Without protections, they are unceremoniously expelled from the city. The lockdowns in India led to a huge and uncontrolled migration of day laborers back to their homes in rural communities—a reaction that almost certainly worsened the spread of the pandemic. In addition, the massive amount of resources used to power urban economies have significant social and environmental effects on rural communities throughout the world. The effects of urban pollution and waste—from landfills to smog to dirty water—are also disproportionately placed on rural communities.
Even when cities are sincere in their efforts to improve their environmental impact , they often ignore the ways they harm the countryside and the free ride they enjoy from the under-priced services of the hinterland. This leads to political discontent: a feeling that urban communities benefit from the resources and work of rural communities, while imposing rules and regulations on them.
This is part of the background behind political phenomena like Brexit, the Donald Trump presidency and the rise of European populism.
Whether or not pandemic-driven de-urbanization happens on its own, governments should leverage this period to create a balance between urban and rural economies that is sustainable. While the impacts of remote work and other digital technologies are probably not as great as their promoters claim, it is true that they reduce the unique value that density provides and may finally dent the allure of large cities for white-collar workers.
Cities will always be useful to national economies, but they have grown into unmanageable Frankensteins. Yes, there really are some things that can only be done in a dense, urban environment but that does not mean turning a blind eye to growing megacities with over five million people. The time has come to rethink whether we should continue to place cities at the heart of our nations, turning them into large parasitic centers which practice economic apartheid.
Contact us at letters time. Ideas world affairs Megacities Are Not the Future. Costa, C. Public Health Den Broeder, L. Citizen science for public health. Health Promot. Dieleman, F. Urban form and travel behaviour: Micro-level household attributes and residential context.
Urban Stud. Fleming, L. Data mashups: potential contribution to decision support on climate change and health. Public Health 11, — Friel, S. Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: food and agriculture. Lancet , — Gauderman, W. Association of improved air quality with lung development in children.
Global Burden of Disease Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks, — a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease. Gupta, J. Communicating the health of the planet and its links to human health. Lancet Planet Health 3, e—e Haines, A. The imperative for climate action to protect health. Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: overview and implications for policy makers.
Hajat, S. Heat-related and cold-related deaths in England and Wales: who is at risk? Hansen, R. The uptake of the ecosystem services concept in planning discourses of European and American cities.
Ecosystem Serv. Heaviside, C. The Urban Heat Island: implications for health in a changing environment. Health Rep. Juarez, P. Applying an exposome-wide ExWAS approach to cancer research. Lake, I. Climate change and food security: health impacts in developed countries. Health Perspect. Leon, D. Cities, urbanization and health. Liu, C. Ambient particulate air pollution and daily mortality in cities.
Mitchell, D. Attributing human mortality during extreme heatwaves to anthropogenic climate change. Mitsakou, C. Total Environ. Morawska, L. In addition to consuming vast amounts of fuel, the oil powering the ships contains high amounts of sulphur, a potent greenhouse gas and pollutant.
Image description: A hand-drawn illustration of a figure standing with their back to the viewer on an industrial quayside with containers and cranes, staring across the water to a skyline of skyscrapers.
Emily Thiessen. Glass-fronted Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design LEED -certified buildings were surrounded by state-of-the-art parks that featured native plants, self-watering systems, and rooftop farms. Over the past decade, I have researched the hidden costs and consequences of sustainable policies and practices in New York City. Sustainability rose to prominence alongside a real estate boom that transformed certain low-income neighborhoods into urban oases and catered to affluent and white-collar residents.
In short, the greening of some neighborhoods seemed to be predicated on the browning of others. Soon, the shore was crowded with factories and communities of immigrant workers, who arrived from Europe in a steady flow. The American Community Survey — , found that approximately 38 percent of households on the North Shore were non-Hispanic white, 20 percent were African American, and 30 percent were migrants from a wide array of countries such as Mexico, Liberia, and Sri Lanka.
Later, the Environmental Protection Agency EPA confirmed that all 21 properties listed in the booklet contained contamination from heavy metals and other toxic chemicals. In addition, the waterway that ran along the North Shore was itself part of an underwater Superfund site that contained Agent Orange, dioxins, and other heavy metals. During heavy rain storms, the Kill washed over its banks and flooded nearby roads, parking lots, and basements.
As sea levels rose and storm surges increased, this flooding only stood to worsen. Potentially, it could dislodge and disperse contaminants throughout the area. After Hurricane Sandy devastated the New York and New Jersey coastlines in , Thurman began lobbying public officials to include the North Shore in their post-storm resiliency plans. In , she created a second booklet that documented instances of shoreline erosion or locations that lacked barriers, buffers, bulkheads, berms, or other forms of flood protection.
All of them were within several feet of contaminated properties. Although Thurman sat on several state and municipal climate change advisory boards, the issues identified in her booklet went unaddressed.
Even where inner-city areas have densified over the past few decades Copenhagen, for example , the citywide trend is still for an overall reduction in average densities. In comparison, the total area of France is , sq km. If the urban population and long-term de-densification trends continue, the area of the planet covered by urban settlements will increase to more than 3 million sq km by And since the most intensively cultivated farmland is typically located near where the bulk of the food is consumed, much of this additional 2 million sq km is currently our most productive farmland.
In short, continued urbanisation in its current form could threaten global food supplies at a time when food production is already not keeping up with population growth. A key determinant of rampant urban sprawl — especially in North America, where it is a particularly serious problem — has been the existence of cheap oil. When oil prices reached record highs in and exacerbated the global economic crisis, the people who travelled furthest tended to be the first to default on their mortgage payments.
As their fuel expenses for travelling to work and school rocketed, so their capacity to afford urban sprawl drastically diminished. Indeed, most of the extra 2. Other than in China, rapid urbanisation in these developing counties has resulted in an explosion of informal urban settlements, or slums.
In India, millions of slum-dwellers live within the core urban areas, creating the fairly unique Indian phenomenon of neighbourhoods where the urban poor and middle class live together. Take Ethiopia, an east African country of 99 million people with one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Government investments have turned this city into a massive building site.
0コメント