Bright lights, big city

Author and urban planning activist Jane Jacobs once said, “Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.” 

Watch almost any sci-fi movie and you’ll see some variation of future cities: they are either all uniformly sleek and glittering or uniformly decrepit and crumbling. Very rarely do you see cities depicted as they actually are: a mix of new and old, shiny and scruffy, efficient and dysfunctional. 

Here’s where Jane Jacobs comes in. In her heyday in the 1950s, North American cities were in the midst of a post-war building boom. New developments sprang up on the edges of existing metropolises, swallowing up many small towns in their orbit. Massive highways linked those previously hard-to- reach places, planting the seeds for the megacities we know today. Highrise homes, tightly-knit neighborhoods and mass transit were out, while single-family homes, residential suburbs and car culture were in. 

Cities on the unlucky end of growth patterns saw their urban centers gradually crumble and decay while a glittering ring of attractive new developments circled them, somewhat resembling a doughnut. 

In 1961, Jacobs published her best known work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, where she took aim at the urban planning practices of the time and argued for denser, mixed-use neighborhoods that put the focus on the people who live and work there (think sidewalks and city parks), rather than so much of city planning being focused on cars and parking lots. 

Though it feels like a recent buzzword, the concept of a 15-minute city is in reality a decades old reaction to the sprawl of today’s megacities all across the globe. A 15-minute city is a sustainable, livable one, with everything including home, work, food and entertainment being no farther away than a journey that takes a quarter of an hour. 

Across the world, people are flocking to cities at a rate never seen before in human history. According to a World Bank estimate, a third of the world’s population in 1960 lived in cities. By 2023, that number had climbed to 57 percent – and 90 percent of increases over the next few years are set to occur in developing countries. 

In this latest issue of the OPEC Fund Quarterly we dive deeper into what is at stake for global cities as they adapt not only to the reality of climate change but how they can build (or rebuild) to foster economic growth, human dignity and environmental sustainability that will carry them into the next decades. Zooming out, this issue also features new sections including our Legal Corner and Dark Matter, which focuses on innovation, science, research and technology. 

Increasing rates of urbanization create many challenges, but also many solutions – especially if the developing world can sidestep many of the problems advanced countries ran into when they dealt with the similar rush to build cities. 

“Just like with the mobile phone, we don’t have to go through the landline just because the Global North did it,” says Caitlin Wale, founder of the African climate tech accelerator Kinjani. “We have the potential to grow green from the start.” As many cities have learned the hard way, sprawl is not the solution, especially when trying to build adequate housing for a warming world. 

As a World Bank blog post puts it: “The greenest home built in suburbia is still more polluting than a classic urban house. As we embrace innovative construction technologies, let us not forget that housing is more than bricks and mortar.” 

Already taking shape in the OPEC Fund’s host city of Vienna is one such example of a positive approach to housing and climate. Seestadt is a massive brownfield site currently being developed on Vienna’s old airfield, on the edge of the capital. This new neighborhood sits in an area where there is little but flat farmland, yet the all-encompassing design will house some 25,000 people and generate 20,000 jobs when completed. 

Unlike a typical suburb, Seestadt is designed to be a self-contained, environmentally friendly city-within-a- city. Already there are apartment buildings, office spaces, schools, parks and more, all of which are built in a circular fashion around a man-made lake that acts as a central hub for the development. Crucially, it is served by one of Vienna’s subway lines which brings you to the city center in just over 20 minutes. Living in other places a similar distance from the center may require a car or a much longer mass transit ride. As a not-so-subtle nod, a street there has even been named after Jane Jacobs.