age of major cities. Cities around the world are combined

On November 15, 2022, a baby girl named Finis Mabansag, born at Dr. Jose Fabela Memorial Hospital in Manila, Philippines, became — symbolically — the world’s eight billionth.

Of these eight billion people, 60% live in a town or city🇧🇷 By the end of the 21st century, cities will account for 85% of the 10 billion people expected to live on Earth.

Cities don’t just grow with population. The more people they host, the more services (public transportation, power infrastructure, water supply) they need, the more management they require, and the more flexible their economy will be. It might be surprising, then, to find out There is no definition Only part of what the city really is.

In the Middle Ages, cities from London to Seoul were lined with walls. Even in the 20th century, the idea of ​​city limits still applied. Today, if the process of urbanization is still reminiscent of the largest pre-millennium capitals (Tokyo, São Paulo, New York or Bombay), it is nevertheless a proportion descending from all cities of the world.

By contrast, in faster-growing urban centers such as Lagos, the geographic scope of the mayor’s formal jurisdiction often ends long before the population they serve. Its economy, however, often very tangled with neighboring cities.

The question of where to draw the line between what is and is not a city is getting harder to answer — let alone where one ends and the other begins. As the world moves towards total urbanizationCities merge with each other to create what urban professionals call “megacities”.

How machines saw cities grow

The largest of these megacities already exceeds 60 million inhabitants. In China, the area of ​​Guangdong Province around the mouth of the Pearl River, now known as the Greater Bay Area, Effectively integrates 11 citiesfrom Macau to Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

total population More than 70 million peopleIt has two million more than the total population of the United Kingdom, crammed into about a fifth of the area. In economic terms, it is just as large: with $1.64 billion in 2018, its GDP is 11.6% of China’s total.

On the west coast of Africa, a 600-kilometre stretch between Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire and Lagos in Nigeria is rapidly recovering. Experts predict that by the year 2100, this agglomeration of nine cities will be the most densely populated on Earth, with up to 500 million people🇧🇷

Cities really only started to grow in the middle of the 18th century, when we started Construction machinery This would propel us faster – and further – than any technology invented to date. For the first time, cities have crossed the threshold of about a million people.

Some cities, including Chicago and New York, thrived where elevator technologies and steel framing made available to those with the means of residence the first skyscrapers, those “Commerce cathedrals🇧🇷

With the invention of the automobile, many cities, such as Los Angeles, grew outward, despite widespread resistance to the idea of ​​urbanization.

Some major cities in the developing world, including Dar es Salaam in Tanzania or Nairobi in Kenya, I grew inward🇧🇷 Here, the idea of ​​a compact city based on public transportation and dense and high residential areas took root.

How the metaverse is redefining the city

Most people today live in medium or even small cities. We still rely heavily on the internal combustion engine to move between different activities, usually at home and at work.

However, over the past 50 years, it has been The invention of the computer Networked connections mean that people can now live at greater distances from their colleagues. This blurs the physical boundaries of any city.

A city’s population and mapping of its geographic boundaries are just some of the aspects to consider when defining what a city is. The digital skin that now covers the planet allows citizens of any city Interact with anyone and everyone, anywhere, anytime.

Cities will continue to grow and change physically. By the end of the 21st century, some form of city will undoubtedly be ubiquitous, but the term itself is unlikely to disappear. While that, Its meaning will change🇧🇷

As early as 1937, in a textbook titled The City Reader, historian Lewis Mumford argued that although cities could be identified as physical entities, they were places of social interactionfrom communication.

This resonates strongly with the idea that, in the future, we will not think of cities simply as distinct physical centers of rural landscapes, but as digital movement patterns, crisscrossing the planet on many levels, from the mega-city to the local neighborhood. Borders will never have the same meaning they had before the first industrial revolution in Britain in the 1830’s.

Scholars agree that as cities grow, they generate economies of scale that increasingly dominate economic growth and prosperity. Evidence suggests that the urban world is more complex.

Increasingly like biological systems rather than mechanical systems, cities are like transportation networks that connect to the countryside around them Tree fractures🇧🇷

The emerging urban world is very different from anything that has gone before. The attempt to define the physical boundaries of the city is still important. However, when figuring out how to deal with this new complexity, it can be very sketchy.