Globalisation Institute: An Urban Globe
It's a little late in coming but it appears that the human race is about to cross a significant threshold:
The world crosses a threshold next year (that's now this year -Tim) when more than half of its population, some 3.3 billion people, will live in urban areas for the first time, a UN report has said.
We'd actually expected to reach this point a few months back:
Forty-eight per cent of the world’s population lived in urban areas in 2003. It is projected to exceed the 50 per cent mark by 2007, thus marking the first time in history that the world will have more urban residents than rural residents. The proportion of the world population that is urban is expected to rise to 61 per cent by 2030.
But really, to complain is to cavil: being out by a few months on an event occuring for the first time in 100,000 years isn't too bad. There are of course those who insist that this is a bad thing. For some it is the strange insistence that only the peasant life, hip deep in the paddy fields, can be considered to be a moral or desirable one. That this view appears not to be held by those doing the standing hip deep in those paddy fields makes this less of a convincing argument than it might be: that those advocating it don't go and do said standing weakens it further. …
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