Phil Redmond: Living in the city

Apr 11 2008 by Phil Redmond, Liverpool Daily Post

CITIES. 50% of the planet apparently now lives in them, yet over the Easter break, I spent two weeks in the UK without actually entering one.

At one point, I found myself in Mid-Wales driving on the sort of roads you assume car ad-makers create with computer graphics and wondering what life was really like before the industrial revolution and the great urban migration.

A migration that has inexorably led to over 80% of the UK population and 50% of the global population now classified as living in urban areas.

If the current trends toward city migration continues, it probably won’t be too long before there’ll only be half a dozen people in each country, out tending the corn and chickens. The rest of us will be rubbing against each other in our cities, the quality of life obviously depending, as it does today, upon whom you get to rub up against.

In fact, by 2030, the UN expects over 60% of the world’s population will be living in urban areas accounting for only 5% of the land mass. Those chicken farmers out in the countryside are going to have a lot of elbow room. However, while they will live in the wide open spaces, the city dwellers will, on today’s data, create up to 75% of green house gases.

If so, a tipping point may arrive when there will be just too many people in too small a space to survive.

From around 250-900 AD, the Mayan population in Central America was one of the most advanced in the world, then it just suddenly collapsed. Originally put down to war and pestilence, suspicion is now falling on nothing more than an infrastructure incapable of supporting its people.

Estimates of over 200 Mayans per sq km in 900AD is quite staggering, considering there are approximately 246 people per sq km in today’s computer-managed UK.

Despite its own level of comparative sophistication, too many people in too small a space may have simply led to a disintegrating social order under pressure from inadequate food, energy and water supplies. Er . . . does that sound a bit familiar?

While cities are now being looked upon as engines of economic growth, as clusters of intellectual potential in the so-called knowledge economy, as well as markets for consumption, someone, somewhere still has to tend those chickens. Recent reports of potential food shortages due to farmers switching from producing food to more profitable bio-fuel crops probably sent a shiver down the spines of Mayan watchers. No point having a sustainable fuel supply if everyone dies of malnutrition on the way to tank up?

With 2009 planned as Liverpool’s Year of the Environment, perhaps that should be less about recycling and switching off lights, but more about how we develop and manage more sustainable cities?