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It’s hard to pin down the precise moment the world’s center of gravity shifted. For thousands of years, people lived in the countryside. They worked on farms or in villages, knew little of the world beyond their immediate families and neighbors, and generally got by on their own. Slowly, they began to congregate. It happened in Mesopotamia and Egypt, later in Greece and Rome, and also in Europe and the Americas. More recently, we’ve seen fast growth in Africa and, most spectacularly, in Asia. And then, by 2008, according to the United Nations, the balance finally tipped: in the ebb and flow of daily births and deaths, the number of people who inhabit the world’s cities ticked into the majority, for the first time ever.
The milestone itself isn’t nearly as significant as the trend. In the 20th century cities grew more than 10-fold, from 250 million people to 2.8 billion. In the coming decades, the U.N. predicts, the number of people living in cities will continue to rise. By 2050 the world population is expected to surpass nine billion and urban dwellers to surpass six billion. Two in three people born in the next 30 years will live in cities.
Many otherwise lucid thinkers, from Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright to President Gerald Ford, tended to think of cities as centers of poverty, crime, pollution, congestion and poor health. In recent years, though, the thinking has shifted along with the demographics. Many experts have come to realize that people are better off when they live in a city. This is not to dismiss the problems of urban life; cities, particularly fast-growing ones in the poorer parts of Asia and Africa, can be places of great human suffering. But even a city slum has benefits that you won’t find on the farm or in the village. The move from the country leads, for instance, to dramatic changes for many women. As Kavita N. Ramdas of the Global Fund for Women notes in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline (Penguin, 2010), “In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and relatives, pound millet, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children.”
Indeed, the city has come to look less like a source of problems than as an opportunity to fix them. Investments in sanitation and water have turned many cities in the developed world from places of disease and pestilence into bastions of health. City folk are at lower risk of death from motor vehicle accidents and suicide by firearms (although they are overstressed). From the standpoint of the metropolis, climate change also seems less intractable. Because city residents rely less on cars and live in more compact dwellings than suburbanites, they tend to leave smaller carbon footprints. The challenge is to extend the efficiency of the urban center to the wider conurbation, embracing the city center, suburbs and satellite towns. Although climate is bigger than any one fix, how we build our cities, and how efficiently we live in them, is going to factor large in our response.
The most hopeful impact of city life may be its effect on the mind. Humans are social animals; we draw stimulation from other minds close at hand. Plato and Socrates both lived in fifth-century b.c. Athens, a city-state. Galileo and Michelangelo lived in Renaissance Florence. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak grew up in a western U.S. conurbation that includes Silicon Valley. The young, agile minds at work on the next Big Thing are probably tweeting—they live, as author William Gibson points out on page 88, in a kind of digital meta city. Chances are, they are living in a physical city, too. Technology is reshaping city life and making it more intellectually productive, but it will not soon replace the easy interchange of ideas that comes from casual proximity, the cornerstone of city life.
This issue of Scientific American celebrates the city as a solution to the problems of our age. We have tried to present it in the true urban spirit: best ideas forward.
This article was originally published with the title Street-Savvy.
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15 Comments
Add CommentWith the planning sate of the urban cities, it is very important to consider security, space, verious levels of social contums, trafic management, green belt, dust contorlling, street lightning, resting places, open common bath rooms, maintance planning, energy savings, human mobilisation, citizen
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMaybe the India located towns of Mohenho-Darho and Harappa, that dissapeared when a drought shift in climate made dry the rivers they were located next to -not the Arian hords invasions, as some say with unidentifyed goals- were earlier urban settlements than the Mesopotamia cities, although this ones have left memories in our culture and beliefs, and the heritage of the earlier India settlements just didn't made the way to us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is one thing I do not understand. If you zoom in on the average lives of individuals I don't see how this would be different in a more rural setting. Most lives will not changes drastically in their everday setting. Pooring drinks in one cafe or another or being a lawyer in one town or another. There are only a few super hubs on many smaller ones. The only thing you can say is that you increase your chance of being part of such of super hub if you move to the cities that rise or are on their top of growth. But without the requirements the level stays mostly the same. Poor or rich in the country or in the city. So I think larger cities have a more dillusional effect that emerges from the pile of possibilities rather than a profound change in everyday life. Sanitation is mere an attitude something Inca's already knew before Europeans did. And those cities are incomparable to todays city infrastructures.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis feature on "Cities" extols urban living to the skies--praise hardly surprising given that Scientific American originates in New York. In fact, the cities mentioned in the articles are mostly from the east coast--especially Boston and New York, both said to be entrepreneurial centers. Apparently, cities have populations that are healthier, greener, and richer--and represent the wave of the future not only across America but across the world.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd yet. Nowhere in the magazine is there a proper definition of a city. Is a town of 2500 residents a city? From the articles one would hardly guess so, but from a widely used definition it is. The cities described for the most part are Mumbai, Delhi, New York, Tokyo and the like.
As for the wealth of cities: One could argue that they are wealthy because rural areas are exploited. People raise crops and mine minerals, often receiving little for their effort, while city residents add value to products, skimming off profit at every stage of production. Money flows from country to city because property owners, factory owners, and managers are found in cities, not in the country.
Are cities healthier places than rural areas? That result startles--the air and water of cities is frequently polluted from exhaust fumes and industrial wastes. Could the difference in health be due to bad health practices of the country--poor eating habits and smoking? And could the reputed difference in suicide rates between urban and rural dwellers have more to do with demographics? After all, in countries like Japan the elderly are left behind in the country--and the elderly are more likely to commit suicide than the young.
So to with the conclusion that city dwellers live a more "green" lifestyle than rural dwellers. I picture a Chinese peasant growing rice in the country and a Chinese worker experiencing the joys of industrial life. It is hard for me to believe urban beats rural in this comparison. When all the inputs necessary for life--water, food, sewage treatment--have to be transported many miles to cities, it is hard to believe the city is so much more environmentally friendly than the country.
The analysis in the articles takes a decidedly economic turn in discussions about wages and economic output. Yet you wonder about the other things that count: happiness, marriage stability, contentedness with work. Are there differences among country, small town, and city dwellers as far as these characteristics are concerned? We don't know.
Scientific American can do better than this.
The article states "lower risk.....suicide by FIREARMS". Lots of buildings and bridges to jump off. Lots of contact yields lots of disease.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLong a dream of idealists, a city allows the designers control of the whole works...Intuitively, cities are more efficient, like taking a train instead of a car, and like buying the 1,000 lb. economy bag of washing powder. I grew up in a rural neighborhood, and in the 60's roamed for miles exploring without parental worries. I moved to a city in the 70's, and saw my first cockroach and a rat. I thought rats were only the things of legend and the bubonic plague.
At one time, before electricity and particularly the telephone, and before air conditioning allowed the persistent closure of windows, a city allowed the ease of communicating with a neighbor across the alley, or convenient voyerism. These times were before FedEx and UPS, before the gas turbine engine, and any travel to a location outside the city took days, not hours.
Today, the blessed internet, free long distance calls, cheap transport of goods and close relationship at a distance nearly obviate the need for cities.
In the day when religious dogma no longer enshrines the killing all not of one's own belief, and terrorists do not target high populations of "the enemy", perhaps we can again consider some benefit.
Regarding women, the editors blatently ignore and deny the greatest joys and satisfaction of accomplishment that women have conducted for hundreds of thousands of years. Tasks more difficult and far more miraculous than those traditional of men, agriculture and the hunt.
If cities are so wonderful and efficient, why are such massive subsidies needed from state and federal governments?
Many big cities even collect income taxes, not required in lower population areas.
Why are "cost of living" numbers persistently higher in cities?
The Irene flood media coverage highlighted raw sewerage in flood waters. Wild animals spread their droppings out over wide areas to naturally compost, yet in cities, human waste is gathered in vast underground rivers.
In this article, SciAm denys once again that we rest on the precipice of an ice age, during only the second time in geologic history that CO2 levels have been below 1,000 ppm, when for 95% of that history it has been higher. Mars has the equivalent of 55,000 ppm CO2 (molecules per m3), yet NO global warming. Oh...I see...it's more complicated than that. None of us mere mortals could possibly understand. Big Al, I want you to tell me GOD's truth on this one.
While much of your post is reasonable, the last part--about the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere never falling below 1000 parts per million--I need a reference for that. Just finished reading Curt Stager's book, Deep Future: The Next 100,000 years of life on Earth. He reports nothing like that--using the Eemian interglacial period as an example of 600ppm CO2 (a much elevated number over average) and the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum as an extremely high carbon dioxide level at 1200ppm. Since Stager is a working scientist in the field, I would only argue with his numbers using robust studies published in refereed journals. Do you know of such a study?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReferenced CO2 levels are from: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOur 2 nearest planetary neighbors both have atmospheric concentrations of over 90% CO2, although at greatly different pressures. I speculate that if it were not for stromatolites, maybe it'd be the same here.
I have come to understand (trying to be up front honest here) that plant growth (both on land and in the water) increases about 50% for every doubling of CO2. Dinosaurs were HUGE. That's only possible with overwhelming supplies of food, sort of the opposite of "island dwarfism". The coal (from plants, oil is from animals) reserves, admittedly formed over 10's of millions of years. Thick layers of coal are almost pure carbon, not thin layers of carbon with sediments interspersed. I can't believe the pressure/heat process responsible for coal formation squeezed out inorganics and concentrated the carbon, but rather the profusion of plant life was much, much higher than most people can even imagine. So, the CO2 levels must have been much higher.
Chemical contaminants in coal are very close to those in regular dirt, with a slight leaning towards calcium, hence the calcium oxide predominance in coal ash. Useful to those who wish to reverse the re-acidification trend of our oceans.
So, such massive plant growth was only possible with the 'Ultimate Green', that is, "normal" levels of CO2, not the relatively low levels we have today.
Although populations amoung educated groups around the world has stabilized at sustainable levels, those of the ignorant masses are responding to classic animal population dynamics....feed the rabbits and prevent disease, and voila', your farm is overrun with rabbits. Better grow more rabbit food.
I didn't mean to draw this discussion away from the "are cities good or bad?" Certainly psycological forces in large groups forces conformity to a great degree. In terms of innovations per person, do big cities have any advantage or really a disadvantage over rural areas?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJapanese with their very high population density, pride themselves with their relentless commitment to incremental improvements in technology, whereas they admire the revolutionary improvements in particularly from the U.S.
As a side note, in high population countries, where 'regular' trains are overwhemingly profitable, high speed types have become successful. What the heck are we doing, trying to justify high speed trains 'so we don't fall behind'? Let's just buy them from someone else when we can financially justify them, and copy. EVERY Amtrak ticket is subsidized what, 35 bucks?
Yes, electric trains in big cities (subways) are helpful, but very expensive. Do they ever pay for themselves?
I suppose the ultimate question has to do with being reactive vs. proactive. If you believe the market will fix all problems, you accept the idea that reacting to crises as they occur is the wisest course of action. If you believe in investing in possible (or even likely) futures, then you active proactively, having new or modified systems in place before change occurs. Take peak oil: we know we will begin producing less oil in the near future as demand increases. Should that scenario require us to invest in fast trains, etc? I would say, yes. Those countries that act proactively will dominate the market in green energy, mass transportation, etc. Those that act reactively, will find themselves buying from those countries that had more foresight. That is exactly what is happening in the United States as other countries--notably China--develop wind and solar technology as we cut back on research and development funds.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour citation did not come from a recognized scientific journal.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow about a university source?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/07_1.shtml
Back to the cities, of course building apartments as they do in China, wherein standardization is much less expensive. All units, all the same, except for the units for higher castes.
Or is it just the 'regular' apartment blocks, and then those for 'the party'?
The energy poll states that 50% of the people in the cities are responsible for 80% of energy usage....this really points out the improvements our cities need, to catch up with rural dwellers, who have access to renewable energy, such as burning wood for heat.
sorry to disagree but cities can never be made better no matter how many amenities there are because humans do not thrive being stacked and packed (like the agenda 21 or sustainable people would have you believe otherwise) humans thrive on open spaces, more options of their lives having animals around them like birds and wildlife and their own crittors. nimrod was the first guy to push for stack and pack city not to help the people but to enslave them, you can control people easier if they are packed together and cannot leave easily or grow their own food. genesis chap11.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thispersonally I hate cities and never see any need for them,smaller towns are nice and thus but these cities they use as examples of sustainable development are stack and pack with 30,000 per square mile like hong kong. watch the video on youtube surviving the slums.
it is sustainable picture of what the socialists want for people protecting the enviroment is a cover story and their pretty picture of cities is a lie.
rosa+
Massive self-deception is what is going on here, or naked capitalism selling misguided social values... Those are not good choices.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's not just the marketing people who get so taken by their beautiful images they quite overlook the rudimentary facts of life. It's the whole community of sustainability experts too, enamored with their beautiful but mistaken solutions. It's just plain false to think cities as being low impact.
The whole illusion of "green cities" is a result of cities being **high outsourced**, good at hiding their resource uses **elsewhere**. It's because the life blood of cities is their commerce, as well as the intensity of crowing a lot of high productivity people in a small area.
Add to that that cities are the centers of finance where money is used to make money by multiplying resource use and impacts all over the world, and you start seeing the true picture. A city is the least self-sufficient kind of habitation there is.
Scientifically you measure the impacts of a city by developing proxy measures for their total economic product. That's usually 8000btu/$GDP and .46kgCO2/$GDP. They are distributed fairly evenly per dollar because GDP is a measure of personal consumption and diverse personal consumption is going to be "about average".
When you do that it erases a number of "now you see it now you don't" kinds of trick shell games with resource accounting that the green economy promoters seem completely fooled by.
http://www.synapse9.com/SEA
re: cheap gas, subsidized highways, suburbs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOIL
We have market price gas, not cheap gas which is available in South American and the Middle East from .12 cents to $1.89 /gallon. Solar receives $1 subsidy for every 2 cents on oil.
Gas is cheap to get it at the drill head: $1 /barrel: hence Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
Fed, state, local taxes equals .45 cents /gallon some $90 billion /year.
New oil deposits abound: Colorado basin, Brazil, Arctic, Siberia, etc.
SUBURB/CITY
City folk endure, crime, constant din, pollution, poor schools, crowded sidewalks/streets, sparse green space, expensive living costs, neighbor smells and noise, car jackings, assaults, big brother cameras, and constant repair and construction noise.
Minorities are fleeing to the suburbs for the American dream of a house and sustainable green space, like yards, trees, wildlife (bird, squirrels, deer, racoons, possums), quiet days/nights, fresh air, clean streets and playgrounds, green play areas, elbow room between homes, good schools, convenient shopping and parking, cheaper housing and two car garages that serve as incubators for billion dollar industries, like Apple.
I have 10 trees, lot of misc shrubs, and grass that are eco-friendly while condos in a city have none. Cities cause some 80% of total pollution: maybe it is the suburbs that can save us instead of cities.
You need not “bash the burbs” to justify urban arguments, but realize that each has a time and place in our lives. Younger folks like cities; boomers with kids like the burbs. Each has a place in our lives.
CARS
Cars mean discovery, freedom, mobility, fun, joy, style, convenience, and utility. They deserve praise not a pounding. Folks in China/India crave cars for similar reasons.
Promoting sardine can urban living and boring, restrictive mass transit sounds more like 1984 than 2011.
A lot of good ideas, but no example applies them all together! What a building to have that had photovoltaics between the windows for the floors and light channels to inner areas, that collected rainwater, that had green gardens on roof spaces, that provided housing space as well as business space, etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith 7 billion plus people now on this planet, we do need to concentrate into cities and leave farmland for growing food and forests for cleaning the air. I find city living hard to tolerate and others do as well. I hope it remains an option for some people to live close to nature while others can enjoy the benefits of a city.