False Economy - Alan Beattie [34]
China has also experimented with making new cities more sustainable. Many cities are depleting their water tables—those in Manila, Shanghai, and Bangkok have dropped sharply in the past few decades. China is conducting an intriguing experiment with the Dongtan EcoCity, built from scratch on an island off Shanghai, which is designed to create a city both environmentally and socially sustainable. For the average city in a rich country, the so-called ecological footprint, a measure of the land and water area needed to support each person sustainably, averages five hectares. For Shanghai it is a less sustainable eight; for sprawling, car-dependent Houston a wasteful fourteen. For Dongtan it is less than three. Construction, though, has lagged behind schedule, and whether it will prove a replicable model remains to be seen.
There is another challenge with which cities, and not just the catchup cities of the developing world, have recently had to deal. So far we have seen how cities were created by the industrial demand for concentrated workforces and the need for hubs of distribution and trade. But in the world's rich countries, as manufacturing has become more capital-intensive and makes up a smaller share of the economy, the demand for large agglomerations of industrial workers has ebbed. The empty ghostly hulks of Michigan car towns show that cities that have outlived their original purpose do not necessarily find a new reason to exist.
With the rise of services in the economy, and particularly with better telecommunications (most recently the Internet), comes the question: Has the entire point of traditional cities in fact disappeared? Could urbanization go into reverse? In the 1970s, there were genuine concerns that this might be so. Several cities, including the world's defining metropolis of New York, seemed on the verge of collapse. With crime soaring and businesses fleeing, New York City very nearly went bankrupt. The initial refusal of Gerald Ford, then president, to bail it out with federal cash produced one of the great newspaper headlines of all time, the New York Post's "Ford to City: Drop Dead."
Any city with a large manufacturing or transport function, and notably those with both, were vulnerable. Liverpool, the port in northwest England that handled much of Britain's transatlantic trade, had been one of the country's richest cities in the nineteenth century. At its height it was the center of global commerce in salt and cotton, and hosted a commercial exchange (if not a physical market) for slaves. The decline of its port, and of British manufacturing, almost halved Liverpool's population, from 867,000 in 1937 to 442,000 in 2001.
The demand for transport hubs, or at least for so many of them, has been declining for a century. Of the twenty largest cities in America in 1900, seven were ports where a river met the ocean (Boston, Providence, New York, Jersey City, Newark, Baltimore, and San Francisco), five were ports where rivers met the Great Lakes (Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo), three were on the Mississippi (Minneapolis, St. Louis, and New Orleans), three on the Ohio River (Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh), and two on East Coast rivers close to the ocean (Philadelphia and Washington). But the cost of transporting manufactured