Here's a question: Will futuristic urban India resemble a) Chicago, b) Dharavi (formerly Mumbai’s largest slum), or c) none of the above?
Researchers at UNH, Yale, and BU recently published a paper visualising the growth trajectories of 100 cities over 10 years, combining satellite data on city lights with SeaWinds scatterometry. Each city was broken into grids, each grid was plotted from 1999 (tail) to 2009 (head) on the x-axis and height on the y-axis. More horizontal arrows reflect greater expansion outward, more vertical arrows with expansion upward.
The results are distinct and fascinating.
Cities in India, much like those in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, have sprawled out rather than up.
By contrast, cities in the developed world added to their skylines with minimal peripheral growth.
Surprise! Cities in China did both. Resembling no other nation. And not just in Beijing and Shanghai.
As I have the privilege of wandering through more cities, such a difference it makes to have parks, superb public transport, preserved architectural heritage, breathing room, air you care to breathe, manifestations of relatively equitable wealth distribution... I sound spoiled, yes? But is it asking too much that we build a city to be resilient and prosperous for all its denizens? Can we justify aiming for anything less?
Amazingly cool graphs, Sisi!! Thanks for sharing! Man, look at China. Just look at those cities. Wow.
ReplyDeleteI have a bad habit of comparing the population of any city with Seoul's and, if it is smaller than Seoul, thinking, "oh pshh it's a small city." like Chicago. has around 3 million people, I believe. and Houston, a city my friend recently told me is the 4th largest in America (leading me to believe it was HUGE), is just 2.2 million or so. Whereas Seoul's population is something like 11 million, and if you include the metro area, is 26 million (as in, half the population of the whole country). I realize in my head that this is bigger than NYC, which is clearly not a "minor" city (lol) but I still have this terrible tendency to dismiss an urban area with less than 10 million people as "small."
Anyway there is little point to my anecdote except it shows how I am very poor at learning. -_- and your graphs are pretty awesome. By the way, I spent a summer in Berlin and was BLOWN AWAY at the amazing way they incorporated public transport, public space, and greenery into the cityscape. I am no sociologist so I don't know how to describe it well, but it just FELT GOOD to be in that city. It just felt like a city that was built to help the people living in it have better quality lives. Really cool. And so much green. I totally agree with your sentiment above. We should not hold ourselves to any less. 2 years in this terribly polluted, very ugly, concrete, antithetical-to-natural-beauty, littered Chinese village has taught me the importance of beauty to our souls, our lives. I can't wait to talk with you more about this in person.
Reference points are funny, aren't they? Edmonton is the northernmost major North American city, the capital of Alberta, home to 800K, which you know, rounds to one whole million. And then I spend a summer in Shanghai at 23M - 67% of Canada's entire population.
ReplyDeleteIt's mind-imploding how megacities like Shanghai and Seoul exist, even more so if they are "built to help the people living in it have better quality lives". I want to visit Seoul and Berlin.
I felt similarly traveling through parts of China, "This is not conducive to happiness. Development vs. deadened souls", though other cities give you hope ie; Hangzhou, but perhaps I am biased being from Zhejiang :)
Haha no you are not biased :) I have never had the chance to go to Hangzhou but I have only heard good things about how beautiful it is. And Yunnan is also stunning. China definitely has both extremes... but I'm hopeful that with time, development will only get more environmental, more aesthetic, more conducive to high quality of life--rather than the opposite.
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