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Cities: How crowded life is changing us

2013-05-17 13:09:56

More than half the world s population are concentrated in urban areas, and this

is having an effect not just culturally, but biologically too. And advances in

technology are adding an entirely new dimension to people s lives.

Tokyo at night

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Future cityscape

Bruce Sterling: The city in 2050

Smart cites: Sustainable solutions for urban living

How to make our cities smarter

Why city transport is set to become 'smarter'

How city transport can be smarter

Humanity now even has the ability to create new islands (Copyright: AFP)

Welcome to the age of modern man

How will our future cities look?

Imagine a city of the future. Do you see clean streets, flying cars and robots

doing all the work? Or something less rosy?

Cities cover just 3% of the planet's land surface, but are already home to more

than half of its people. That means cities are bringing people into ever

greater contact, where collectively they act as a giant physical, biological

and cultural force. Transport links and communication between cities, from

superhighways to express trains and planes, allow businesses to operate

planet-wide, shrinking the human world and making the global local.

The great homogenisation of the Anthropocene includes human culture and

lifestyle as much as any effect on the natural ecosystem. And cities are the

biggest expression of that. They truly are universal. I feel at home in cities

around the world precisely because they essentially provide the same

experience. Some are more violent, or more sleepy, or more wealthy, but the

urban environment is at its heart the same. There is not the vast diversity of

landscape and experience that exists across the natural world.

The sheer concentration of people attracted by the urban lifestyle means that

cosmopolitan cities like New York are host to people speaking more than 800

different languages thought to be the highest language density in the world.

In London, less than half of the population is made of white Britons down

from 58% a decade ago. Meanwhile, languages around the world are declining at a

faster rate than ever one of the 7,000 global tongues dies every two weeks.

It is having an effect not just culturally, but biologically: urban melting

pots are genetically altering humans. The spread of genetic diversity can be

traced back to the invention of the bicycle, according to geneticist Steve

Jones, which encouraged the intermarriage of people between villages and towns.

But the urbanisation occurring now is generating unprecedented mixing. As a

result, humans are now more genetically similar than at any time in the last

100,000 years, Jones says.

The genetic and cultural melange does a lot to erode the barriers between

races, as well as leading to novel works of art, science and music that draw on

many perspectives. And the tight concentration of people in a city also leads

to other tolerances and practices, many of which are less common in other human

habitats (like the village) or in other species. For example, people in a

metropolis are generally freer to practice different religions or none, to be

openly gay, for women to work and to voluntarily limit their family size

despite or indeed because of access to greater resources.

Virtual revolution

Now that the technology exists for individuals to communicate instantly with

companies, government departments, to broadcast to millions or to specific

groups over the internet, the city has gained an entirely new dimension. This

virtual city of communities formed online, using social networks like Twitter

or Facebook, is incredibly powerful and not necessarily limited to the

geographical contours of the real city. Like-minded individuals can find each

other easily, gathering in online forums or through hashtags and comment

streams in the same way as special interest clubs and cafe movements coalesce

in the real city. Virtual applications make it easier to sift through a crowd

the Grindr app, for example, allows gay people to find other users of the app

in a public setting. Online clubs like the shopping network Groupon are

attempting to personalise trade exchanges and perhaps develop a proxy for the

relationship people might have with a neighbourhood store.

Those petitioning for social or political change can hold governments and

companies accountable in a manner never possible before. Instead of ploughing

through books of corporate ledgers in libraries, vast amounts of data are now

published online and can be searched and filtered in minutes with algorithms,

allowing journalists and other groups to discover corruption, tax evasion or

other information of public interest. Such information can be self-published in

seconds, where it is available for billions to see. In a few seconds, I can

compare hospital cancer survival rates in my area or nationally, I can look up

how much profit popular stores shift to offshore accounts to avoid taxation, or

read hundreds of reviews of a product I m thinking of buying.

The virtual and real cities are closely enmeshed. Information gathering and

community building can take place more easily online than in the vast cities of

the Anthropocene, where members of a group may live far from each other or be

unable to meet easily for momentum-building. But the discussions and real-world

changes these online gatherings initiate move easily to government chambers,

mainstream media outlets in television, radio and press, or onto the streets.

The Arab revolutions across Northern Africa and the Middle East since 2010 were

coordinated via the virtual city of Twitter, Facebook, SMS messaging and other

apps, but they took place on the streets and squares of the real cities,

uniting flesh-and-blood individuals who had united online using computers and

smartphones. Starbucks was compelled by a Twitter campaign to pay billions of

pounds of tax to the UK government after its perfectly legal offshore tax

evasion was revealed in 2012.

So the virtual city is as global as it is local. I can get hourly updates on

air-pollution levels in my neighbourhood or buy a new battery for my phone from

Korea. People from across the world can gather online to share ideas, pressure

for change, innovate, spread their artistic talents or make friends. The

virtual city provides a way of shrinking and filtering the real megacity,

saving time and energy on real journeys across complicated spaces, of accessing

multiple conversations with relative anonymity, and of individually helping

steer humanity through collaborative creativity and problem solving. It

enhances but doesn t replace the real city with its face-to-face social cues,

physical exchanges and wealth of information humans use to make judgements

about trustworthiness and other value-laden decisions.

The virtual city does have a more problematic side, however. Never has there

been so much information about so much of our lives in such an accessible form.

In the course of a day, the average person in a Western city is said to be

exposed to as much data as someone in the 15th century would encounter in their

entire life. The digital birth of a baby now precedes the analogue version by

an average of 3 months, as parents post sonogram images on Facebook and

groups, individuals and corporations can access data about us and use it for

their own purposes.

This erosion of individual privacy can be benign or malevolent, but it is

already a part of life in the Anthropocene. Customer data collected by the US

supermarket Target allows it to identify with a high degree of accuracy which

shoppers have recently conceived and when their due date is. The store uses

this information to target such women for advertising of its pregnancy and baby

products in a timely fashion, even if she has not yet told anyone else.

Sinister? Maybe. What about police officers identifying householders as

marijuana growers by analysing energy use data? Or neighbours targeting

individuals for cyber or physical bullying because of information they discover

online? We re all generating data, every time we make an ATM transactions or

log onto a website. In the Anthropocene, we will have to decide who owns our

data and whether it can be shared.