Do Very Large Cities Have a Future?

Smart phones keep chirping with unpleasant news. Millions of refugees on the move worldwide, Britain leaving the EU, IS attacks on a gay nightclub in Orlando, a French City on the Cote D'Azur celebrating the national holiday being ambushed by a radicalized truck driver, Istanbul on lock-down because of a military putsch, over a hundred square miles of precious forest on fire near Monterey, California thanks to the ongoing severe drought, locally, near Baltimore, a quaint historic little town dubbed "Main Street America" by Senator Cardin devastated by torrents stemming from a rain fall that should occur only once every thousand years. Even the Olympic games garner more headlines for polluted waters, political instability, the big Brazilian drought and the Zika virus than for the athletes.

Chinese megacity Guangzhou

People around the world feel insecure and some are beggining to doubt what they have considered proven and true until now. The crazy turns of the US presidential election alone can make one lose one's bearings because none of the old rules seem to apply. So, instead of giving in to summer and its usual sluggishness, let's question if one of those ironclad certainties, the global growth of cities, is really such a certain and such a good thing.

That age of cities is cherished by those who also believe that multi-cultural diversity is good, that nations should open their borders to each other, that data should be open, that collaboration is better than isolation, that partnership beats isolationism, and knowledge beats ignorance. Cities are the best manifestation of all these virtues. In that narrative, cities are the zenith of civilization. Is this notion ready for the dustbin of history?

Indeed, most articles and studies about urbanism celebrate the prospect that we live in the age of cities, that cities will become ever larger, and that more and more people will live in urbanized areas. Conventional wisdom holds that urbanization equals prosperity, knowledge and opportunity, as demonstrated by the following quotes:

Today, the most urbanized regions include Northern America (82 per cent living in urban areas in 2014), Latin America and the Caribbean (80 per cent), and Europe (73 per cent). In contrast, Africa and Asia remain mostly rural, with 40 and 48 per cent of their respective populations living in urban areas. All regions are expected to urbanize further over the coming decades. Africa and Asia are urbanizing faster than the other regions and are projected to become 56 and 64 per cent urban, respectively, by 2050. (UN Urbanization Prospects, 2014)

Urbanization and growth go together: no country has ever reached middle income status without a significant population shift into cities. Urbanization is necessary to sustain (though not necessarily drive) growth in developing countries, and it yields other benefits as well. But it is not painless or always welcomed by policymakers or the general public. Managing urbanization is an important part of nurturing growth; neglecting cities— even in countries in which the level of urbanization is low—can impose heavy costs. (World Bank)

Agglomeration effects in cities affect knowledge sharing. By bringing together large numbers of people, cities facilitate the kinds of face to face interactions needed to generate, diffuse, and accumulate knowledge, especially in industries that experience rapid technological change. This aspect of urban agglomeration economies has received less theoretical and empirical attention, but it has promise to be one of the more significant drivers behind dynamic growth in developing country cities. (World Bank)

Urbanists and progressives have bought into this narrative lock, stock, and barrel. Did they drink the Kool Aid? Does urbanization really equal prosperity or are cities what many conservatives have suspected for a long time, just a breeding ground for radicals?

What, if the trajectory of history doesn't continue as projected? What, if there are paradigm shifts ahead that most hadn't planned for? Would increased instability accelerate or slow urbanization? Is continued growth sustainable, no matter how unstable the world?

This article will try to investigate how the apparent global instability may affect cities and urbanization. What trajectory will cities follow?

Cities are certainly not just places for the good times. Challenges arising from human strife, nature, and instability are nothing new for cities, and cities have not only weathered those before but some have been created for the purpose of withstanding adversity.

Historically, cities have been constructed to be safe havens inside protective walls to protect against attack from the outside (medieval towns in Europe), or as places of peaceful exchange of ideas (Athens in antiquity) and goods. Cities have flourished as fortifications and places of trade and cultural melting pots. Some designs adapted to climate, such as the white adobe buildings of Italian Hill Towns, some made water and floods their dominant features (Amsterdam and Venice). Cities were often also designed to control strife from within; Haussman's Parisian boulevards are often associated with the desire to control insurrection, even though their original reason was based on growth and infrastructure. Thus, the form of many cities is already an expression of adversarial conditions. History would suggest that cities would withstand future instability as well.

But the challenges today are different, at least quantitatively.

Never have this many people lived in urban conglomerations, never have they reached sizes in excess of 10 or 20 or even near 30 million people, a common occurrence nowadays. (See table below). In 1900 only 15% of the then much smaller world population lived in cities.
Never before have cities been so similar in form and technology all across the globe, adjusted to a narrow range of conditions from which to any deviation has catastrophic consequences.
Never before was the existence of so many people fully dependent on functioning complicated logistic and information systems.
Never has so much information been exchanged by so many people in such short time.

One can make a number of good arguments why cities will not or should not continue to grow much further and why this would be undesirable:

The concept of urbanization on which predictions are based is very vague and includes not just central cities but the suburban rings around them. Located neither in an actual city nor in a bona fide rural area, much of that type of growth is outright sprawl and no cause for celebration neither from a sustainability perspective nor does it provide the urban benefits attributed to urbanity. In fact, one has to wonder if exploding global sprawl would have any redeeming attributes compared to life in villages or small towns.
Many forms of organization have an optimal size. It is known from management and business that beyond a certain size corporations become unwieldy, inefficient and unmanageable. It stands to reason that cities or metropolitan areas are no exception. It is a little studied subject, but common sense would suggest that the very advantage of a city, a government that is responsive to its constituents due to proximity and responsiveness between residents and city administration, would start to break down at a certain size, say 10 million or more people.
Cities are no longer automatically the centers of opportunity where access to jobs, information, goods and services. Rural areas become more equal to big cities thanks to Internet, social networking, next day delivery and the option of remote work. With that, one of the chief reasons that led to urbanization in the past wouldn't hold true any longer, at least in highly developed countries.
Postindustrial societies are no longer dependent on a large readily available workforce, nor does just-in-time customized production need the economies of scale that only comes with large metropolitan agglomerations, both on the production and the consumption sides.
A reversal of trends: Progressives like to think as history running on an arrow of time that is irreversible just as dictated by thermodynamics in physics. History cannot go backwards and there is only a choice of being on the right or wrong side of history. Historians know better. Throughout history there were periods when hard-fought progress was lost, when insights and knowledge that had been gained was forgotten again. Some say that the Middle Ages were such a time when intellectual and technological advances common during the Roman Empire were lost in the West for centuries, until they were rediscovered in the Renaissance and finally expanded during the Enlightenment and the ensuing industrial revolution. This would suggest that humanity is not inoculated against falling back into more barbaric times in which open collaboration, sharing, partnership, diversity and curiosity are not only less prevalent but considered suicidal traits to be suppressed with all means at the disposal of those societies survival-focused societies.

Following that type of skeptical line of inquiry several studies question the simplistic linkage that economic growth and well=being is universally tied to urbanization and ever larger cities. A Harvard study states:

there is no empirical evidence of a causal effect of the level of
urban population share on the pace of economic growth. Although the agglomeration of diffuse populations into urban areas will generally increase output per capita, very large or rapidly growing urban areas can have offsetting negative effects through crowding and environmental degradation, and by overwhelming city administrations' capacities. Policies regarding urban development should weigh carefully the positive and negative spillovers
of urbanization, without a presumption that urbanization is a policy for promoting
economic growth. (Urbanization and the Wealth of Nations)

Once one sees perpetual urbanization as neither a natural law nor current trends as irreversible, humankind's greatest achievement, the modern city, appears in a new light. It could be seen as endangered by a reversal of progress at the dawn of another dark age, or, it could be seen as not that desirable after all, whether for global sustainability or individual happiness.

That the correlation between urban growth and progress or prosperity is not ironclad is also the finding of a paper about African cities:

[...]the development effects of urbanization and the magnitude of agglomeration economies are very variable. There is no simple linear relationship between urbanization and economic growth, or between city size and productivity. (Ivan Turok, Urbanization and Economic Growth)

These considerations bring to the fore a number of serious questions for city planning:

Does it make sense to have ever larger cities?
Even without the need for a rural workforce to sustain agriculture, is the continued flow to cities rational, reasonable and sustainable?
Are cities more vulnerable to attacks from within? If so, how can and should they be fortified?
How can cities become more resilient to deviations from past weather patterns which are the basis of all current engineering?
Is real time data driven system management and open data just another vulnerability?
Is there still consensus on cities as melting pots of cultures?

These questions are technical, political, and social in nature. Especially the last one is social and goes to the nerve not only of cities, but American culture in general. Acceptance of the multi cultural society as a desirable goal has waned in Europe and here at home, even though it has been the very trademark of our society; our culture prides itself of being a melting pot and to be thriving on diversity. How will the United States define themselves once voters or government would relinquish on that goal?

The ongoing rush of rural populations to cities is either driven by a big differential between economic opportunity in rural areas and cities, or it is political and driven by national policies that support those migrations. Both seems to apply in China, India and South America. Interestingly, though, even absent a declared national policy of urbanization and absent the extreme differential in economic opportunity, the trend towards cities continues in the US as well, even though opportunity for prosperity for all is often not higher in cities than in rural areas, Especially the traditional highly urban cities of the industrial age exhibit significant and systemic poverty that in some cases excludes around a quarter of the urban population from urban benefits. The high concentrations of poverty in cities that can be observed across the globe are more driven by the expectation of opportunity than actual pathways, especially when the necessary skill-sets are absent. Conversely, a low skilled workforce allocated in a rural area has sometimes the option of being self-sustaining in a setting where cost is lower and sustenance through self help such as growing food, raising some livestock or constructing shelter is frequently possible. Urban poverty, by contrast requires support systems which often are underfunded and overtaxed.

The matter of vulnerability is no less vexing. It is obvious that one cannot fly planes into the low buildings of a village in the manner they were turned into weapons of destruction at the World Trade Center high rises. Nor have villages and small towns subways to be blown up or tunnels to be poisoned. But with the non-directed more or less spontaneous lone-wolf attacks, size doesn't matter any longer. Not even small towns or local trains are exempt from an individual running amok as recent attacks in France and Germany demonstrated. Attacks of that nature defy the urban rural distinction. A new type of attacks we haven't seen yet but we should expect includes the soft infrastructure from drinking water systems, to electric grids and communications systems. The challenge is not the simple hacking of information, but the taking down the whole cloud. The ephemeral non-physicality of how complex systems are managed today and in which knowledge and information is exchanged is hard to defend with built form of any kind. The home-made calamities with airline servers have demonstrated this in recent months. There is little study about whether such attacks would be more devastating in bigger cities than in smaller ones with dependencies on vulnerable systems existing in towns and cities of all sizes.

Resilience against nature and climate change is alos not easily tied to size. The larger and more complicated systems are the larger the exposure and the bigger the impacts of failure. But size brings also redundancy which is a form of resilience. Existential systems need to be fortified against the wrath of nature, whether these are electrical or wind storms, high waters or high winds. Centuries of human settlements have been optimized for a small range of to-be-expected extremes. Any bit outside that range makes buildings collapse or cities flood because the winds were higher than the connections could resist, because the precipitation was more than stormwater systems could handle or the rafters weaker than the amount of snow-load a freak storm dumped on them. Fires race through national parks faster than bulldozers can be brought into position to create fire lines, streams swell over the banks with more force than the hillsides can withstand. Again, size may increase the impact but size also favors sturdier and less vulnerable construction. Experience suggests that the biggest calamities are wrought on small communities with either old, temporary or otherwise fragile structures. Nature's wrath makes it abundantly clear that to prevail much more has to be done than rebuild exactly what was lost. Resilience requires a strategic reset of the feedback loops that cause calamity in the first place, whether it is CO2 emission, water scarcity or scandalous depletion of the world's rain-forests. There appears to be no evidence, though that larger cities would put humans into a disadvantage in getting the upper hand in this. Only if nature would completely exceed the manageable range could it be that cities become an achievement of the past to be followed by much more primitive life-forms nimble enough to promise survival.

Lastly, the issue of a city too big to govern. A study that specifically looked at the efficiency of services delivered in relation to size shows no evidence that even the very large size of (mega) cities really reduces the efficiency of governance.

Cities tend to be better governed than non-urban agglomerations such as large
villages and small towns, as the country urbanization indicator (a measure of the
share of a country’s population living in cities) shows overall better results when it
is high than when it is low even for more advanced economies (Table 7a through
7c). This indicator is also positively correlated to low bribery in utilities (see
Annex A)and soundness of Banks (Table 4). The detailed regression results in
Table 4 also show that city size (city population) has no significant impact on most
of the governance variables except low bribery in utilities, low informal money
laundering, low diversion of public funds, and low bribery in permits. Large cities
can be as well governed as small cities. This result is further reason why one needs
to look at globalization and urbanization, as cities seem to be better able to handle
governance questions than rural agglomerations. (An Empirical Exploration into Global Determinants of Urban Performance).

So one has to conclude at this point is that neither risk nor strife and attack, neither resilience against natural forces, nor governance or technological advance in providing access provide pervasive evidence against large cities. While there is no guarantee that growing cities provide prosperity, they are still the best chance of providing opportunity to as many people as possible. The very real possibility of a period of restoration attempting to turn back time would not remedy any problems or open new opportunities just as there never has been a time when more people had access to food, shelter and opportunity than today. In fact, given the global population, there is probably no more sustainable way to accommodate everybody than very large cities.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
edited by Ben Groff, JD

World Bank: Urbanization and Growth
The State of African Cities 2014, Journal of Asian and African Studies August 1, 2016
Urbanization and the Wealth of Nations (Harvard 2008)
An Empirical Exploration into Global Determinants of Urban Performance).
Analyzing Urban Systems:Have Mega-Cities Become Too Large?, Princeton 2014
.
Largest cities in the world over 10,000,000 (Wikipedia)

City	Country	City proper population	Urban area population^[7]	Metropolitan area population
Shanghai	China	24,256,800^[8]	23,416,000^[a]	34,750,000^[9]
Karachi	Pakistan	23,500,000^[10]	25,400,000^[11]	25,400,000
Beijing	China	21,516,000^[12]	21,009,000	21,148,000^[13]
São Paulo	Brazil	21,292,893^[14]	20,365,000	36,842,102^[15]
Delhi	India	16,787,941^[16]	24,998,000	21,753,486^[17]
Lagos	Nigeria	16,060,303^{[note 1]}	13,123,000	21,000,000^[20]
Istanbul	Turkey	14,657,000^[21]	15,328,000^[22]	16,703,000^[23]
Tokyo	Japan	13,297,629^[24]	37,843,000	36,923,000^[25]
Mumbai	India	12,478,447^[17]	17,712,000	20,748,395^[17]
Moscow	Russia	12,197,596^[26]	16,170,000
Guangzhou	China	12,080,500^[27]	20,597,000	23,900,000^[28]
Shenzhen	China	10,780,000^[29]	12,084,000	10,630,000^[30]
Suzhou	China	10,650,501^[31]
Kinshasa	Democratic Republic of the Congo	10,130,000^[32]	13,265,000
Cairo	Egypt	10,230,350^[33]	18,290,000	22,439,541
Jakarta	Indonesia	10,075,310^[34]	30,539,000	30,075,310^[35]
Lahore	Pakistan	10,052,000