Researchers contest widely-accepted UN's predictions on urban population growth
thisisplace.org
thisisplace.org
Current estimates puts urbanisation at 55% of all humans, and it's expected to grow to 70% by 2050, more than thirty years from now. And these researchers now claim the current level of urbanisation is already over 84%.
In which field would an error of more than half the current estimate not be a huge deal? Or already being 14% over the projected number of a generation away?
As the article mentions, these numbers matted a whole lot to policy makers and international decision making. It may feel abstract and uninteresting to the average nerd but this stuff has serious consequences.
>Researchers contest widely-accepted United Nations' predictions on urban population growth
Which is a pretty good description. About an hour ago, the title was:
>‘Everything we’ve heard about global urbanization turns out to be wrong’ - researchers
Which is ridiculous clickbait. Since your post is only a few minutes old, you're probably commenting on the new title, whereas others are commenting on the old title.
EDIT: even so, it's still a direct quote of one of the researchers, and indicated as such in the title. Clickbaity, but not misleading.
Plus, adding up all the issues raised about how urbanization has been measured so far, all the in which ways politics muddles up the data, and the resulting gigantic error in measurement together, the problem does seem so fundamental that I don't find the quote that overblown either.
I didn't see a paper or anything linked, so at the moment it remains a superficial interview. I'd like to know more about which remote sensing techniques they're using and how they're classifying population. Like the dissenter in the article, I wonder about informal settlements which can sometimes make up the majority of an urban centre. Do their models include these? The implication seems to be no, but there isn't much to go on.
https://unhabitat.org/the-tale-of-broadville-and-narrowtown-...
Details in the method can be found in a 2016 report about the "Atlas of the human planet" project, where they produced something called the "Global Human Settlement Layer" (there are a lot of plots labelled GHSL in the talk linked above). Starts at page 22, infographic at page 26: https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/documents/Atlas_2016.pdf?t=147...
I can not understand why HN mods do this. Doesn't matter if X is a better title than Y, changing it is by far worse than either - at least once it has hit the front page. And everyone that has already clicked on the discussion will click on it again with the new title because naturally one would believe it was another related article spawned by the first one.
"We changed the title from Aliens Ate Your Code to Problems with Managing Remote Contract Programmers."
If so I'd rather have the pin just say "We think a better/more descriptive title would have been X".
This is a good problem for a classifier. A big-data problem for some grad student. A good thesis project. Or an overlay on Google Earth.
This metric has some correlation with population density. It's not direct; multistory buildings get underrated, and large greenhouses might be mis-identified as an urban feature. Another job for a classifier.
A city is then the set of municipalities that have at least 50% of their population in that urban centre.
I think the article is just summer filler, the results are at least a year old. Here Dijkstra talks about them:
https://unhabitat.org/the-tale-of-broadville-and-narrowtown-...
But yeah, if you take photos from space, it clearly shows most of Earth's land area isn't actually occupied by humans dwelling there. Most of the humans have apparently congregated into what we now like to call urban areas, for which there may or may not be a new definition. Great.
A lot of people hear urban and think Manhattan, San Francisco, central London, etc. The reality in the US (where 80% of the population is "urban") is heavily suburban. The town where I live surrounded by 100 acres with 2 or 3 other houses is also considered urban. I'm not going to be walking to a corner grocery store or taking mass transit anywhere.
That’s not urban. US gov defines <1000/sq mi as rural. This works out to about 2/3 acre/person. So either you live in a rural town or there is a much denser part of the town offsetting your hundred acres.
The context Lewis Dijkstra operates in is that of global development goals, so trying to improve the lives of people across the world by seeing who has it bad. Obviously having varying definitions is simply fatal to that effort.
He explains: > For example, a narrow definition focussed on the city centre will lead to poor scores on air quality and the presence of open or green space, but it will give better scores for access to public transport. Also measuring changes over time will be influenced by where the boundary is drawn as most growth occurs at the fringes of a city.
https://unhabitat.org/the-tale-of-broadville-and-narrowtown-...
I'm really not trying to be on the attack here, but this kind of vague melodrama is pervasive on the internet and is really exhausting.
In third world countries labor is increasingly dedicated to working in factories on subsistence wages to build things for the wealthy that control the means of production. I take a Marxist approach on world politics in that I believe the primary driver of conflict and power is class as opposed to States / Nations. (Note: I have no interest in communism)
Historically these circumstances have led to major upheavals such as the French Revolution, the multiple populist waves that have swept Latin America and the rise of the Nazi Party. So essentially I am predicting a major wave of social unrest on a much larger scale than we have seen recently with the Arab Spring being a precursor.
Of course I could be totally wrong.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but it's just kind of dull...catastrophic stuff is happening as we speak...
But, I think depending on your role within an organization really dictates whether a remote "office" will work. (and personality, work ethic, etc.)
Anyway, I think that companies, especially large orgs that will need to embrace remote more. Customer support is a great example where mostly remote can work well, could even become a "gig economy" thing (I hate that term). I don't think that many orgs will move to cheaper locations, at least not fully. I do think larger orgs will have remote offices in smaller markets, which many do. I'd like to see large orgs be open to investing in co-working spaces in small towns so that all the rural technology workers that are now commuting hours a day can save time and money.
Exciting time, decentralized workforces seem like a useful thing in many areas.
As an analogy, we live in houses with refrigerators because this is a higher quality of life than farming or foraging for food and huddling under trees to get out of the rain.
We live in concentrated environments because walking down the street is a higher quality of life than needing to travel tens of kilometers to buy necessities. A smaller house is easier to maintain and clean.
In the US, a population density greater than 999/sq mile is urban.
If I was only considering American style urban vs. rural environments, the notion of being able to walk to a grocery store in an urban environment wouldn't be true either (for suburbs).
That has its own disadvantages, but I think the social/communal ties are definitely stronger in small towns.
I see this sentiment often on HN, but so far I have not seen strong evidence to support it other than anecdotes. Have there been studies that show that most people would prefer to live in dense cities if employment wasn't a major deciding factor?
It gives me a lot of hope to hear that there are people who do like that kind of thing, given how many folks I know who live in such situations.
Personally, I don't like it-- at least in Texas it's the worst of all worlds: everything is far enough apart that you still need to drive most places in a car (and public transportation / biking are afterthoughts) but you're still living almost on top of each other.
But if folks like it, good on them. I'm trying to figure out how to get out of it. I like being in places like manhattan where I can get on a subway and access some much amazing things, and I like to be out in the hills where have some space and quite. But that in-between space isn't good for me, and that's not taking into account the various cultural and economic issues that I find in living in "suburbia".
A decent used car is much cheaper than urban real estate in many US cities. Poor retirees often live in mobile home parks. And people who need to save money shop at Walmart, not a pricy convenience store.
Seems like a poor person living in a big city who isn't lucky enough to have a rent-controlled apartment is going to end up homeless?
Observationally, people are moving to bigger cities, I think this is common enough knowledge to not require a citation.
If I walk down the street, the most dangerous things I can expect are deer, or if I'm very unlucky, a bobcat.
When I lived in the nearby urban cities, I could walk down the street and the most dangerous things I have faced in the past were people on crack, with weapons, wanting money. If I had been less fortunate, it would have been a gang that split open a neighbor's skull over a stolen CD.
Nothings perfect, but I'll take the country life any day.
I'm perplexed reading this. The number of people required to work on farms is already very low. Is there something particularly revolutionary happening with farming technology right now that would lower it dramatically again?
TLDR: using satellite imaging instead of relying on self reporting, researchers found that the world is already 80%+ urbanized
If anything, this only proves the authors of the study right, as in development aid should be re-prioritized to fulfill urban-like needs (i.e. helping build a courthouse and paying the adjacent salaries) instead of continuing pumping money into things like agriculture, pretending that those 100,000 people are in the majority agricultural workers.
Well, local "specific country policies for cities and population density and infrastructure" shouldn't matter.
We should pick one definition and stick to it, not just consider an 1M people place a "village" just because some country calls its so.
What interests us is how many cities etc there are population wise -- not name-wise. Whether they're called "cities" locally is irrelevant if they still function as such for our criteria.
Politicians will never address the rural areas in a positive way, because they know they will loose city votes. That’s why you always here generic promises, like “more police” and such, then they also get the city votes.
https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/veluwse-knokploeg-met-helikopte...
Not necessarily -- at the first sign of disruption, e.g. a large economy crash, a peak oil related problems, climate change related catastrophes, it's the cities that will become like in Zombie movies.
Rural areas can be much more self-sustainable when it comes to the essentials.
(Someone feels invested enough in city life to downvote a pretty standard argument. And yet this is how people survived major wars and famines in the city in my country -- by having an outlet to grow vegetables etc. in the countryside).