Meet the Solutionists, with Mark Scott

Why do you live where you live? 

If you’re lucky, it’s by choice. Maybe you love the solitude and sprawling nature of the bush. Maybe you can’t get enough of the coffee, cuisine and culture that makes your dense inner-city neighbourhood special. 

Many of us don’t get to choose, though. People are forced into tiny living spaces as their cities grow in population, while others are pushed to the outskirts when gentrification prices them out of their homes. As our global population grows and the climate crisis worsens, how we live – and how we live together – needs to change. 

Ian Goldin, Professor of Globalisation and Development at the University of Oxford, says cities are the greatest engines of innovation. They’re melting pots, bringing together the top performers and brightest minds from all over the world. But they’re hotbeds of inequality, and that inequality is only growing. At the same time, some of the world’s greatest cities are in great physical danger thanks to rising sea levels.

That’s the big picture, but what does a great city feel like? To give you a sense of what makes a city livable and loveable, Dr Jennifer Kent, a Senior Research Fellow in Urbanism at the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, takes you on a walking tour of the Sydney suburb of Abbotsford.

Mark Scott  00:01

This podcast is recorded at the University of Sydney's Camperdown campus on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. They've been discovering and sharing knowledge here for 10s of 1000s of years. I pay my respects to elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Dr Jennifer Kent  00:30

My name is Dr Jennifer Kent. I'm a senior research fellow at School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. I'm an urbanist and my research specialty is links between urban design, urban planning and health. So we're standing here in Abbotsford, considered to be in the inner west of Sydney, even though we're about twelve kilometres from the CBD here. Abbotsford is a peninsula suburb, so we're located on Hen and Chicken Bay on the Parramatta River. Originally, the land was called Bigi Bigi, according to the Indigenous people here, who were the Wangal people. So even though around 80 percent of Australians live in cities, most of us don't live in urban CBD areas. Most of us don't live in apartment buildings. Most of us live in either townhouses or detached dwellings on single blocks, and this is the kind of suburb that represents that. It's your average, everyday kind of a suburb.

Mark Scott  01:40

The cities are the cradle of human invention. Cities bring together the top performers in a wide array of fields and encourages them to cross pollinate their biggest ideas. More than half of the global population lives in cities right now, and by 2050 that number will exceed two thirds. Professor Ian Goldin believes that cities are the engine that will power the solutions to our biggest problems, including climate change, pandemics and poverty. Ian Goldin is Professor of Globalisation and Development at the University of Oxford. I'm Mark Scott, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney, and this is The Solutionists, where you meet the people who make change happen. Ian, you've written we're living in the age of the city, what's your favorite city? What cities work for you?

Ian Goldin  02:39

I love many cities, including the city you're in, Sydney and Melbourne, but my favorite city is Paris, where I had the good fortune of spending four years. It's very compact, it's very easy to get around. It's magnificent in the old buildings that one sees everywhere. And it's also very easy to do exercise in the city, which I enjoy very much. So it's an amazing blend of work, leisure and social activity within a very small, compact area. 

Mark Scott  03:08

One of the interesting things about Paris, it seems, it's a city, you know, unlike any other, and its ability to preserve so much of its history and to not be dominated by high rise. To what extent is strong, rigorous, centralised planning one of the things that makes Paris a great city?

Ian Goldin  03:29

I think that's absolutely right. It's highly regulated. I know because I try to get some work done on my apartment there. There are high rise areas that they're outside the periphery, the ring road of Paris. I think it is absolutely vital to have that regulatory framework. Of course, it's one that started with Haussmann, with the original designs for the city, and has continued. So the challenge is, I think, if cities doesn't have that, adding it on later can create a lot of political frictions. But yes, regulation is essential, so too is the infrastructure required for it. So, the vision that the mayor of Paris has, for example, of the 15-minute city where you live, work and play, within a small area where you can walk or go on public transport very easily and fulfill all your needs within 15 minutes. I think that's the way that cities should go, that we create communities, villages with public spaces. It does, I think, mean that we’re likely to end up living in more compressed surroundings, so less gardens that we have privately, more publicly. I think that's likely to be the case very much in the future. But as we've seen from the data on happiness, welfare, wellbeing and health, this does not lead to people being worse off. Some of the happiest cities in the world and happiest people are in the places where they are closest together with other people living in apartment buildings, etc. So there's no correlation between the size of your house and your garden and your happiness.

Dr Jennifer Kent  05:21

I've chosen to speak about Abbotsford because it's a really diverse kind of a suburb. It's got a lot of different housing types. So there's lower density detached housing, which most people associate with the suburbs, but it's actually quite high density, with a lot of apartment blocks. But these apartment blocks are no higher than three storeys, so it doesn't feel like a really high density suburb, and I think that that's what Sydney should really be aiming for when we're thinking about accommodating our growing population, and trying to do that in a way that doesn't spread out into our greenfield suburbs, which are more isolated, more difficult to service. One of the big issues that's associated with building out and out into the suburbs in our cities is that it's making our cities more car dependent. A livable, healthy city is not going to be one where the only way that people can travel is by private car. Long commutes can have a really poor impact on people's mental health, and it also stops people spending time doing the things that they want to do, the time that is used to exercise, for example, to spend time with their friends and family, even to spend time making a fresh and healthy meal. But if we think about a city where most people travel by walking and cycling, the use of public transport, there are a lot more convivial cities. Walking and Cycling, for example, provides us with an opportunity for physical activity. Public transport, even though it may not feel like it sometimes, does provide us with an opportunity to connect with the communities around us, even if it's just an everyday hello or a nod, those things are really important for sense of belonging in a city.

Mark Scott  07:10

Why do cities need our special attention right now?

Ian Goldin  07:14

Well over half of humanity lives in cities, as you mentioned, that's growing very rapidly to two thirds. But when you look at economic activity, for example, it's well over 80 percent of global economic activity comes from dynamic cities. So they’re the source of economic dynamism. They are the home to something like 90 percent of the patents and innovations that are happening in the world, but they also are particularly vulnerable. My sense is that the politics of democracies is being defined by what is or isn't happening in cities. I don't think we would have, for example, had President Trump elected into the US or Brexit in the UK without the city divide, where people in some places are feeling that they don't have the opportunities in other places, this growing inequality, the spatial inequality between cities and that are dynamic and more left behind places.

Mark Scott  08:14

What role does scale play when it comes to the success of these mega cities, and can that scale be a risk? 

Ian Goldin  08:23

Absolutely, Mark. I think it is the opportunity and the risk. What's happened is that cities used to be located and defined, the opportunities, the jobs, came from forces that were related to natural resources, to the Industrial Revolution, be close to a mine, be close to a port, a crossroads, a great agricultural area, that's where cities developed in the past, historically, over many thousands of years. But what's happened is a great change in this dynamic, due to the fact that a smaller and smaller share of our economies is natural resource based. Trade is increasingly digital and services, and we're getting into a situation where people can basically choose where they want to live. The cities aren't defined anymore by natural resources or crossroads. They're defined by being very livable, good places to be, and particularly young people are concentrating in a smaller number of cities. So some cities enjoying these agglomeration effects as they specialise more, as more and more people from professional backgrounds come to them, they develop more wealth and they become the places to be. They have a greater range of diverse activities for people, both local people and migrants, different cultural, different food, different nightclubs, different fashion, and that's where people want to be, great cities like Sydney or London or Paris or others. What's happening is that as people have been drawn to these cities, and they accounting for greater share of global economic activity, incomes are much higher, people in other places can no longer get there as easily. Mobility between places, between left behind places and the new dynamic cities is about half of what it was 50 years ago, and that's because of the lack of affordability of housing, stresses on public transport, congestion, lack of availability of other services, schools, care homes for elderly parents and so on. And so we  see this rigidity, people being stuck in past places and unable to get to the new dynamic places, and that's concentrating these divisions. So, some dynamic cities pulling away from the rest, and a real challenge. So a city like St Louis, for example, in the US, used to be 97 percent of New York income. It used to have 15 Fortune 500 companies. Now it has two, and its income levels are 67 percent of New York. That sort of division is happening around the world as some cities pull away from the rest.

Mark Scott  11:07

You talk about three forces that make a city truly great, cooperation, specialisation and invention. What do you mean by that?

Ian Goldin  11:17

Well, when our distant ancestors didn't have the technological means to specialise, everyone had to be in agriculture, basically, to produce the food they needed. There was very little progress for humanity. And actually cities are a relatively modern invention. Until a thousand years ago, less than 5 percent of the world's population lived in cities. Even a great city like Rome was still very small by today's standards, less than much less than a million people. It was really only when we developed agricultural surpluses that we could have people that didn't work in agriculture that specialised. And as specialisation grew and the size of cities grew, as a result, cooperation had to grow because there was more and more need to organise all these people that came together. And of course, the other great source of dynamism was trade, where you saw what other people were doing in other places, bring the wheel, bring new technologies, bring writing, bring mathematics, and this pollination occurs, and that's where the innovation, specialisation, cooperation boundaries merge, and we get this dynamic effect of great cities.

Dr Jennifer Kent  12:35

Part of the history of Abbotsford was actually settlement of a lot of Italian communities, like the inner west in Sydney more generally, and that's expressed in the architecture. So in the 70s, perhaps into the early 80s, there were a lot of really large, white brick, ornate houses constructed here, which were designed to house extended families, people coming over from Italy. One of the great legacies of that in Abbotsford is that we've got really good coffee and really good gelato, but it's also written into our streetscapes as well.

Mark Scott  13:14

One of the great superpowers of cities, and I think of a city like Sydney, is the migrant communities. You know, Sydney is one of the most multicultural cities in the world. Your new book is about migration. You've got a special interest in migration. Why has that been a fascination for you? 

Ian Goldin  13:32

Well, Mark, I'm a migrant. My parents, both on my father's and mother's sides, were refugees. My father's from Eastern Europe. My mother's from Nazi Germany. They were Austrian, born in Vienna. So I felt this growing up, and then the cycle of history turned and I became a refugee myself. I came to study, I couldn't go back to South Africa because I was involved in the anti-apartheid struggle. So I saw this very personally, firsthand. But more than that, what I've come to appreciate is that migrants have historically always been the driving force of change and innovation. Migrants outperform native people in innovation. Australia, of course, is a country of migrants. But if you look at Nobel Prizes, if you look at Academy Awards, if you look at innovation, if you look at small business creation, you see that migrants tend to be 40 percent or more overrepresented in these fields. So they're particularly innovators. They're risk takers, often in ways that are trying to allow them and to develop their families in new places, and we know also from all the management literature that diversity spurs innovation.

Mark Scott  14:52

So why then are people always up in arms about migration? What are the common arguments against migration, and what validity do they have?

Ian Goldin  15:02

So there's a lot of arguments against migration, and not all migration is good. Certainly there have been terrible episodes in humanity, like slavery that we are associated with migration, but voluntary migration, where people come for economic reasons, I think, has been tremendously significant. The arguments that they reduce wages or that they drain on the state are now largely disproved by economists in all countries, that because they're more working age people, they tend to contribute much more than they take out, and they don't reduce local wages because they create, over time, more jobs because they're more dynamic, so our economies are enriched by them. The question, I think, really, is, how does one effectively manage migration? We see anti-migration sentiment around the world, and we need to be able to explain why, if migration is so good, are people so angry about migrants everywhere? And I think the answer is being very poorly managed. We see these stresses on housing, on public transport, in different areas of our economy and people blame migrants. I think what we need to be doing is thinking more carefully about a migration bargain in which we have migrants in our economies. We accept them, but we ensure that they are properly managed in the sense that they leave when we want them to leave, and also, of course, that they pay their taxes, that they abide by the laws of the land. But we need to treat them more fairly. They’re paid the minimum wage, they're subject to health and safety legislation, and we don't discriminate against them in other ways.

Dr Jennifer Kent  16:47

Okay, so now we're standing on what's known as Hen and Chicken Bay. It's one of the bays that comes off the Parramatta River, and the Parramatta River comes off Sydney Harbour. So it's a fairly flat area that we're in at the moment, I can see some mud flats in front of us, there's some mangroves here as well. At the moment the tide's out, so we can see some of the Sydney sandstone poking out. Many of these bays in Sydney, coming off the Parramatta River, have actually been quite contaminated because they used to be fairly industrial areas. So if I look across I can see the old Bushells factory, which actually is still operating. It's where they make Harris Coffee and Bushells Tea. It's one of the last remaining factories in Sydney that is operating in that inner urban area. One of the things I really love about this bay is that it's home to a bird called the Godwit, and Godwits are actually, they're the birds who do the longest migration in the world. Every year Godwits fly from this bay, leaving it around Easter time, and they head north to the Arctic Circle, doing a trip of around 9000 kilometres. This is a really green open space that we're standing in now. I love it because it facilitates contact with nature. We know that access to nature and access to green spaces is so important for people's mental health and physical health in cities, it's a space where people can come to exercise. It's a busy foreshore walkway early in the morning with people getting out and about. There's some research that's been done that says that for optimal health, we need to have about 30 percent of our city areas as green, natural, open spaces. As we densify our cities, as our cities grow, these spaces are really at risk of being taken over.

Mark Scott  18:45

Some of the world's most revered cities grew very quickly, but these days, cities in developing countries are growing much faster than we've ever seen before. What's driving that, and what are the limits to that? Do you see circumstances where cities become beyond scale and impossible given their size?

Ian Goldin  19:10

I don't think there's a scale limit to cities. We're seeing cities like Tokyo growing to 40 million people, and I think we'll see cities in developing countries growing to that size that was thought of as being impossible, they often just mergers of accompanying cities that are near them. So the development of metropolitan areas that basically absorb neighboring places, and that raises a very big question, what do we mean by city? What is the boundary of a city? So, I think there's no limited size. If one can mobilize the water, the energy, the food, etc. for them, and that really depends on the wealth of the economy, but also the ability to manage this effectively. There is a danger that one cannot do that, and that cities collapse, and we’ve seen this in my own country, South Africa, many cities don't have electricity or water for times of the day, and that is a really big problem. But it's happening in small places too. It's not only the result of size, it's just mismanagement, and that leads to that. I think the reason for the rapid growth is going to continue. It's this agglomeration effect, when you people are desperate for jobs and come they're often living not in formally structured places, such as mushrooming places that grow next to the existing cities, and that raises very big questions for sanitation, for sewerage and services which these have to cope with, and we see this around the developing world, but people come because they're desperate, and there's more chance of working these places. The climate pressures, I think, are going to add to this, extreme weather is making the countryside much more vulnerable, and of course, in these fragile lands, people are being forced to find alternative income, so desperate people coming to the cities in search of jobs, I don't see that reversing. The one thing that is going to put enormous pressure on cities is, of course, ocean rise. A lot of this growth in developing countries, cities, something like 70 percent of it is in cities which are on the sea. And we’re predicting in Oxford, two to five metre ocean rise this century, plus many tidal surges, saline intrusion, big storms, etc. These low lying areas of very dynamic cities are likely to be particularly vulnerable. I'm thinking about Lagos, Mumbai, Jakarta, places like this, which will simply be unable to afford the work necessary to keep the ocean at bay.

Mark Scott  21:56

Let's play God for a moment. You know you've spent a lot of your time studying cities and thinking about cities, if you had to design one, if you had to create your perfect utopian city from scratch, what would its key features be? What would it look like? 

Ian Goldin  22:10

Well, I think one of the great, in a sense, errors or faiths of cities that developed in the past century was due to the development of the motor car and this great suburbanisation of cities, the concentric rings with wealthier people moving further out and now poor people being pushed to the furthest reaches of cities. I think that is really a reflection of where we were with motorways and cars, suburbanisation, that desire for everyone to have a house and a garden, I think that's no longer feasible in many countries, although it's very pleasant, and I think where we're moving to is a much more village-like city. And I think what we're likely to see in the future, particularly for people that cannot afford to be distant, is much more compression, but with much more thinking around public spaces, distance to work, distance to leisure, and that, I think, would be a very healthy trend. 

Mark Scott  23:12

And is there an example of a great leader of a city that you can reference who really took on the deep challenges of that city and turned it around and fundamentally improved it as a place for its citizens to live and work?

Ian Goldin  23:25

I think Mayor Hidalgo in Paris has done a phenomenal job. A lot of what we're seeing, including the successful Olympics, is due, I think, to her ability to bring people together, the whole vision of the 15 minute city, the cleaning up of the sand, the insistence of a greater and greater share of pedestrianisation, the reduction in pollution, these are all things which result from things that were driven before her, but that she's really taken forward and accelerated.

Dr Jennifer Kent  24:02

So cities provide a critical mass of people. It supports the cultural opportunities. It supports that sense of conviviality and belonging and feeling like you're part of something bigger. I love living in a city because I really like having access to all of the opportunities that are open to me in cities, and because it feels like home.

Mark Scott  24:28

Dr Jennifer Kent is a senior research fellow in urbanism at the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning. I'm Mark Scott, Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney, and I've been speaking to Ian Goldin, who is Professor of Globalisation and Development at the University of Oxford. 

If you enjoyed this episode of The Solutionists, good news, there's a whole lot more coming your way. But if you can't wait, scroll back in your podcast app, because there's two full series of The Solutionists for you to catch up on. The Solutionists is a podcast from the University of Sydney produced by Deadset Studios. This episode was recorded at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences media room, and our thanks to the technical staff here.

The Solutionists is a podcast from the University of Sydney, produced by Deadset Studios. Keep up to date with The Solutionists by following @sydney_uni on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

This episode was produced by Liam Riordan with sound design by Jeremy Wilmot and field sound recording by Harry Hughes. Executive producer is Madeleine Hawcroft. Executive editors are Kellie Riordan, Jen Peterson-Ward, and Mark Scott. Strategist is Ann Chesterman. Thanks to the technical staff at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room.

This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. For thousands of years, across innumerable generations, knowledge has been taught, shared and exchanged here. We pay respect to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.