Free Republic

The relentless march of urbanization, in the United States and around the world, has been coming for a long time. .. America went from 8.8 percent urban in 1830 to 25.7 percent in 1870, then to a majority in 1920, and up to about two-thirds by the mid-1950s. We were 80 percent urban by 2010. North America has the most urban population in the world. But it is not alone in seeing an accelerating trend. The U.N. estimated that, in 2009, half the world’s population lived in urban areas for the first time in human history. Over 4 billion people...

Conservatives need to address urban concerns and try to bridge the growing rural-urban divide, rather than just denouncing cities as the malign foil of real America. Chicago, Illinois — Looking out over downtown Chicago on a bright, unusually warm Christmas Eve, I get why people love this city, even though I am not really among them. I’m not a city person, and even if I were, this isn’t my city.This is not just a burst of Christmas cheer. Christmas Day will be over by the time I finish writing this article, let alone by the time it is edited and...

Texas is a highway state. This reality stems from the need to meet the mobility demands of both sprawling metropolitan regions and vast rural areas.Paying for the state's massive system of highways has always been a challenge, however. Estimates from the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) put the state's highway expansion and maintenance needs alone at nearly $383 billion by 2040. Existing public funding, projected to be $70 billion over the next decade, will not be able to cover that cost without unprecedented funding increases after 2026.While Texans are clearly amenable to paying for better roads — two recent state...

QUITO, Ecuador (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - More than 60 mayors from around the world have joined forces to create an alliance dubbed a 'global parliament' to demand a more powerful role in the management of city growth and urbanisation. Speaking on the eve of the United Nations Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador, on Sunday, the mayors outlined a united vision in which local government would lead the global response to rising urbanisation. ... She said the feminisation of politics at local government level had already achieved more livable cities and that the group had to work for more women...

Home to two thirds of Germany’s population, many of its small cities and towns are struggling to revive their declining centers. […] Big box stores on their outskirts, online shops and the proximity of larger, better serviced cities have all eaten away at the share of the retail market available to businesses that once thrived in smaller towns, says the expert in trade and retail at Niederrhein University. In Delmenhorst, it’s a perfect storm. The retiree Bieler has watched big retail chains like Kik and Kaufland set up and thrive on the outskirts. And he’s seen how people gravitated more...

The urbanization fallacy Posted by Michael Pettis on August 16, 2013 in Urbanization The latest default bull argument supporting higher levels of growth in China than I believe possible is the urbanization argument. Beijing is planning another major urbanization push, and according to this argument China can resolve the problem of wasted investment by investing in the urbanization process, that is it can engage in a massive investment program related to the need to build infrastructure for all the newly urbanized. Here is the Financial Times on China’s urbanization policy:

The Obama administration envisions a “low-carbon, low-petroleum” future where Americans tele-work, tele-shop, walk, bike and use carpools or mass transit if they must leave the neighborhood at all. A study released Friday says the U.S. has the potential to reduce petroleum use and pollution in the transportation sector by more than 80 percent by 2050. In other words, gasoline-powered cars may go the way of the dinosaur, and many Americans may end up living in planned, mixed-use, “walkable” neighborhoods, built along mass transit lines. … Higher densities (more people living in the same area in smaller homes), a mix of...

China's urban population now exceeds the number of rural dwellers for first time in its history, the country's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Tuesday.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood defended the pro-mass transit policies of the Obama administration today, and fired back at conservative writer George Will, who devoted an entire column to attacking LaHood earlier this week. "We have to create opportunities for people who want to ride a bike or walk or take a streetcar," he said. "The only person that I've heard of who objects to this is George Will." Will wrote a column in Newsweek magazine criticizing the secretary, whom he dubbed "Secretary of Behavior Modification," for supporting measures to wean commuters off automobiles. LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois,...

A new global map released by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre and published in the World Bank’s World Development Report 2009, measures urbanisation from the new perspective of Travel Time to 8,500 Major Cities. The map fills an important gap in our understanding of economic, physical and even social connectivity.

Baghdad was a wonder of the world in the year 800 while London was an economic backwater. By 1800, London was the largest city in the world while Arab cities languished. Recent research attributes this ‘trading places’ to institutional differences: Arab cities were tied to the fate of the state while European cities were independent growth poles. Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in northwestern Europe? At the turning of the first millennium, Europe was a backward part of the world economy with low levels of urbanisation and income. But between 1000 and 1800, Europe surged from a backwater of...

Decades ago, when geologists were developing ideas about how water typically flows across land, many of them studied the streams of the Mid-Atlantic States, concluding that they naturally move in ribbonlike channels cut through silty banks. In the years since, ecologists and conservationists have used this model in efforts to restore streams damaged by urbanization. Now, though, researchers at Franklin and Marshall College are challenging it. They say the streams studied by their geological predecessors were not “natural archetypes” but rather the artifacts of 18th- and 19th-century dam building and deforestation. The scientists, Robert C. Walter and Dorothy J. Merritts,...

The real Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is back, and now he’s taking on rural California. Landowners are up in arms over a mostly overlooked provision in last week’s budget revise to terminate a 40-year-old environmental- and agricultural-preservation act, which critics say will negatively affect California’s heartland. The governor has eliminated state funding for the Williamson Act, which leaves California’s farmland and open spaces vulnerable to urbanization. “In my own county, for example, about 65 percent of the land is protected under the Williamson Act,” Assemblywoman Lois Wolk of Davis said. “So unless we want to see more houses instead of crops,...

Chinese Urban Development: Introduction Kenneth A. Small Guest Editor University of California at Irvine For scholars interested in how urban processes affect human welfare, it is hard to think of anything more important than urbanization in China. The sheer numbers of people involved is staggering: roughly one out of every 25 people in the world today is a resident of a Chinese city who arrived, or was born, since the current round of economic reforms began in 1978. This has taken place despite China’s unique hukou system of home registration, which restricts permanent migration to cities but allows a large...

Agriculture employs half the world's population outside the advanced countries, where only one person in 40 still farms. In the United States, the ratio is one in 50. By prevailing standards of technology, 1.25 billion workers are redundant, and nearly 3 billion people (including their dependants) stand to be displaced. [1] The good news is that Chinese and Indian farmers comprise three-fifths of the world's total, and have good prospects of eventual integration into the world economy. But that leaves more than a billion people at risk, mainly in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

BEIJING: They are unskilled and unhappy, but China’s hordes of rural migrants are a big reason why China is likely to remain the workshop of the world. Last month’s 2.1 percent revaluation of the yuan, coming on top of labour bottlenecks in southern China that have pushed up employment costs, has given hope to China’s rivals that they might grab a bigger slice of the low-cost manufacturing pie. So they might, especially if producers decide not to put all their eggs in the China basket because of spreading trade rows. But with scores of millions of peasants destined to leave...

Code: ZE04110503Date: 2004-11-05Pope Enumerates Challenges and Resources for Church in AmericaEvaluates Progress of First Synod of Bishops for AmericaVATICAN CITY, NOV. 5, 2004 (Zenit.org).- John Paul II numbered the negative consequences of globalization, anti-family ideologies and the rich-poor divide as some of the most urgent challenges for the Church in the Americas. The Holy Father also analyzed the resources of the Church in those countries in which half of the world's Catholics live when reviewing the progress on the conclusions of the First Synod of Bishops for America, held in Rome from Nov. 16 to Dec. 12, 1997. The conclusions...

Three decades ago, the Jersey City waterfront was a wasteland of abandoned rail yards and decaying brownstones, the worst of which were heroin shooting galleries. Four waves of development later, the downtown historic districts boast some of the nicest brownstone blocks in the Garden State, wholly restored beauties that once couldn't be given away for $7,500 but now sell for up to $1 million. The waterfront has seen so much growth that Jersey City now has more office space than Denver, Cleveland or Kansas City, and young families are starting to rethink flight to the suburbs.

People should be let to live, work where they like Guest perspective: Debate tackles merits of free-range urban planning ___ Participants in an Internet e-mail discussion list recently engaged in a heated debate on the impact of libertarian principles on urban planning in the United States. Here we present an edited version of the original e-mail debate, which centered on the "The Lone Mountain Compact," which appears at the end of this perspective. Kenneth Orski, editor and publisher of Innovation Briefs: The Lone Mountain Compact, of which I am proud to be a signatory, is a collection of principles, the...

Proposed amendment passes easily The Senate on Monday easily approved a change to the state constitution that would protect the tradition of hunting and fishing. Senate President Pro Tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah), the amendment's author, said hunters and anglers are worried that "activist judges and increased urbanization" could take away their rights. "You may not think this is a big threat, and neither was the right to bear arms 200 years ago," Johnson said. "There is a growing anti-hunting and anti-gun group out there. That's why I think we need to do it now before they get stronger." Johnson said...