For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. (Hebrews 11:10) [1]
We are living in an increasingly urbanized and urbanizing world. According to a recent United Nations Human Settlements Programme report (UN-Habitat),[2] more than half of the worldâs population lives in human built environments with a density of at least 1,500 persons per square kilometer, or cities.[3] By the middle of this century, the percentage of the population that resides in urban areas is expected to rise to more than 70 percent. There are now more than 1,000 cities on earth with more than 500,000 inhabitants.[4] According to the 2016 report of the UN-Habitat, across the globe there were forty-four large cities, which the report defined as having between five and ten million inhabitants, and twenty-nine megacities, which it defined as having ten million or more inhabitants and are often metropolitan regions encompassing several administrative districts or cities. The number of megacities by 2018 had already risen to thirty-one and is expected to reach forty-three by the middle of the century.[5]
Megacities can now be found on five continents (Asia, Africa, South America, Europe, and North America). According to the United Nations report, China has six megacities (Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Tianjin, and Shenzhen). A World Economic Forum report in 2016 stated the actual number in China to be fifteen (the difference is in how a particular urban region is defined).[6] According to the United Nations, the largest megacity on earth remains Greater Tokyo (or the National Capital Region) in Japan, which includes Tokyo, Chiba, Kawasaki, Sagamihara, Saitama, and Yokohama and has a combined total population of more than thirty-eight million inhabitants. The largest megacity in both the Southern and Western hemisphere is SĂŁo Paulo, Brazil, whose population numbers approximately thirty-three million, while Lagos, Nigeria, with a population of twenty-one million is the largest city on the African continent.
Numbers alone donât tell the full story of the phenomenon of global urbanization. Cities accounted for 54 percent of the worldâs population in 2016, but they generated more than 80 percent of the GDP.[7] They also accounted for 80 percent of the worldâs energy consumption and nearly that amount of the worldâs greenhouse gas emissions.[8] The role that a few âglobal citiesâ play in organizing and running the global economy has been explored by social theorists in considerable depth.[9]
Cities have, from the ancient world, played a critical role in the history of human migration.[10] That role has accelerated in the contemporary global context.[11] From ancient times, cities have played a major role in facilitating the spread of infectious diseases among human beings.[12] The recent global spread of diseases such as Ebola and SARS is but the latest chapter in this long history.[13] At the time of writing this essay, the global COVID-19 pandemic had not emerged yet. But, the virus and the disease associated with it have moved quickly in the past few months, severely impacting in particular urban areas.
Drawing connections between a contemporary megalopolis and the first human cities that appeared 10,000 years ago assumes that a degree of historical continuity can be found across what amount to enormous ruptures in urban form and identity across centuries of time and place. Henri Lefebvreâs broad historical outlines of the history of the city are helpful in making these connections. Recognizing the transformations that had taken place over time, Lefebvre nevertheless posited a meaningful overall history of cities. The formations of political capitals and their surrounding supporting cities in the ancient world gave way in the early modern period to commercial and colonial cities driven by the expanding energies of capitalism and colonialism. Commercial and colonial cities in turn were succeeded by industrial cities, post-industrial cities, and then global cities.[14] Such a typology barely begins to do justice to the fuller complexity of the âdense, internally variegated websâ of urban realities and urbanization, of course. Edward J. Soja, for instance, offers six different discourses or analytical frameworks for understanding the complexities of contemporary urban spaces and experiences, provocatively titled âFlexcity,â âCosmopolis,â âExopolis,â âMetropolarities,â âCarceral Archipelagos,â and âSimcities.â[15] For both Lefebvre and Soja, despite the enormous changes and transformations that appear in the history of cities, it is still a continuous history. That means there are meaningful connections to be made between ancient cities and the cities of today.
A number of urban theorists argue that the key element that defines the urbanization process is not just agglomeration, but social differentiation. Allen J. Scott and Michael Storper, for instance, argue that âthe urbanization process resides in the twofold status of cities as clusters of productive activity and human life that then unfold into dense, internally variegated webs of interacting land uses, locations, and allied institutional/political arrangements.â[16] Cities are social formations that diversify internally along lines of skills, wealth, and political power. They do not only experience difference along their borders with what is outside of them. They foster difference from within.
Soja traces this experience of differentiation and variegation to the very origins of cities in human history. What set the first cities apart from the forms of human settlement that preceded them, he argues, was synekism (or synoecism, from the Greek word âsynoikismos,â meaning literally âto dwell together in the same houseâ). In ancient Greece, the term denoted the process in which several human settlements came together in a political union under a single form of governance.[17] Synekism, Soja has often said, was âthe stimulus of urban agglomeration.â[18] The act of members of several different settlements coming together to live in close proximity with each other under a common form of governance created the conditions for new forms of social innovation. Cities continue to be places that stimulate new ideas, Soja argues.
Cities are spaces in which all aspects of human life and experience are enhanced and amplified. They have played a critical role in fostering the development of writing, commerce, and the arts over the past 10,000 years of human history, and they continue to do so today. Richard Sennett argues that cities are spaces where human beings hone their ethical skills, build systems for exercising justice, and learn how to live with strangers. Saskia Sassen says that they are places where those who are without social power find space to create it. She writes,
A city is a complex but incomplete system . . .. In this mix of complexity and incompleteness lies the possibility for those without power to assert âwe are hereâ and âthis is also our cityâ. Or, as the legendary statement by the fighting poor in Latin American cities puts it, âEstamos presentesâ: we are present, we are not asking for money, we are just letting you know that this is also our city.[19]
In the words of the United Nations Human Settlement Programmeâs report from 2005, cities are places âwhere new things are created and from which they spread across the world.â[20] In short, they help us as human beings to become more human on a global scale.[21]
Cities are not without their negative aspects and dimensions.[22] They are places of great inequalities in wealth and power as they simultaneously foster both.[23] They foster violence, suffering, and oppression alongside cooperation, healing, and freedom. They promote patriarchy even as they create space for gender differences and greater gender freedom to emerge.[24] They expand all dimensions of human experie...
