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Kingston is not yet a true city
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
"DECAYING buildings are jumbled together, forming a mass broken at irregular intervals by open spaces where animals, the indigent and children wonder untended. Streets are narrow, winding and unpaved and are the chief repositories of refuse. Proper drainage is non-existent, lighting is inadequate and sewage flows in the gutters. Law and order is spasmodic and not always by public authorities."
This is an excerpt from Gideon Sjoberg's classic "The Preindustrial City" describing medieval cities. But you could just as well be reading about parts of Kingston, Jamaica.
Kingston is a human settlement on the Liguanea plain sloping gently up from one of the finest natural harbours in the world to the magnificent blue green hills of St Andrew. No more beautiful habitat exists anywhere on the globe. Yet Jamaicans and their British colonisers systematically despoiled this natural patrimony bequeathing to future generations the irreparably damaged possibility of a city.
We expect disagreement but we maintain that Kingston is not yet a city. Edward Glaeser in "Triumph of the City" correctly extols the virtues of cities as places where humanity can realise their full potential in all ventures of life through a community that facilitates collaboration, increases specialisation and prompts innovation and creativity. This is certainly not the case in Kingston where there is but a territory of warring gangs and people who despise and avoid each because of colour, class and politics.
The state of Kingston is an indictment on the lack of planning and concern by the ruling classes who made their living in the city but left it for England (the British) or more recently Miami (the local plantation owner or merchant) for the salubrious climes - from downtown, to South Camp Road, then to Hope Road and on to Barbican, Beverley Hills and Cherry Gardens, continuing up the hill, further and further removed from Kingston.
The wealthy abandoned the city and deprived it of their expenditure by relocating the business centre from Harbour St/King St to New Kingston. The poorer classes and unwelcome rural outcasts are scattered centrifugally to the periphery. Spatial segregation, residential aparthied and ecological differentiation starkly enforce a rigid bifurcation of uptown-downtown differences in language, social behaviour and income.
The rich live in a true city, like Manhattan in New York and, in most cases, the prime settlements are along the waterfront, like San Francisco, Helsinki, Sydney, Hong Kong, Vancouver, Miami, Panama. The expenditure of high income groups sustains shopping, the arts, entertainment, cosmetic services and fine dining. This employs other people and maintains businesses and these people in turn live in the city.
In any thriving city, the seafront is the most valuable real estate but in Kingston the most desirable land is where there is a prison, a lunatic asylum, oil-burning electricity plants that pollute, derelict docks, abandoned industrial estates and a city dump. Factories pour industrial effluent, the cement plant generates a fog that settles from Hellshire to Mona Heights and gullies flush raw sewage into the stagnant waters of the harbour.
Redevelopment of a narrow strip on the waterfront will not make Kingston a city or a community. This is no panacea, what is required is a cogent plan for the comprehensive and inclusive development of Greater Kingston.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
"DECAYING buildings are jumbled together, forming a mass broken at irregular intervals by open spaces where animals, the indigent and children wonder untended. Streets are narrow, winding and unpaved and are the chief repositories of refuse. Proper drainage is non-existent, lighting is inadequate and sewage flows in the gutters. Law and order is spasmodic and not always by public authorities."
This is an excerpt from Gideon Sjoberg's classic "The Preindustrial City" describing medieval cities. But you could just as well be reading about parts of Kingston, Jamaica.
Kingston is a human settlement on the Liguanea plain sloping gently up from one of the finest natural harbours in the world to the magnificent blue green hills of St Andrew. No more beautiful habitat exists anywhere on the globe. Yet Jamaicans and their British colonisers systematically despoiled this natural patrimony bequeathing to future generations the irreparably damaged possibility of a city.
We expect disagreement but we maintain that Kingston is not yet a city. Edward Glaeser in "Triumph of the City" correctly extols the virtues of cities as places where humanity can realise their full potential in all ventures of life through a community that facilitates collaboration, increases specialisation and prompts innovation and creativity. This is certainly not the case in Kingston where there is but a territory of warring gangs and people who despise and avoid each because of colour, class and politics.
The state of Kingston is an indictment on the lack of planning and concern by the ruling classes who made their living in the city but left it for England (the British) or more recently Miami (the local plantation owner or merchant) for the salubrious climes - from downtown, to South Camp Road, then to Hope Road and on to Barbican, Beverley Hills and Cherry Gardens, continuing up the hill, further and further removed from Kingston.
The wealthy abandoned the city and deprived it of their expenditure by relocating the business centre from Harbour St/King St to New Kingston. The poorer classes and unwelcome rural outcasts are scattered centrifugally to the periphery. Spatial segregation, residential aparthied and ecological differentiation starkly enforce a rigid bifurcation of uptown-downtown differences in language, social behaviour and income.
The rich live in a true city, like Manhattan in New York and, in most cases, the prime settlements are along the waterfront, like San Francisco, Helsinki, Sydney, Hong Kong, Vancouver, Miami, Panama. The expenditure of high income groups sustains shopping, the arts, entertainment, cosmetic services and fine dining. This employs other people and maintains businesses and these people in turn live in the city.
In any thriving city, the seafront is the most valuable real estate but in Kingston the most desirable land is where there is a prison, a lunatic asylum, oil-burning electricity plants that pollute, derelict docks, abandoned industrial estates and a city dump. Factories pour industrial effluent, the cement plant generates a fog that settles from Hellshire to Mona Heights and gullies flush raw sewage into the stagnant waters of the harbour.
Redevelopment of a narrow strip on the waterfront will not make Kingston a city or a community. This is no panacea, what is required is a cogent plan for the comprehensive and inclusive development of Greater Kingston.