megacity

"in 2052 most of the world's population will live in big cities...the big cities will be divided into two types of communities, as they are today. the center ( or multiple centers ) will be part of the industrialized world, with adequate infrastructure. the periphery will be huge shantytowns basically without infrastructure. there will be 'cities of gold' on a 'planet of slums'...the huge populations in the megacities of 2052 will be part of the global community. still, most people will live their lives as part of a local community that will form the stable frame for their daily lives. the local community will gain importance for most people as the main source of their identity rather than the megacity itself. the multi-center structure will facilitate the cultivation of specific cultural traditions..." per arild garnasjordet and lars hem.___________________________ humans have been on the planet for about a million years and some of them have lived in cities for about five thousand...i have to wonder what in those nine hundred ninety-five thousand years of evolution has equipped them to pack themselves together in high-rise buildings ringed by atrocious slums...i can see where economic drivers will spell the end of the cul-de-sac and zoysia grass lawns sprawling further and further into rural areas...the advent of liquid fuels with less efficiency and much lower energy density than current fossil fuels ( you have to burn about four times as much ethanol as gasoline to do the same work...something the national corn growers boosterism for "corn based ethanol" is silent about...that and the impact it has on food prices ) will spell the end of the long-distance commute from suburbia for all but those with the wealth and the hankering to rusticate...but what in a history of foraging and nomadic pastoralism prepared people for megacity sedentism? well...there may be a hint in what garnasjoret and hem have to say and it's the part about the " multi-center structure" allowing "cultivation of specific cultural traditions"...some anthropologists i know say that culture is "everything humans do"...i am inclined to see it as problem solving...creating uses for a given area's assets and adaptations for its limits...it may be economics that drive future populations into sprawling slums as opposed to sprawling gated communities ( although i am willing to wage those won't readily disappear...just be closer to the slums...more heavily gated as well ) but it will be a tradition of cultural adaptation to local conditions that hold them together ( if anything can hold them together ) and make them livablr at all.