Urbanization?
It probably won't turn out the way we plan
We’re an incredibly arrogant species.
In the two hundred thousand years or so that we’ve existed in roughly our current configuration, we’ve never successfully managed the evolution of anything on the planet except in order to fulfill our own personal whims.
We’ve adapted chickens to make them more edible (or egg-able). We’ve done much the same to everything else we like to eat, proliferating some of the specific breeds we prefer to the extent that even their farts have become a significant contributor to helping us put an end to the most recent stable climate state of our planet.
We’ve wiped out countless less fortunate variety of creature that had the misfortune of being either delicious, snuggly warm or both, and we’ve tamed others to the extent that they’ll allow us jump on their backs and run around killing more animals or people more efficiently than we were able to previously on foot - saving us the bother of evolving ourselves a couple of extra legs
The dog is probably the only creature I can think of for which the process has not been mostly negative, but even there we've prioritized what we want in the cuteness or hostility department, and created our own favorite version of the perfectly serviceable wolf ancestor that are either crippled with skeletal deformities or barely able to breathe properly, all - as usual - for our pleasure.
Walking back from any of these outcomes simply is not an option.
That’s the problem when you do anything for the first time. You can never do it the first time ever again, and if your initial attempts destroy the potential for a makeover then the only place you get to is a new starting line, ready to do the next thing for the first time. We do things today and the outcomes work out to be good or bad. Doing the same thing tomorrow will not necessarily result in the same outcome, and doing them differently today will not necessarily result in the outcomes that would have happened if we’d tried this last time. You can never put your foot into the same stream twice…didn’t somebody clever say that already?
There are quite a lot of people currently telling us that they know how to design cities.
It has become an accepted wisdom that the world is on an inevitable trajectory towards increased urbanisation. It’s been explained as a simple consequence of globalization and capitalism in general, where the centralization of utilities and commerce just works better when we’re all packed together in a smaller space, and can get at what we need without too much travelling.
Of course, it makes sense, and the figures have been backing it up for a long time, but like another of the models we mistake for laws we shouldn’t assume that because the numbers have been heading in the one direction for a while, the causes that drive the trend are all the same, regardless of where that trend is happening or what conditions drove those trends in the past.
Models based on scientific laws that accurately predict cause and effect are not the same as models based on observed information in which you guess at the cause and you postulate upon the effect.
My guess is that a very large proportion of the people who might find themselves reading this article either live in or work in a city, as did or do their parents, and even their grandparents. It probably feels to you as if that's what's normal - what’s always been and always will be.
However, if you look at the tradition of what mankind is all about, high density city dwelling and urbanism are not how we got here.
Tim Urban (who has a strangely apt surname for this piece) describes this really neatly in his idea of representing the whole of human history as a 1000 page book.
In that book, each page would document 250 pages of human history. Pretty much everything that is of massive significance to you or I happens in the final lines of the last page. Flip back a couple of pages and half the countries on the planet didn’t exist, and we couldn’t have even made the book because we hadn’t sorted out printing or production yet.
Even the smallest cities that exist today to an extent that people outside of their home country have heard of them are bigger than the biggest cities that might have been mentioned on page 999.
Pages 1 to 990 read like a David Attenborough documentary only probably less interesting and very repetitive.
The world population only hit the one billion mark around 1800 (near the top of page 1000), when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing and a reasonable quantity of people were beginning to enjoy sustainable enough lifestyles that they could stay alive long enough to have kids that survived childhood.
It took until around 1920 (well towards the bottom of page 1000) to procreate ourselves up to a population of two billion, but by then all of the bizarreness of the Twentieth Century had kicked in, and over the one hundred years since, we’ve multiplied by around another 400%.
The growth of urbanisation has roughly tracked this trend. If you tried to tie the two things together in a causal relationship you might find that there was a link but it wouldn’t be in the causes that caused each other…
Of course, throughout our history people have often chosen to live in communities, but only since around 1900 have megacity metropolises begun to sprawl across the globe, and it’s in these rather than the townships of the past where modern urbanisation concentrations are becoming ever more focused, and in which I’m particularly interested.
Super-cities are new. Most of them have grown out of older communities that were there before, but there are some that had a plan from the start, even though they maybe got too big for their boots somewhere along the way and became sprawls too big to contain. This sort of thermal runaway appears to be an inevitable risk as soon as you accept the possibility that your city is going to be one.
At the level of the community, there’s definite advantage to being close to the blacksmith and the general store when you’re in need of their services. Having like-minded individuals around you to help in times of need provides you with a sense of security and kinship that develops into a local identity and colours the atmosphere and culture of the whole place.
But when things are good (or bad) word gets around, and prosperity kindles (or extinguishes) procreation.
That's probably going to remain the same for any established community going forward, but what makes that community attractive or unattractive, or what drives the incoming or outgoing trends for different demographic or socioeconomic groups in the community will always be a complex mix of factors too nuanced for a mere mortal like me to provide an analysis of.
What draws a group of like minded wealthy individuals to want to relocate to a purpose built 15 minute city off in the desert somewhere are not the same set of motivations that result in a group of middle class individuals choosing to move into a gated community in a busy city, or the same reasons that put minority groups into poorly maintained social housing with few facilities, or the same as what puts climate or conflict displaced refugees into some rapidly retasked shipping containers on the waste ground of a port, but all of these will be reflected in survey data on urbanisation.
The crime statistics we might see in each of those community templates are inevitably going to be extremely different in different parts of the world too, but not for the same reasons.
Our models of urban environments are worse than our models of weather systems, but still we claim to know what we're doing when we design new cities.
We pontificate about how we can build better cities by adopting this approach or that approach, by adjusting our architecture or adding what we’ve decided are wellness enhancing spaces with more of this or less of that. It's a lovely plan, but in actuality we're really just flipping a coin on what might happen next.
Urban design concepts come and go, but on the whole, many of our cities are still a bit shit, but once again, you can’t blame us. Our species has never urbanised a planet before.
So, why do we believe that we know what we’re doing?
While we can look back into the past and attempt to interpret the path that brought us to where we are as city dwellers, it would be foolish and short sighted to use that trajectory as a means of predicting where we might be in a few years time.
You only need to look at how wrong footed we've been by COVID and the switch to a work from home expectation that's hit us straight out of left field. Now we're making decisions about how new cities should accommodate pandemic resilience from the experiences of the last three years…the last few letters, of the last few words on the final page of the 1000 page book of human history.
I'm sorry - city planning peers - but I simply don't believe you know what you're talking about.
In the subsequent parts of this series, I aim to describe some of the opposing forces that are pushing and pulling us towards the future cityscape, in particular attempting to remind people that we have to start from where we are, and work with what we've got.
Planetary boundaries may not be your priority today, but one day they're going to be the end stops that we run into.