Architect, urban planner and Director of the Aga Khan Programme at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Hashim Sarkis has spent much of his life thinking about the city. Understandably, perhaps. Lebanese in origin, he comes from a country that may be small but is home to five of the oldest cities in the world.
Some 10,000 years after the city was first created – Ur, in what is modern-day Iraq claims the title of the world’s first – we still haven’t quite managed to get it right, as traffic jams, overdevelopment, overburdened infrastructure, shrinking public spaces, pollution and rising levels of stress all attest. And yet, we can’t get enough of the city which is we are now, as a species, overwhelmingly urban. Here, Dr. Sarkis talks to Bespoke about ‘The City’, its problems, its pluses and the possibility it should represent.
First of all, what is a city?
The best definition I have read is from archaeology: a city is when houses in a settlement start sharing walls. The beauty of this definition is that it focuses on sharing. By sharing a wall, each of the two households saves a bit but by sharing, they also build a long-term relationship of managing resources together. They build trust. When they start sharing, they reinvent the house and shared spaces, aspiring to something better than what each could build separately. This is a deeply architectural definition. You can understand why I like it. However, this is perhaps an answer to when is a city rather than what. The question is a deceptively simple but difficult to answer. I don’t think we know anymore because the city is everywhere.
The city, as we had understood it in the past, as the opposite of the country, is no longer valid. Urban life is no longer the opposite of nomadic life. City dwellers are mobile, nomadic. Cities are also growing and connecting with each other to form vast networks - the city-world. There will come a time, very soon, when there will be no ‘outside’ to the city. At that point, it will cease to be a useful category. We will have to invent others. What will remain are the necessary qualities of sharing and therefore of density, multiplicity, tolerance and if I can add one more, of promise. The city holds the promise that by coming together with other people, most of whom we do not know, our aspirations could be better achieved. This promise is perpetual.
We live in an overwhelmingly urban world and we’ve been settled for over 10,000 years, so why have we not managed to get cities working properly yet?
Cities are difficult to manage because it is always difficult to share especially when you do not know the people with whom you share. This one world, this city-world, is going to be more difficult to manage because while the lived environment is becoming increasingly connected, its politics and policies remain disconnected. If I live in the suburbs of a city, shop in another neighbourhood, and work in a third, that does not mean that these three areas are organised by the same agency. A city like Cairo or Beirut is indelibly tied to its territory and yet they are governed separately. I am not sure that we will ever find a properly working city and even if we do, I am not sure we’ll like it. It will be too boring, too finite, too predictable. Constant change, differences between adjacent parcels, blocks and neighbourhoods and a dose of chaos are important ingredients of any city.
Do we take too many of the problems of urban life for granted? In other words, do we simply assume that the difficulties/ inconveniences associated with life in city are inherent, rather than created?
The city is a place of anonymity, mobility, diversity and voluntary association. These can also be invitations for trouble. If everybody is mobile, then we have traffic. If everybody is different then we will have difficulty agreeing on issues that affect us all. How to nurture these qualities without losing the vital attributes of urban life remains one of the biggest challenges to urban governance. Another challenge is that for the most part, cities are open to visitors and strangers. We have to find a way where they can become part of the urban covenant. This is one of the biggest challenges of the Gulf Region cities: citizenship.
What are the most successful cities, in your opinion, and why?
The most successful are those that negotiate well between three main roles that cities play in relation to their surroundings: nodes in a network of other cities, anchors of the territory and “balconies onto the world”. The first means that they are well connected to other cities. Dubai thrives on that. Anchors are cities that serve well the regions around them. Fez, Cairo and Aleppo play this role. And “balconies onto the world” a phrase from Le Corbusier, are cities where you feel that you feel that you are a citizen of the world, that you can relate to the world at large. Beirut aspires to this. A colleague from Istanbul once told me that among Istanbulis there is a sense that they are not citizens of Istanbul but guardians of the city for the world. This is also a very forward-looking understanding of citizenship.
Some cities are spared one of these roles. This is not to say that they become less successful. They just become more intense in their mono-functionality to remain attractive to outsiders - Dubai is a case in point. Being attractive to foreigners without losing its own residents is the best aspiration a city can have.
How do Middle Eastern cities compare? What are the major problems they face?
I am not sure that there is a salient characteristic that binds all Middle Eastern cities together and distinguishes them from the rest. When it comes to architectural character, Beirut has more in common with Montevideo than Damascus which is next door and Damascus has more in common with Beirut than it has with Dubai. We can go on. The differences between them run from origin (Roman encampment, oasis, trading stop, agricultural settlement), geographic location, (coastal, inland, hillside, desert) as well as economic and political role.
Yet if I can highlight one characteristic that seems to be common - except for Gulf city states - it would be that they are all bound by strong nation-state control. Their budgets, infrastructures and services are nationally driven. We cannot really speak of citizenship as separate from nationality. This could be good in terms of helping redress some imbalances that come about in urban economies but it does weaken a city’s identity and decision-making capacity. Working as urban designer with Byblos in Lebanon, I realise that one of the key reasons for its recent success is that its dynamic mayor and his team have quickly understood the benefits of recent decentralisation efforts in Lebanon.
Which are the worst offenders? Why?
Cities that do not host foreigners well, because the covenant of sharing becomes a covenant of exclusion.
Which are the most effective? Why?
Cities with many hotels! For the same reason. Hotels for all groups of visitors with all incomes and hotels where the locals also go for lunch and dinner.
What can be done, immediately, to make our cities more liveable?
The collective aspects of the city need to be emphasised. The transience of certain cities that are lived in for a short period of time by people who are not committed to them is detrimental in the long run. There is a lot of wear and tear but little care. Something needs to be done to make the sense of citizenship stronger in order to make cities more liveable.
What are the longer-term issues that need to be tackled?
Same as the short term: a stronger sense of citizenship even for outsiders.
