During the Clinton Global Initiative a special session was held to discuss the nature of the cities of the future (full transcript). I extracted some facts that found very interesting.
- Over half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas.
- 160,000 people are moving from rural areas to urban areas every single day.
- The Tyndall Center (London) says we have 4 to 10 years to avoid the tipping point to reversible climate change.
- 300 million people in India are going to move to cities in the next 15 years.
- If urbanization of China continues at its present pace will mean they lose 25% of their farmland by 2020.
- China expects to build housing for 400 million people in the next 12 years. This would be like rehousing the entire United States in 7 years.
- An apartment in Mumbai costs more than an apartment in New York. Land is very precious and a source of income for all kins of people in developing countries.
- London charges $8 dollars a day to drive a car in the city, creating an incentive for people to use alternate transportation. The charge was introduced in parallel with massive expansion of the bus fleet.
- In the West no one saw the impact of the industrial revolution on the environment. In China it has happened in the span of single life time.
- Even though Britain has reduced carbon emissions by 15% below 1990 levels, the increasing in air travel is actually creating more carbon emissions than they are saving from everything else.
In this context, the post a convenient solution: community living seems to be more relevant now.
[...] While I had provided a brief snapshot of the massive changes underway in countries like China, understanding how the social unit (the family) thinks reveals a lot more about their future than those statistics. The subject of this article is a family which does really well compared with the 3/4 of the population living in poverty but is still considered lower-middle-class with an: annual household income equals about $26,700 a year. Much of that comes from Bin, 30, who earns 10,000 yuan ($1,280) a month in his shift job as a supervisor at car manufacturer Volkswagen; his wife earns about 5,500 yuan ($690) monthly in her IT job, including her Internet business, and her parents receive a combined 2,000 yuan ($256) in (pension) money a month. (It is the children’s obligation to support the parents, hence the Chinese three-generation social unit. However, the grandparents in this household tend to lavish much of their stipend on their “Little Emperor” grandson.) Their monthly expenses include $260 in mortgage payments and about $130 on food. [...]
These demographic statistics remind me of a very nice set of maps to visualize characteristics of the world. The project is called Worldmapper:
http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/worldmapper/thumbnails/mapindex1-12.html
I warn you though, you may spend hours looking at their maps…