The Future of Cities

The latest issue of The Economist features a special report on cities. It states that the global population living in cities will "pass the 50% mark, if it has not done so already." It goes on to forecast that in the future, 80% of us in the world will be urbanized. What are the implications of this shift?

There is a contrarian view:

No longer do people have to gather round the agora to do their business. Information technology allows them to work wherever they want. Given that they can also get a religious, sporting or cultural fix by turning on the television, and do their shopping as well as their work on the internet, why live in a city?

A counter-argument:

Land is finite, population is still expanding and the motor car’s dominance may not last much longer. With global warming and no economic alternative to scarce petrol, it may not be feasible to go on living 20km away from everything – school, work, babysitter, Starbucks.

And finally, a resolution:

Looking to the future, William Mitchell, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that the next urban age will be characterised by "the new, network-mediated metropolis of the digital electronic era". He believes that 21st-century cities will be "e-topias" – places where people live and work in the same building, lead busy local lives in pedestrian-scale neighbourhoods and strong communities, but also gather virtually in electronic meeting-places and link themselves up to enable decentralised production.

The Economist