Big cities toxic to raising kids

MANILA, Philippines—About 70 percent of the world’s population is expected to be living in cities by 2050. Some experts are concerned that as cities continue to grow and prosper, they become less and less habitable for families.

For some reason, people stop marrying and having children in places that are too urban, too congested or too expensive.

“There’s something really strange that’s going on right now,” said Joel Atkin, an internationally recognized expert on global economic, political and social trends.

“What’s happening to many cities is that they are no longer attractive to families,” he said at the closing plenary of the World Cities Summit held in Singapore last month. The summit was a meeting place for leaders to discuss the best ways and practices to make cities more livable.

Rich big cities like New York are witness to this phenomenon, and so have rich mid-sized cities like Singapore, Atkin said.

Metro Manila

Even Metro Manila, which has 11 million residents, does not seem to be an ideal place anymore for growing a family as it grapples with the same issues that beset many big, densely populated cities of the world: congestion, pollution, crime and poverty.

“Something in the way we’re building our cities and our society, but cities in particular, is making it toxic for the formation of families and raising children,” Atkin said.

“That’s why we have things called suburbs. That’s why people start off in Manhattan, get married and they move up to the Hudson Valley or they go to New Jersey, and they raise a family,” he said.

High cost, little space

Which is not to say most New Yorkers don’t want to stay in the city. “(But) they can’t afford to stay. They can’t have enough space to stay. And this seems to be the same thing that we’re hearing from people in Singapore—that they may stay but they never have children,” Atkin said.

The same could be said for Metro Manila. As people start to raise a family, they move to a neighboring province, like Rizal, Cavite, Laguna or Batangas where land is cheaper and the cost of living is much lower.

The question, then, is how do governments create dense urban spaces that can accommodate families? “(We have to know) how we can do that because what we’re building now is certainly not encouraging,” Atkin said.

This is probably the single biggest issue that cities must face down the road, in 10, 20 or 30 years “when our cities are overwhelmingly made up of people who are in their 60s, 70s and 80s,” he added.

Liu Thai Ker, chair of the Center for Liveable Cities Advisory Board and the master planner of Singapore, admitted that density was a big problem, especially for a city-state like Singapore, which has one of the thickest populations crammed into a tiny space.

Singapore has 5 million people and a land area of 702 square kilometers. (Metro Manila is about 636 sq m.)

But it is a problem that is not without a solution, he said.

Sociologists

Liu cited the experience of Singapore’s public housing sector, which had been planned with input from sociologists to determine what was best for the welfare of the families that would live there.

“When we started public housing, we had to plan ahead of people’s aspirations. Because in those days, all people wanted was a roof over their heads, nothing more. But we felt that that would be setting too low a standard, and it’s not good for the long term development of Singapore,” he said.

“We decided that we would not be building houses, we’re building communities. So that means we had to study what makes a community. What kind of territorial size should we devote for people to have a sense of belonging to this piece of land,” Liu said.

Singapore precinct

After a lot of surveys, it was determined that the smallest community unit was to be the precinct, which should be somewhere between three and five hectares, and the population should be around 700 to 1,000 families, he said.

The rationale was to make sure “you have enough variety of people there,” he said. In fact, Singapore’s public housing estate has a population that roughly approximates the national proportions of ethnicity, that is, the number of Chinese, Indians, Malays and other races in each building must correspond to the national average.

On top of that, each estate must only have one entry point. “Because these are urban people, they don’t really go out of their way to make friends with the neighbors, so what we tried to do was, in each precinct, we have only one entry point,” he said.

“So at least you can recognize their faces even if you don’t talk to them,” he added.

Liu said the sociologists also told him that people stop talking to each other with more than eight families in a block. So what they did was to put partitions in the corridor for every eight families.

“Six months later, I went to visit the families (in one block). I went to the first family, Chinese, all the other kids, Malay, Indian, followed into the living room. I went to another one. I went in—all other kids followed me. In fact, some of the neighbors followed me,” he said.

“My point is, even in sociology, there’s a possibility to look at a problem, analyze the problem, and find solutions, not just through design, (but) through a variety of means,” Liu said.

Intergenerational mixing

Atkin said another important feature that must not be absent in cities was intergenerational mixing.

“We must bring back multigenerational families, which have been the backbone of urban life from the very beginning. How can we get the older people and younger people together and have multigenerational neighbors?” he said.

Most cities want to build neighborhoods where everybody is 30 years old and stays out at 3 in the morning. “Then they’re gonna build senior housing so that all the old people are together,” he said.

“That, I think, is very socially destructive both for the old people and the young people,” Atkin said.

One good example of an intergenerational neighborhood is the community where his mother lives, he said.

“In this (New York) neighborhood, they did a very good job. They have the inner core, which is quite a few single people and elderly, and a lot of houses surrounded with families. You have, during the daytime, a lot of the elderly around, then at night, the kids are out. Then on weekends and Sundays, the families are out. So the same spaces are being used over and over again,” he said.

He recalled asking his mother, who was 87 years old, if she wanted to move to Florida with her sister and other people her age. His mother replied: “Oh, that’s for old people.”

Preschool, senior center

Citing another example, in Los Angeles, he said a preschool sits right next to a senior center. “That breaks down the sense of isolation (among the elderly). I think it’s unnatural for young people not to be with older people, and for older people to be deprived of young people,” he said.

But in the future, there may just be fewer and fewer young people in the most successful cities.

Stress, low fertility

Singapore has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, something Atkin finds ironic, considering government efforts to make sure it can provide for families.

Housing in the city-state is heavily subsidized. Education is practically free and health services are universally accessible.

“So I asked myself, why aren’t the citizens making children? Were people so stressed, so busy and so competitive? (These are) all the things that made Singapore a great city, and many other cities like New York or San Francisco, a great city. But now it is producing a very strange effect—people are not having children,” he said.

“At this agency I was at, they couldn’t even get Singaporeans to date,” he said, eliciting laughter from the audience.

Atkin’s observations did not sit well with his hosts. After all, the summit, in some ways, was intended to celebrate urban lifestyles as much as it was to find solutions to the ailments that cities faced.

Mah Bow Tan, then Singapore’s minister for national development, said Atkin’s points were too simplistic, and that there might well be other sociological explanations for Singapore’s low birthrate.

“In cities like Singapore, and in many cities in Asia, I think high-density living is a necessity. Suburbs are a luxury and we get to make the best of them,” he said.

“If you look at the case of Singapore and visit a public housing estate, each town has about 200,000 people. In the town, there are schools, places of worship, work, transportation, shops and sports. Name it, we have it,” he said.

“Within this community of 200,000, we start to build flats, apartments which are comfortable, which can house a family of four, five people, three bedrooms, dining hall, and so on. And in each block, there are common spaces. The ground floor is open. Children can play. Where you can hold a wedding. If there’s a demise in the family, you can have a funeral. Or you can hold a concert, or put a child care center, you can put an elderly care center as well,” Mah said.

It is quite possible, he insisted, “to have livable, sustainable cities which are high-rise and high-density.”

Melbourne

Melbourne Mayor Robert Doyle pointed out that something was being forgotten in the debate: “We begin with people, but we very quickly move to buildings and densities, and these sorts of things.”

“You know,” he said, “when we think about our cities, the question we have to ask ourselves is why would a family come into the center of our city other than to lose and enjoy themselves?”

He said it was the role of city leaders to “activate” their city and make it attractive for all kinds of people to come visit and, perhaps, even move there to raise a family.

Comedy festival

In Melbourne, he said they are trying to accomplish this through festivals. “Whether it’s a comedy festival, or the arts festival or music festival, we actually pay extra money so that they can put on family-friendly and alcohol-free activities, like in the evening at 10:30, 11, midnight, 12:30, 1 in the morning,” he said.

“We often think about the buildings. To me, the important part is the fine grain. The important part is what happens on our streets, what happens when the buildings kick the footpath or the sidewalk, as somebody would say, and the activity that we generate there. That’s what will bring the people in,” he said.

Century of culture

Doyle said this is the “century of culture.” “It is the century of people, and that’s what we should be serving. So what we try to do is make it very attractive for families to come in. And you can actually plan for this.”

In the mid-1990s, Melbourne had only 400 dwellings in the central business district. “And the city decided, ‘we want people in our city, we want families in our city.’”

But the property developers were reluctant. “They said, ‘No, no, you can’t sell apartments to families in the middle of the city,’” Doyle said.

Residential flats

So, he said, the city took a commercial building, converted it into residential flats, and sold them to show the developers that they could have a commercial residential proposition in the middle of the city.

“And I believe Melbourne today, from that 400 dwellings in the middle 1990s, we now have 17,000, and that’s in the CBD, right in the center of the city,” Doyle said.

“So my answer just keeps coming back to people,” he concluded. “Why would people want to come to the center of your city? It will be different for all of us. But if you get them in there, I’ll tell you what, ‘you get a more vibrant city.’”

WORLD’S MEGACITIES

MEGACITY POPULATION(in millions)

1 Tokyo 35.68
2 New York-Newark 19.04
3 Mexico City 19.02
4 Mumbai 18.98
5 São Paulo 18.84
6 Delhi 15.92
7 Shanghai 14.99
8 Kolkata 14.79
9 Dhaka 13.48
10 Buenos Aires 12.80
11 LA-Long Beach-Santa Ana 12.50
12 Karachi 12.13
13 Cairo 11.89
14 Rio de Janeiro 11.74
15 Osaka-Kobe 11.29
16 Beijing 11.11
17 Manila 11.10
18 Moscow 10.45
19 Istanbul 10.06

–DJ Yap, Philippine Daily Inquirer

Source: UN-HABITAT 2008; Data from UN Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects 2007; LAWRENCE DE GUZMAN, INQUIRER RESEARCH