Urban Fattening

By Roger Colins

Researching for this post brought up another problem about statistics of which I will add a short note. Statistics can be used to say anything using the same data. Mathematicians are said to like numbers because they don't lie but unfortunately if numbers are used by statisticians, numbers will do nothing but tell fibs. If you find a bar chart, pie chart or wavy line graph you can be pretty sure it's full of gremlins because the axes can be monkeyed with. Increase or decrease the range on X or Y and your clever little chart suddenly changes, producing an entirely different effect on it's audience. Having gotten that out of the way, I've came across a curiosity about city living. London has a few more skyscrapers on the way, China wants to build prefab one's and Singapore, India, the Philippines all have to constantly figure out places to put their people. Paris, France has a number of suburbs named with the affix 'sous bois' which translates to roughly 'in the woods'. They aren't in the woods of course, not any more but I can happily imagine that upon the settling of these tiny villages, centuries ago, they were surrounded by trees. Now there are, as we see in all cities, sweeping motorways and highways flying through the air, snaking between grimy apartment blocks and smothering the occasional blip of greenery. What happened to the greenbelts? London is by quite a stretch, the greenest city in the world. It has more parks, gardens, trees, grasslands and flowers than any other. The London Green belt is actually bigger than the Greater London area that plays host to nothing short of 8.2 million people and as a result, pretty darn lucky. Almost every other urbanised sprawl sees dollar signs hovering over green spaces. Should the city in question have a green belt then the dollar signs are, supposed to be, redirected skyward. Hence the birth of the skyscraper. For those that don't, the skyscrapers are still going to go up but the unused, boring countryside is constantly blossoming with unbridled potential for developers. The world population is of course, booming. The baby boom was one thing but the standards of living in the twenty first century suggests contraceptives might not even work at all. Looking only at the square mileage, any one city without a green belt could be suggestive. Population growth on my line charts (however differently manipulated and twisted out of recognition they might be) certainly agree on the soaring nature of human reproduction and longevity. This has to be transferred into places for them to live. Work too, and go to school, do the shopping. You get the idea. My curiosity is not the rate of growth but the rate of expansion. The North American East coast enjoys a continuously urbanised path from Boston to Washington with New York bang in the middle. About 400 miles of non stop buildings. Should the rate of this expansion continue along the same lines as the rate of population growth (which it should until someone invents a TARDIS) then I can't help but wonder how long it will be before there are more urban areas than green spaces and our cities have to start taking over the sea. With any luck we will be colonising other planets before that happens but never the less, the fatter a city looks from space, the longer the circumference for expansion. This indicates truly exponential expansion. Cities with greenbelts have a veritable chance to stem urbanisation, with this particular motivation to think up density solving ideas. Those without greenbelts are already ones of convenient position as they were never bothered about trees in the first place. ____________________________________________________

urbanisation population growth