Does low fertility correlate with dense urban dwelling and sky high real-estate prices? I suspect it probably does, but I haven't seen any proof.
Maybe this shift to remote-first work that happened over the last 18 months will help....
Or neither. Cities since at least the Roman era have been considered "population sinks". That is, they often maintain or grow their population by attracting surplus population born outside of the city.
As an experiment, if you ever find yourself in a large city like San Francisco, New York, London, or Tokyo, ask around and note what fraction of the residents you meet were actually born in the city.
From a purely financial standpoint, skimming motivated young talent from around the world and then discouraging them from having kids or encouraging them to leave if they do seems like it would be a cheaper approach than raising a native population.
I think this would make cities a bit more "pro-child" than they are currently.
Despite having tens of millions of people and average densities much higher than most cities, they’re both among the most livable cities in the world.
Both of them inherited pre-war street layouts (in Tokyo’s case, despite being bombed, the layouts stayed the same). So neighbourhoods have narrow streets which makes them safer to walk (due to cars needing to drive slowly) and more interesting. And most neighbourhoods have older 2-4 storey or newer 10-20 storey apartments that provide the density to enable local shops and amazing public transit.
So much easier to raise children when you have everything you need within walking distance in the same neighbourhood, including child care.
All that convenience that you see is there because of that fast paced life style people have.
Source: Married to korean and lived in Korea.
Having lived in Toronto, South Korea (Ulsan), and now SF (Sunset), I can’t imagine a better place for a family to live than many neighbourhoods in Korea.
Now that I’ve got a wife, dog, and newborn baby, we needed to purchase a car to get them around (since SF public transit isn’t good enough for this). At least in Toronto we were within a few hundred metres of doctor/dentist/pharmacy, but lacked a walkable grocery store despite being in the city.
There are reasonably nice walkable streets, but in both Toronto and SF the neighbourhood streets are too wide, which results in traffic going way too fast along them. I’ve seen some traffic-calmed streets with artificial barriers and curves but there’s not much.
When I lived in Korea, both neighbourhoods I lived in contained everything I needed, and would have needed if I had a family at the time. And walking around (even with no sidewalks) was a pleasure because cars took the main roads. (Only the delivery scooters were a menace, which I’m sure you were familiar with ).
Of course, this excludes societal pressures, personal finances, etc that affect local Korean and Japanese people.
This is anecdotal, but I've been casually studying urban planning for years to help quantify why I found daily living in Korea to feel so much nicer than anywhere else.
1. Noisy apartments and noisy streets typical for asian megalopolises.If you can afford to live in one of the more quality condos it's better though.
2. Commuting by subway for an 1h with 1-2 stops to change lines is dreadful during peak hours.It's worse than commuting by car from a suburb here in Europe.Michael Wolf's video captures this very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxZLq3IpYAU
Living in Korea is convenient but not comfortable.
2. I didn't mention commuting because I was referring to living locally within a neighbourhood where you don't have to leave. I didn't commute far (walked to work), and I couldn't imagine commuting with multiple line changes in either Seoul or Tokyo. It was bad enough in Toronto with just a 30 minute commute. (I won't commute ever again due to remote work so it's no longer a consideration for me.)
You're lucky to live in Europe, where the suburbs/non-downtown is much more livable and walkable than North America. In many ways, many European cities have the best of both worlds.
For the entire recorded human history, people have lived in cities just fine.
The problems today are entirely self created and imposed by governments and culture of people.
Take housing, the easiest way to solve the housing crisis in Canada and the US is to build more supply and a variety of housing (boarding homes, multi-family homes, 12-unit condos, mixed housing, giant apartment complexes, studios, micro studios). That would likely alleviate a multitude of problems cities have and probably solve a few others unexpectedly (increasing the tax base, the variety of people that live there, etc).
But walk into any public development meeting you will see a few dozen people force the process to a crawling halt because of a myriad of reasons. The needs of the few now outweigh the good of many.
Or, people now value cities more than they value having more children, leading to depopulation due to replacement rate reduction, rather than people leaving to have more children.
Otherwise, maybe the ‘modern city’ is where cultures go to die.