Thoughts on Urbanization in the 21st Century

Over the past few hundred years one of the safest bets when making predictions for the future has been that human populations will continue to shift from rural areas to new metropolitan centers. Since the Industrial Revolution of the West during the 19^th Century, the number of people needed in agriculture has decreased while more jobs have emerged in cities. But the opportunities that drew people to London and New York 200 years ago are not necessarily the reasons drawing people to live in cities today. With technological advancements in the areas of transportation and communications, people can theoretically work from anywhere to anywhere. Even still, as of 2007 more than half of the world’s population lives in cities and the process of urbanization shows no signs of slowing down.

The spectrum of opinions about what urbanization means for the future of the world is wide ranging from those who see it as positive change to those who would have people believe that it is the beginning of the apocalypse. I want to briefly examine the opinions of two individuals on this subject before giving my own opinion.

One of the gloomiest predictions about urbanization I came across was that of James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere. Kunstler believes that the rapid pace of urbanization will eventually slow and even decrease. He argues that once the world runs out of oil people are going to have to return to farming for themselves in order to survive. Kunstler believes that this will then lead to the disappearance of smaller cities while larger cities shrink to a smaller core, turning the outer limits and suburbs into slums.

On the other hand, Edward Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard believes that urbanization is an enormously beneficial process. He argues that cities offer many individuals a chance in life that they wouldn’t get in a rural setting.  Glaesar states, “Cities remain important because they create the intellectual connections that forge human capital and spur innovation.” He argues that metropolitan areas offer a place for people to come together, collaborate, and be more economically productive.

Overall I would have to agree a lot more with Glaeser than with Kunstler. Many people want to argue that cities are major agents of pollution. I disagree and would argue that living in a city is actually the greener way to live. In a city you have people sharing more of the same resources than you do in rural settings. People can use greener ways of transportation such as walking, bicycling, and public transportation because distances between Point A and Point B are much closer.

Kunstler does make a valid point, however, when he says that fossil fuels are not going to be able to support our way of living forever. There is only so much oil out there and nobody in authority really wants to talk about how much time we have left before we run out. Whether that will happen in the next 50 years or 200, no one can be certain but either way an alternate source of energy will need to be found. But while Kunstler suggests that such alternate energy sources will not be able to meet the needs to power urban areas making cities less viable, I disagree. I think that people will be able to come up with solutions for better sources of energy as well as other challenges posed by the future when they are living in close proximity among one another and able to collaborate easily—probably in cities.