A History of Future Cities

  • Daniel Brook
W. W. Norton: 2013. 480 pp. $27.95 9780393078121 | ISBN: 978-0-3930-7812-1

In 1914, Patrick Geddes arrived in Madras, India, in the waning phase of a plague pandemic that had killed 10 million people on the subcontinent. Geddes, a pioneer of urban planning from Scotland, had been invited to lecture on his ideas and, later, to evaluate the government's draconian proposal to 'sanitize' cities through slum clearance, street widening and the installation of public latrines.

The replica Eiffel Tower in the suburb of Tianducheng in Shanghai, China. Credit: OLIVIER CHOUCHANA/GAMMA/GETTY

Geddes did something surprising. After four years visiting dozens of cities across India, he produced a series of reports extolling the superiority of native urbanism over British idées fixes. He concluded that the official sanitation crusade was a huge threat to the cultural and environmental foundations of Indian town life. He prescribed “conservative surgery”: providing communities with the resources to cleanse and repair themselves, improve rather than remove slums, and plant gardens in demolition sites. He advocated collecting human waste and trenching it in public vegetable and fruit gardens, rather than dumping it into streams or latrines.

His ideas achieved small-scale successes in Lucknow, Baroda and Indore. The larger urban-reform movement in India collapsed after the First World War, in part because of the immense cost of building New Delhi on an imperial scale.

Geddes was not an anti-modernist; indeed, he was an enthusiast for concrete and electricity. But he rejected the hubris of British engineers who, ignorant of local 'webs of life', proposed for India the same drastic palliatives that had been applied to industrial British cities such as Liverpool and Glasgow. Geddes' work poses an enduring question: why do politicians, bankers and developers continue to ignore the local genius of non-Western architectures and urban life, and promote generic urban modernity?

This is a question that Daniel Brook should have tackled in A History of Future Cities, his fascinating parallel social histories of St Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai and Dubai as deliberately constructed facsimiles of the distant modernities of Amsterdam, London and Las Vegas. These 'instant' cities are light years away from the tinkering, incremental urbanism advocated by Geddes, which thrives today in self-built slums. The global middle classes, especially in Asia, seem to prefer theme-park cities with replicas of the Eiffel Tower (in Tianducheng, a suburb of Shanghai) and gated subdivisions copied from The Real Housewives of Orange County (in Ju Jun, for example, near Beijing).

Brook is undismayed by the popularity of simulated landscapes and monumental knock-offs. Unlike Geddes, he does not see urban conservation as the precondition of modernization. Authentic modernity, Brook argues, is usually the conquest and transformation of a copy of somewhere else. From a historical perspective, “impersonation is often just a first step, not a final destination in a place's development”. To illustrate this thesis, he traces the “idea of Dubai” back to the building of St Petersburg as a copy of Amsterdam, and later through Shanghai and Bombay (now Mumbai) as artificial iterations of English cities.

My experience of reading this book, however, would have been much happier without the introduction. In it, Brook, in my view, depicts sophisticated Chinese and Indian civilizations almost as if they were stunned hunter-gathers seeing iron tools for the first time: “to their Chinese and Indian inhabitants these strange new buildings and the cosmopolitan cities themselves were, by turns, confusing, threatening, and inspiring.” Likewise, Brook's assertion that “the idea of Dubai ... is the idea of our time: the Asian Century, which is also the Urban Century” would make a good slogan for the side of an Emirates passenger jet; but I dread to think that a debt-ridden absolute monarchy exploiting foreign labour might be the shape of things to come.

Once past the clichés, the studies of St Petersburg, Shanghai and Bombay begin to grip (Dubai is too recent a phenomenon and fits awkwardly into the narrative structure). Brook describes how imposed modernity, combined with epic inequality, eventually triggered three-way struggles between the colonial or autocratic state, an aggressive and modernizing local bourgeoisie, and radical labour movements anchored in the new factories. Such conflicts, albeit occurring at great human cost, generated the extraordinary, if brief-lived energies of avant-garde Leningrad, Jazz Age Shanghai and Art Deco Bombay.

Will history repeat itself in a similar pattern in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, New Songdo or others of today's instant cities? I think that such a question is equivalent to asking what time the revolution will begin in Las Vegas, the utopia of tack. Brook tends to confuse cosmopolitan modernity with malls, skyscrapers and theme parks, especially with the strange claim that “Dubai represents the world as it is”. Rather than searching to “catch the glimpses of utopia within the dystopia”, as he recommends, I think it would be more fruitful, as Geddes advised, to focus on the solidarities and practices of daily life.