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I don't think the Megacity is a good model and here in Germany we certainly don't "lack it". It's nothing we desire. Germany is currently happy NOT to have citi

by lispm 11y ago

I don't think the Megacity is a good model and here in Germany we certainly don't "lack it". It's nothing we desire. Germany is currently happy NOT to have cities like London, Paris, Tokyo, New York or similar. What's the future for those Chinese Megacities? I'm not sure we see a linear/whatever development of them over the next decades. Already huge cities like Beijing or Delhi (India) are having huge problems (waste, energy, water, air quality, and all kinds of pollution, transport, ...) which easily could lead to very nasty scenarios. The medium sized large cities (1-3 million people) usually offer better quality of life, especially if there is enough space around them. If we look at Germany, there are competing concepts like the "Metropolitan Region" (the region with a big city or a city landscape as its center) and the "Region" (sometimes the Bundesland/State, sometimes a bit smaller). The region is defined by cultural/political/economic aspects - it could lack a big city, but have a cultural identity, which provides the bonding. The large cities were growing, not because of foreign migrants, but because they provided the better infrastructure and cultural life + the young east germans were looking for work after the fall of the 'Wall'. At the same time in western Germany quite a bit of the economy has been driven by medium sized companies sometimes in remote/rural areas in small towns. Some of them are no longer medium sized, but kept the spirit of one. They show that it is possible to deliver high-tech to a global customer-base from small cities. Just take 'Herzogenaurach' in southern Germany, a small town with just over 20k people. It hosts three large companies: Adidas (> 10bn Euro revenue), Puma (3bn Euro revenue) and Schaeffler (>10bn Euro revenue).

Nimitz14 11y ago
Yeah... anybody who knows Germany will laugh at the idea of Berlin being some sort of powerhouse in comparison to Munich and Stuttgart. The fact the last two weren't even mentioned makes the author look really uninformed.
- ptaipale 11y ago
  Indeed. Berlin is nice in many ways, but it is precisely because it is a historical anomaly from the Cold War time; it was subsidized in several way to keep it alive as a West German (BRD) enclave within DDR (East Germany). Now it's the capital again, and "normalizing", which means that rents and property prices are going up, and so is the general price level (which is currently lower than in other German cities - not usual for a European or any capital city).
- mattlutze 11y ago
  Though Stuttgart, at least, really is "just a city," albeit one dense with industry and finance. If the author was looking at describing cities that exist as quasi-independent entities, I'm not sure it'd really fit. As well to consider is its size: as big as it feels, the city is around 600k people and the official metropolitan region, even with its 5.3 million, is very low density (the Wiki heads say ~340 persons/sq.km., vs thousands in other reported areas).
  - junto 11y ago
    Also send to miss the fact that Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen are (uniquely in Germany), both cities and states officially. Bremen and Hamburg are an oddity since they have maintained some degree of state autonomy since the forming of the 'Hanseatic League', the history of which is several hundreds of years old, dishing numerous cities birding the North and Baltic Seas. Interestingly, the German city of Lübeck also held this honour, up until it was removed by Adolf Hitler, after they refused him to publicly speak in the city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League
jychang 11y ago
Germany has only 80 million people, however. And the cities in Germany are all spread out around the country. China has 1.3 billion people, mostly clustered on the east coast. Building megacities is basically mandatory. According to Wikipedia [1], a "medium sized city" with population 1 to 3 million people, in China, would be among 169 other cities. There are 73 cities with a population over 3 million, in 2010. A city with exactly 1 million people would be rank 242 in China... the city (town?) ranked 242 in population in Germany would be the city/town of Eisenach, population 42,700. That's a seriously small city, or about half the population of Mountain View, California. And these numbers are from the 2010 census- according to some sources, China's population has increased by 80 million people from 2010 to 2016. That's the size of one entire Germany. The comparison here between cities in Germany vs cities in China isn't exactly fair. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_population_and_built-up_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop... [2] http://www.citymayors.com/gratis/german_topcities3.html http://www.citymayors.com/gratis/german_topcities3.html
- jld89 11y ago
  You are not accounting for surface area for both countries or population density. Germany has even higher population density than China (245 vs 137). Of course we have to account for the gobi desert but even so population shouldn't be a factor of comparison. I agree that the comparison is not fair though, mainly because the infrastructure development between both countries is vastly different, a better infrastructure helps in distributing population over large areas in my opinion.
  - mxfh 11y ago
    Since state area alone doesn't produce anything (maybe it's a rough indicator for general access to share of natural resources, but that's not relevant here) The comparison could be done on province level though. If you add up Jiangxi and Fujian Province you would end up with roughly the same are and population as Germany with a slightly higher density.
  - pavanky 11y ago
    A significant part of China is a desert. Historically the population of China has been clustered along its east coast. That area is not that much bigger than Germany (if at all). Look at this section of the wiki article for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Population_density_and_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Populati...
pluma 11y ago
I'm not entirely convinced either way. Look at the Ruhr region. Like all German cities the cities in the Ruhr region have their own identities which the locals are very attached to and their own differences and rivalries. But to outsiders moving in it's all one contiguous region and this is exactly the direction politics is taking the region (with things like the Ruhr University which has merged the various local universities into a single distributed entity). I don't see Cologne swallowing Bonn or even Leverkusen anytime soon (or in Leverkusen's case: swallowing it again) but given enough time (and in comparison with the total age of the cities even a hundred years isn't much) it might happen eventually. That said, I'm a Cologne native who recently moved into a small city in Westphalia and am still amazed how many major companies have their headquarters in the region despite having theoretically outgrown their home towns. As far as I can tell, Germany seems to define itself in terms of regions as you say. Whether those regions will eventually grow into megacities or merely "polycentric urban areas" (as Wikipedia describes the Ruhr region) is ultimately philosophical.
- lispm 11y ago
  > Whether those regions will eventually grow into megacities or merely "polycentric urban areas" (as Wikipedia describes the Ruhr region) is ultimately philosophical. I think defining regions around cities vs. regions around an area (Franken, Ostfriesland, etc.) makes some difference. In one concept the big city is the central point of orientation/development/... It's not necessarily political the center, but where the money, the development, the modernity and the culture is located. The other concept of the 'region' distributes power/wealth/culture/infrastructure across the region more even, with some respect for the different strengths of the enclosed areas.
- fit2rule 11y ago
  I lived in the Ruhr for a while, and I have to say that I think that it is quite easily overlooked, but nevertheless true: the Ruhr is a mega-city. What once were unique enclaves and villages and small towns are mere pit-stops across a vast concrete jungle, which has - admittedly - quite some green spaces between it, but is nevertheless well-navigated by its citizens. It is nothing to go for a night out from Bochum to Mannheim-Ruhr, or live in Dusseldorf but work in Cologne .. the rail - and general design of German civilization itself - allows for a much, much bigger scale of things - in this region - than might be generally accepted. I think of the Ruhr region as a mega-city-one (Judge Dredd) kind of thing, anyway ..
mafribe 11y ago
huge cities like Beijing [...] are having huge problems I don't think these problems are city problems. The problem is a consequence of the numbers of people. For example the waste n people produce is more or less constant (relative to a given level of development) regardless of whether these n people live in a dense city space, or are spread out. Indeed, densely populated cities are probably better placed to deal with transport energy and so on, because economies of scale work in favour of dense cities. A particularly good example of this is public transport. Only dense cities can be walkable, and only dense cities can support efficient, well utilised public transport networks.
- morsch 11y ago
  Density alone is not an argument for mega-cities, though. While it's possible that the economies of scale keep increasing with size -- ie. maybe the electrical network of a dense city of 5 million people is more efficient than that of a dense city of 100k people -- there is probably a point somewhere between those two points where the gains are only marginal. A dense city of a 100k can support an excellent bus network, a dense city of 250k can additionaly support an excellent networks of trams or subways. 500k gets you direct access to high speed rail and beyond that I'm not sure what additional millions get you in terms of public transport -- an airport, I guess. And a dense city of 100k people is more walkable than a dense city of millions: In the former case, you can pretty much reach the whole city area by walking (if you are a healthy adult). In the latter, you can only walk in your general neighbourhood -- which probably ends up being much like a city of 100k itself, meaning you rarely have to venture outside for everyday needs (shopping, services, culture, even your job if you're lucky).
  - mafribe 11y ago
    there is probably a point somewhere between those two points where the gains are only marginal. I think we have not reached it in any city currently on earth. I think the whole earth's population could live in a space the size e.g. of Texas, if that space was as densely populated as London (which is not that dense). In such a scenario it would be near trivial to provide everybody with top-notch public transport, waste disposal and so on. In the latter, you can only walk in your general neighbourhood That's true, but why is this a problem? For a sustainable, walkable city it's only relevant that all key infrastructure (e.g. schools, shopping, leisure, parks ...) is within walking distance and this infrastructure gets replicated in bigger cities.
stegosaurus 11y ago
I agree. The whole idea seems to be based on people that adore living in tiny boxes in concrete paradise. It really is mind boggling to me. If you're a person that wants to live in such conditions, go for it. There is a reason that the wealthy have holiday homes. Apartments in capital cities are based on the needs of capitalism and the workplace, not on the needs of humans.
- vidarh 11y ago
  Consider that many cities aren't "concrete paradise" despite being high density. A large proportion of London is parkland. Parts of my suburb is outright rural, and I live in an area full of terraced houses with gardens, and about a dozen parks within walking distance, of which one is a "country park" where you can easily walk for half an hour without seeing a car - or other people. London still has a density of 5,437/km2 (14,080/sq mi). Yes, some of the inner boroughs have little green space, but even most of them have large parks. As for being based on the needs of capitalism over humans, I don't agree. It is both. I don't want to live in the countryside, or in a small town. I moved this "far out" because this is where it was affordable to buy, not because I had any issues with living further in (now that I have a young child, I might have picked an area like this for that reason, but not for myself). There are appeals to many of living in a big city. In just living near the edge of one, I still miss the days when I lived two minutes from Oxford Street (one of the busiest shopping streets in Central London) and could wander out at 3am and walk a couple of minutes to buy ice cream, or could go out during the weekend and just walk to Soho where the big night clubs are (I don't care so much about that any more, but in my 20's that was a big plus), and could walk home rather than depend on expensive cab rides or rare night trains. A lot of the reasons we seek together in big cities are not about (just) jobs, but about the social factors and the network effects that for many makes it hard to imagine living somewhere smaller after you've come to expect there to always be something to do or see, or people to meet, no more than a few blocks away, any time, day or night.
  - stegosaurus 11y ago
    I agree in a lot of ways. I've kind of dramatised the point for clarity. I live in London, out in Zone 6. In some ways it's the best of both worlds, but often it feels daft that I don't just live in the actual countryside. (I previously lived in Z1/2 - great for 'doing stuff', but it had me feeling like a farm animal fairly rapidly). There is indeed lots of green space, within the city and outside of the city. But it's still a city. It's almost completely manmade, there's pollution or at least distraction everywhere (billboards, vehicle noise and fumes, people). It doesn't appeal to everyone, and the idea that it's the 'way forward' I find quite obscene. We should be giving people the choice. There are lots of parts of living in the city I enjoy, and lots of parts of living in the country that I enjoy, and I think we should be setting up society so that people can choose their poison. Remote working would be a great start. I think the most basic issue I have is with the idea that all of the problems of cities can be solved. There's at least one which is impossible to solve - and that is the sheer number of humans and the restrictions that go along with that. I don't want to live in a street or a tower block that has 10,000 other humans in. It makes me feel like I'm in an ant farm.
vidarh 11y ago
> What's the future for those Chinese Megacities? I'm not sure we see a linear/whatever development of them over the next decades. Individual cities like Beijing and Shangai are peanuts compared to what is coming. I don't know if you are aware and if that is what you were referring to with "Chinese Megacities", but the Chinese government is working to tightly integrate larger regions. Some very explicitly directed from the central government, some thanks to city/province level cooperation. E.g. the Bohai Economic Rim[1] include cities like Beijing and Tianjin. Currently about 66 million people in the whole area. There's work underway to tie them together with high speed rail, more highways, combining communications networks, government structure etc. Some projections suggest that all of the Bohai Rim will merge into a megacity with 250m+ people over the next few decades. Then there's the Pearl River Delta [2], which includes Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Macau, Shenzhen, Dongguan and a number of other large cities, and which is headed in the same direction. Depending on how you count, the PRD is already the largest metropolitan area in the world with the number of people ranging from somewhere around 63million people and up to 120 million. Then there's the Yangtze River Delta [3], which may compete with PRD for the largest population - the main contention is whether the YRD is one metropolitan areas or series of adjacent ones - it's not as tightly integrated as the PRD. Yet. But it has 140 million inhabitants, and includes cities like Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou etc. Chances are all three of these will in practice merge. Whether or not they will be unified to the point of being governed like cities is another matter (they are large enough that currently they straddle multiple provincial boundaries. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohai_Economic_Rim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohai_Economic_Rim [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_River_Delta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_River_Delta
- lispm 11y ago
  > Individual cities like Beijing and Shangai are peanuts compared to what is coming. I don't know if you are aware and if that is what you were referring to with "Chinese Megacities", That's basically also what Tokyo is today. 40 million people in its 'metropolitan prefecture'. The Chinese versions will be a lot larger.
jimbokun 11y ago
"Already huge cities like Beijing or Delhi (India) are having huge problems (waste, energy, water, air quality, and all kinds of pollution, transport, ...) which easily could lead to very nasty scenarios." I seriously doubt the waste and environmental impact per capita in urban communities approaches the staggering amounts of waste and environmental devastation caused by suburban living. Having many people living in close proximity increases opportunities to optimize energy efficiency and control environmental impacts. Look at the water used to create lawns out of deserts in Arizona and California, the natural environments paved over for parking lots, and the greenhouse gases produced by hour commutes by one person in an SUV.
- lispm 11y ago
  'suburban' is still a feature of the huge metropolitan areas. Suburban usually means that there is a big city or more around, where people drive to work. > Having many people living in close proximity increases opportunities to optimize energy efficiency and control environmental impacts. Alternatively you could have a landscape with smaller and dense cities, which each are more self-sufficient. > Having many people living in close proximity increases opportunities to optimize energy efficiency and control environmental impacts. Look what happens in these large Megacities in China or India: there are lots of opportunities to optimize efficiency. But these opportunities are not exploited. China still creates their electricity from a zillion dirty coal power plants (that's today) and the air is dirty, among the worst in the world. There are a lot of mechanisms at play, and better energy efficiency or cleaner production is not the top mechanism. With larger energy providers, we see less modern energy creation. They tend to run huge systems for decades and avoid every pressure to modernize (-> invest money). They won't replace a paid dirty power plant with an expensive state-of-the-art gast turbine-based power plant. They are happy to invest into large scale nuclear, though. They tend to create corrupt political structures just to be able so. We've seen the effect of these large energy providers here in Germany. Without political pressure, they would not have installed one filter in a power plant, would not have invested in distributed/decentralized energy systems. Decentralized energy production can be MUCH more energy efficient, than the big generation systems we've seen for the last decades. A typical combined electricity/heating system is extremely hard to beat. These don't need large cities. Some of them need dense cities, but not all.

by lispm 11y ago

Nimitz14 11y ago

Yeah... anybody who knows Germany will laugh at the idea of Berlin being some sort of powerhouse in comparison to Munich and Stuttgart. The fact the last two weren't even mentioned makes the author look really uninformed.

ptaipale 11y ago
Indeed. Berlin is nice in many ways, but it is precisely because it is a historical anomaly from the Cold War time; it was subsidized in several way to keep it alive as a West German (BRD) enclave within DDR (East Germany). Now it's the capital again, and "normalizing", which means that rents and property prices are going up, and so is the general price level (which is currently lower than in other German cities - not usual for a European or any capital city).
mattlutze 11y ago
Though Stuttgart, at least, really is "just a city," albeit one dense with industry and finance. If the author was looking at describing cities that exist as quasi-independent entities, I'm not sure it'd really fit. As well to consider is its size: as big as it feels, the city is around 600k people and the official metropolitan region, even with its 5.3 million, is very low density (the Wiki heads say ~340 persons/sq.km., vs thousands in other reported areas).
- junto 11y ago
  Also send to miss the fact that Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen are (uniquely in Germany), both cities and states officially. Bremen and Hamburg are an oddity since they have maintained some degree of state autonomy since the forming of the 'Hanseatic League', the history of which is several hundreds of years old, dishing numerous cities birding the North and Baltic Seas. Interestingly, the German city of Lübeck also held this honour, up until it was removed by Adolf Hitler, after they refused him to publicly speak in the city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League

jychang 11y ago

Germany has only 80 million people, however. And the cities in Germany are all spread out around the country. China has 1.3 billion people, mostly clustered on the east coast. Building megacities is basically mandatory. According to Wikipedia [1], a "medium sized city" with population 1 to 3 million people, in China, would be among 169 other cities. There are 73 cities with a population over 3 million, in 2010. A city with exactly 1 million people would be rank 242 in China... the city (town?) ranked 242 in population in Germany would be the city/town of Eisenach, population 42,700. That's a seriously small city, or about half the population of Mountain View, California. And these numbers are from the 2010 census- according to some sources, China's population has increased by 80 million people from 2010 to 2016. That's the size of one entire Germany. The comparison here between cities in Germany vs cities in China isn't exactly fair. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_population_and_built-up_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop... [2] http://www.citymayors.com/gratis/german_topcities3.html http://www.citymayors.com/gratis/german_topcities3.html

jld89 11y ago
You are not accounting for surface area for both countries or population density. Germany has even higher population density than China (245 vs 137). Of course we have to account for the gobi desert but even so population shouldn't be a factor of comparison. I agree that the comparison is not fair though, mainly because the infrastructure development between both countries is vastly different, a better infrastructure helps in distributing population over large areas in my opinion.
- mxfh 11y ago
  Since state area alone doesn't produce anything (maybe it's a rough indicator for general access to share of natural resources, but that's not relevant here) The comparison could be done on province level though. If you add up Jiangxi and Fujian Province you would end up with roughly the same are and population as Germany with a slightly higher density.
- pavanky 11y ago
  A significant part of China is a desert. Historically the population of China has been clustered along its east coast. That area is not that much bigger than Germany (if at all). Look at this section of the wiki article for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Population_density_and_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Populati...

pluma 11y ago

I'm not entirely convinced either way. Look at the Ruhr region. Like all German cities the cities in the Ruhr region have their own identities which the locals are very attached to and their own differences and rivalries. But to outsiders moving in it's all one contiguous region and this is exactly the direction politics is taking the region (with things like the Ruhr University which has merged the various local universities into a single distributed entity). I don't see Cologne swallowing Bonn or even Leverkusen anytime soon (or in Leverkusen's case: swallowing it again) but given enough time (and in comparison with the total age of the cities even a hundred years isn't much) it might happen eventually. That said, I'm a Cologne native who recently moved into a small city in Westphalia and am still amazed how many major companies have their headquarters in the region despite having theoretically outgrown their home towns. As far as I can tell, Germany seems to define itself in terms of regions as you say. Whether those regions will eventually grow into megacities or merely "polycentric urban areas" (as Wikipedia describes the Ruhr region) is ultimately philosophical.

lispm 11y ago
> Whether those regions will eventually grow into megacities or merely "polycentric urban areas" (as Wikipedia describes the Ruhr region) is ultimately philosophical. I think defining regions around cities vs. regions around an area (Franken, Ostfriesland, etc.) makes some difference. In one concept the big city is the central point of orientation/development/... It's not necessarily political the center, but where the money, the development, the modernity and the culture is located. The other concept of the 'region' distributes power/wealth/culture/infrastructure across the region more even, with some respect for the different strengths of the enclosed areas.
fit2rule 11y ago
I lived in the Ruhr for a while, and I have to say that I think that it is quite easily overlooked, but nevertheless true: the Ruhr is a mega-city. What once were unique enclaves and villages and small towns are mere pit-stops across a vast concrete jungle, which has - admittedly - quite some green spaces between it, but is nevertheless well-navigated by its citizens. It is nothing to go for a night out from Bochum to Mannheim-Ruhr, or live in Dusseldorf but work in Cologne .. the rail - and general design of German civilization itself - allows for a much, much bigger scale of things - in this region - than might be generally accepted. I think of the Ruhr region as a mega-city-one (Judge Dredd) kind of thing, anyway ..

mafribe 11y ago

huge cities like Beijing [...] are having huge problems I don't think these problems are city problems. The problem is a consequence of the numbers of people. For example the waste n people produce is more or less constant (relative to a given level of development) regardless of whether these n people live in a dense city space, or are spread out. Indeed, densely populated cities are probably better placed to deal with transport energy and so on, because economies of scale work in favour of dense cities. A particularly good example of this is public transport. Only dense cities can be walkable, and only dense cities can support efficient, well utilised public transport networks.

morsch 11y ago
Density alone is not an argument for mega-cities, though. While it's possible that the economies of scale keep increasing with size -- ie. maybe the electrical network of a dense city of 5 million people is more efficient than that of a dense city of 100k people -- there is probably a point somewhere between those two points where the gains are only marginal. A dense city of a 100k can support an excellent bus network, a dense city of 250k can additionaly support an excellent networks of trams or subways. 500k gets you direct access to high speed rail and beyond that I'm not sure what additional millions get you in terms of public transport -- an airport, I guess. And a dense city of 100k people is more walkable than a dense city of millions: In the former case, you can pretty much reach the whole city area by walking (if you are a healthy adult). In the latter, you can only walk in your general neighbourhood -- which probably ends up being much like a city of 100k itself, meaning you rarely have to venture outside for everyday needs (shopping, services, culture, even your job if you're lucky).
- mafribe 11y ago
  there is probably a point somewhere between those two points where the gains are only marginal. I think we have not reached it in any city currently on earth. I think the whole earth's population could live in a space the size e.g. of Texas, if that space was as densely populated as London (which is not that dense). In such a scenario it would be near trivial to provide everybody with top-notch public transport, waste disposal and so on. In the latter, you can only walk in your general neighbourhood That's true, but why is this a problem? For a sustainable, walkable city it's only relevant that all key infrastructure (e.g. schools, shopping, leisure, parks ...) is within walking distance and this infrastructure gets replicated in bigger cities.

stegosaurus 11y ago

I agree. The whole idea seems to be based on people that adore living in tiny boxes in concrete paradise. It really is mind boggling to me. If you're a person that wants to live in such conditions, go for it. There is a reason that the wealthy have holiday homes. Apartments in capital cities are based on the needs of capitalism and the workplace, not on the needs of humans.

vidarh 11y ago
Consider that many cities aren't "concrete paradise" despite being high density. A large proportion of London is parkland. Parts of my suburb is outright rural, and I live in an area full of terraced houses with gardens, and about a dozen parks within walking distance, of which one is a "country park" where you can easily walk for half an hour without seeing a car - or other people. London still has a density of 5,437/km2 (14,080/sq mi). Yes, some of the inner boroughs have little green space, but even most of them have large parks. As for being based on the needs of capitalism over humans, I don't agree. It is both. I don't want to live in the countryside, or in a small town. I moved this "far out" because this is where it was affordable to buy, not because I had any issues with living further in (now that I have a young child, I might have picked an area like this for that reason, but not for myself). There are appeals to many of living in a big city. In just living near the edge of one, I still miss the days when I lived two minutes from Oxford Street (one of the busiest shopping streets in Central London) and could wander out at 3am and walk a couple of minutes to buy ice cream, or could go out during the weekend and just walk to Soho where the big night clubs are (I don't care so much about that any more, but in my 20's that was a big plus), and could walk home rather than depend on expensive cab rides or rare night trains. A lot of the reasons we seek together in big cities are not about (just) jobs, but about the social factors and the network effects that for many makes it hard to imagine living somewhere smaller after you've come to expect there to always be something to do or see, or people to meet, no more than a few blocks away, any time, day or night.
- stegosaurus 11y ago
  I agree in a lot of ways. I've kind of dramatised the point for clarity. I live in London, out in Zone 6. In some ways it's the best of both worlds, but often it feels daft that I don't just live in the actual countryside. (I previously lived in Z1/2 - great for 'doing stuff', but it had me feeling like a farm animal fairly rapidly). There is indeed lots of green space, within the city and outside of the city. But it's still a city. It's almost completely manmade, there's pollution or at least distraction everywhere (billboards, vehicle noise and fumes, people). It doesn't appeal to everyone, and the idea that it's the 'way forward' I find quite obscene. We should be giving people the choice. There are lots of parts of living in the city I enjoy, and lots of parts of living in the country that I enjoy, and I think we should be setting up society so that people can choose their poison. Remote working would be a great start. I think the most basic issue I have is with the idea that all of the problems of cities can be solved. There's at least one which is impossible to solve - and that is the sheer number of humans and the restrictions that go along with that. I don't want to live in a street or a tower block that has 10,000 other humans in. It makes me feel like I'm in an ant farm.

vidarh 11y ago

> What's the future for those Chinese Megacities? I'm not sure we see a linear/whatever development of them over the next decades. Individual cities like Beijing and Shangai are peanuts compared to what is coming. I don't know if you are aware and if that is what you were referring to with "Chinese Megacities", but the Chinese government is working to tightly integrate larger regions. Some very explicitly directed from the central government, some thanks to city/province level cooperation. E.g. the Bohai Economic Rim[1] include cities like Beijing and Tianjin. Currently about 66 million people in the whole area. There's work underway to tie them together with high speed rail, more highways, combining communications networks, government structure etc. Some projections suggest that all of the Bohai Rim will merge into a megacity with 250m+ people over the next few decades. Then there's the Pearl River Delta [2], which includes Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Macau, Shenzhen, Dongguan and a number of other large cities, and which is headed in the same direction. Depending on how you count, the PRD is already the largest metropolitan area in the world with the number of people ranging from somewhere around 63million people and up to 120 million. Then there's the Yangtze River Delta [3], which may compete with PRD for the largest population - the main contention is whether the YRD is one metropolitan areas or series of adjacent ones - it's not as tightly integrated as the PRD. Yet. But it has 140 million inhabitants, and includes cities like Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou etc. Chances are all three of these will in practice merge. Whether or not they will be unified to the point of being governed like cities is another matter (they are large enough that currently they straddle multiple provincial boundaries. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohai_Economic_Rim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohai_Economic_Rim [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_River_Delta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_River_Delta

lispm 11y ago
> Individual cities like Beijing and Shangai are peanuts compared to what is coming. I don't know if you are aware and if that is what you were referring to with "Chinese Megacities", That's basically also what Tokyo is today. 40 million people in its 'metropolitan prefecture'. The Chinese versions will be a lot larger.

jimbokun 11y ago

"Already huge cities like Beijing or Delhi (India) are having huge problems (waste, energy, water, air quality, and all kinds of pollution, transport, ...) which easily could lead to very nasty scenarios." I seriously doubt the waste and environmental impact per capita in urban communities approaches the staggering amounts of waste and environmental devastation caused by suburban living. Having many people living in close proximity increases opportunities to optimize energy efficiency and control environmental impacts. Look at the water used to create lawns out of deserts in Arizona and California, the natural environments paved over for parking lots, and the greenhouse gases produced by hour commutes by one person in an SUV.

lispm 11y ago
'suburban' is still a feature of the huge metropolitan areas. Suburban usually means that there is a big city or more around, where people drive to work. > Having many people living in close proximity increases opportunities to optimize energy efficiency and control environmental impacts. Alternatively you could have a landscape with smaller and dense cities, which each are more self-sufficient. > Having many people living in close proximity increases opportunities to optimize energy efficiency and control environmental impacts. Look what happens in these large Megacities in China or India: there are lots of opportunities to optimize efficiency. But these opportunities are not exploited. China still creates their electricity from a zillion dirty coal power plants (that's today) and the air is dirty, among the worst in the world. There are a lot of mechanisms at play, and better energy efficiency or cleaner production is not the top mechanism. With larger energy providers, we see less modern energy creation. They tend to run huge systems for decades and avoid every pressure to modernize (-> invest money). They won't replace a paid dirty power plant with an expensive state-of-the-art gast turbine-based power plant. They are happy to invest into large scale nuclear, though. They tend to create corrupt political structures just to be able so. We've seen the effect of these large energy providers here in Germany. Without political pressure, they would not have installed one filter in a power plant, would not have invested in distributed/decentralized energy systems. Decentralized energy production can be MUCH more energy efficient, than the big generation systems we've seen for the last decades. A typical combined electricity/heating system is extremely hard to beat. These don't need large cities. Some of them need dense cities, but not all.