Futuristic, smart, green and sustainable cities are the dream of many political leaders, especially dictators. Built from scratch, these urban utopias promise to solve the problems of overcrowding, pollution and poverty that affect any city with centuries of history. More than a hundred have been designed and put into operation in the last two decades, but none, however, has achieved what was proposed.
"It is very difficult to create a city from scratch because it is very difficult to create a community," explains Agustín Fernández de Losada, director of CIDOB's Global Cities program. "A city only makes sense if it allows the full development of its inhabitants, facilitating access to housing, employment, health and education, and doing so, furthermore, promoting equality, something almost impossible, especially in authoritarian regimes that do not respect human rights and that they are the main promoters of these projects".
The new administrative capital of Egypt, on the outskirts of Cairo, a government complex designed in 2015 for five million people, is a clear example of this failure.
On the plan, everything fits, but on the ground it is not the same. The figures in the promotional brochure are far from being reached. 1.1 million homes, 663 hospitals and clinics, 150 mosques and churches are promised. Also a pharaonic obelisk one kilometer high that will be the tallest construction in the world.
The new Cairo aspires, with a planned area of 700 square kilometers, to be the largest planned city in the world. It is the flagship project of President Abdul Fatah Al Sisi's Vision 2030 program.
The project, however, makes much more sense if it is seen as a real estate development for the benefit of the Armed Forces, the main player in the Egyptian economy, and the officials who will live there. China contributes with a credit of 3,000 million dollars.
Business is guaranteed, even if expectations are not met because the city will house the main buildings of the republic, such as the army headquarters, the presidential residence, the ministries and Parliament.
Another thing is that people want to live there. The average price of an apartment is around 60,000 euros, an exorbitant cost for the vast majority of Egyptians.
The new Cairo will be, therefore, an administrative capital, of officials, without the social and business mix of a normal city. It is even likely that the civil servants who must work there will continue to live in the old Cairo, much more affordable, but also much more difficult due to traffic congestion and air pollution.
Removing weight from a large city has also been raised in other countries. In South Korea, for example, the city of Songdo was designed two decades ago, a space of six square kilometers reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. 40% of this area is green area. There are cars, but a sensor system in the streets and avenues notifies the user when to leave home and which is the best route to minimize traffic jams.
Some 167,000 people live in Songdo, half of those expected, because the price of housing is much higher than that of Seoul or Incheon, the neighboring city.
The garbage collection system is exemplary. It consists of a network of underground tunnels and machines that not only collect and sort waste, but also convert it into energy.
Luis Bettencourt, a leading urban planner at the University of Chicago, believes that Songdo, like the new Cairo and many other planned cities -some with something built, like Masdar, in the United Arab Emirates, but others only on paper, like Telosa, in the United States-, do not solve the basic questions to justify a city.
"Cities -explains Bettencourt- are the main source of growth and change in human societies. This has been the case from the beginning of history until today, when the majority of humanity lives in cities. Cities place us in front of the issues insights into society and human nature How does culture develop? How does behavior change to favor hypersociability and long-term planning? Where is the balance between cooperation and competition? How technology changes society? Is inequality an inevitable consequence of growth? Is a prosperous and sustainable future possible?"
Fernández de Losada believes that planned cities cannot answer these questions because "they cannot guarantee inclusive and sustainable development".
There are times, however, when living in a big city becomes very difficult. Cairo's problems are replicated in many other cities in the developing world, especially in Asia and Africa.
Urban massification is unstoppable. Every day, 200,000 people around the world move to live from the countryside to the city. Population growth is exponential in cities like Lagos, Manila and Dar es Salaam, where all kinds of infrastructures are lacking.
Jakarta is another example. The Indonesian capital, located on the island of Java, is sinking and the president wants to move it. The sea level rises due to climate change and the drying up of the 13 rivers that converge on the plain on which the city was built.
40% of Jakarta is below sea level. The neighborhoods of the northern zone have sunk four meters in the last 20 years. Half of its 30 million inhabitants do not have access to running water. Pollution, overcrowding and earthquakes further aggravate the problem of recurrent flooding.
Jakarta is located on the north coast of Java, an island similar to Cuba and slightly larger. While Cuba has 12 million inhabitants, Java has a population of 141 million.
This difference in density and resources, between the most and least inhabited areas of the planet, creates the inequalities that urban planners believe can only be solved by improving the old cities, not by building new ones.
"It is much more sustainable to improve the cities that already exist -says Agustín Fernández de Losada-. Planned cities, to begin with, need a space that is usually virgin, as in the case of Nusantara, the capital that has been planned to replace Jakarta."
"In the case of Masdar, Nuevo Cairo or Neom, the developable land is desert -adds Fernández de Losada-. Cheap land attracts real estate investors and the entire project ends up revolving around economic profitability, rather than social or environmental profitability" .
"Many planned cities -explains the urban planner from the University of Oxford Nicholas Simcik Arese- end up being speculative urban projects for the rich. We can speak of a high standing apartheid".
This segregation is what will occur, in all probability, in Neom, the futuristic complex in Saudi Arabia that is part of the Vision 2030 project, an ambitious program to decouple the oil economy.
Conceived for nine million people divided into four cities, it will function as an autonomous entity and, on its own, it will have to demonstrate that a hostile environment, desert and without resources, is not a problem that technology cannot overcome. Its inhabitants aspire to live in the best of all worlds.
A planned city, however, is not viable if it cannot create jobs. That is why many are state capitals. The Line, Neom's central project, will not be, but it is designed to house a powerful technology industry, the engine of the new Saudi economy.
Planned cities are an opportunity to reinvent a country. They are presented as the definitive solution to the challenges posed by the climate crisis and the emergence of renewable energies.
The serious problem is that almost nobody wants to live in them. Nusantara, the new capital of Indonesia, will not save Jakarta, just as the new Cairo will not save the old.
And, although it may seem paradoxical, the vast majority of the inhabitants of cities that do not work prefer to continue in them, enduring traffic and pollution. They are suspicious of urban artificiality, however sophisticated and intelligent it may be, because it is managed from above. They prefer their neighborhood communities, even if they are chaotic, because they allow them a lot of autonomy.
The old and mammoth cities offer spheres of freedom that in authoritarian regimes are sources of life.
