Urbanization
Also implicit to the Federal Government’s apparent view of the future is that current global urbanization trends can be projected to the end of the century. This assumption also underlay the discussions at the recent UN Habitat Conference in Vancouver.
In the pamphlet issued on this occasion by the British Government’s Department of the Environment, it is categorically stated that the world, by the end of the century will be (not may be) totally urbanized. The very possibility of a reversal of this disastrous trend does not even seem to have occurred to the scientists of the British Department of the Environment. Yet if they had taken the trouble to examine what would actually be involved in “totally urbanizing” the world in 25 years, they might indeed have realised that, for all practical purposes, such an enterprise is simply not possible.
Surprisingly enough, they themselves concede that it will mean building as many houses in the next 25 years as have been built since the beginning of the historical era, but this does not appear to daunt them. They seem to regard it as just another challenge, which man, with his ‘limitless ingenuity’ to use a well-worn phrase, will be able to meet, as he always has those of the past.
Where, however, will this gigantic enterprise – the land, the water, the timber, the metals and fuel with which to power it and the capital to finance it? Also, let us not forget that cities are built with resources extracted from the countryside; but can the countryside, from which we must also derived our food, support further depredations on quite this scale?
Have the DOE scientists also considered the massive costs of supporting a totally urbanized world population on a global scale? Of providing it with capital intensive jobs, of transporting food from where it is grown to the vast asphalt jungles where it will be consumed, the cost of evacuating and dispersing the huge quantities of waste products that the cities must generate, of maintaining the roads and motorways, the sewers, the hospitals, the schools, the universities, the prisons, the de-alcoholisation centres, and the vast state-welfare institutions needed to sustain the increasingly alienated city masses?
It should also be unnecessary to point out, that, in to what extent we are failing, even today, to provide such amenities, and thereby to accommodate present urbanization pressures.
It should also be unnecessary to point out, that, in spite of the massive and very costly conference in Vancouver, no remotely feasible plan has been formulated for dealing with the problems already caused by industry in any major country, let alone on a global scale.
What then is it assumed will happen? Is it really believed that the governments of the world, aided and abetted by the international agencies, will simply go ahead systematically manufacturing misery and squalor on an ever more massive scale until it encompasses the greater part of humanity?
Is it not more likely that something will collapse, somewhere along the line, that one at least of the many aberrant conditions that have rendered possible this fatal process will suddenly cease to be satisfied?
Back to topSelf-fulfilling Predictions
If we continue insisting that the future will be like the past, it is also that we wish to justify present activities to which we are committed psychologically and also financially? As Taylor points out,
“The forecasters are often at the same time the planners, and often too they have decided in advance to undertake projects such as Pickering Airport and ‘Design for Development’ and must rationalise such decisions by forecasting a need for them.” [64]
Once such projects have been undertaken, the predicted urbanization and economic growth will have been accommodated, thereby rendering it that much more likely to occur. In this way the original forecasts will have been self-fulfilling. In Taylor’s words,
“they are implicitly based on the decision to provide the public capital and urban facilities necessary to service the forecasted growth, otherwise the growth would not occur.”
Urban population figures
There is, in fact, another factor involved. The different aspects of the urbanization process tend to be examined in isolation from each other. If they were regarded together, as Kenneth Watt [65] has attempted to do for the US, and as we shall also attempt – in very rough outline – in this report, then we must quickly come face to face with reality. For one thing, the total cost of urbanization at a national, let alone a global level, cannot conceivably be met for very long even in the US, let alone in many other countries, with much shakier foundations such as Canada and the UK.
Kenneth Watt [66] has shown just how much cheaper it is to sustain a small population in small towns and villages than in large cities. He shows, for instance, that the cost of public welfare in towns of less than 10,000 people is about $12 per capita, while in large cities such as New York it is $192. The cost of police protection in the small town is $5.70 and in a large city $52. The difference is also appreciable, though not quite so dramatic, for education, fire, and direct general expenditure.
J. C. Kapur [67] does the same exercise for a Third World Country. He and all other serious students of the socio-economic problems facing India can only see their solution in terms of a programme of radical decentralisation. For one thing, as Kapur points out, the capital necessary to provide just one job in Bombay will provide 22 in the villages.
People until recently have been required in the cities as necessary components of the production-consumption process to which everything else has been subordinated. Today, this process is saturated with people. It requires no more. It cannot, in fact, even absorb those that have already been introduced into it. Over and above the number it can make use of, people are random to it. They constitute ‘noise’ or, ‘pollution’, since they serve but to interfere with its proper functioning. This means that the state must care for them – and that capital must thereby be diverted from activities that contribute to the perpetuation of the production-consumption process, to others that are largely parasticial to it.
If these costs be taken into account, it is not difficult to show that urbanization has, among other things, become uneconomic and that, on economic grounds alone, systematic de-urbanization is required. In fact, it can be shown that in many countries de-urbanization is the only alternative to bankruptcy, social breakdown and famine in the very short-term. It is not surprising, in fact, that such a policy has been adopted by a number of governments that are not ideologically committed to fostering the lifestyle that goes with urbanization.
Thus, in China, urban migration appears to have ceased, and as many as 8 million young people have left the cities for the countryside, the population of Shanghai itself having fallen in the last decade by 500,000 to 5.6 million.
The same trend is occurring in South East Asia with the communist victories in South Vietnam and Cambodia, though in the latter case de-urbanization is apparently occurring with considerable brutality. Thus, it is said that the population of Phnom Pen has been reduced from 2 million to 20,000 – and according to some reports to an even smaller figure.
The Government of South Vietnam has announced its intention of moving 10 million people from the cities to the countryside. Sooner or later, other countries will probably follow their example.
In the meantime, a trend towards de-urbanization is discernible even in Western industrial countries. Mainly as a result of ethnic problems and the associated escalation of the crime rate in the major cities of the US, there has been a systematic exodus of the middle class which has had a positive feedback effect. Offices and factories follow in the wake of this exodus, with a resulting decline of job opportunities in the cities (by more than 10 percent in the four years between 1970 and 1974 in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington, and by more than 18 percent in Detroit and St. Louis over the same period). [68]
The consequent increased expenditure on welfare has to be met from a reduced tax base, putting the city government into financial difficulties. As a result, the cities are simply being run down. In fact, some city areas, where crime and general dilapidation are particularly bad, are simply being abandoned. in 1973, the City government in Philadelphia was actually selling abandoned houses for one dollar apiece – at the time there were 30,000 of them. [69]
In general, amenities are being eliminated, museums closed down, the police force reduced, teachers and security guards in schools laid off – all of which must render life there still more unattractive and accelerate the trend towards yet further de-urbanization.
In fact, in the US since 1970, the number of people living in big cities is down 1.9 percent, those living in suburbs up 8.4 percent and those living in small towns and rural areas up 5.0 percent. in the eastern half of the US, practically every large city is losing population, those in which the trend is most pronounced being Minneapolis (down 12.0 percent) and St. Louis (down 10.3 percent). [70]
The notion that the problems facing US cities are a specifically American one is a terrible illusion. The same situation must occur to a varying degree throughout the industrial world, as the environment provided by modern conurbations comes to satisfy, ever less adequately, man’s biological, social and aesthetic needs.
The presence in many US cities of large Black, Puerto Rican and Mexican minorities, which find it even more difficult to adapt to urban and industrial living than does the mainstream society and tend to form a depressed proletariat at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, is of course an aggravating factor – especially in a society whose members are exposed from infancy to egalitarian values.
Immigration is leading to precisely the same problems in the UK, contrary to all the predictions of the experts who have continually evoked all sorts of arguments to rationalise their desire to show that British cities would be exempt from the problems that are devastating the cities of the US.
The signs are too, that the same problems are beginning to occur in Canadian cities – in particular Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. As large cities in the US, and in general throughout the industrial world, become increasingly run-down and abandoned by all who can afford to do so, they will be left to ever more demoralised slum-dwellers, living off an ever more bankrupt welfare system, and ever more addicted to crime, vandalism and various forms of retreatism -such as alcoholism, drugs, etc. – that permit people to escape, albeit temporarily, from an increasingly intolerable social environment.
What solution is there to such a problem? There is only one: the slum-dwellers must be moved out and efforts must be made to integrate them into smaller communities that provide a physical and social environment that better satisfies basic human requirements than does a modern conurbation. In other words the only solution to the urban problem is de-urbanization.
De-urbanization, as already intimated in this report, will be necessary for other reasons as well: firstly so as to reduce the consumption of fuel and mineral resources, secondly to reduce pollution levels, and thirdly, as we shall see, to reduce the loss of agricultural land. (Geno [71] points out that attitudes are changing rapidly. For instance, the Alberta Land Use Forum gathered over 450 written and oral presentations to the forum members – and the most often represented theme was the importance of preserving agricultural land from further development pressures.)
Changing attitudes will partly facilitate this process. Disillusionment with the urban, industrial way of life is setting in very rapidly among middle-class youth in industrial countries, and will probably soon spread to the working classes. A new ethic is developing which stresses such things as natural foods, self-sufficiency, small-scale enterprise, the rural way of life, community living and a search for cultural identity. There is every reason to suppose that these are not just fads but the necessary components of an emerging post-industrial culture.
In reality, we have little choice. De-urbanization will occur whether we like it or not, for among other things, we can no longer afford our cities. Either they are phased out or they will die a natural death – and this would be very much more painful.
Back to topEconomic Growth
Population growth, increased food production, urbanization, the substitution of capital inputs for human labour – these are the necessary components of economic growth. To suggest, as I have done, that all these trends are going into reverse implies that the continued increase in the material consumption that has marked the last 150 years can no longer be maintained and hence that the ‘march of progress’ itself – at least as it is defined today – is coming to an end.
Needless to say the implications of such a development are immense. Among other things if economic growth is to be no more, then capital will cease to be available to provide material and institutional solutions to people‘s problems. Since no government can admit to its electors that it cannot solve their problems, a totally new range of solutions must be found – and to provide its rationale a new interpretation is required of man‘s relationship with his physical and social environment.
This means a revolution in our most basic assumptions. Secretly, most people know that this revolution is necessary, that present attitudes to basic issues are archaic. The events of the last four years should by now have dispelled any doubts as to the validity of the thesis of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and of A Blueprint for Survival. What is more, they should have made it amply evident that these limits will manifest themselves much sooner than the authors of these documents envisaged, in fact, that they are already beginning to do so.
Maurice Strong recently said in a speech in Ottawa that the energy crisis, the rapid development of the environment issue, and the chronic shortages of food are no longer isolated events, “but the harbingers of a major transition in human affairs – comparable in effect to the discovery of fire, the advent of agriculture and the industrial revolution.” [72]
This major transition is unlikely to be directly triggered off by resource shortages, pollution, social breakdowns and the growing gap between population and food supply as suggested in Limits to Growth. Their effect is to render conditions ever less suitable to the industrial process and a symptom of this is the dramatic increase in the cost of maintaining our industrial society. In fact, it seems increasingly clear that it is inflation and capital shortage that will directly bring the industrial society to its knees and bring about the major transition that Maurice Strong refers to. Since there is nothing in current economic theory that suggests why this should occur, it may be worth reexamining this theory in the light of the problems we face today.
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