Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 2012, volume 39, pages 972 – 974

doi:10.1068/b3906ed

Editorial

The 22nd-century city

Ten years ago in the summer of 2002, I was driven from Nanjing to Shanghai through
Suzhou, a distance of about 250 km. I was struck then by the fact that we journeyed through
almost continuous urban development where the countryside was turning into a new kind
of city—‘desakota’ as Terry McGee (1989) once coined the term—a mixture of town and
country, an urban sprawl indigenous perhaps to China itself but symptomatic of the fact that
by the end of this century, nearly everyone will be living in one kind of city or another (Batty,
2011). At the time of writing I have just retraced my steps but this time simply travelling
from Suzhou to Shanghai. Nevertheless, I remember Suzhou in 2002 as a town of perhaps 1
million but still enough of a village built around canals in its core—this is the Yangtze delta
region—reminiscent of the old China. In the intervening years, it seemed to me that Suzhou
had reached 2–3 million (Xie et al, 2007) but I was told quite firmly that Suzhou is now 11
million and rising. Simply add that to the Shanghai municipality population of 23 million and
you already have more people living there than in any of the large city agglomerations that
are currently ranked number 1 in the world such as Mexico City or Tokyo which are said to
be about 25–30 million. My journey was through a remarkable urban sprawl which was more
a series of adjacent and linked clusters of high-rise development all running into one another,
rather different from anything that resembles Phoenix or Atlanta, the archetypical examples
of sprawl in America. This in many senses of course is the Chinese city of the future just as
the continuous urban development that we have in Western Europe at much lower densities
and with very little high rise, is our (at least my) future. London is no more 8 million people
than Amsterdam is 1 million. The wider London region is at least 15 million, probably nearer
25 million while in the Netherlands, it is simply impossible to draw city boundaries for a
population of nearly 17 million which in any case spreads across the border into Belgium.
In an age when we will all live in cities, defining city size will be entirely problematic as
it has already become in many parts of the world. What this means for some of the seemingly
long-lasting signatures of urban development such as our city-size scaling laws is unclear. If I
can define a city like London as 8 or 15 or 25 million, then we can manipulate the rank-size curve
in such a way that it no longer has any meaning with respect the organisation of the hierarchy
of cities (Cristelli et al, 2012). When we are all living in cities, there will of course still be a
distinct hierarchy because this is the signature of the competition between cities which in fact
appears to be becoming even more intense. But physical form is what we have used for many
years to define the city and this is no longer the measure of what a city actually is. If it takes
40 minutes on the bullet train from Suzhou to Shanghai, then where does Shanghai end and
Suzhou begin? If you look at the top-50 cities in terms of the rank of their population over the
last 2500 years, it is Suzhou that has been in the top rank for more years (2150) than any other
city, although in terms of the current population rankings, it left the top 50 over 150 years ago.
Clearly it has now returned but the fact that it is not recognised as such is simply an admission
that the current ranks bear no relation to what is happening on the ground. It is an admission too
that we can no longer define city boundaries with any certainty. I can now draw ‘plausible’
boundaries that would easily put the Shanghai-Suzhou at the top of the hierarchy and London
in the top 20 but there are many plausible boundaries: that is the problem.
So how do we define a city? And how will we define cities in the next century when most
populations will feel the influence of globalisation, for this in essence is one of the major
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reasons why we can no longer define the extent of a city. Indeed, it is tempting to think of
cities being composed of networks of linkages across the world which reflect trade, social
contacts, even knowledge which has become global through access to information on the
Internet. The ‘cloud’ is recognition that increasingly information is global in its import and
that it no longer matters where it is physically located. Much of what we now do does not
relate to the place we inhabit which, in some senses, is becoming independent of the activities
that support and sustain us both economically and globally. Networks are of course the icon
of our age and the real challenges in science are related to how multiple networks are coupled
together in diverse ways, interacting with one another through diffusing processes. Networks
of genes, e-mail, brains, migration, computers—you name it and it will have some network
characteristic—are all being studied in new ways, and cities are no exception. But there is a
difference in that our sense of place is not really network based. Although most places and
the activities and populations within them now depend on others, once we recognise that
such networks are spatially disjoint, we lose the recognition that pertains to clusters that we
have defined as cities for the last 5000 years. The challenge thus is to find characterisations
of cities or rather urban clusters that span large distances and times while at the same time
rooting these notions in the traditional idea that places are defined locally by contiguous
configurations of development. In short, we need new ways of linking local to global.
The usual way has been to aggregate the populations into small zones that provide enough
variation across a city as conceived of as a contiguous physical development to examine its
spatial heterogeneity. However, spatial contiguity is broken in a global world, for populations
depend on networks related to all the activities they engage in—work, social interactions,
entertainment, education, health, and so on. Plotting networks at an individual or more
aggregate level is difficult and there is no way of really reconciling this variety to represent
it in a spatial context. In short, we have not yet come up with aggregate varieties of network
that portray variations across space (and time) in a sufficiently robust manner as to provide
a good summary of how cities are now composed of multiple populations and activities that
depend on a continuum of linkages from local to global. We still need to show this continuum
in one place at the level of the physical city, and this probably means we need to map the
phenomenon of the future city in the same way as we have done traditionally. One simple way
would be to fix on some local–global set of linkages and provide an average distance—a kind
of global accessibility for every population in every space. This might literally be measured
as a distance or reach which is an index of how the activities of each population depend on
other activities and populations at a distance from the location of the population in question.
To make this idea operational, we really need a local–global footprint for every member
of the population and this might contain several subfootprints dependent on the particular
activities that an individual is engaged in. For example, someone working in financial
services might be supplying activities whose demand is truly global and whose inputs are
equally global in terms of the inflow of cash to support the product. This would be in contrast
to a worker providing services locally but whose inputs also contained some measure of
more global activities. In short, each individual in terms of work would have a footprint
determined by the spatial extent to which their activities depend on inputs in different places
as well as providing outputs that determine consumption and production at different places.
The location of these places would determine the footprint in terms of some measure of
distance or accessibility. This of course is no more nor less than a highly disaggregate spatial
input–output model which is a set of accounts related to where the inputs and outputs for any
individual in the population come from. However such models have rarely been examined
spatially in the past, largely due to lack of data but we may be able to get somewhere for
aggregate populations by making assumptions about where their work originates from and is
destined for in terms of a global measure of distance.
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For example, we might portray the footprint of individuals from their work perspective
as containing different percentages of local, regional, national, continental, and global reach
by noting what they produce and applying a national estimate to each in terms of their work
location. We could then add up these values for aggregate populations living or working in
each zone of the city and produce a composite index by weighting the values according to
an average distance measure for each of these five scales and summing them. The larger the
score the greater the global reach of the aggregated zonal population and plotting these would
give a sense of the diversity of the city in terms of work and residential locations with respect
to the extent to which the city was globalised. If one had this type of measure for several
cities, one could then filter the data for each level and produce composite mosaics of the
global, continental, national, regional, and local city.
To launch this idea, we need data on the precise locations where the inputs and outputs
of products produced by an individual are actually located. Let us define the footprint for an
individual pi 6 I1 (xi1, yi1), I2 (xi2, yi2), f, On (xin, yin), O n + 1 (xin + 1, yin + 1), f @ , where I1 (xi1, yi1) is
a typical input distance to location xi1, yi1 and On (xin, yin) a typical output distance. We can
then sum these values over the relevant set of locations in zone j, i ! Z j in each city and
apply the percentage weight t k to determine a composite index for each input and output as
I j (k) = /i ! Z j t k Ik (xik, yik) and O j (m) = /i ! Zj t k Im (xim, yim) . This gives us the value of the
relevant input or output reach for particular products in the aggregated zone j . Now imagine
collecting all the zones j in all the cities for each input and output. We can then construct a
spatial profile of the typical city input or output with respect to its global reach by aggregating
values between different ranges of reach. We can do this for all inputs, all outputs, for inputs
and outputs, and for these different aggregations with respect to work or residence. We can
in principle take the zones j from each city that satisfy these different ranges and map these
as mosaics or composites, but frankly this has little meaning. A much better plot would be
to look at the pattern of cities as some sort of frequency distribution, rank ordered by the
number of zones from which it would be easy to see patterns of city types.
We urgently need a new definition for cities that goes beyond physical extent: one that
takes into account how cities fit into the global picture which is built from what we know
about networks at every scale. But we also need to retain a measure of spatiality and ideally
adjacency, as the way we interpret cities is still strongly physical. A sense of place is essential
and, even if cities are composed of many parts all spatially distinct in terms of their global
reach, our earliest and most formative influences are likely to be local rather than global. The
ideas mooted in this editorial may seem a little fanciful with respect to how we might map
and visualise the future city at the beginning of the 22nd century. But we need to begin to deal
with cities which have fluid boundaries if we are to grapple with the kind of complexity that
is now infusing urban development. One way of beginning is to map the city of tomorrow.
Michael Batty
References
Batty M, 2011, “Commentary. When all the world’s a city” Environment and Planning A 43 765–772
Cristelli M, Batty M, Pietronero L, 2012, “There is more than a power law in Zipf” Scientific Reports
6 November, http://www.nature.com/srep/index.html
McGee T 1989, “Urbanisasi or kotadesasi? Evolving patterns of urbanization in Asia”, in
Urbanization in Asia Eds F J Costa, A K Dutt, L J C Ma, A G Noble (University of Hawaii Press,
Honolulu, HI) pp 93–108
Xie Y, Batty M, Zhao K, 2007, “Simulating emergent urban form using agent-based modeling:
Desakota in the Suzhou-Wuxian region in China” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 97 477–495

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