The City and History

These days, I find myself thinking a lot about cities and history. After all, the whole world looks increasingly like Britain during the 19th century -- a landscape plagued by vicious plutocrats and the predations of the klept (William Gibson's wonderfully apt term), economic immiseration and ecological disaster.

It is also a landscape full of astonishing cultural dynamism, technological innovation and political ferment. Today, the local contradictions observed by Marx and Engels in Britain, Belgium and the northern United States have become truly planetary, to the point that yesterday's Chartist, abolitionist and trade union struggles speak directly to the democratic mass mobilizations of the billions against the billionaires.

Yet our accounts of the rise of transnational media, transnational audiences, the digital commons and transnational politics have been missing a crucial piece of the puzzle. This is the fact that the world has urbanized on an unprecedented scale over the past forty years. Where things happen is just as important as how and when they happen.

For the sake of comparison, British urbanization went from about 19% of the population in 1800 to about 50% by 1860, while world urbanization went from 37.2% in 1973 to 55.3% in 2018 (UN data).

This story is much bigger than just China. The rest of Asia and Africa have been urbanizing as well, and large countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria and Thailand now have majority urban populations. This massive shift has transformed the countryside, as the number of all human beings who work in agriculture has dropped from 43.2% in 1991 to 26.0% in 2018 (World Bank data). At the same time, many rural communities now have access to smartphones, the internet and consumer goods.

Given decades-old trends in fertility rates, demographics and urbanization, our world's population will stabilize at around 9.5 billion people in 2050. Two-thirds of us will live in cities, and less than 5% of us will work in agriculture.

One small sign of this transformation: the first mass shipment of electric buses to Kolkata, India. Battery-powered rickshaws have started to appear here, and it's likely that a local retrofit industry will emerge to convert existing hydrocarbon vehicles into electric devices.