The new look at cities has been promoted by the pandemic. Retail was already crashing; workforces are becoming more agile, rather than more mobile. Gridlock was already killing the roads, and the future of work/life for coming generations is up in the air without a parachute. Middle class wealth has been largely obliterated by costs and ever-changing constant economic problems. The time for change is long overdue.
A potted history of cities and why they exist
Cities and towns were originally fortified places to shelter during the turgid millennia of constant wars. Those who couldn’t live inside built close by. They were also centres of trade, often on trade routes like the Silk Road, harbours, and river crossings. Until the 1800s that was pretty much the story.
The story of cities is also a story of prices. The cost of living in a city is always higher. Population density drives costs. People moved to cities to find work. During the early industrial revolution in Britain, populations were packed in to the point where two families would share a room, the “walls” being marked in chalk on the floor. Now, overpriced pigeon coops and luxurious cupboards and converted hallways with huge price tags are the story.
The cost viability and safety of living in cities have always been issues. Cities can be very costly and very dangerous places to live. In the past, plagues started in cities. The equation “more people = more crime” hasn’t changed much, either.
Cities are very high maintenance. Even a place like Flint, Michigan, right in the American heartland, has had incredible trouble getting clean water. Just maintaining infrastructure, cobbled together using various generations of technologies, is expensive. Bigger populations have added to the cost.
The old models for cities are well past expiry date. Attempts to reduce the problems have been stumbling along for decades. Less noise, less traffic, less pollution, you name it; all these targets are in the ongoing but uncoordinated efforts to keep cities functional. Pollution is horrendous, and lethal, thanks to decades of truly criminal negligence. (Fines for polluting people to death? Forget it. Send them personally broke, and there won’t be any pollution.)
The pandemic has emphasized the message of obsolescence in so many ways. The big hits were first in the cities. Just coping was a major issue for major cities around the world. The new ways of coping and creating safe spaces for work and business worked; the old ways didn’t. The lockdowns worked; the old ways of doing business just spread the grief.
Reinventing cities in a nearby dangerous future
If you’ve noticed things have changed a bit since the Bronze Age, you’re not alone. Commerce is now largely online. So is work, and so they should be. The cost bases are much better. Nobody needs huge buildings full of people trapped for 8 hours a day anymore. The technologies which supported the old urban environments have gone. An actual “centre of commerce” is now much more likely to be a Cloud server than a city.
The new ways work. You can do multiple income-earning jobs online without the masochism of commuting. People can click and meet anywhere, anytime. You don’t have to risk your life travelling through a crime-infested war zone to get things. You can do all of these things much cheaper.
…Which leads to a much-neglected part of future history. Forget “dystopia”. The world has quite enough dystopia, thanks for asking, and it just doesn’t work. It’s expensive, it’s inefficient, and it simply can’t support people.
The new dystopia, oddly, is a schematic:
• What are the next generations going to be doing to survive? The old work/career models can’t continue. There’s no need for them. The “college solves everything” approach is unrealistic when people can’t afford college and you need millions of people with high-end skills.
• The likely scenario is that people will have stop/start working lives. Not “careers” as they are now. Not stable incomes. Getting a mortgage when you get a few months’ work per year isn’t very likely. Keeping a roof over your head could be the all-consuming issue for these generations. So even things as basic as homeownership and renting, the staples of city economies, are in the blender.
• Technologies inevitably create exponential diversification of human activities. There are more than likely thousands of new roles people can fill, but how viable are these people in their own lives? You can assume that the primitive El Cheapo pay scales and skinflint accommodation costs will continue. Life won’t be easy for most people, any more than it has been for the last 4000 years or so.
• In fact, life could be near-impossible and very ugly, if the old city/work/life/cost cycles continue. (It’s already murderous in terms of income, costs, etc.) Hordes of technologically advanced serfs plowing the fields of cyberspace are still serfs, and the economics of serfdom are godawful. Poverty is humanity’s oldest self-inflicted enemy. Prosperity brings change; failure brings stagnation and economic degeneracy, such as we have now.
• Existing city spaces are extremely dangerous to health and given current levels of irresponsibility, are likely to get worse. Pollution alone is doing as much damage as many wars. This problem won’t go away unless it’s addressed, and future generations will carry the costs, human and financial, until that’s done.
• Cities are partly to blame for the sheer mediocrity of human existence as it now is and is trying to be in the future. They imprison people in slow-moving, slow-thinking economic structures and strictures. Change is slow, because in cities so much more obsolescence needs to be upgraded or simply removed. A lot of income goes on absolute basics. Reinventing cities may be the only way to survive.
A solution? Maybe it’s easier than it looks.
Cities are to some extent inevitable. They’re social phenomena, too. People mix and mingle, and they need places to do that. Some services need physical bases. Social management, (sometimes called government for no obvious reason), needs a space to operate and interface with society. Woodstock proved you can have huge numbers of people in one place without a lot of infrastructures, but wow do you need the plumbing.
So what are the options?
1. Reinvent city spaces as purely functional things, not “buildings for the sake of buildings”.
2. “Suburbs in the sky” can be good, sizeable spaces in much lower densities with open spaces built in, a higher quality of life than ever with a much smaller footprint.
3. Create vertical space to reduce population densities. This is extremely easy, and the quality of life goes up instantly.
4. Manage education, housing, and accommodation costs to ensure the viability of future generations. (The old ways are about to drop dead any minute, anyway.)
5. Rip out the old deadweight set-in-stone infrastructure and make it a lot easier to manage. New materials, modular infrastructure so you can rip it out and replace as required will save billions a year.
6. Don’t plan for huge numbers of people in one place, and the people will spread out.
7. Eliminate traffic. You should be able to travel at a microscopic fraction of the cost of the old four-wheeled liability.
8. Turn freight into a high-efficiency distribution network with regional distribution.
9. Redesign roofs to turn urban areas into gigantic catchments with simple water collection, pumps, and molecular filtering systems. It’s easy.
10. Robotic building means you can create any kind of purpose-built building anywhere. Just don’t clutter the place.
11. Stop the sprawl with better use of space, and allow the environment to recover. Most of the old stuff needs to come down anyway, so redevelop those places, rather than simply continue to chew up limited space.
12. Stop mentally living in some damn cliché-saturated sitcom environment. The Flintstones did it; you don’t have to be the Flintstones. The Bundys did it on Married With Children, and their goal, not surprisingly, was to stop living like that. That lifestyle must go, soon.
13. Efficient spaces are easier to manage during crises like pandemics, earthquakes, wars, etc. The clumsy combinations of multi-generational old tech which operates cities must be broken up and replaced with “survival-based” structures which don’t fall to bits. Like the internet, they must be able to keep functioning, no matter what the situation.
The future is what you make it. It can be nothing else. Do nothing, allow the cities to rot, and the deadweight of the past will bury generations to come.
