• In developed regions like North America and Europe, the rural push and urban pull are different but just as compelling. Lou Reed sings, “When you’re growing up in a small town / You know you’ll grow down in a small town./ There’s only one good use for a small town: / You hate it, and you know you’ll have to leave.” In America’s northern high plains, cities like Fargo, Bismarck, and Grand Forks are thriving, but the rest of the vast grasslands is emptying, leaving ghost towns and decaying farmhouses. National Geographic describes “a sense of things ebbing, of churches being abandoned, schools shutting down, towns becoming ruins.” Some megafauna—moose and mountain lions—are coming back. The whole high-plains region from eastern Montana to northern Texas is headed toward becoming the “buffalo commons” that environmentalists long for.
In developed countries like the United States the migration is from boring, lonely, and hard to exciting, busy, and pleasant—toward coasts, sun, and densely citified regions called megapolitan areas, such as the one encompassing everything on the eastern seaboard from Boston to Richmond, Virginia, or the one I live in, reaching from San Francisco to Reno, Nevada—“from sea to ski.” All over the developed world, once-thriving remote fishing villages are emptying. The fishing, alas, carries on more intensely than ever, but now in urban-based factory ships. When Communism collapsed, the formerly subsidized small towns of central Russia and Eastern Europe instantly lost their young people and their future.
But the main event is not in Europe or North America. The United States has 49 cities with populations over a million; China has 160. Since 1950 in China, 300 million people have moved to the cities, and another 300 million are expected in the next few decades. That’s nearly half of China’s total population of 1.3 billion on the move. It is typical of the developing world.
According to some historians, “Civilization is what happens in cities.” (Civilization and city are in the same Latinate word group, along with civil, civics, citizen, etc.) I live in California, but I avidly read the New Yorker and the New York Times, just as the French read Paris Match and the English read the London newspapers. You can characterize any nation by its largest city, and study the progress of any era by examining the largest cities of its time. Most of the people I know think of the world in terms of London, New York, Paris, Berlin—the great Western metropolises. Those were indeed the largest cities a hundred years ago. In 1900 London had a population of 6.5 million; New York had 4.2 million; followed by Paris, Berlin, Chicago, Vienna, Tokyo, Saint Petersburg, Manchester, and Philadelphia. Tokyo is the only surprise in that top-ten list.
Fifty years later, in 1950, the leading ten cities had doubled in size, and Shanghai, Buenos Aires, and Calcutta had joined the list. Fifty years after that, in 2003, the top ten cities had further tripled in size, but that was the least of their changes. The leaders now were Tokyo with 35 million, Mexico City with 19 million, New York still in the game with 18 million, São Paulo with 18 million, Mumbai with 17 million, Delhi with 14 million, Calcutta with 13 million, Buenos Aires with 13 million, Shanghai with 13 million, and Jakarta with 12 million. Those big numbers are big events. By 2015, according to United Nations predictions, the top-ten roster will be joined by Dhaka, in Bangladesh, and Lagos, in Nigeria; and coming on fast will be Karachi, Cairo, Manila, Istanbul, Lima, Tehran, and Beijing.
The trend is pretty clear. The “rise of the West” is over. The world looks the way it did a thousand years ago, when the ten largest cities were Córdoba, in Spain; Kaifeng, in China; Constantinople; Angkor, in Cambodia; Kyoto; Cairo; Baghdad; Nishapur, in Iran; Al-Hasa, in Saudi Arabia; and Patan, in India. As Swedish statistician Hans Rosling says, “The world will be normal again; it will be an Asian world, as it always was except for these last thousand years. They are working like hell to make that happen, whereas we are consuming like hell.”
• It may be distracting, though, to focus just on the world’s twenty-four megacities—those with a population over 10 million. The real action is in what the United Nations calls small cities (fewer than 500,000 inhabitants; home to half of the world’s city dwellers) and intermediate cities (1 million to 5 million, where 22 percent of urbanites live). A UN report points out: “They are often the first places where the social urban transformation of families and individuals occurs; by offering economic linkages between rural and urban environments, they can provide a ‘first step’ out of poverty for impoverished rural populations and a gateway to opportunities in larger cities.”
The Marxist scholar Mike Davis gives perspective on the phenomenon in his 2006 book, Planet of Slums:In Africa . . . the supernova-like growth of a few giant cities like Lagos (from 300,000 in 1950 to 10 million today) has been matched by the transformation of several dozen small towns and oases like Ouagadougou, Nouakchott, Douala, Antananarivo and Bamako into cities larger than San Francisco or Manchester. In Latin America, where primary cities long monopolized growth, secondary cities like Tijuana, Curitiba, Temuco, Salvador and Belém are now booming.
In other words, more and more news will be coming from cities most people in the West have never heard of. Developing countries are urbanizing at a rate and volume qualitatively different from what happened in Europe and North America—three times faster and nine times bigger. Beyond our horizon of attention, the world is being transformed.
• Of all human organizations, cities are the longest-lived. The oldest surviving corporations, Stora Enso in Sweden and the Sumitomo Group in Japan, are about 700 and 400 years old, respectively. The oldest universities, in Bologna and Paris, have lasted only 1,000 years so far. The oldest living mainstream religions, Hinduism and Judaism, date back about 3,500 years. But the town of Jericho has been continuously occupied for 10,500 years. Its neighbor Jerusalem has been an important city for 5,000 years, even though it was conquered or destroyed thirty-six times and endured eleven conversions from one religion to another. Many cities die or decline to irrelevance, but some thrive for millennia.
I suspect that one cause of their durability is that cities are the most constantly changing of organizations. In Europe they consume 2 to 3 percent per year of their material fabric (buildings, roads, and other construction) through demolition and rebuilding. Effectively, a whole new city takes shape every fifty years. In the United States and the developing world, the turnover is even faster. Yet despite all the physical metamorphosis, something about a city remains deeply constant. Some combination of geography, economics, and cultural continuity ensures that even a city destroyed by war (Warsaw, Tokyo) or fire (London, San Francisco) will often be rebuilt and retain its identity.
• Cities are horrendously expensive, both environmentally and economically, but they more than earn their keep. “Cities make countries rich. Countries that are highly urbanized have higher incomes, more stable economies, stronger institutions. They are better able to withstand the volatility of the global economy than those with less urbanized populations.” So notes the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), which was impelled to its city-boosting position by revelations in the worldwide data it has been gathering since 1978.
The reversal of opinion about fast-growing cities—from bad news to good news—began with The Challenge of Slums, a 2003 UN-HABITAT report. The book’s reluctant optimism came from its groundbreaking fieldwork—thirty-seven case studies in slums worldwide. Instead of just compiling numbers and filtering them through remotely conceived theories, the researchers hung out in the slums, talking to people. They came back with an unexpected observation: “Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city.”
In 2007 the United Nations Population Fund gave that year’s report the upbeat title Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth. The lead author, Canadian demographer George Martine, wrote, “Cities
concentrate poverty, but they also represent the best hope of escaping it.” He declared in a talk that “80 to 90 percent of GNP growth occurs in cities” and that “the half of the world’s population living in cities occupies only 2.8 percent of the world’s land area.” He went on to say, “In cities, concentration and density make it easier to provide social services. Education, health, sanitation, water, electrical power—everything is so much easier and cheaper on a per capita basis.”
Cities have always benefited from what are called “economies of agglomeration”—density accelerates economic activity—and lately they have gotten a further boost from globalization. Telecommunications and markets bypass national borders ever more easily. In some developing countries where the national government has been discredited, everybody just works around it. Aid organizations go straight to the cities, where the need is; and multinational corporations go straight to where the workers and emerging markets are, in the cities.
“The world’s forty largest megaregions, which are home to some 18 percent of the world’s population,” writes urban theorist Richard Florida, “produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations.” Whereas nations are defined by their boundaries, cities are densely connected nodes, making every city a world city to some degree, with the accompanying multipliers of cultural diversity, financial flow, and population flow. In the vast worldwide migration toward jobs, the poor hardly limit their travels to cities in their own countries. Also there is coming to be a large population of global urbanists who live at large in multiple cities. (In airports, they would say.) These peripatetics include hundreds of thousands of professionals and many of the world’s wealthy—there are over 10 million millionaires worldwide. As cities intensified globalization, and globalization enriched cities, world trade grew elevenfold between 1980 and 2004—from $580 billion to over $6 trillion. (That growth rate hit a wall in 2008 with the world financial crisis.) Growing affluence has brought a return of the city-state in some places. The independent power of a Singapore or Dubai rivals that of ancient Athens or fifteenth-century Venice.
• A new theory is upsetting our idea of what cities are and can become. Through a phenomenon known as Kleiber’s law, organisms become more metabolically efficient as they scale up—from shrew to elephant, say. Cities do the same. “One of the basic principles of cities is that it’s more efficient to bring people together,” says physicist Geoffrey West. “You need a little bit less of everything per person. It’s the exact same way in biology. As animals get bigger, they require less energy to support each unit of tissue.” But organisms move more slowly as they increase in size (compare a shrew’s whirring heart rate to the stately thump of an elephant’s heart), whereas cities speed up as they get bigger.
That was the news in a landmark paper, “Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities,” which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2007; Geoffrey West was a coauthor. Looking at everything from patents to personal income to electrical cable length in a variety of cities, the researchers found that not only do cities increase their creativity with increasing size, but the relation is “superlinear”: when a city doubles in size, it more than doubles its rate of innovation. A summary of the paper in the Santa Fe Institute Bulletin reported thatIndividual productivity rises (15% per person when the city doubles) as people get busier. Average walking speeds increase. Businesses, public spaces, nightclubs, and public squares consume more electricity. The city draws in more inventors, artists, researchers, and financiers. Wealth increases, as does the cost of housing.
City growth creates problems, and then city innovation speeds up to solve them. “Not only does the pace of life increase with city size,” the authors wrote, “but so also must the rate at which new major adaptations and innovations need to be introduced to sustain the city.”
The paper concluded, “We have shown that growth driven by innovation implies, in principle, no limit to the size of a city, providing a quantitative argument against classical ideas in urban economics.” In other words, West told me, “Cities can go on growing forever. Look at the invention of the steam engine, the car, the digital revolution. What these advances all have in common is that they allowed cities to continue growing.” If cities are concentrators of efficiency and innovation, an article about the scaling paper in Conservation magazine surmised, then, “the secret to creating a more environmentally sustainable society is making our cities bigger. We need more metropolises.” (I am a contributing editor to Conservation.)
In Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000), he quotes William Blake—“Without Contraries is no progression”—and ventures that Blake came to that view from his immersion in London. “Wherever you go in the city,” Ackroyd observes, “you are continually being assaulted by difference, and it could be surmised that the city is simply made up of contrasts; it is the sum of its differences.” What drives a city’s innovation engine, then—and thus its wealth engine—is its multitude of contrasts. The more and greater the contrasts, and the more they are marbled together, the better. The most productive city is one with many cultures, many languages, many neighborhoods, and more kinds of urban experience available than any citizen can keep track of. In this formulation, it is the throwing together of great wealth and great poverty in the urban stew that is part of the cure for poverty.
The common theory of the origin of cities states that they resulted from the invention of agriculture: Surplus food freed people to become specialists. You can’t have full-time cobblers, blacksmiths, and bureaucrats, the theory goes, without farms to feed them. Jane Jacobs upended that supposition in The Economy of Cities (1969). “Rural economies, including agricultural work,” she wrote, “are directly built upon city economies and city work.” It was so in the beginning, she argued, and continues to this day. Most farming innovations, for example, are city-based. When Rome collapsed, European agriculture collapsed. When crop rotation was reinvented in the twelfth century, it began around European cities and took two centuries to reach remote farms. In the eighteenth century, the revolutionary use of fodder crops like alfalfa to fix nitrogen in the soil was developed first in city gardens. American agriculture soared in the 1920s when hybrid corn was invented, not on a farm but in a New Haven, Connecticut, laboratory.
If agriculture didn’t create cities, what did? Jane Jacobs thought it was trade. My guess, based on the “constant battles” view of history, is defense. The first urban invention, I’ll bet, was a defendable wall, followed by rectangular buildings that allowed close packing of maximum residents within a minimum amount of wall. (Pastoral and hunter-gatherer buildings—yurts, tipis, hogans, wikiups, bomas, and the like—are round.) Just like the most ancient town dwellers of Mesopotamia, the agricultural Pueblo tribes of the American Southwest lived in dense fortresses several stories high, with no openings in the outer walls. Entry was by retractable ladders. When defense against raids by nomadic Apaches and Navajos became irrelevant after the conquest by whites, the Pueblos all dispersed into scattered buildings (except where high-rise density is maintained partly for tourists, as at Taos and Acoma). “The earliest meaning of ‘town,’ said the urban scholar Lewis Mumford, “is an enclosed or fortified place.”
Agriculture, it appears, was an early invention by the dwellers of walled towns to allow their settlements to keep growing, as in Geoffrey West’s formulation. Today’s megacities rely on the same flow of innovation. A 2006 UN-HABITAT report proposed thatCities are engines of rural development. . . . Improved infrastructure between rural areas and cities increases rural productivity and enhances rural residents’ access to education, health care, markets, credit, information and other services. On the other hand, enhanced urban-rural linkages benefit cities through increased rural demand for urban goods and services and added value derived from agricultural produce.
Nothing saves a village like a good road to town and a good cellphone connection.
> When urban migration leaves fewer people on the land, the ones remaining can shift from subsistence farming on marginal land to more concentrated cash-crop agriculture on prime land. That’s better for the city, better for the locals, and better for natural systems in the area. Aquifers recover; forests recover. A study in Panama showed what happened when people abandoned slash-and-burn agriculture to move to town: “With people gone, secondary forest has regenerated. Crucially, if protected from hunters, nearly every bird and mammal species found in primary forest has also been found in secondary.” Fifty-five times more tropical rain forest is growing back each year than is being cut, according to a 2005 report on world forests from the UN: 38 million acres of primary forest is cut, but 2.1 billion acres of secondary forest is growing back on land that was once farmed, logged, or burned.
Yet another urban innovation is the environmentalist idea of protecting, preserving, and restoring natural systems. As societies become more urban, they become Greener in their sensibilities. As their cities become more globally oriented they pick up environmentalist ideas and practices—and demands—from abroad. All of that can, if encouraged, contribute to increasing protection for the countryside emptying of people and refilling with biodiversity.
Peasants who leave the land take rural skills and values to the city slums with them. Building their own shelter is what they’ve always done, at a minuscule fraction of the cost of city-provided housing. Collaborating with extended family and neighbors in close proximity is nothing new to them, and neither is doing without elaborate infrastructure. Those are all the abilities they need to build the most creative urban phenomenon of our time, the squatter cities—the teeming slums of the uninvited that house a billion people now, two billion soon.
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