found it incredibly boring. But I’m at a different stage of life now. I like the outdoors.” Indeed, he’s an avid cyclist and completed the Cape Town Cycle Tour the day before our interview. And, yes, his calves are fine! “I really love my job at the university, and Oxford is very close to London,” he adds.
And his Heimat? “It was not a nice place at all,” he says of our country’s administrative capital. “I mean, this was the seat of the apartheid government, the civil service and the army. It certainly wasn’t cosmopolitan, diverse or anything else that’s attractive about cities.”
Goldin defines successful cities as “places where things are happening and which have a lot of different alternatives on offer”. He explains: “Even in a country that is relatively homogeneous in terms of not having that many foreigners, like China, the dynamic cities are still the ones that are pulling in people from all over.”
“I believe in cities. I’m a huge fan of cities,” he adds. “And the book is basically saying that cities are great, and that they’re especially great for humanity. However, unless we fix the problems associated with them, they could also be the source of our destruction.”
Given that its metropolis is defined as a global city, Joburg’s absence from the book’s index came as a surprise. “I wanted it to be a global book of interest to readers everywhere,” Goldin says. “I decided not to make it a South Africa-focused book. That’s a whole book in itself! Johannesburg is an amazing, fascinating, vibrant city that represents many of the good things about cities, but it also has some worrying features that could characterise cities in the future.”
Concerns about the future of cities doesn’t seem to have dissuaded people from moving to them. In fact, the opposite is true: “About 3-million people move to cities each week. There’s an ongoing mass movement into cities, and already more than half of the world’s population lives in cities.
“And in South Africa more than two-thirds of the population lives in cities. So South Africa is one of the most urbanised African countries,” Goldin points out.
“More and more people are choosing to live in cities,” he says, “and the reason is because, despite their being tough, they’re better than the available alternatives.
“You’re more likely to get a job, you’re more likely to escape your past, and you’re more likely to be able to adopt a diverse lifestyle, find like-minded people and do the things you want to do in a city than in a small rural town in the countryside,” he says. “That magnetism is growing, not declining.”
The magnetism of cities dates back to the Renaissance, and Goldin says Florence in particular intrigued him when he was trying to understand what made cities work.
“How was it that this tiny city could have been the source of such extraordinary breakthroughs in the arts and sciences, leading to all sorts of other developments?
“Why did that city at that time bring about this complete change in the way people see things?” he ponders. “That intrigued me. And then, because I’ ma professor of globalisation and development at Oxford and I think a lot about those issues, I began asking myself questions such as ‘What does globalisation do?’ and ‘How do you create development?’”
The famous adage “location, location, location” is not limited to Pam Golding property brochures.
“What we’ve seen is that, if you want to understand politics and power, you need to understand wealth, inequality and development,” says Goldin. “It’s all about place. Place matters more than ever in history.”
Where you’re born and where you live “shapes your future to a great extent”, he says.
In keeping with the subtitle Why Our Future will be Won or Lost Together, Goldin mentions the threats that will be faced by the cities of the future. Populist agendas and anti-city narratives are on the ascent, but Goldin says that “you don’t see this as obviously in South Africa as you do in England and in the US”.
Another problem is growing spatial tyranny and inequality, and “South Africa has that very acutely because of the legacy of apartheid”. Finally, there is climate change, which Goldin says is “a huge threat to society”.
“The [Covid] pandemic was a massive threat, and that really focused my mind,” he says, referring to his 2021 book Rescue: From Global Crisis to a Better World. “[The pandemic] led me to understand how the wealthy are fleeing cities. This whole shift to remote work is a big threat to cities, because wealthy people are basically leaving, meaning the ecosystem they support in their offices and homes is being threatened.”
He further cites the rise in psychological ill-health, loneliness and depression as quintessential city phenomena.
“Unless you resolve these issues and focus on fixing cities and making them better, you can’t fix societies. You can’t overcome inequality, you can’t defeat extreme politics, you can’t address climate change, and you can’t stop the next pandemic.”
If this statement seems somewhat bleak, fear not because “the great thing about cities is that they can solve many of the problems themselves”.
“The answer isn’t to say, ‘Go back to the countryside’. First, that would destroy what remains of the countryside and, second, what people need is not there. The jobs aren’t there, the health isn’t there, the education isn’t there, and the ability to learn to do things differently isn’t there.
“I think the answer isn’t to say: ‘Stop urbanisation.’ I think the answer is to say: ‘Our future is urban, and we need to make these places work.’”
If Goldin were appointed mayor of, say, Johannesburg or Cape Town, how would he go about implementing — and ensuring — a viable urban future? “I’m an economist by background, so everything depends on two things,” the hypothetical city custodian says. “The first is money — you can’t do anything if you don’t have the resources. And the second is management and leadership. So the first issue is a question of how much money you have and how you can get more of it.”
He proceeds to mention the importance of national legislation and the limited amount of money one can raise through rates and local taxes, saying you “can also raise money in other ways, from parking fines to other levies”.
“I think one has to make everything work.” (A party-political slogan, perhaps?)
“First, you want safety, because otherwise people will flee the city. And then you’ve got all sorts of questions about housing affordability — who lives where, and where they can afford to live.”
The phenomenon of people fleeing cities is a universal challenge, and Goldin points to Johannesburg as an example of how, when businesses move out of the CBD and go to suburban spaces, “you have massive problems”.
“Not only must you now keep the CBD active, safe and attractive to people, but you also have to ensure that infrastructure in the suburban areas is properly designed to accommodate such large volumes of people,” he says. In particular, inadequate public transport and traffic congestion become problems when decentralisation occurs.
A sense of social solidarity is the key to creating the liveable cities of the future, Goldin says. “We have to recognise that we are in it together. We can put higher and higher walls around ourselves, and have more and more security guards, but if we want to enjoy our cities, if we want to live in our cities, we have to realise that we’re in them together. There has to be much deeper civic engagement. Cities all too often are very fragmented and fractured spaces.”
In this regard, Goldin shares an anecdote about his experience of cycling in the Cape Town Cycle Tour: “What’s interesting to me is, first, it’s obviously incredibly beautiful. It goes around the whole peninsula.” He smiles at the thought of the picturesque route. “Now, what really struck me yesterday was how warm all the communities were about us cycling through their areas. People on the roadside were clapping and cheering us on throughout the whole trip,” he animatedly continues. “And we went through some pretty poor informal settlements.
“And the reason there was such goodwill is because of a very active programme of engagement mounted by the City of Cape Town. The city has explained to the local communities why this race is important for them and how they will benefit from it. And they do get material benefits out of the race, including fundraising for things they need in their communities. That comes out of the cycle tour. That, to me, is a good example of a more holistic intervention that benefits the entire city.”
The opening sentence of chapter 4 of his new book, Divided Cities, reads as follows: “In The
Republic, Plato wrote that every city ‘is in fact divided into two: one the city of the poor, one the city of the rich’.”
The Ancient Greek philosopher’s observation is starkly apparent in South African cities, and Goldin applies Plato’s pronouncement to housing inequalities: “What we take for granted in, say, South African cities is that if you’re wealthy, you own a house. It’s not the case in many places. And in South Africa there’s the terrible apartheid legacy,” he says in relation to the pre-1994 forced removals.
“The same is true in London and New York,” he says. “The poorer people are pushed further and further out and have to spend longer and longer and more and more money to get to where the jobs are.”
But how can the problem of gentrification be solved? “Rezoning and building affordable housing closer to where the jobs are,” is his resolute answer.
Does the ardent advocate of cities perchance have a favourite city? “That’s a very interesting question! I love many, many cities. So, you know, it’s like asking a parent to tell you who his or her favourite child is,” he grins. “I was very lucky to live in Paris for four years. It’s a wonderful place. I’ve been lucky to have been at university in Cape Town. That’s also an amazing city. I’ve been to lots of cities around the world, and some are difficult. Some are polluted. I like running, and you can’t run in some cities.”
However, he “really enjoyed living in Johannesburg for five years”. (See? One of the least pedestrianfriendly cities in the country does have its merits!)
“I wasn’t mad about Washington, DC,” he confesses. “It reminded me a lot of Pretoria when I was growing up. It’s a civil service city, and it’s an international bureaucratic city. It’s very suburban. It’s very pleasant, and the countryside around it is quite beautiful,” he adds, “but it’s very dispersed and nothing happens there at night.”
Which perhaps explains why he passionately proclaims: “I love New York!” (The city that never sleeps, mos!)
It seems Goldin is drawn to cities with green spaces, a thriving arts scene and a vibrant nightlife. Diversity is also a must-have for him. “Yes, we’re living in a time when people are increasingly not all thinking the same way,” he says of his penchant for diversity and his encouragement of it in cities. “We’re not all into the same music, clubs or fashion, and we don’t all have the same gender or identity.
“We have a diverse world, and we need to celebrate that diversity, because it’s the source of what makes us all very special as human beings,” he says. “But, as I show in the book, diversity is also the source of creativity, change and progress — human progress.
“Go back to Florence and you will see it was so successful because it was so diverse. Muslims and Jews and Catholics intermingled, and ideas from the Ottoman Empire and around the world were brought to the city. Even the pigments in the paints Michelangelo used were not Italian! They were brought from elsewhere. That diversity can only thrive in a city if you allow it to. It’s like pollination: different ideas need to be brought together and shared in a common place. The more vibrant a city is, the more alternatives it has, and the more people it can attract.”
Goldin says migrants are attracted to cities because there is often an established network of previous generations already there.
“They can find the food they want to eat and other likeminded people.”
Seeking social solidarity? Aim for cities.