We read about the growth of the world's cities all the time. We encounter dazzling statistics of urban population growth, the pace of land being converted from farms to factories, from forests to suburbs. Attention to urban living has been heightened under COVID-19.
A recent report by UNHABITAT, COVID-19 in an Urban World, highlights a pivotal role for cities in addressing the global pandemic. This is unsurprising. With more than half the world's population living in urban areas, cities play a major role in the spread and containment of COVID-19. Perhaps more surprising is the report's claim that COVID-19 has a role in shaping cities for current and future pandemics.
What are we to make of this idea? Can our pandemic, a mostly invisible infectious disease, reshape the cement, bricks, tarmac and fibre-optic cable that make up our cities? Perhaps more importantly, are all cities equally capable of responding to the vulnerabilities of health pandemics and other periodic crises?
COVID-19 stresses the interconnectedness of people around the world, but also the interconnectedness of cities to almost all other elements of the earth. The concept of "planetary urbanism", coined by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid in 2011, proposes that even areas that seem outside of cities such as forests, coast, rivers, mountains, mines, farms, and even communications infrastructure, shipping lanes, and the earth's atmosphere "have become integral parts of the worldwide urban fabric".
For instance, ships pass through Newcastle Harbour loaded with coal from the 'countryside' headed for ports in the Asia-Pacific to light up cities and towns, power computer servers to deliver real-time government services, and keep cement factories churning out the stuff that makes cities grow. COVID-19 has tested the idea that cities can disentangle themselves.
However, not all - or even most - cities are so deeply entangled. If we're to better plan how our cities respond to a pandemic, we need to understand in depth how cities work - both big and small. For example, cities such as Dimapur, the focus of my recent co-authored book with Dr Dolly Kikon (University of Melbourne). Dimapur is in Nagaland, on the far eastern edge of India, bordering Myanmar. Its population is similar to Newcastle, around half a million people.
Dimapur is intoxicating. It's the largest city in an Indigenous-majority state in India and has been embroiled in Asia's longest-running armed conflict, the Naga independence movement, which lasted for more than 50 years until a ceasefire in 1997.
After the ceasefire, the city has grown vertically and sprawled into villages and forests. Away from the commercial centre, localities operate as villages despite being urban in form, and are governed under customary law. There are scores of Indian army and paramilitary bases in the city, and on the outskirts are two large ceasefire camps where former anti-India combatants live. The city has drawn migrants from within and across international borders, making it a hive of multi-ethnic, multi-faith and multilingual communities.
Dimapur is a city "off the map". It has almost no public presence; museums, public archives or historic photo repository. The city can be scoured using online maps, but with unplanned growth, military bases, multiple names for different localities and landmarks, and kilometres of unnamed roads, conventional mapping tools are severely limited. Contrary to popular belief, this is fairly common in cities across the world and a major impediment during crises such as COVID-19.
To understand the city, we had to immerse ourselves in its fabric. We became obsessed with the everyday lives. We interviewed urban hunters who scour the edges of the city for animals straying from nearby forests. We spent time with musicians who have started studios drawing the city's youth. We learned about the city's past through coffin makers, writers, and municipal officers. We learned about aspirations for its future from return migrants.
For a period during 2017 the city was inaccessible, shut down during massive protests over proposed changes to the municipal act. The crisis heightened tensions between traditional forms of rule and desires for new political institutions.
When we think of the rapid growth of cities, we rarely imagine places such as Dimapur. Yet, according to agencies that monitor urbanisation, most humans becoming "city people" are doing so in cities of fewer than a million people, cities like Dimapur. In Australia too, growth, decline and continual mobility towards and away from big cities is altering the categories we use to understand places.
This makes research into the world's small cities crucial for future generations seeking to understand and intervene in planetary urbanism and future crises.
