Ambivalence of Megacities: Catastrophe or Solution?

Abstract

Cities have always been dynamic places of change and beyond that of human civilisation.They are nodes connecting highly diverse networks, flows of people, capital and knowledge on local, regional and global levels (Castells 1996; Levebvre 1976).Thereby they are transformers of development processes (Braudel 1985; Dwyer 1972; Dwyer 1975).As development is ambivalent, it implies that cities are not only centres where problems, conflicts and tensions are concentrated and intensified, but also that they form innovative milieus (Hall 2000) continuously creating new ways of coping with changing circumstances (social creativity) (Holston 2002, p. 326; Korff 1988).Solutions to numerous problems faced by humankind are in fact invented and tested in the urban context and disseminated through city networks on national and global scales.In conclusion, a city is always as much a centre of conflicts, problems, tensions as it is a centre of innovations and solutions.Unfortunately, most research on megacities focuses on Cassandra-like warnings of a coming apocalypse and largely neglects identification of solutions created already.

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