Cities

These cities will be large enough for novelty and economies of scale, and make it easy to find housing, work, communities, services and activities.  They will be rewarding places to grow up in, raise families, and grow old, in time.

For the first time in our history, most of humanity now lives in cities.  However our large cities are becoming sprawling, unrecognisable and unliveable megacities.  Overcrowding creates difficult social and economic pressures.  Too many of us are competing with one another for limited space, housing, opportunities, infrastructure and services.

Complex pressures are pushing people to crowd into megacities.  Many are driven by limited work options.  Another draw is the attraction of living in a ‘superstar city’.  Such promises are not usually fulfilled.  This is obvious looking at the vast cities growing outside the rich world, where most of humanity is increasingly living – but also true in wealthier countries as well.

Rich megacities try to fix their own problems, but the solutions are expensive and temporary. They compete to attract scarce investments and jobs, but this is not a sustainable future.  Any improvements to housing or transport attract more people, soon overwhelming them.  Even ‘successful’ cities have high costs of living, time poor inhabitants and limited options.

Cities should really be cheap and easy to live in, which is almost counterintuitive to us now. This presents a puzzle.  We compete with one another to live in cities, but something has limited our ability to create housing and employment, to generate a kind of artificial scarcity.  Population growth alone does not explain why we overcrowd into the same megacities.

One underlying problem is our transport infrastructure, which is expensive to build and scale.  We increasingly move to where transport exists, rather than building more where we need it.  Technology which makes it easier and cheaper to move within, across and between cities would quickly reduce some of the economic pressures forcing us to compete for housing.

Reducing the costs of living would also radically change which types of jobs are sustainable.  Vital labour intensive work like childcare, teaching and nursing is often not paid well enough.  If living costs drop, such livelihoods are far more viable, with knock on benefits for everyone.  Our unemployment crisis is actually a housing crisis, which is itself actually a transport crisis.

For a calmer future, we need smaller cities which are economically and socially viable, as well as ecologically sustainable.  Our overheating megacities create artificially high returns on investment, as land values skyrocket.  Smaller cities with lower costs of living would reduce the pressure on all other parts of the economy to make harmful short-term profits.