Awakening to the urban tsunami
be central for some of us (Jackson 1994, Karr 2002, Orr 2002, Yu and Padua 2006).
In short, a strongsense of placeperhaps especially develops from the arrangement
of human objects and nature in the space where a person lives for a period.
Finally, consider change. Implicit in the preceding is that the space or place
remains in a reasonably similar form over the period of a person’s experience
there. That continuity or stability is at odds with the widespread urbanization
processes of change in an urban region. People treasure and care about and fight
fortheir town or place. Meanwhile the onrushing wave of population growth
and outward development laps around them, undermines and degrades their
place, and seems to roll right over it. What does a person with a strong sense of
place do? Stay, and suffer? Or leave, and roll outward ahead of the tidal wave?
Awakening to the urban tsunami
Today the Earth has six billion people, half living in urban areas. (State
of the World’s Cities2006). One out of two urban people lives in a city of <500 000.
Abillion people, one out of three urban residents, live (in a ‘‘slum”) with inad-
equate housing and no or few basic services.
By 2030, a single generation ahead, United Nations Population Division data
point to a global population of eight billion, with 60 % in urban areas. Do the
math: 50 %×6=3billion urbanites today, and 60 %×8=almost5billion
tomorrow. Two billion humans, a doubling, are expected to live in urban slums.
In 2030, big cities will be noticeably more numerous (megacities increasing
from 20 to nearly 30, and cities of 1--10 million increasing from about 400 to 600;
Robert McDonald, personal communication), and more widely distributed over
the land. Meanwhile small and mid-size cities are growing at even faster rates.
Equally conspicuous, outward urbanization around nearly all the cities will have
created more extensive metropolitan areas, more built-up urban regions, and
more-severe heat-island effects. Add it all up. Huge urban population growth,
more cities, more big-population cities, cities more widely distributed over the
land, cities with larger metropolitan areas, outward urbanization from much
longer metro area borders, and dispersed urbanization much further out. Does
that add up to an ‘‘urban tsunami” on land?
In essence, more cities, more big cities, more widely distributed, with growing
populations and with expanding metropolitan areas are all rapidly covering the
land -- anurban tsunamieasily identifiable today. Our powerful turbulent eddies
coalesce in places, as the wave sweeps swiftly, almost inexorably across the land.
Three other huge human forces are also testing the resilience of nature and
theland. Water scarcity worsens leaving cities in short supply, cropland parched,
watertables lowered, wildfires burning, and answers drying up. Species extinc-
tion accelerates as tropical forests shrink, coastal areas are developed, natural