Navigating the Anthropocene
P1040054.jpg

Commentary

The city as a mosaic of ethical urban projects

In 2019 (when this picture was taken) the number of tourists visiting Kyoto reached 53.5 million. Photo by author.

When I first arrived in Kyoto as a student in 1987, the city had a somewhat run-down feel to it. While even then tourism was important for the local economy, the place was quieter with fewer, mostly domestic tourists (close to 38 million that year) including lots of school kids.

Since then, Kyoto has become progressively busier and increasingly dependent on tourist spending. After a significant drop during the Covid 19 pandemic, “revenge travel” saw the number of tourists visiting Kyoto return to 50.28 million in 2023 (of which 5.36 million were international) and their collective spend amounted to ¥1.54 trillion, up by 24.3% compared to 2022.

Nowadays some parts of Kyoto feel like a big amusement theme park. A chance to wear a kimono and eat delicious macha ice-cream while exploring Japan’s historic, cultural and spiritual capital.

Not surprisingly the news media has been reporting extensively on “over-tourism.” The buses in Kyoto are overcrowded with tourists and local people complain about their commuting struggle. It appears that many tourists lack basic manners, drop trash everywhere and hassle geisha for photos.

This picture is mirrored across the globe with Airbnb blamed for Barcelona’s housing crisis and huge cruise ships causing problems for Venice. According to a CNN report, anti-tourism protests have swept across Europe this summer with demonstrations in the Netherlands, Greece and Spain.

Finding a balance between catering for experience seeking tourists and meeting local population basic needs remains a huge challenge for many cities.

Kyoto is in danger, some commentators suggest, of becoming a “hollowed-out city” as high land prices due to speculative hotel development force young people to relocate to the suburbs, commuting into the center for work.

Part of a bigger problem!

According to David Harvey cities in the era of neoliberalism have become tourist destinations for globe trotting travelers interested in culture and consumption.

Cities need to focus on creating a “good business climate” rather than implementing projects for the benefit of local people and have become wonderful places for the super-rich and corporations, but unaffordable for everyone else.

Back in 2015, I discussed how the Economist Intelligence Unit’s ranking of the most world’s liveable cities was initially designed to help companies decide how much “hardship” allowance they would need to pay employees who relocate.

For many years Melbourne in Australia was the world’s most liveable city and this is indeed true if you have a lot of money. This label was successfully used in campaigns to attract more tourists, together with the hosting of major sporting events like the Australian F1 Grand Prix or the Australian Open tennis. These mega-events place considerable financial and other strains on the already struggling host cities.

Many cities are struggling because the neoliberal preoccupation with market fundamentalism plus economic individualism has weakened urban administrations and created a globally competitive environment where cities need to focus on both wealth creation and wealth attraction.

In this context, measures to address inequality and hardship are often left to third sector charitable organizations. We (the residents) support these charities because, as Peter Bloom stated in his 2017 book, neoliberalism has successfully made each one of us responsible for dealing with its moral and structural failings.

This is addressed by the Guardian’s Anywhere but Westminster series exploring how community activists are holding Britain together through various ethical urban projects as shown in the video below.

Searching for Ethical Urban Projects

Over the past few years, I have been thinking about how it might be possible for our cities to become more ethical. This has involved research on a diverse range of ethical urban projects such as community wealth building in Preston, the Bristol Pound local currency and affordable housing with the Nightingale project in Melbourne.

To this list, I would add universal basic income (helping people escape from precarity and improving their well-being), participatory budgeting (giving communities more say in how local governments spend money) and new economic approaches such as the doughnut economy.

What do they have in common? To begin with, they are attempts to address failings in neoliberal economics and contemporary governance whereby the ethical urban project proponents must accept responsibility, risks and burdens associated with various social and economic problems.

According to Mortiz Ege and Johannes Moser these projects seek to improve “not just the quality but the ethical character … of urban life” and promote a range of goals such as sustainability, social and cultural inclusivity, openness and transparency, participation, conviviality, consensus-building and community engagement.

Their list of ethical urban projects includes recycling schemes, mobility sharing devices, pro-bike campaigns, cooperatives, urban gardening, beekeeping, community-based agriculture, local energy initiatives, participatory planning, campaigns for better neighborly relations and campaigns against loneliness.

Creating Mosaics within Cities

Ethical urban projects are not new and they tend to emerge in rich countries with thriving middle-class lifestyles and material abundance.

Some of these projects are anti-consumerist, according to Ege and Moser, such as “non-monetized sharing programs or spectacular versions of publicly owned housing construction.”

They also suggest that ethical urban projects contrast sharply with the “violence and brutality and also the banality of much of actual urban life.”

A key concern is that while these projects may hold communities together and fill gaps left as a result of neoliberal policies, they may not in the longer term be capable of responding to deepening climate impacts on livelihoods, technological impacts on employment and social polarization within cities between residents and new migrants.

It is also unclear how ethical urban projects manifest outside of the affluent West in rapidly growing African and Asian cities of the Global South.

While ethical urban projects may be a direct consequence of neoliberalism, they do not represent as yet a viable alternative to it. We do not know what will replace neoliberalism in the future.

However, it is possible to envisage mosaics of ethical urban projects somehow coalescing to shape the direction of cities.

This brings to mind an important comment made by Richard Sennet in his 2019 book on Building and Dwelling - Ethics for the City. “The ethical problem for cities today is whether urbanism should represent society as it is, or seek to change it?”

Surely ethical urban projects could become part of that change.