Mega Cities are the New Green

“We are not saying that any large city is assured of prosperity forever, but if you look at the collection of cities, large cities have managed to out run their problems. Large is smart.”

~ Jose Lobo, ASU economist

(Shanghai, China Waterfront)

Big cities are both a blessing and a curse, but a team of researchers have found that we haven’t been looking at the big picture in terms of what large cities contribute to society. Traditionally, the idea is that the increased pollution, crime and poor social structures of cities is the price that must be paid for innovation and for generating wealth. Statistically, large cities are the home of most high paying jobs. However, there may another reason for giving props to big cities, including that cities are actually “greener” than rural living.

A team of researchers, including an economist from Arizona State University, have debunked some of the popular notions about big cities.

“It’s true that large cities have more problems, they are more congested, they create more pollution and they have more crime,” said Jose Lobo, an ASU economist in the School of Sustainability. “But also because of their size, cities are more innovative and create more wealth. Large cities are the source of their problems and they are the source of the solutions to their problems.”

“Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities,” the researchers state. “The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development.”

This will require thinking about cities in new ways, they add. The old way of thinking about cities is as if they were an organism, which continually consumes resources as it grows in size is an inaccurate metaphor Lobo says.

“The one thing that we know about organisms whether it be elephants or sharks or frogs, is that as they get large, they slow down,” Lobo said. “They use less energy, they don’t move as fast. That is a very important point for biological scaling.”

“In the case of cities, it is actually the opposite,” he added. “As cities get larger they create more wealth and they are more innovative at a faster rate. There is no counterpart to that in biology.”

In fact, Lobo said, the larger the city the greater return on investment. The researchers base their findings on data on the growth of cities (large urban areas) in the U.S., Europe and China over the past 150 years. They measured cities consumption of resources, (such as water usage), requirements for infrastructure (roads, transportation, lengths of electrical cable) and then measured the creative output of these areas (patents issued, “super creative jobs” generated, R&D employment, total wages).

What they found was that as the city grew in size it required less energy (resources) to sustain it in a proportion called sublinear scaling. What was surprising to the team was when they measured creative output (jobs, wealth generated, innovation) as cities grew, the scaling of this output was not sublinear, but superlinear, meaning as the city grew its creative output grew faster and faster.

“It isn’t like if you double the size of a city you double its creative output,” Lobo said. “The increase you get in wealth creation is greater than the increase in size of the city.”

It seems we need to rethink large cities, both in how they are managed and what they contribute to the greater good of humanity. This may be especially true today, as cities appear poised for explosive growth around the world. Today a little more than half of the world’s population lives in large urban areas. By 2030, it is estimated to be two-thirds of the world’s population will be in urban areas.

“Cities are really one of the most important innovations in humans history,” Lobo said. “We need to think of them as being very human entities and as engines of creation. We need a different perspective about cities, one that is away from thinking of large cities as a source of problems but as possible sources of solutions.”

“The practical application of this work is that the problem is not large cities, the problem is the conditions in which some of the people live in large cities,” Lobo added. “Policies should be directed to making large cities more livable not making them smaller.”

Posted by Rebecca Sato

Related Galaxy posts:

Origins of Ancient Cities -A New Theory
Green Cities –The Escape from the "Heat Island"
Homo Urbanus - For the 1st Time in Human History the City Dominates
Cities Intensify Storm Violence

Link:
http://nationallloydsinsura.ottawabloggers.com/2007/10/23/large-is-smart-when-it-comes-to-cities/

Comments

[Antonio Lopez]

Yes, but have they displaced their problems elsewhere? If a city dumps its sewage into the ocean, the city solves its problem. But what about the ocean?

[Brian]

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[Mr. Bear]

Watch the film 'Code 46'. Can't tell if running a shot of Shanghai with this piece is amazingly ironic, or amazingly appropriate... .

[bitirim]

thank you

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