Posted on 03/21/2018 3:16:49 AM PDT by C19fan
Discussing cities is like talking about the knots in a net: they’re crucial, but they’re only one part of the larger story of the net and what it’s supposed to do. It makes little sense to talk about knots in isolation when it’s the net that matters.
The 100 million city: is 21st century urbanisation out of control?
Cities are part of the system we’ve invented to keep people alive on Earth. People tend to like cities, and have been congregating in them ever since the invention of agriculture, 10,000 or so years ago. That’s why we call it civilisation. This origin story underlines how agriculture made cities possible, by providing enough food to feed a settled crowd on a regular basis. Cities can’t work without farms, nor without watersheds that provide their water. So as central as cities are to modern civilisation, they are only one aspect of a system.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
What a bunch of Marxist mental masturbation.
“The entire population of the earth can fit in Texas with about 1,000 feet between each person. Just sayin’”
I heard the figure is more like at the density of Manhattan Texas could hold the entire human population of the earth.
It depends on what you consider overpopulated to mean. Abraham Lincoln’s father was supposed to have said that when you can see the smoke from your neighbor’s chimney it’s time to move. Years ago I read something about the world’s most densely populated city. I think it was Singapore, anyway I did the math and determined that if you had that many people standing on a flat area of the size given for the city they could stand in ranks like an army and each person could put his left hand on the shoulder of the person to his left and his right hand on the right shoulder of the person in front of him. Obviously there must be a lot of high rise buildings that people live in. I don’t know your opinion of that but to me it meets the definition of Hell on Earth. I grew up on a little forty acre farm that my father called his “Doodle” farm because it was so tiny compared to what he grew up on. I don’t follow the Georgia guide stone idea of reducing world population to 500 million or less but I would be quite happy to see the increase come to a halt. Some of us just prefer some open space. I currently live on eight beautiful acres on a river bank and it seems tiny to me.
“An apartment building uses less power per person for HVAC than suburbia.”
If you make the building big enough it needs no heating system but you will need a cooling system year round. Personally I don’t want to live in a giant beehive.
“On the basis of a hypothetical world population of one billion in the early nineteenth century and an adequate means of subsistence at that time, Malthus suggested that there was a potential for a population increase to 256 billion within 200 years but that the means of subsistence were only capable of being increased enough for nine billion to be fed at the level prevailing at the beginning of the period. He therefore considered that the population increase should be kept down to the level at which it could be supported by the operation of various checks on population growth, which he categorized as “preventive” and “positive” checks.”
I have known of Malthus for a long time but never read him. Based on the paragraph above it appears that he was not the madman that some suggest but made a very reasonable projection at the time. He said that food production at about this time would support a world population of nine billion which would be more than adequate for the current population. His error was in thinking that population would increase far more rapidly than it has. If people had continued to have eight or more children per family he might have been proven right. My mother had eight siblings and my father had seven siblings but my now deceased parents have only three great grandchildren.
You're right - more children OR if we had not increased food production per acre to levels beyond anything Malthus could have imagined in his wildest dreams. His math was fine but this future forecast was waaaaay off. Malthus - - right on the math, wrong on the path the future would take... which is almost always the rub.
I spent two weeks in Singapore a while back. During that time I rode my bicycle around a large part of the island-city. Wonderful place!
I visited high-rise housing communities with small factories on the lower floors and open space around them. The 'downtown' areas had boulevards with wide sidewalks and spacious 'sidewalk' restaurants. One day I rode out to a park and spent time tromping through a jungle without seeing another soul.
I, too, like 'elbow room', but there are plenty of places left with lots of elbow room. I was surprised when I made a business trip to India and flew from Mumbai to Pune to Bangalore to Hyderabad to Rajkot to New Delhi. I saw lots of empty land below. Driving from New Delhi to Agra I saw mostly open land.
“You’re right - more children OR if we had not increased food production per acre to levels beyond anything Malthus could have imagined in his wildest dreams.”
That does not compute. He predicted enough food for nine billion at this time, WELL over current levels, his only error was expecting people to continue having huge families. If not for declining birthrates the world would have been very different.
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