What is a City, Really?
This ‘article’ is in the form of a podcast! Our first podcast episode.
You can listen above and the transcript is below
Seyi Fabode (00:01.334)
Hi, welcome to the Utilicity podcast. And my name is Shea Fabade. This podcast is an exploration of ideas around cities, people, and the technologies and infrastructure that define our existence in cities. I've lived in some of the greatest cities in the world, London, Lagos, say what you will about Lagos, Chicago, and I just love the...
unsexy underbelly of our cities I run, the infrastructure, the processes that keep you and I going in our cities every day. I enjoy it. This podcast is an exploration of that and what I enjoy about it. And I hope you enjoy it too. Our first episode will be titled, What is a City Really? Because before we can start talking about cities, we need to sort of try to define it.
The interesting thing about that though is, as I started reading, and I've been doing this for a few years now, but I read a lot of books about cities. They keep me going, honestly. When I see problems in cities and it becomes tough to understand why a thing might be the way it is, I go to the books. In all these books.
not one definition across the books came to this through-line thread of, oh, this is a sheer definition of a city, which is actually quite interesting in my opinion. So I came up with an amalgam of all the definitions based on my perception of cities. And to me, a city is a combination of the economic, human, cultural, political, and governance structures
within a defined but malleable geographic area. Malleable because the borders of the cities are defined by biased parties, period. If you move into a new city, or even when the people who landed in the city you live in landed there, they defined some borders based on whatever their agenda was. And those agendas still play out in how
Seyi Fabode (02:25.006)
the borders and the areas of cities are defined. So to rebuild, redesign, and mold the cities as we want them, those borders need to be malleable, both in their minds and physically as well. Because the underlying core element of this definition of cities, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm sure most people agree, are the people.
The beautiful organisms that live in these cities continue to form and shape the borders, build their lives, build community in the cities. Those are the essence of any city.
Along with that definition, which is sort of the soul of the city, in my opinion, the cities we all live in also get defined by numbers that the stakeholders, the leaders of the city, elected or selected or nominated themselves. Those stakeholders rally around some specific numbers to form their stories about the cities. And some of these numbers are things like
how many people live in the city, the growth rate of the city, percentage of X in Y part of the city. All these things help define what a city is to the people who live in them. But therein lies the tension here, the tension between the soul, the essence of the city, which involves the corner store, the bodega that only takes cash.
serious cultural element of the city, but those numbers from the bodega, and we all know this, don't show up in the gross revenue that the city has generated over a period of time. Which one is true? They can both be true, but we need to always, in my opinion, define the city based on its soul. And yes.
Seyi Fabode (04:32.718)
There might be some news for some data for policy decisions. In fact, there is a need for data for policy decisions, but we should never lose the collective emotions, the aspirations of inhabitants, and our collective just desire to do well and do good in the cities we all choose to live in.
Underlying these two ideas are subsystems that run in a city. A city is a system. There are subsystems that run in a city and the single unit system is you or me, the individual, but I'm talking about the subsystems that are still at system scale, but subsystems. The health system, the water system, the transportation system.
These are all subsystems that within their core functioning, they have to be self-contained enough to run. And collectively, they now make up what we know as a city. So it's the interconnection between all these macro subsystems that form the main system that we consider as a city. And the individual plays a part in that because
you as an individual, you wake up in the morning, you desire to go from point A to point B, the actions that you take are inputs into whatever the subsystem is. If you choose to take public transit.
Taking public transit from A to B within the borders of a system as defined by, of a city, as defined by the people who built the system.
Seyi Fabode (06:21.87)
constitute your participation in that system. And it's the aggregation of all our actions as individual systems and the actions and inputs and the functioning of the subsystems that collectively build up to what we call a city. The beauty of this is that, as I mentioned, I've lived in some of the greatest cities in the world.
Lagos, London, Chicago, Birmingham, second city in the UK, in my opinion. Spent considerable time in places like New York City. Again.
All these are different, varied in their forms. And we will touch on some of these cities in subsequent episodes. They are all running based on these core subsystems. That makes this fundamentally easy to assess and understand where the points of leverage might be. Because whether it be Chicago or New York,
or Mumbai or Lagos or Sydney.
there is a requirement to have some of these subsystems, healthcare, energy, transportation, water, and understanding how those things function, the interconnectedness amongst them, will point out to us how we as individuals have a part to play in the system, that is the city, but also how these systems impact us and the quality of life we come to expect from our city.
Seyi Fabode (08:10.506)
And that honestly is what we hope to explore in this podcast. These interconnections, the thread between the underlying systems and finding the leverage points that can improve the quality of life and increase the equity in the systems and cities we all live in so that it can function for the good of all, honestly. We'll touch on in more detail in subsequent episodes, water.
Lagos, Mumbai, transportation, and land somewhere around what do we need to do about the economies of our cities and designing future cities based on the understanding we've drawn through as we go from episode one to whatever the episode number we end up at is. Because the fundamental idea here is the more we understand our cities, the more we understand our cities.
the better we'll get at evolving them. And it will come from a collective will and the collective actions of people who truly understand their cities. Because to know better is to do better and to know more about the cities we live in and the systems that are put within those cities. The better we'll all do. I hope you enjoyed the first episode. I look forward to seeing you and to you listening to the second episode. Till then, bye.