The 21st-century city

When I first saw China's dark factories, the plants that run in the dark because there is no longer anyone inside who needs the light, I went cold. I understood in that moment that the city would never be the same, and that what was changing was not only the economic system but the very place we live in, since the modern city was born precisely to sit next to those lit-up lights.

The city we know, if you look closely, is a child of the industrial revolution: a great dormitory designed to let workers live at a reasonable distance from the factory. In Italy this logic took a fairly precise shape. A big city could afford to have its industry a hundred kilometres away, as long as it was well connected; a small one wanted it a few kilometres off, reachable by bicycle or bus. Homes, schools, transport, even shop opening hours were drawn around the shift. The model of the industrial-revolution city, especially the large one, is London, a city literally designed around the factories that came to it.

The only real exception, and a very Italian one, is the cities with a medieval commune tradition, those of eighty or ninety thousand people that grew up centuries before the factory around a square, a market, a university. They work as self-contained hubs, with their own economy and their own ruling class, and in the twentieth century they looked like leftovers from the past. Today they could come in useful again.

In our century industry either goes into crisis or automates to the point of almost doing without people, and in both cases the pact the city rested on breaks: the factory no longer needs the dormitory. The city must then find another reason to exist and itself become a place that produces wealth, through services, knowledge, finance, culture, and above all through the ability to attract people who choose where to live rather than having it chosen for them. The ones that haven't understood this are recognisable at a glance, with neighbourhoods built for a shift that no longer exists and young people who leave as soon as they can.

Last century states competed for factories; now cities compete with each other, and the prize is people.

If the twentieth-century challenge was keeping cities from being too polluted, today's is making wealth creation and everyday life fit together in the same space. Big cities, it seems to me, have found a way. They spread out by absorbing nearby towns and link them with fast trains that don't all end at the same central station (in Rome, for example, not only Termini but also San Pietro), and a kind of radial city takes shape, made of different worlds that talk to each other. London built the Elizabeth Line on this idea; New York has known it for a century, with a subway that stops everywhere and express trains that skip stops. The idea is always the same: in ten minutes you must get to where the work is.

Meanwhile the centre changes its trade. It stops being a place where people live and becomes a place that generates money. Madrid is an interesting laboratory: after its renovation the Santiago Bernabéu stadium produces figures nobody would have imagined a few years ago and has become the real centre of gravity of its district, so much so that residential life tends to move further out.

The radial pattern doesn't stop at the commuter belt, either. It reaches distant cities, sometimes very distant, as long as the quality of life is high and the train is good. Brighton for London is the textbook example: the sea, a comfortable, almost elegant train, and the capital less than an hour away on the fastest services. Many children of well-off London live there, not least because work is no longer nine to five, in the office every day. Something similar is happening between Valencia and Madrid, a couple of hours apart by high-speed rail, and it could happen between Genoa and Milan once the new Terzo Valico line has brought the two cities, they say, to about an hour apart. The sea and a different climate on one side, a fast train on the other: it sounds like little, but it changes geography.

The airport changes too, and in this design it stops being one city's airport and becomes that of an entire region, reachable directly from many different centres without passing through the middle. Schiphol, with its station beneath the terminal and trains running straight to half of the Netherlands, is the model to look at. When a neighbourhood can be twenty, thirty, even fifty kilometres away, distances are no longer measured in kilometres but in minutes by train, and every connection has to be rethought.

One condition remains, and it is no detail. Residential areas may well be far away, but they must offer a very high quality of life and be superbly connected, otherwise those who create wealth leave and the centre goes dark, just like a dark factory. Last century states competed for factories; now cities compete with each other, and the prize is people. Italians living abroad know this better than anyone, because they have already made that choice, often leaving cities stuck in the twentieth century. Italy, with its commune cities born before the factory, holds a card few others have. It would only need to make up its mind to play it.