Cities
After spending thousands of years living mostly in small settlements, humans
have entered an urban stage of evolution. That concentration of people gives
rise to some of the world's greatest problems, such as air and water pollution,
poverty-stricken slums and epidemics of violence and illness. In poor countries,
images of attractive, well-dressed urban people whose main job appears to be
enjoyment and adventure create immediate dissatisfaction with rural life. The
happy and adapted poor become the dissatisfied and disenfranchised who abandon
traditional ways of life for city jobs that are often transient, demeaning and
fail to deliver the wealth necessary to achieve the glamorous movie-magazine
lifestyle. Humans continue to have basic needs – shelter, water, food, safety
and sexual privileges.
In less than a human lifespan, the face of Earth has
been transformed. In 1950, only 29% of people lived in cities. Today that figure
is 50.5% and is expected to reach 70% by 2050. At the end of the 20th century,
humans lived in enlarging cities with populations in the millions; their carbon
dioxide emissions are greater than the capacity of all the world’s forests to
process the gas. Cities consumed two-thirds of the total energy used and emitted
more than 70% of the energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. City states are
depleting 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. Climate changes threaten agriculture, as we know it.
William Rees, an economist at the University of British Columbia takes
and 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 has measured the ecological footprint of cities and his
results are not encouraging. One city person requires at least five square
hectares of high-quality land to support him or her. The 500,000 people living
in the city of Vancouver on 11,400 hectares of land actually require the output
of 2.3 million hectares of land. The real capital is not money but air,
water, food and other resources.
Some scientists have imagined major disruptions
of city-states with civil disobedience and armed conflicts arising from the
competition for scarce resources. Cities attract impoverished people
seeking employment and broadcast economic inequality without an easy solution.
Poverty is concentrated in city slums, informal settlement, with substandard
housing and squalor. Slums lack sanitation, clean water, electricity, fire
control, hospitals and schools. Law enforcement is minimal and often corrupt.
Crime flourishes. According to UN-Habitat, around 33% of the urban population in
the developing world in lived in slums; the highest concentrations
existing in cites in Sub-Saharan Africa (61.7%), South Asia (35%), Southeast
Asia (31%), East Asia (28.2%), West Asia (24.6%), Oceania (24.1%), Latin America
and the Caribbean (23.5%), and North Africa (13.3%). Among individual countries,
the proportion of urban residents living in slum areas in 2009 was highest in
the Central African Republic (95.9%). Between 1990 and 2010 the percentage of
people living in slums dropped, even as the total urban population increased.
The world's largest slum city is in Mexico City.
Livability Ranking
The latest findings of The Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Livability
Ranking of 140 cities (2016) show that livability has deteriorated in 29 of the
140 cities (20 per cent) surveyed over the last 12 months. Melbourne in
Australia remains the most livable of the 140 cities surveyed, very closely
followed by the Austrian capital, Vienna by 0.1 percentage points.
Canada’s Vancouver and Toronto are just 0.2 and 0.3 percentage points below
respectively. Another Canadian city, Calgary, shares joint fifth place with
Adelaide in Australia. In 2016 increasing instability across the world caused
volatility in the scores of many cities. Sydney, for example, has fallen by four
places owing to a heightened perceived threat of terrorism. This has allowed
Hamburg in Germany to move up to tenth place, although other German cities, such
as Frankfurt and Berlin, have experienced declines in stability. Over the past
six months 16 cities of the 140 surveyed have experienced changes in scores.
This rises to 35 cities, or 25% of the total number surveyed, when looking at
changes over the past year. Of these changes, the majority have been negative
(29 in the past 12 months), reflecting deteriorating stability as cities around
the world face heightened threats of terrorism or unrest. Violent acts of
terrorism have been reported in many countries, including Turkey, Australia,
Bangladesh, Pakistan, France, Belgium and the US. The frequency and spread of
terrorist attacks have become even more prominent in the past year. Terrorism
has also been compounded by unrest and, in more extreme cases, civil war in some
countries. Libya, Syria, Iraq and Ukraine remain the subject of high-profile
armed conflicts, while a number of other countries, such as Nigeria, continue to
battle insurgent groups. Meanwhile even relatively stable countries such as the
US have seen mounting civil unrest linked to the Black Lives Matter movement,
which has scrutinized the large number of deaths of black people while in police
custody.
Sane City Policy
A sane, rational city-state would limit its growth; limit its pollution and
progress toward food, water and air sustainability. If all long-distance
supplies were blocked could the citizens of a city continue to live comfortable,
healthy lives? One criterion of a sane city would be self-sufficiency. To
make cities more livable and less polluted, car use would be reduced to less
than half of current levels. Fossil fuel vehicles would be replaced by eclectic
and hydrogen fuels cell vehicles. Car-free zones would restore healthier living
conditions for many citizens. The need to transport food and goods would be
reduced by increased local production. The transportation of goods would 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 in 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 of the food. Cities, like cancers, have grown unchecked, metastasized and
destroyed much of the support system they used to enjoy.
Beyond the growing problems within countries, the world has also seen
increased diplomatic tensions between countries, weighing on stability. Russia’s
posturing in Ukraine and the Middle East has been well reported, but China has
also been diplomatically more aggressive in the South China Sea, and tensions
remain between India and Pakistan over the disputed Kashmir region. The US,
always paranoid and convinced they must control the world to remains safe, is
committed to military aggressions in other countries and renewing their nuclear
weapons. As a result, it is not surprising that declining stability scores have
been felt around the world.
