The 21st century began with 50% of humans living in cities. If you are wealthy, cities collect interesting people, expensive goods, and diverse erotic pleasures. If you are poor, cities are concentrations of displaced humans who lack food, shelter, sanitation and medical care.
Cities concentrate the most negative expressions of humans: gambling, prostitution, crime, and drug use. Poor people from rural areas tend to migrate to cities, hoping to make money and improve their circumstances; they seldom succeed. Even in the most affluent countries displaced and poor people crowd into cities. Some are exploited by rich people as cheap labor. Others are ignored. Some turn to crime, others depend on charity or government welfare.
In the best case, the trend established in the first half of 20th century was to increases employment opportunities and increase general wealth. Canada was one of the nations developing a social contract that guaranteed essential benefits for all citizens including new immigrants and refugees. The benefits included free public schooling, free medical and hospital care and guarantees of minimal access to food, shelter and public health services. These benefits are expensive, so that reductions in the budgets for social services began in the late 20th century and will decrease further as budgetary deficits grow.
At the same time, income and personal wealth disparities grew larger. The net effect was the fewer humans had more and more humans had less. Cities change as the population demographics change within them. Cities states, in the historical record, were ephemeral. Most were built to withstand attack from invaders and most disappeared after decades to centuries of growth and affluence. Modern cities, like cancers, grow unchecked, metastasize and destroy their own support system.
William Rees, an economist at the University of British Columbia took an ecological approach to economics. He is concerned that cities are growing too large to be sustainable. Cities are centers of consumption and depend on the surrounding environment to supply energy, food and to accept and disperse waste. Rees measured the ecological footprint of cities and his results are not encouraging.
At the end of the 20th century, 1.1 billion people live in the largest cities with populations in the millions; their carbon dioxide emissions were greater than the capacity of all the world’s forests to process the gas. One city person requires at least five square hectares of resource rich land to support him or her. The 472,000 people living in the city of Vancouver in 1999 on 11,400 hectares of land actually required the output of 2.3 million hectares of land.
The real capital is not money but air, water, food and other resources. City states deplete these resources at an alarming rate – fish stocks are depleted; soils are depleted, washed or blown away; fresh water supplies are marginal, depleted or contaminated; the air is polluted and ozone depletion combined with global warming from increased greenhouse gases threatens progressive and erratic climate changes. Extreme weather becomes more destructive with the cost of repair and replacement escalating every year. Climate changes threaten agriculture, as we know it.
Patel and Burke expressed concern about poverty and disease in growing urban populations. They wrote: "Although natural disasters and armed conflicts cause migration into urban centers, most people relocate to cities in search of employment. When they arrive, many find only one affordable housing option: illegal and unplanned dense settlements lacking basic public infrastructure, where they must live in lodgings made from tenuous materials, such as used plastic sheets, discarded scrap metal, and mud. The United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat) reports that 43% of urban residents in developing countries such as Kenya, Brazil, and India and 78% of those in the least-developed countries such as Bangladesh, Haiti, and Ethiopia live in such slums… residents are usually tolerated and their presence tacitly accepted, but the local government generally ignores them, accepting no responsibility for accounting for them in planning or the provision of services.
Urban hazards include infections, injuries, air and water pollution, diabetes and hypertension.Increasing the population density in cities without proper water supplies and sanitation increases the risk of transmission of communicable diseases. Mortality among children under 5 years of age and among infants is higher in urban slums than in rural settings."
Scientists, anticipating the effects of climate change, have imagined major disruptions of city-states with civil disobedience and armed conflicts arising from the competition for scarce resources. Solutions are available but are improbable, given human tendencies.
A sane, rational city-state would limit its growth; limit its pollution and progress toward food, water and clean air sustainability. You must ask the key question: If all long-distance supplies were blocked could the citizens of a city continue to live comfortable, healthy lives?
One prerequisite of a sane city is self-sufficiency. Global Trade has always been the enemy of self-sufficiency and the ally of vulnerability. The need to transport food and goods long distances would be reduced by increased local production. The local transportation of goods could be streamlined into centrally controlled supply lines that achieve maximal efficiency. We could advance toward intelligent distribution systems such as large pneumatic or electromagnetic tubes that send containers between city centers at high speed with minimal pollution. It is absurd to have goods distributed by trucks, in traffic, chaotically, with no cost effective distribution plan. Food can be grown and processed within a city by returning some of the land area to market gardens and intensive greenhouse technology. Each city would have to renew and support a surrounding agricultural zone.
Cities would essentially backtrack about 100 years when food supply lines were shorter and farmers living adjacent to the cities could supply most if not all of the food.
The humanity of a city can be restored by living arrangements that promote a sense of community. Good architecture and city planning support groups of individuals that know each other and can relate to each other – small interactive communities. Local groups can relate to their natural environment and can restore an understanding of how to supply their own needs. If a local group does not have a natural environment, then the group will be dysfunctional and members of the group will become sick animals. If a group grows too large for individuals to know and relate to each, then the group will be dysfunctional – sick humans.
From Group Dynamics (2010) by Stephen Gislason
Cities concentrate the most negative expressions of humans: gambling, prostitution, crime, and drug use. Poor people from rural areas tend to migrate to cities, hoping to make money and improve their circumstances; they seldom succeed. Even in the most affluent countries displaced and poor people crowd into cities. Some are exploited by rich people as cheap labor. Others are ignored. Some turn to crime, others depend on charity or government welfare.
In the best case, the trend established in the first half of 20th century was to increases employment opportunities and increase general wealth. Canada was one of the nations developing a social contract that guaranteed essential benefits for all citizens including new immigrants and refugees. The benefits included free public schooling, free medical and hospital care and guarantees of minimal access to food, shelter and public health services. These benefits are expensive, so that reductions in the budgets for social services began in the late 20th century and will decrease further as budgetary deficits grow.
At the same time, income and personal wealth disparities grew larger. The net effect was the fewer humans had more and more humans had less. Cities change as the population demographics change within them. Cities states, in the historical record, were ephemeral. Most were built to withstand attack from invaders and most disappeared after decades to centuries of growth and affluence. Modern cities, like cancers, grow unchecked, metastasize and destroy their own support system.
William Rees, an economist at the University of British Columbia took an ecological approach to economics. He is concerned that cities are growing too large to be sustainable. Cities are centers of consumption and depend on the surrounding environment to supply energy, food and to accept and disperse waste. Rees measured the ecological footprint of cities and his results are not encouraging.
At the end of the 20th century, 1.1 billion people live in the largest cities with populations in the millions; their carbon dioxide emissions were greater than the capacity of all the world’s forests to process the gas. One city person requires at least five square hectares of resource rich land to support him or her. The 472,000 people living in the city of Vancouver in 1999 on 11,400 hectares of land actually required the output of 2.3 million hectares of land.
The real capital is not money but air, water, food and other resources. City states deplete these resources at an alarming rate – fish stocks are depleted; soils are depleted, washed or blown away; fresh water supplies are marginal, depleted or contaminated; the air is polluted and ozone depletion combined with global warming from increased greenhouse gases threatens progressive and erratic climate changes. Extreme weather becomes more destructive with the cost of repair and replacement escalating every year. Climate changes threaten agriculture, as we know it.
Patel and Burke expressed concern about poverty and disease in growing urban populations. They wrote: "Although natural disasters and armed conflicts cause migration into urban centers, most people relocate to cities in search of employment. When they arrive, many find only one affordable housing option: illegal and unplanned dense settlements lacking basic public infrastructure, where they must live in lodgings made from tenuous materials, such as used plastic sheets, discarded scrap metal, and mud. The United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat) reports that 43% of urban residents in developing countries such as Kenya, Brazil, and India and 78% of those in the least-developed countries such as Bangladesh, Haiti, and Ethiopia live in such slums… residents are usually tolerated and their presence tacitly accepted, but the local government generally ignores them, accepting no responsibility for accounting for them in planning or the provision of services.
Urban hazards include infections, injuries, air and water pollution, diabetes and hypertension.Increasing the population density in cities without proper water supplies and sanitation increases the risk of transmission of communicable diseases. Mortality among children under 5 years of age and among infants is higher in urban slums than in rural settings."
Scientists, anticipating the effects of climate change, have imagined major disruptions of city-states with civil disobedience and armed conflicts arising from the competition for scarce resources. Solutions are available but are improbable, given human tendencies.
A sane, rational city-state would limit its growth; limit its pollution and progress toward food, water and clean air sustainability. You must ask the key question: If all long-distance supplies were blocked could the citizens of a city continue to live comfortable, healthy lives?
One prerequisite of a sane city is self-sufficiency. Global Trade has always been the enemy of self-sufficiency and the ally of vulnerability. The need to transport food and goods long distances would be reduced by increased local production. The local transportation of goods could be streamlined into centrally controlled supply lines that achieve maximal efficiency. We could advance toward intelligent distribution systems such as large pneumatic or electromagnetic tubes that send containers between city centers at high speed with minimal pollution. It is absurd to have goods distributed by trucks, in traffic, chaotically, with no cost effective distribution plan. Food can be grown and processed within a city by returning some of the land area to market gardens and intensive greenhouse technology. Each city would have to renew and support a surrounding agricultural zone.
Cities would essentially backtrack about 100 years when food supply lines were shorter and farmers living adjacent to the cities could supply most if not all of the food.
The humanity of a city can be restored by living arrangements that promote a sense of community. Good architecture and city planning support groups of individuals that know each other and can relate to each other – small interactive communities. Local groups can relate to their natural environment and can restore an understanding of how to supply their own needs. If a local group does not have a natural environment, then the group will be dysfunctional and members of the group will become sick animals. If a group grows too large for individuals to know and relate to each, then the group will be dysfunctional – sick humans.
From Group Dynamics (2010) by Stephen Gislason