Urbanization, challenges and opportunities
I once heard Joseph Chamie, Director of the United Nations Population Division, joke that most people consider the work of demographers dull, while the demographers feel like they are recording the most dramatic event in human history: the demographic transition and the concurrent urbanization of humanity. And the more I think about this statement, as an ecologist, the more I must concur. Most of the major changes in global ecosystems, for good (e.g., regrowth of forest in the northern hemisphere) or ill (e.g., fragmentation of natural habitat), are due in one way or another to this massive shift of people from rural to urban areas.
In developed nations, perhaps because of this environmentalist perspective, urbanization is a bad word; when I mention it in conversations people usually talk about population growth or urban sprawl. These are indeed negative consequences: rapid growth in an urban area poses a severe challenge for transportation and urban planning systems, often resulting in ever increasing gridlock on urban roads. Moreover, rapid growth makes it extremely hard to maintain healthy air, water, and forests.
However, there’s an irony for those of us in the developed work, which mostly live in urban areas, attacking urbanization as something bad. First and foremost, urban life offers opportunities, both cultural and economic, that are simply not available in rural areas. In this sense, urbanization is a natural process most economies go through as the mature. Beyond this, there are numerous positive effects of urbanization. From an environmental perspective, resource use is often more efficient, per-capita, in cities than in rural areas. From a governance perspective, an urban middle-class is often one of the prerequisites for the formation of a democracy. Maybe instead of cursing urbanization, for the challenges it poses, we should all bless it, for the opportunities it represents.
There’s another, deeper irony here in the 21st century. The very concept of a dense urban area, with sidewalks and apartments and a core downtown area, is being reconsidered. Each transportation revolution, from trolleys to interstate highways, has increased the distance people can travel for work and decreased the importance of the downtown of cities. Urban areas all over the world are getting bigger in population, but are not getting denser; instead their boundaries just balloon outward. For example, Manhattan had more people living on it a hundred years ago than today. The Internet should further accelerate this trend, for telecommuting workers can easily be several hours commute from the home office, as long as they can make the trip once every several weeks (face-time still being crucial for proper collaboration). This should, I think, radically change cities, with the core area becoming where the young, the rich, and the artists (who often are economically irrational) live, and with parents and kids moving further out into the exurbs. It makes perfect economic sense, and yet I worry something will be lost culturally when people aren’t born, live, and dies all in one place, and interact with other generations...
