“I want to be where the people are.”
— Ariel, The Little Mermaid.
Over the years, I’ve heard countless people of all sorts of political stripes and movements suggest (sometimes in jest and sometimes decidedly not) that there are “too many people on Earth.” I’ve never cared for this position. I believe the human potential is, for the most part, squandered by this society. We have no idea what we are truly capable of because most of the world’s population isn’t freely participating in any sort of dignified way, and not just the world’s poorest — an unfathomable number of people across the socioeconomic strata are employed as so-called ‘inessential laborers’. One wonders, with so much to do, why is it that we pay people to do things for no useful reason?
The current crisis makes this ‘overpopulation’ claim even more discompassionate. We may be tempted to raise our finger and point to cleaner air during the midst of the quarantine, or cheer for the dolphins swimming through the empty canals of Venice — but we must make a more rigorous observation about these things. The population was never the problem. The daily operation of our civilization is, for the most part, what has been suffocating our ecosphere. If we can change the characteristics and priorities of that operation, there is no reason we cannot build a world for countless more to appreciate the beauty life on this Rare Earth has to offer.
“Illness strikes men when they are exposed to change.”
— Herodotus, The Histories
The Cosmopolitan Germ
It is worth noting that the threat of a plague has coincided with the birth and rise of civilization’s primary unit, The City. When prehistoric populations formed settlements — intermingling with domesticated animals, processing waste, and living in close proximity to one another — they began a microscopic practice of social immunology, the implicit goal of which is so-called herd immunity. In short, local populations passed germs around to each other over and over, gradually developing immunities that distant cultures had not. When those cultures clashed, it often spelled disaster. In the earliest accounts of history we have, Thucydides recounts in his description of the Peloponnesian War the Plague of Athens that killed nearly 100,000 Athenians and arguably brought the end of that city’s hegemony in the Greek Empire. An important observation that he made — the earliest known of its kind — was that “the sick and the dying were tended by the pitying care of those who had recovered, because they knew the course of the disease and were themselves free from apprehensions. For no one was ever attacked a second time, or not with a fatal result.”
As the distance becomes smaller between cultures, the risk of transmitting a disease from one locality to another (infecting those who have not had a chance to develop an immunity) rises dramatically. The germs introduced by Early European colonization of the Americas killed nearly the entire human population of the Western Hemisphere, reducing all but a few civilizations to the Stone Age hundreds of years before Europeans even had a chance to take that land by force. Few note that the residents of the Native American empires lived in vast cities no smaller than contemporary settlements elsewhere on the globe. A sober fact: there are twice as many people living in New York City’s metro area today than there were in the entire Incan Empire at the beginning of their first outbreak of smallpox.
Today, herd immunity is less effective for two reasons. First, the residents of those far off places are not the misfortunate subjects of devastating imperial conquests, they are our trade partners, relatives, and fellows. And second, our civilization is in continuous contact with itself. Even its furthest corners and most distant shores. I used to joke that when New York City sneezes in the morning, the world goes to bed sick that night. Not so funny now, but truer than ever. The current crisis will no doubt forever change how cities feel to live in. Unfortunately, disease and contagion are only a couple of many concerns about the city’s impact on the future.
The obstacles and opportunities presented by the urbanization of humanity is central to how I think about the future of our species, and how best to kindle it for generations to come. What I would like to do with this edition of Rare Earth is examine and define The Megacity — and related concerns — to provide context, as I plan to frequently revisit these over the course of my writing.
“Do you know how big the city of Seoul is?”
— Donald Trump, March 30th, 2020
What is a Megacity?
In order to answer this question, we must first know what we mean by ‘city’. Counting people is hard, and politically motivated. Most United States population information comes from our federal census, which by mandate of our constitution, is mostly concerned with where to draw lines between districts in order to appoint representatives. Naturally, the tendency to strategically redistrict to entrench incumbents has polluted our sense of boundaries. Population data elsewhere in the world is corrupted in similar ways. Nation states use demographic statistics to manipulate the public sentiment on myriad domestic policy issues and human rights. Where exactly the boundary between city, suburb, and rural lies is and always has been fuzzy. However the current crisis can help us answer this question in a new way. A city is a zone that can be simultaneously stricken with illness.
According to the intellectual consensus, a Megacity is any metro area with more than 10 million inhabitants. By this measure, there are 47 Megacities on Earth. Excuse the tedium, but they are worth listing:
Tokyo, Japan (38,140,000)
Jakarta, Indonesia (34,365,000)
Shanghai, China (34,000,000)
Delhi, India (27,200,000)
Seoul, South Korea (25,600,000)
Guangzhou, China (25,000,000)
Beijing, China (24,900,000)
Manila, Philippines (24,100,0000)
Mumbai, India (23,900,000)
New York, United States (23,876,155)
Shenzhen, China (23,300,000)
São Paulo, Brazil (21,242,939)
Mexico City, Mexico (21,157,000)
Lagos, Nigeria (21,000,000)
Kyoto-Osaka, Japan (20,337,000)
Cairo, Egypt (19,128,000)
Wuhan, China (19,000,000)
Los Angeles, United States (18,788,800)
Dhaka, Bangladesh (18,237,000)
Chengdu, China (18,100,000)
Moscow, Russia (17,200,000)
Chongqing, China (17,000,000)
Karachi, Pakistan (16,900,000)
Bangkok, Thailand (15,931,300)
Tianjin, China (15,400,000)
Istanbul, Turkey (15,033,000)
Kolkata, India (14,423,000)
Tehran, Iran (14,000,000)
London, Great Britain (13,842,667)
Buenos Aires, Argentina (13,834,000)
Hangzhou, China (13,400,000)
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (12,981,000)
Xi'an, China (12,900,000)
Paris, France (12,405,426)
Changzhou, China (12,400,000)
Kinshasa, DR Congo ( 12,350,000)
Lahore, Pakistan (12,200,000)
Rhine-Ruhr, Germany (12,190,000)
Shantou, China (12,000,000)
Nanjing, China (11,700,000)
Bengaluru, India (11,800,000)
Jinan, China (11,000,000)
Chennai, India (11,000,000)
Harbin, China (10,500,000)
Bogotá, Colombia (10,350,000)
Nagoya, Japan (10,105,000)
Lima, Peru (10,072,000).
This list of cities seems long because we are not accustomed to thinking about all the cities of the world at once, but the fact is this is a very short list compared to what is projected for the next few decades.
Instead of the unwieldy ‘city’, urban economists use the more intellectual-sounding phrase ‘urban agglomeration’ for metro areas of one million people or more. To date, there are 585 of these areas known. The speed of civilization can be measured as the rate at which these cities become megacities relative to population growth. According to the architects who have been desperately trying to reduce the built environment’s greenhouse emissions, urban space world wide is going to double by 2050. That’s right, the footprint of civilization will duplicate before we reach retirement. Everything we have built thus far will be built again in a single generation. Effectively adding one New York City to the surface of the Earth every 35 days. The existential question we have to ask is how do we get there without making this planet uninhabitable?
“Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.”
— Sinclair Lewis, Babbit
Population Has Gravity
The population of the United States and Western Europe largely reside in cities — around 85% of the total population. Approximately 89% of people living in China are living in cities. Globally, one in three people who live in an urban environment live in what we would consider “slum” conditions.
The urban trade deficit is a good way to think about the footprint of a city. The US Department of Agriculture estimates that the average American eats nearly a ton (1996 lbs) of food each year. That puts the NYC Metro Area’s food consumption at 47.6 billion pounds of food per year. In theory, all of this food could be produced within the city. The limiting factor in agriculture has always been energy — it’s hard to compete with free sunlight and rain. This dynamic plays out for virtually all consumer goods. Megacities attract matter and radiate information. The insatiable appetite of megacities tell us how much it costs to keep civilization alive.
Population density is an important part of what makes the role of megacities so crucial. The most dense region of the United States is the Los Angeles metro area. Even the wealthiest residents of LA consume 8000 kilowatt hours less than the per capita national average. Contrary to stereotype, the average Los Angeles household burns less gas on the road — about 630 gallons of gas over the course of a year, which is substantially less than the average for smaller cities. For instance, in “The Triangle” region of North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham metro area — one of the least dense urban areas of the country — households burn an average of 1,074 gallons in a year.
What I find most fascinating about megacities is how well they encapsulate the narrative of civilization. While it may seem like they are the epitome of the damage we are doing to the planet, they are in all likelihood going to contain the solution to most of the obstacles we will face going forward. They are the bad news that we reflexively want to spin into something uplifting, and yet they are our destiny.
“If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.”
— Frank Lloyd Wright
Too Few To Count
The footprint of a megacity is both the (vast) portion of resources it requires as well as the toll its growth has on rural economies. As we systematically unravel the communities which supply our world’s megacities with food, water, electricity, and consumer goods, we risk destabilizing not only our supply of those things but also civil cohesion itself.
Anyone who has grown up in a megacity knows what gentrification looks like. The weather patterns of property values and oblivious newcomers and displaced families and newly homeless. It’s too expensive to move, and too expensive to stay. For those living in megacities, we wring our hands trying to solve the social fallout of our mass migration to them. For those on the outside, we can shake our heads in disbelief “who would want to live in … that.” What we all too often fail to realize is just how quickly things are changing and just how unprepared we are to handle the dual problems of accelerating growth and crisis.
The truth is that we need more megacities. Rent is too damn high. In every respect, but especially in the literal one. If we, so-called everyday people, don’t take it upon ourselves to make this happen as our generation comes to power, then we risk leaving humanity trapped in a few dozen megacities, surrounded by an asteroid belt of Detroits. Are we a species stuck in it’s own gravity well? Will we be capable of sustaining ourselves? These are questions we may well have the answer to within our lifetime.
The quarantine of a megacity merely reveals what has always been true: we must construct self-sufficient cities or the shelves will eventually become empty. Where do we start? Anywhere.
T