Rip Van Winkle took his famous nap on the outskirts of Palenville in the Catskill Mountains. In Washington Irving’s original story, Rip slept for only 20 years, managing to miss the entire American Revolution in the process. Let us imagine that Rip, being incredibly long-lived due to his many hours of restorative sleep, is still wandering around the Hudson Valley. How different it must look to him! The New York City megalopolis alone now holds more Americans than the Empire State and all of New England did in 1900. Rip has just been the witness to one of the most dramatic transformations of the last century, the shift from a rural to urban existence for the vast majority of Americans. In 1900, 60% of the U.S. population was rural. Today, less than 25% of the population is. It was a transformation that changed the very character of life for Americans, and drove a series of political and cultural changes that continue today.

 

          I’ve heard that Rip Van Winkle has grown tired again. This time, however, in his quest to find a quiet place to rest his head, he’s ventured to a calm spot along the China coast. What can Rip expect to see when he awakens, another 50 or 100 years hence?

 

          The United Nations Population Division is making plans to celebrate the day, sometime in the next couple of years, when, for the first time in the history of the world, a majority of humanity will live in cities. Most of this growth will occur in developing countries, particularly India and China. In all likelihood, Rip will awaken from another long slumber to find a landscape far more modified than that of upstate New York. He will be witness to a momentous, qualitative change in the lived experience of humanity, one that poses a grave challenge to the goal of sustainable development, and yet offers hope of achieving the dream of international peace.

 

Sustainable urbanization

 

          This massive urbanization occurring worldwide creates new possibilities for environmental problems. An increase in urban population necessarily requires an increase in urban land area, on a grand scale: by one estimate, there will be more housing units built in the 21st century than in the rest of recorded human history. And as urban land increases, there will be a host of impacts on the environment. Many of the negative impacts will be clustered in poor neighborhoods in fast growing cities in developing countries: the fast growing favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the shantytowns of Mumbai. Understanding and managing this array of environmental impacts is thus crucial not just for environmentalists, but for anyone interested in reducing poverty and human misery.

 

          Foremost among the problems that the megacities of the 21st century will face is the pollution of drinking water by industrial waster. The Chinese city of Harbin, for example, just had to shut off its public water supply after a petrochemical plant upstream exploded. Its three million residents had to survive without easily available water for several days. Even more common in cities in poorer countries that lack sewer systems are frequent outbreaks of cholera and other water borne diseases. The UN estimates that more than a billion people live in slums, the vast majority without clean drinking water, and this number will likely continue to grow unless there are substantial increases in infrastructure investment.

 

          If Harbin is a warning of the water crises that may become common in the near future, then Lanshou is an example of the worst kind of air pollution that can occur with poorly planned development. This West China city has arguably the world’s worst levels of total suspended particulates, which can cause bronchitis and asthma when inhaled, some 8 times more than recommended levels. This kind of air pollution problem is now common to virtually all big cities in developing countries. However, there’s some evidence that as countries become wealthier they can clean up their air. A whole field of economics has sprung up investigating the relationship between a country’s development and the emissions of different pollutants. For some pollutants such as suspended particulates, any increase in per-capita income beyond a certain point is correlated with reductions in pollution levels. In effect, these pollutants can be reduced or eliminated — it just takes money and expertise that many rapidly growing cities in developing countries do not have. Increases in literacy levels and political rights are further correlated with reduction in these pollutants, suggesting that further democratization in the developing world will be good for the environment.

 

          One of the most common mistakes environmentalists and progressives from developed countries often make is to assume that urbanization is always bad for the environment. This viewpoint focuses on urbanization without having a proper baseline — what would happen if all these people didn’t move to cities? What would the world look like? People would be more dispersed across the landscape, multiplying the impact on the environment many times. One example is energy use, which is markedly more efficient in cities than in rural areas in many countries. Most major uses of energy, like heating and transportation, are more efficient at higher densities. For instance, 53% of New York City residents take public transit to work, far above the United States overall average of 5%, a gain that is possible in large part because of the increased population density of that city. This substantially reduces the energy required to transport people and goods: on average, European cities are 5 times denser than American cities and consume 3.6 times less transport energy per capita. In this sense, the massive migration to urban regions in the developing world provides an opportunity for energy savings, if planned properly. In effect, the world faces the largest urban planning challenge in the history of the human race. The question is, are we ready for it?

 

Convergence of needs

 

          If urbanization is a great challenge for sustainable development, it is also a great opportunity for progressives to build a more peaceful world. Urbanization involves a move away from rural areas, which often are isolated, without adequate education or political representation, toward an urban lifestyle. Despite the many problems of the slums, its residents often enjoy better education than their rural counterparts, and the sheer proximity of poor citizens to one another can greatly facilitate political organizing. The slum dwellers in El Alto in Bolivia, for example, through a series of protests, succeeded in forcing the state to take back control of water and sewer service from the private consortium that had failed to provide the slum dwellers with affordable service. In short, urbanization creates new potentialities for democracy.

 

          City dwellers have much in common with one another, even if they are in different regions or nations. The slum dwellers in El Alto in Bolivia have more in common with the slum dwellers in Khan in Mumbai, India, than they do with those living in rural regions of Bolivia. While this commonality is often obscured by cultural differences and nationalist sentiment, it is a powerful political force that will be ascendant in the 21st century. Urban dwellers have a convergence of needs and desires that makes them a class with shared interests.

 

          The increased mobility of many city dwellers heightens this sense of commonality among urban populations. It is worthwhile to note, for example, that much international migration is not rural to urban but interurban. In the developed world, the European Union provides a good example of what the future probably looks like: younger workers willing to move to find jobs will bounce between cities frequently. One acquaintance of mine, for example, moved from Barcelona to Paris to London in the space of 3 years, all in a quest of a better, more stable job. This kind of cross-cultural movement reduces the sense that this or that city seems foreign. Indeed, what seems foreign to many EU youth is a more rural lifestyle, even if it is in their native country.

 

          This is not to sound sanguine about the political effects of this convergence of needs caused by the ongoing global urbanization. Significant resistance to a sense of commonality remains a political fact. Internally, cultural ties may bind urban dwellers to a rural culture long after that rural culture has ceased to exist. The United States political scene is a prime example of this, with the family farmer being seen as decent and the urban dweller seen as corrupt — never mind the fact that the net flow of tax dollars is from productive cities to stagnant rural areas, or that almost 80% of Americans are urbanites. That isn’t to say that the good rural traits — hard work, honesty, simplicity — should disappear, but rather that politically we must re-envision these ideals in an urban context.

 

          Among countries, nationalism may prevent an acknowledgement of how similar the urban realities are. Still, progressives must be aware of the great opportunity this convergence of needs presents, and seize the opening to push for real improvements in the lives of urban dwellers. Progressives must also avoid any blanket condemnation of urbanization in the developing world, recognizing that any such condemnation is pointless and highly offensive to many Third World residents.

 

 

Robert McDonald, an ecologist, is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, where he spends time thinking about some of the dry technical details of how to create more sustainable urban areas. He also writes a weekly blog on progressive politics and sustainable development.

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