Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey then, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: the podcast that looks at the future and says, when
Speaker 1: you're alone in life is making you lonely, you can
Speaker 1: always go downtown. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren, and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. And I've got a question for you guys.
Speaker 1: You do what's the biggest city you've ever been to? Uh?
Speaker 1: New York City? Yeah? New York? Are you sure you actually?
Speaker 1: I haven't. London might be bigger as London, bigger significantly,
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, that was kind of a surprise to me.
Speaker 1: When we were doing research for this episode. I assumed
Speaker 1: London was bigger than it actually is. Well, part of
Speaker 1: the problem is defining what a city is, right, because
Speaker 1: the perception of what a city is versus what it
Speaker 1: legally is are two different things. Just as a quick
Speaker 1: aside before we even get to the topic, So Atlanta,
Speaker 1: for example, not that big of a city. I live.
Speaker 1: I live actually in the city limits of Atlanta, all right,
Speaker 1: So we're all three in the city limits of Atlanta,
Speaker 1: But about five years ago I lived just outside the
Speaker 1: city limits. And the thing about it is that I
Speaker 1: would still tell people I live in Atlanta. I still
Speaker 1: thought of it as Atlanta. And in fact, I noticed
Speaker 1: something interesting that the further away from Atlanta a person lived,
Speaker 1: the bigger the city seemed to be. So, for example,
Speaker 1: you might you might live inside what we call the perimeter,
Speaker 1: that's to eighty five. It's a highway that circles not
Speaker 1: just the city of Atlanta, but some of the metropolitan
Speaker 1: area immediately around it, and uh, someone outside of that
Speaker 1: would refer to anything inside two eighty five is Atlanta.
Speaker 1: So when living in say, part of Decatur, might say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: I live in Decatur. Uh, Atlanta. The city of Atlanta
Speaker 1: is down the street. But you know, when I lived
Speaker 1: in Decatur, if I was talking to somebody who didn't
Speaker 1: live in town, I would just tell them I lived
Speaker 1: in Atlanta, so that the answer made sense exactly. And again,
Speaker 1: the further out you would go, the bigger the city
Speaker 1: would be. So I know people who live uh, pretty
Speaker 1: far up in northern Georgia who would think of Gwynette,
Speaker 1: which is a suburb of Atlanta, as being Atlanta. That
Speaker 1: is also Atlanta, and it's not people who live in
Speaker 1: Atlanta and Gwynette is where you like get lost looking
Speaker 1: for a flea market you heard about, or a Chinese
Speaker 1: restaurant or etcetera. Yeah, it's it's where you go and
Speaker 1: you drive to eight different chain restaurants, all of which
Speaker 1: have a forty five minute wait, and you think, what
Speaker 1: where am I? I apologize, I didn't mean to slam Gwynette.
Speaker 1: I'm sure it's it's just full of absolutely lovely people,
Speaker 1: but it is. Yes, it's way out there. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: our point being that even all of us who live
Speaker 1: within the city limits, I think there's at least seven miles.
Speaker 1: Is the crow flies between each of our houses. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so it's it's one of those things where defining
Speaker 1: what is the actual city is a is a bit
Speaker 1: of a tricky situation. And the reason why we're even
Speaker 1: talking about it, why this the seemingly weird tangent is happening,
Speaker 1: is because we're going to talk about mega cities today.
Speaker 1: Now these are giganto enormous cities, and the same problem
Speaker 1: of defining what is a mega city exists on that
Speaker 1: scale as it does with something like Atlanta, which does
Speaker 1: not merit it is not a mega city. Sure, because technically,
Speaker 1: a mega city has to have a population of over
Speaker 1: ten million people to be considered a mega city. But
Speaker 1: but right, But where do you draw those lines? Because
Speaker 1: as as it turns out, when we call it something
Speaker 1: a mega city, it's not necessarily the political or or
Speaker 1: you know, the boundary of a city. It's it's the
Speaker 1: urban development around it. Where from an outsider's perspective, you
Speaker 1: you know, you come into the outside areas of that sprawl,
Speaker 1: that's where you start saying, this is the city of whatever.
Speaker 1: And a mega city can also be not just a
Speaker 1: single entity, but it could be two cities that have
Speaker 1: grown outward so that their edges now meet. A lot
Speaker 1: of what you're talking about actually points to a larger
Speaker 1: principle that might be something that's good to start with here,
Speaker 1: which is that in many ways, the cities we live
Speaker 1: in today's are largely accidental. Yea. You know, they grew
Speaker 1: out of settlements that arose for some reason. They might
Speaker 1: have been on a river where there was a good
Speaker 1: place to load and unload cargo, or they might have
Speaker 1: been at the center of where some railroad lines met,
Speaker 1: or at the end like Terminus, which is the old
Speaker 1: name for Atlanta, sure where they might have been at
Speaker 1: a good port where there was a place to again
Speaker 1: load and unload cargo. It seems to be mostly based
Speaker 1: around economic transportation. But right, so there are these kind
Speaker 1: of strange ways in which many of the cities we
Speaker 1: live in today are the result of this strange growth
Speaker 1: process that we don't even fully plan or under stand
Speaker 1: all the time. Like we we live in an urbanization age.
Speaker 1: This is the age of moving to the big city.
Speaker 1: And it's not just where we live. This is a
Speaker 1: trend that's happening all over the world. Yeah, more all
Speaker 1: over the world than right, Like, if you go back
Speaker 1: a couple hundred years to like eighteen hundred, what percentage
Speaker 1: of the people on earth were living in urban areas,
Speaker 1: like in cities three percent of the hum of the humans.
Speaker 1: We're living in places that you would not describe as
Speaker 1: an urban area. So not a city or a large town.
Speaker 1: We're talking people who are living out in small villages
Speaker 1: or even on you know, individual farmland, real one Starbucks
Speaker 1: town kind of places. Yeah, right where where if you're
Speaker 1: equivalent of Starbucks, it was a horse. I think if
Speaker 1: your town had a horse in it, that was a
Speaker 1: big deal about those one horse town. Yeah. So if
Speaker 1: you go a hundred years after that and go to
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds, so now the industrial revolution is underway right
Speaker 1: where we're seeing people who are meeting each other on
Speaker 1: the road like do you have small yet? We have small?
Speaker 1: Let me show you. So by then a hundred years
Speaker 1: going by, it went from three percent to fourteen percent
Speaker 1: of the world's population. And at that time about a
Speaker 1: dozen cities had populations of a million or more people
Speaker 1: in it. So now we're talking about an era where
Speaker 1: we've got some some pretty large cities for the time
Speaker 1: and just we're starting to see this trend of people
Speaker 1: seeing an opportunity to make a living doing something uh
Speaker 1: in a city. Also, mechanization is starting to take some
Speaker 1: of the load off of agriculture, meaning that there are
Speaker 1: fewer jobs out in the more remote areas. So you've
Speaker 1: got a double incentive to try and find your way
Speaker 1: possibly moving to the big city. Right. But new to
Speaker 1: types of jobs are coming into being, and a lot
Speaker 1: of these would be urban based jobs, like some manufacturing
Speaker 1: type jobs or new knowledge based jobs. So if we
Speaker 1: move up to nineteen fifties and now now we're just
Speaker 1: going fifty more years, uh, it had more than doubled.
Speaker 1: We're talking about thirty of the world's population exactly. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And in ninety to the world's population was about seven
Speaker 1: forty six million people. And that also happens to be
Speaker 1: when the growth of rural population started to officially slow. Uh,
Speaker 1: it hadn't quite peaked yet, but the UN expects it
Speaker 1: to begin reversing. Today there are fifty four percent of
Speaker 1: the world's population living in urban areas. So how many
Speaker 1: is that? Some three point nine billion three point nine
Speaker 1: billion people living in urban areas. Now, whether you define
Speaker 1: that as a city or the suburb of the city
Speaker 1: or a large town, that sort of stuff. So World
Speaker 1: Health Organization actually predicts that between twenty and twenty will
Speaker 1: have a growth rate of urban population of one point
Speaker 1: eight four percent. Uh, that's global. Like if you were
Speaker 1: to average everything out, and then that would actually slow
Speaker 1: down and continue to slow down over the next few years.
Speaker 1: So between twenty five the growth rate would be one
Speaker 1: point six and twenty five to thirty would be one
Speaker 1: point for four percent. And if you look at the
Speaker 1: globe that these different regions have um very different percentages,
Speaker 1: like the overall percentage of the globe, like Lawrence said,
Speaker 1: has of the population living in urban areas in North America,
Speaker 1: it's excuse way more to the urban areas. It's two
Speaker 1: of the population of North America lives in an urban area.
Speaker 1: But if you look in areas like Asia and Africa,
Speaker 1: it's closer to So it all depends on where you
Speaker 1: are looking. Um So, yeah, it's it's it's a trend
Speaker 1: that is going to continue, and it's going faster in
Speaker 1: some places, some some places significantly faster than yeah, absolutely so.
Speaker 1: So in we said that there were twelve cities that
Speaker 1: had populations of a million or more. How many is
Speaker 1: it today? More than four d more than four hundred
Speaker 1: cities with a population of a million or more people.
Speaker 1: And uh, there are the mega cities like you mentioned, Lauren,
Speaker 1: those are the ones that have ten million people in them.
Speaker 1: We now have about twenty eight of those. By we
Speaker 1: may have as many as forty estimations, very because it's
Speaker 1: very difficult to predict exactly how sustainable some of these
Speaker 1: growth trends are. UH. And there's some who think that,
Speaker 1: you know, Chicago, which has been hovering just beneath mega
Speaker 1: city levels, like they have around nine million something uh
Speaker 1: in their population may top that by twenty twenty. But
Speaker 1: other cities like London, which has also been hovering just
Speaker 1: under mega city for for the actual city, well not
Speaker 1: the actual city of London, for greater London, um, they
Speaker 1: might also hit that level. Yeah, there was another estimate
Speaker 1: I found that was according to the u N again,
Speaker 1: there are going to be a predicted forty one mega
Speaker 1: cities on Earth with populations exceeding ten million by right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So again the estimations obviously their estimations, so they vary
Speaker 1: depending upon what data people are looking at and how
Speaker 1: they are are breaking that down, and they change from
Speaker 1: year to year. So that's exciting, Yeah, because I mean
Speaker 1: all sorts of stuff. Factors can things like you know,
Speaker 1: natural disasters, weather patterns, wars, I mean, all these very
Speaker 1: complex issues will clearly make a huge impact on these
Speaker 1: growth rates. Also, what's interesting to me is that while
Speaker 1: fifty four percent of the world's population live in cities,
Speaker 1: if you look at just mega cities and say, all right,
Speaker 1: well what percentage of the population lives in mega cities,
Speaker 1: it's six point seven percent. So mega cities, while they
Speaker 1: are huge, and you know, you look at this and
Speaker 1: you're like, wow, ten million people or more are living
Speaker 1: in this mega city. It still represents um six point
Speaker 1: seven percent population, but that number is growing, Yes, it is,
Speaker 1: and we will expect that to continue to grow, both
Speaker 1: as existing mega cities grow larger and new mega cities
Speaker 1: come into being as the smaller I hate to use
Speaker 1: the word smaller. That doesn't even make sense. These these
Speaker 1: already large cities boom into mega cities. Uh so, it's
Speaker 1: there's other some other predictions that are really interesting to me.
Speaker 1: The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs says
Speaker 1: that by nearly seventy percent of the world's population will
Speaker 1: be living in urban areas, so we'll continue to see
Speaker 1: that increase from up to seventy percent, and that at
Speaker 1: that time, the population is expected to be somewhere in
Speaker 1: the neighborhood of ten billion people. So that means the
Speaker 1: number of people who are living in cities by the
Speaker 1: year will be the same as the number of people
Speaker 1: who are alive on the planet right now. So if
Speaker 1: we took everyone who's alive right now and put them
Speaker 1: in a city, that's essentially the number of people who
Speaker 1: will be living in cities by according to the United Nations,
Speaker 1: well let's start busting people in and see you feel fit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we could fit another twenty or thirty people in this
Speaker 1: room alone. Yeah, I mean as long as they don't mind,
Speaker 1: you know, not touching the floor, and then we just
Speaker 1: be stacked on top of one another. But but no,
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean that's that's a joke, but also
Speaker 1: a kind of horrifying actual question of how are we
Speaker 1: going to fit all of these people into these areas
Speaker 1: and what on earth are we going to do with them? Right?
Speaker 1: And I would say it's not so much a question
Speaker 1: of physically fitting, like you're packing a trunk in some
Speaker 1: In some areas, it kind of is, but we're we're
Speaker 1: lucky enough to not really have that problem in middle
Speaker 1: class Atlanta. But yeah, I think that the issue is
Speaker 1: more thinking about what a city is. I mean, a
Speaker 1: city is not your resource production landscape. It is your
Speaker 1: resource consumption landscape. And it makes lots of things. It uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it makes knowledge, It creates economic value in
Speaker 1: plenty of ways. But the raw resources that your population
Speaker 1: uses don't typically come from cities, and how could they.
Speaker 1: You You need farmlands to create food, your quarries to
Speaker 1: to mind stuff exactly. Yeah, and that's going to come
Speaker 1: from the wider landscape. So as you think about cities,
Speaker 1: it's kind of interesting to think about. Basically, you're moving
Speaker 1: more and more consumption into tiny areas farther and farther
Speaker 1: away from where resources are produced, and beyond that, you're
Speaker 1: also expanding outward the borders of the urban That's that's
Speaker 1: why a lot of these these studies talk about urban
Speaker 1: environments as opposed to cities, because the term city has
Speaker 1: a very specific meaning. If you are being really you know,
Speaker 1: strict about it, you're talking about the borders of a municipality.
Speaker 1: And when we say the city of you know, when
Speaker 1: we say New York City, we're really not just meaning
Speaker 1: the New York City like where the borders would stop.
Speaker 1: We mean the entire metropolitan area around New York City.
Speaker 1: In fact, if we were to limit ourselves to just
Speaker 1: the definitive this you know, city, then the numbers would
Speaker 1: be totally different when you start looking at the you know,
Speaker 1: the the top mega cities that are out there. Um So,
Speaker 1: whether it's an a a concentrated urban environment around a
Speaker 1: large city like New York City is, or it's um
Speaker 1: more of a kind of a convergence of two different cities.
Speaker 1: We've got different terms for that as well to kind
Speaker 1: of explain those. Okay, what's Dallas fort Worth? Is that
Speaker 1: just one city? Now that would be I would argue
Speaker 1: that Dallas. I guess it all depends on your your perspective, right,
Speaker 1: You've got like the metroplex. A metroplex would be a
Speaker 1: an urban environment made up of two different cities that
Speaker 1: are more or less or two or more cities that
Speaker 1: are more or less on the same level already. So
Speaker 1: you wouldn't say that one city is predominantly you know,
Speaker 1: this was the big anchor city and these other ones
Speaker 1: just got swallowed up by the sprawl. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: a binary star system. Yeah, exactly. And it's just that
Speaker 1: the spheres of influence have now overlapped one another. So
Speaker 1: Baltimore and Washington, d C. This is absolutely the case, Lauren.
Speaker 1: I remember we went up to when we went up
Speaker 1: to visit the Discovery headquarters back when How Stuff Works
Speaker 1: was part of Discovery Communications. We took a bus from
Speaker 1: or I guess it was a cab from the DC
Speaker 1: area all the way into Baltimore to where or actually
Speaker 1: beyond Baltimore to too um, silver Spring. I think it
Speaker 1: was left town the whole time. You're just like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I see now there's more city, and now there's more city,
Speaker 1: and now there are different monuments and more city. There's
Speaker 1: no differentiation. Really, you know, you didn't You never felt
Speaker 1: like you had left one city and now you're entering another.
Speaker 1: You just free landscape. Yeah, so that would be a metroplex.
Speaker 1: Raleigh Durham Chapel Hill is another great example. You know,
Speaker 1: that's a that's sometimes called the triangle, and but it's
Speaker 1: the same sort of thing. Then you've also got a conturbation,
Speaker 1: which is where that's the best word. I've got to say,
Speaker 1: it's the least awkward best word ever, conturbation, conbation. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't. It doesn't make me think that. I'm like,
Speaker 1: there's gotta be a different way to pronounce that, right.
Speaker 1: Um No, I can see that. It's it's con so
Speaker 1: with and then urbation. Yeah. And so it's it's more
Speaker 1: or less continuous urban environment. Yes, so we're talking about city, suburbs, towns,
Speaker 1: everything getting swallowed up that I would argue metro Atlanta
Speaker 1: falls into that category. Um, it's it's obviously it's not a.
Speaker 1: It's it's not a mega city. We don't have a
Speaker 1: population that would put us into that category. But if
Speaker 1: you look at a map of the metropolitan Atlanta area,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of little towns that are essentially
Speaker 1: swallowed up by the city. Oh yeah, absolutely, the same
Speaker 1: thing with with Boston or San Francisco. So let's take
Speaker 1: a look really quickly about the two at the top
Speaker 1: five cities by population. Now, this is according to the
Speaker 1: World Atlas. Again, look, depending upon what resource you use,
Speaker 1: you may see different a different ranking. And it's also
Speaker 1: because it's all on how you define the city. So
Speaker 1: if you're defining it as the metropolitan area around a
Speaker 1: particular core, that's going to give you a different number
Speaker 1: than if you limit yourself to a specific city. So
Speaker 1: number one on the list is Tokyo, Japan. It is
Speaker 1: the largest mega city with thirty seven million, one d
Speaker 1: twenty six thousand people in it. I do not even
Speaker 1: understand that number. Yeah. Now, to be fair, this again
Speaker 1: doesn't just mean the the established historical borders of Tokyo.
Speaker 1: It it also is the metropolitan area around it. Now,
Speaker 1: the population density is six thousand, thirty eight people per
Speaker 1: square kilometer, or fifteen thousand, six hundred people per square mile.
Speaker 1: Every square mile is a lot. Yes, as someone who
Speaker 1: walks a few miles each day, the thought of, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, if I were to walk a square mile
Speaker 1: and think fifteen thousand people are inside of that, that
Speaker 1: would be pretty incredible. However, that's not as incredible as
Speaker 1: it gets, it gets more so. So again, the city
Speaker 1: is number one. If you look at Tokyo and its
Speaker 1: surrounding areas, the actual population within the established borders of
Speaker 1: what is Tokyo is closer to nine millions. So if
Speaker 1: you were being really super strict and saying no, I'm
Speaker 1: just talking about traditional Tokyo, it would not even be
Speaker 1: a megacity. It would be nine million people. It wouldn't
Speaker 1: quite uh, it wouldn't quite count. But no one reasonable
Speaker 1: would ever say that, because again, it's not like as
Speaker 1: soon you cross the border you go into like, oh
Speaker 1: now it's pastoral Japan. That's not the way that works.
Speaker 1: So Tokyo itself is a collection of twenty three smaller cities.
Speaker 1: They are called wards, and each of those has its
Speaker 1: own independent administration. This also makes it complex when you
Speaker 1: start talking about mega cities, because you're off often talking
Speaker 1: about lots of different political entities, all working within uh
Speaker 1: kind of vaguely defined areas. Like you know, there are
Speaker 1: actual borders that if you look on a map you
Speaker 1: can see them, but when you are a person just
Speaker 1: moving through that environment, you may not see that distinction. Also,
Speaker 1: the like material necessities of life don't necessarily obey the
Speaker 1: administrative borders that you've put up. Because so you've created
Speaker 1: a mega city and you just say, oh, we'll just
Speaker 1: divide it up like a pie into a bunch of
Speaker 1: smaller things that are easier to manage, you still have
Speaker 1: to get all the resources that a city this size
Speaker 1: needs to the area, and you still have to find
Speaker 1: a way to provide all of the overlapping services a
Speaker 1: city of this size needs within the area, right, And
Speaker 1: you can't just put water pipes for for one ward
Speaker 1: of a city in that ward and have them not
Speaker 1: connect to any of the other water pipes in the area,
Speaker 1: for example, does the perfect example, because anyone who has
Speaker 1: ever seen anything about water rights knows this is incredibly complicated,
Speaker 1: and even neighboring towns that are technically within the same
Speaker 1: urban environment can have vicious fights over this sort of stuff. Understandably,
Speaker 1: because this is a necessity, right Oh yeah, yeah, Well
Speaker 1: neighboring states have that argument sometimes, so yeah. And as
Speaker 1: these mega cities grow, we're likely going to see more
Speaker 1: and more examples of mega cities across state lines start
Speaker 1: to merge where you can't see the difference between one
Speaker 1: city and the next even as you're going from one
Speaker 1: state to the next, And that gets complicated. Man, I
Speaker 1: bet it's no fun to be a mega city that's
Speaker 1: literally down river of another mega city. Probably not great.
Speaker 1: So uh to to kind of sum up with Tokyo,
Speaker 1: one of the things I wanted to point out is
Speaker 1: that some of the wards, you know, keeping in mind
Speaker 1: that that number, that population density number I gave earlier,
Speaker 1: the six thousand, thirty eight people per square kilometer that
Speaker 1: was an average across Tokyo. Obviously there's some words that
Speaker 1: have a much higher density and some that have lower.
Speaker 1: One of the highest is uh Setagaya, which in two
Speaker 1: thousand seven, uh there was a census that listed at
Speaker 1: having a density of fourteen thousand, seven or twenty eight
Speaker 1: people per square kilometer. So if we convert that to
Speaker 1: square miles, that's thirty eight thousand people in a square mile.
Speaker 1: So twice more than twice what it is throughout the
Speaker 1: rest of Tokyo. Yeah, if you were to you know
Speaker 1: the average, it's more than twice what the average is. Now.
Speaker 1: The other four cities that are in that top five,
Speaker 1: I don't I'm not going to break them all down,
Speaker 1: but I'll tell you know what they are and what
Speaker 1: their populations are. You have Jakarta, Indonesia, which has twenty
Speaker 1: six million people, Seul, South Korea two million, five d
Speaker 1: forty seven thousand, Delhi, India, which is two million, two
Speaker 1: forty two thousand, and Shanghai, China twenty million, eight hundred
Speaker 1: sixty thousand. New York City, which is in fact the
Speaker 1: largest city I have ever visited, ranks at number eight,
Speaker 1: So it is is a little bit further down on
Speaker 1: the list. It has twenty million, uh four hundred sixty
Speaker 1: four thousand people living in the city and surrounding metropolitan
Speaker 1: area Los Angeles, which I've also been to, number seventeen. UM.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you know, London doesn't even count in mega
Speaker 1: cities because of defining what is an actual city. UM, London,
Speaker 1: in fact is is a particularly interesting one. If you
Speaker 1: look at the city of London, you want to be
Speaker 1: super official and really pedantic and say just the city
Speaker 1: of London. The city of London is tiny. It is
Speaker 1: about one point one two square miles in area. It's
Speaker 1: basically inside big ben kind of uh, kind of. I
Speaker 1: have walked through like from one edge side to the other,
Speaker 1: the city of London. It is not a big deal,
Speaker 1: but it's it is the core of the city. This
Speaker 1: is what what had been establishes the historical city of London,
Speaker 1: and then everything else grew up around it, but it didn't.
Speaker 1: That was what had been established as the city. So
Speaker 1: within that that very strict city limit, how many people
Speaker 1: fewer than twelve thousand, eleven thousand, seven hundred. So definitely
Speaker 1: not a mega city, right, I mean you didn't. They
Speaker 1: just really dropped the ball on that. But when we're
Speaker 1: talking about Greater London, yeah, you're looking at Greater London.
Speaker 1: That is around seven million, two thousand and thirty six
Speaker 1: people from a two thousand one census. So obviously that
Speaker 1: has changed since then. And if you look at the
Speaker 1: London metropolitan area again, depending on where you draw the line,
Speaker 1: where do you say, all right, well this is now
Speaker 1: outside the metropolitan area. It's between twelve and eighteen million.
Speaker 1: That's a big gap, right, that's a big difference on
Speaker 1: the low end in the high end. So clearly it
Speaker 1: gets complicated saying all right, this still counts as part
Speaker 1: of the mega city versus this is now not part
Speaker 1: of the mega city. This is this is either too
Speaker 1: far out or separated by too many you know, miles
Speaker 1: of uh only partially developed area or whatever however you
Speaker 1: want to you know designated. Um. So, yeah, if you
Speaker 1: were to, if you were to look at the London
Speaker 1: Metropolitan Area and consider that as a whole, it would
Speaker 1: fit under mega city. But no one on any of
Speaker 1: the lists I looked at does that. They all look
Speaker 1: at more of the greater London area. Uh and uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this this is a big deal because, like we were saying,
Speaker 1: you know, when you have different areas of the same
Speaker 1: urban environment under the direction of different political entities, whether
Speaker 1: it's a city government, of town council, whatever it may be,
Speaker 1: it makes the whole integration really complicated, especially when it
Speaker 1: comes to things like infrastructure and and this is affecting
Speaker 1: more and more people. It's officially over half of the
Speaker 1: world's population is affected by this kind of urbanization. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can really think about this is that we're living
Speaker 1: in a period of transition, that we're actually fundamentally changing
Speaker 1: the way humanity occupies space, and it's happening very quickly
Speaker 1: from a historical time scale. Sure. Yeah, And in fact,
Speaker 1: it's happening faster than what policy can keep up with.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, not that that's surprising. That happens
Speaker 1: all the time. We talk about that all the time
Speaker 1: on this show, where technology or other advances science, that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff can can quickly outpace legislation for example.
Speaker 1: So I would imagine that this mega city trend is
Speaker 1: going to not only continue, but it's going to continue
Speaker 1: to be problematic. Oh absolutely, because you know, some of
Speaker 1: the cities that we've been talking about, like like New York,
Speaker 1: have had really in the scheme of the universe, I
Speaker 1: suppose a short time, but but in the scheme of
Speaker 1: a city along time to kind of develop infrastructure and grow.
Speaker 1: But but some of those established cities are are absolutely
Speaker 1: not the fastest growers right now. Sure. Didn't you say
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty New York was the biggest metropolis on
Speaker 1: the planet. Yeah, I mean it was. It went from
Speaker 1: number one to today it's like number eight. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's and the ones that have UM surpassed it, they're
Speaker 1: all in uh In essentially in Asia. That's where the
Speaker 1: top seven are uh In fact, number seven UM is Karachi, Pakistan.
Speaker 1: And it grew by eighty percent over a decade, I mean,
Speaker 1: an eight percent growth in ten years. Can you imagine
Speaker 1: imagine that you moved to Atlanta and within ten years
Speaker 1: I moved to Atlanta about ten years ago, imagined the
Speaker 1: population that grown by you'd be moving away from Atlanta. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean when you think about that, that's not even
Speaker 1: that seems more than just a city growing. That's essentially
Speaker 1: like a new city has been creative. In fact, it's
Speaker 1: great that you say that, because there's another example. The
Speaker 1: Chinese mega city of Shenzhen has twelve million people in
Speaker 1: it now. In nineteen seventy nine, it had thirty thousand
Speaker 1: people thirty nine today. Yeah, so even more than than Karachi. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it grew so fast and changed so much that
Speaker 1: it is often referred to as a city without history
Speaker 1: because it didn't have a chance to establish any It
Speaker 1: was just when you think of you know, we talked
Speaker 1: about the singularity, how that's going to be an era
Speaker 1: of constant change where it is difficult to have a
Speaker 1: meaningful conversation about the now this is it, this is
Speaker 1: this is the it in city form. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's problematic because a lot of these very
Speaker 1: fast growing areas are also some of the poorest, yes,
Speaker 1: in the in the you know, most struggling developing parts
Speaker 1: of the world. Yes, and and we'll we'll talk more
Speaker 1: about that in a little bit and the host of
Speaker 1: issues that come with that, and also some of the
Speaker 1: reasons why that is happening and their understandable reasons. But
Speaker 1: that doesn't make it any less problematic. So uh, some
Speaker 1: of the mega cities that you know, like like New
Speaker 1: York City, Tokyo, some of them, their growth rates have
Speaker 1: slowed over time, Like they're still growing. It's not like
Speaker 1: they're getting smaller or or maintaining, but that percent that
Speaker 1: growth rates started to drop, whereas they're ones in other
Speaker 1: parts of the country. Are parts of the world that
Speaker 1: country that are increasing, like Asia and Africa in particular,
Speaker 1: So uh, we will likely see that those those impoverished
Speaker 1: places are going to continue to have growth as people
Speaker 1: try to move to cities in an effort to chase opportunity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a thing that I think can be easily misunderstood.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I've read about mega cities
Speaker 1: is that people often look at large urban areas and say, oh,
Speaker 1: we see a lot of poverty here, and then they
Speaker 1: interpret that as being that the large urban area is
Speaker 1: the cause of a lot of poverty. But that might
Speaker 1: not necessarily be the case. Another way of looking at
Speaker 1: it would be that the large urban areas where people
Speaker 1: come seeking economic opportunity, right, And so it could be
Speaker 1: seen as drawing people from poverty who are trying to
Speaker 1: find a way to escape it, right. And And in fact,
Speaker 1: the two main contributors to mega city growth in these
Speaker 1: developing nations tend to be migration from rural areas or
Speaker 1: smaller cities into larger ones with the hope that those
Speaker 1: larger cities do have this opportunity. And also high birth rates.
Speaker 1: Those would be the two things together we're seeing in
Speaker 1: more developed nations, especially places like Japan, we're seeing not
Speaker 1: just a decrease in birthrates, but to a point where
Speaker 1: we're seeing negative growth a decrease in population. Right, So, uh,
Speaker 1: that those are both factors. But like you were saying,
Speaker 1: It's exactly that case where one of the stories I
Speaker 1: was reading was about how in Nigeria you would have
Speaker 1: people who would live in uh in a city go
Speaker 1: once a year to go back to where they came from,
Speaker 1: and everyone had a story to tell to make it
Speaker 1: sound like they're doing well, which would perpetuate this idea
Speaker 1: that the city was a place of opportunity. Even if
Speaker 1: the person wasn't doing well in the city, they didn't
Speaker 1: want to come back to their home and say they
Speaker 1: weren't doing well, and that perpetuated this idea of I
Speaker 1: can escape poverty, I can make something of myself, I
Speaker 1: can be a success by moving to the city. And honestly,
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases, we're talking about cities that
Speaker 1: just get so flooded by people there's just no way
Speaker 1: to to to deal with that. There's not enough opportunity
Speaker 1: in that time span. Like perhaps if it were over
Speaker 1: a longer time frame, it would be more manageable, but
Speaker 1: in a compressed time frame and in a manner of
Speaker 1: a couple of decades, that's just not realistic, right, So
Speaker 1: you can think of this as a lot of people
Speaker 1: who travel to cities seeking economic opportunity. Really the reality
Speaker 1: is they end up sort of waiting in line for
Speaker 1: economic opportunity in cities. All of these, all these musings
Speaker 1: and predictions that we're making about the ways that these
Speaker 1: populations might change and how people's lives might change because
Speaker 1: of them, raise a few questions about about what is
Speaker 1: going to happen in the cities. Cities and how they
Speaker 1: are going to adapt this kind of stuff. There's another
Speaker 1: question that comes up when we're considering the role of
Speaker 1: huge cities in the future, and and this question is
Speaker 1: sort of related to Atlanta. So when I think about
Speaker 1: the state of Georgia that Atlanta is in, yes, it's
Speaker 1: kind of like you have Atlanta and and you've got
Speaker 1: the rest of the states. So it's like a little
Speaker 1: island inside of a larger like ocean. Yeah, and if
Speaker 1: Atlanta keeps growing, it's going to be kind of strange
Speaker 1: to think about it. So imagine a scenario where I
Speaker 1: don't know, in the future, the population of the Atlanta
Speaker 1: metro area is three times the population of the rest
Speaker 1: of Georgia. Okay, in that case, what happens to the
Speaker 1: balance of power between the city of Atlanta and the
Speaker 1: state of Georgia. That is technically a part of and
Speaker 1: subject to. And you can extend that question basically to
Speaker 1: to any kind of like power dynamic between cities and
Speaker 1: states or cities and countries. What happens when a city
Speaker 1: becomes so big and so powerful, and it's economic negotiating
Speaker 1: power is so large, and its population is so large
Speaker 1: that it might be seeved as a threat to the
Speaker 1: authority of the jurisdiction in which it technically resides. Sure,
Speaker 1: and this isn't a new question. Even one analogy might
Speaker 1: be like city states in ancient Greece, where so you
Speaker 1: could have Athens or something, and that's not really like
Speaker 1: there is a country of Athens. It's a city state.
Speaker 1: It's a city, yet it has enough power to exert
Speaker 1: a sphere of influence and project its power to the
Speaker 1: area around it. That's madness, No way, that's sparta. Well
Speaker 1: I do wonder, I mean, could we see a return
Speaker 1: to this kind of model? Well, modernly, I mean we
Speaker 1: kind of already are in some cities if you take
Speaker 1: New York City as an example, as Swedish PhD candidate
Speaker 1: Kristan young Fist did in her doctoral thesis for Uppsala
Speaker 1: University in teen and I really hope I pronounced those
Speaker 1: things correctly. Nice Swedish listeners. I tell me, if I
Speaker 1: was wrong, you're way better at it than I would
Speaker 1: have been. I would have probably end up saying something
Speaker 1: like Kirsten Lungfish and that we've just been terrible. You know,
Speaker 1: I do love that name. Young. It's okay, it's all
Speaker 1: great that I said it wrong, like nineteen times before
Speaker 1: I got that one right at any rates. The thesis
Speaker 1: is called the Global City two point oh an international
Speaker 1: political actor beyond gnomism, economism, question mark well but but
Speaker 1: in it she she argued that the powers wielded by
Speaker 1: such densely populated, strong economy cities like New York have
Speaker 1: have gone global. Their powers have gone global, that they
Speaker 1: make policies that affect climate change and pandemics and transnational
Speaker 1: crime and global poverty and terrorism. And she was saying
Speaker 1: that in New York City in particular, following nine eleven,
Speaker 1: that the local government there has developed a security force
Speaker 1: that's larger than that of many countries, complete with ground
Speaker 1: to air defense systems and intelligence force with permanent staff
Speaker 1: in Asia and the Middle East, in Europe, And okay,
Speaker 1: if that just plain old freaksy out. Then here's a
Speaker 1: gentler example, um cities adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, which
Speaker 1: is a U N emission reduction plan that was written
Speaker 1: up way back in young Vist says Toronto was the
Speaker 1: first place in the world to adopt these emission reduction
Speaker 1: targets while lots of national governments were still trapped in debate.
Speaker 1: So she she says that lots of cities have been
Speaker 1: able to pass better laws of this sort. It implies
Speaker 1: that modern cities, being more nimble and having more specialized interests,
Speaker 1: are capable of making and implementing far reaching decisions a
Speaker 1: lot faster than larger governmental bodies. And this is interesting
Speaker 1: to me specifically because we've been pointing out the complications
Speaker 1: that come into the fact that you know, when we
Speaker 1: say city, we may be talking about a collection of
Speaker 1: different governments. And in some cases it may just be
Speaker 1: that the one that is at the core of the
Speaker 1: city makes a decision and that's going to cascade outward
Speaker 1: from there. In other cases, it may be a collaboration
Speaker 1: between the various kinds of bodies of political officials to
Speaker 1: bring something like this to fruition. Yeah, another thing that
Speaker 1: seems interesting is a possibility to me, is what about
Speaker 1: the idea of merging mega cities that transcend larger borders,
Speaker 1: like like between two different states in the United States
Speaker 1: or two countries. And yeah, so imagine one example might
Speaker 1: be the I eighty five corridor. You know what if
Speaker 1: Atlanta eventually merges with the major cities of North Carolina
Speaker 1: and it really just kind of becomes continuous between them.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a long time until something like that
Speaker 1: could happen, but I just needed to imagine in like
Speaker 1: science fiction, and yeah, that or or you could imagine
Speaker 1: the bridging of say Atlanta and Chattanooga across the border
Speaker 1: from Georgia and Tennessee what happens then? Yeah, And then
Speaker 1: I mean we already have examples of that, like Baltimore
Speaker 1: and d C. You know, we already have these examples where, uh,
Speaker 1: you have this this imaginary dotted line that only exists
Speaker 1: on paper and uh, but not in reality. And then
Speaker 1: you know, how do you resolve those things things that
Speaker 1: where if one municipality were to make a decision, it
Speaker 1: would it would obviously affect the other one. So at
Speaker 1: what point do you say, listen, we have to come
Speaker 1: together and have this discussion, because now we're no longer
Speaker 1: talking about something that's just going to affect us, It's
Speaker 1: going to affect you as well, So you should have
Speaker 1: a stake in this decision. Yeah, yeah, or even even
Speaker 1: across country borders. You know what if Toronto and Detroit
Speaker 1: like just filled in that little gap. These are really
Speaker 1: interesting questions and it and it is not just you know,
Speaker 1: a hypothetical or thought experiment, nothing like that. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's becoming reality and the idea of these really
Speaker 1: powerful cities kind of not necessarily throwing their weight around.
Speaker 1: I mean, the example you gave about Atlanta and Georgia
Speaker 1: is a great one. The if you look at the
Speaker 1: political leanings of the state of Georgia, you'll see that
Speaker 1: Atlanta tends to go one way, in the State of
Speaker 1: Georgia tends to go another way. So right now, the
Speaker 1: the rural population of Georgia is larger than the city
Speaker 1: of Atlanta. So ultimately, the people who live in Atlanta
Speaker 1: can sometimes feel in state or national elections like they
Speaker 1: aren't truly being represented. If that were to change, if
Speaker 1: the city of Atlanta's population were to exceed that of Georgia,
Speaker 1: of the rural parts of the state, we might see
Speaker 1: that flip, and then we would have a situation where
Speaker 1: people in the rural parts of the state would feel
Speaker 1: like the big city folks are the ones making all
Speaker 1: the decisions. Yeah, and I'm sure it's already like that
Speaker 1: in a lot of states, right where you've got big
Speaker 1: enough cities where you know, there are lots of rural
Speaker 1: parts of the state of New York, right, but New
Speaker 1: York cities, New York City, and it's gonna outweigh almost
Speaker 1: any kind of concern that rural New York has, at least. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean when people say New York, I think almost
Speaker 1: nine times out of a hundred in casual conversation, if
Speaker 1: you're not in the state of New York, can you
Speaker 1: say the words new York you you, Yeah, you're referring
Speaker 1: to New York City, which ironically might beat New Jersey.
Speaker 1: So uh. At any rate, this was really kind of
Speaker 1: an interesting conversation. We've got so much more to say,
Speaker 1: and we knew going into this that we were going
Speaker 1: to divide this up into two episodes, and in our
Speaker 1: second episode we're going to explore more of the issues
Speaker 1: that mega cities have. Also, we're gonna look at some
Speaker 1: science fiction scenarios, one in particular, and discuss what would
Speaker 1: it take for it to become possible or is it
Speaker 1: even possible? So you can tune into our next episode
Speaker 1: for that. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes
Speaker 1: of Forward Thing, maybe there's a topic that you've just
Speaker 1: been dying to have us tackle. You gotta let us
Speaker 1: know about it. Send us an email the addresses FW
Speaker 1: thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us
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