Cities, People, Planet

Abstract

As urban areas become our primary habitat—three-quarters of the human population are expected to become city dwellers by around 2050 (Worldwatch Institute 2000)—it is of key importance to establish whether a sustainable relationship can be established between cities and the planet. The urgency of this task is only too evident: the size of modern cities in terms of numbers of citizens and physical scale is unprecedented: in 1800 there was only one city of a million people: London. At that time the largest 100 cities in the world had 20 million inhabitants, with each city usually extending to just a few thousand hectares. In 1990 the world’s 100 largest cities accommodated 540 million people, of which 220 million people lived in the 20 largest cities, mega-cities of over 10 million people, some extending to hundreds of thousands of hectares. In addition, there were 35 cities of over 5 million and hundreds of over one million people (Satterthwaite 1996). Urban sprawl is a major concern for environmentalists. It is typical of cities of increasing affluence in which people often prefer the spaciousness of suburbs to denser city centres. Metropolitan New York’s population, for instance, has grown only 5 per cent in the last 25 years, yet its surface area has grown by 61 per cent, consuming much forest and farmland in the process. In the USA and Europe, sprawl today is above all else caused by the routine use of the motor car. Los Angeles is famous for the way it sprawls along its vastly complex freeway system. Ninety per cent of its population drive to work by car and many live in detached houses surrounded by large patches of land. A city of 11 million people, it covers an area three times larger than London which has a population of 7 million. London itself, where semi-detached houses are the norm in the suburbs, is several times larger than Hong Kong which has 6 million inhabitants and where most people live in high rise blocks. Not surprisingly, Hong Kong uses space far more efficiently than either LA or London.

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