Urbanism

The case for increased urbanism

The human race is expanding, roughly at 2.37 people per second. Needless to say, all these new people require feeding, clothing and many expect to be equipped with all the amenities that consumerist society will say that they deserve. However, the impact of this on the planet is, as the media tells us nearly every day, devastating. More and more of the planet’s virgin territory is being given over to the farmer’s plough; forests are devastated to make way for crops to feed the animals that we slaughter for food and the oceans are being stripped of biodiversity as the result of intensive fishing disrupting the life cycle. Species disappear every day as a result of our drive to survive, while we cut ourselves off from the planet in our steel and concrete cities. Green gives way to silver and grey.

This snapshot is not the whole picture of our crime against the planet. As we cut down the forests and strip the earth and oceans we pollute on an unimaginable scale, and as we do so we slowly render the planet hostile to life.

So, what then is the remedy to this? Some have advocated a back to the land movement, where we shift from a individualistic life in vast cities, to a collectivist society focused on self sufficiency based around small communities. Yet surely with the amount of people on the earth this would increase out impact, if each person was a small plot of land with which to grow food. Furthermore, this would also require technological and societal change, people would have to abandon the western focus on the individual and return to a mindset more familiar in the east, where the individual is less important than the collective. The reason for this is that if we continued with the attitude whereby personal gain is applauded, then we would in time return to the old way of things, the carelessness for how our actions are affecting others. Technologically speaking we would also require bioengineering as only some of the planet is conducive to growing certain crops and to ensure that famine would not be the very real danger it would be if we all grew our own food.

A reformed view of city living then, perhaps has the answer. If we were to move farming away from the earth itself and transferred it to large buildings, then we would avoid the need to destroy large areas just to feed ourselves. By building up, rather than out, we would be able to avoid the negative impact of urbanisation upon the planet, while allowing ourselves greater personal space within these structures, overcoming the social minuses that people dislike about living in apartments. We would, of course, have to ensure that these cities would have less emissions that our current society, yet the technology to enable us to shed our reliance on fossil fuels is already here. Greening these cities, i.e by intertwining plant life with architecture would mean that each of us feels closer to nature, and perhaps would even increase our happiness.

 

Copyright Daniel Waterfield 2008.