Birth of a New Earth by Adrian Parr

Author:Adrian Parr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

UNIFORM REMOVAL OF URBAN LIFE

Prior to industrialization the majority of the human population lived in rural areas, relying on hunting, fishing, and agriculture to survive. In 1800 the urban population was a mere 2 percent of the global population.8 Today, more than half of humanity lives in towns or cities, with the global urban population projected to increase to 2.5 billion by 2050.9

The world has urbanized rapidly since industrialization, and with it has come slum growth and mounting housing, transportation, infrastructure, and energy challenges. I examined the issue slum growth poses for environmentalism and development in the previous chapter. Here I want to focus on the importance urban living has for the majority of people on earth. Urban environments are the primary human habitat and will become home to many more people in years to come. In short, the human species is principally urban.

When considering what constitutes an urban population, there are a variety of measures that are used, such as population density, the size of a city, land-use patterns, and travel time to a large urban center.10 The U.S. Census Bureau defines an urban population as an incorporated place with a minimum of twenty-five hundred residents.11 The European Union (EU) adopts a regional approach in its classification of urban and rural populations, preferring to describe areas as predominantly rural, intermediate, or urban. Using this typology, a predominantly urban population is one where the “rural population in rural grid cells accounts for less than 20% of the total population.”12 If at least 50 percent of the population lives in an urban center, the EU describes this as a city. A town or suburb is one where “less than 50% lives in an urban center but more than 50% of the population lives in an urban cluster.”13 The Indian census classifies an urban population as one with a minimum population of fifty thousand, where 75 percent of males are not engaged in agricultural work, with a density of at least four hundred people per square kilometer.14 The urban population continues to grow as the global population increases and more people migrate to cities from conflict zones and in search of economic opportunities.

Cities, however, are not only a physical space that can be measured according to their size, volume, and shape.15 Edward Glaeser has characterized cities as the “absence of physical space between people and companies. They are proximity, density, closeness. They enable us to work and play together, and their success depends on the demand for physical connection.”16 Cities provide a platform for human interaction and a place to reap the benefits of enhanced social relations. Living in close proximity can bring enormous benefits, such as conserving important resources and energy along with sharing a variety of social and cultural services providing access to health, education, entertainment, and transportation.

Moving against the grain of history and with an unapologetic nod to the highly acclaimed book The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, Leo Hollis has rejected the idea that cities are bad for people.

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