Posted on 10/18/2003 9:07:54 PM PDT by blam
World's mega cities expand as millions quit the countryside
Peter Beaumont
Sunday October 19, 2003
The Observer (UK)
It used to be the stuff of 2000AD, the comic that introduced the world to Judge Dredd and two vast crime-filled cities, Mega City One and East Meg One. In its dystopian vision, the first mega city around New York began construction in 2030, intended to house three to four million people.
In a sign of how quickly future dystopias age, the new Times Atlas of the World lists the growing club of real mega cities, all of them with predicted populations of more than 10 million - not by 2030, but by 2005.
According to these estimates, Tokyo - the world's largest city - will hit nearly 27m. São Paolo in Brazil will reach just under 20m and Mexico City 19m. Sixteen other cities are expected to exceed the 10m mark, including Bombay (Mumbai) 18m, and Dhaka in Bangladesh, 15m.
Two cities in Africa are expected to go mega - Lagos in Nigeria and Cairo in Egypt. According to the atlas - the 11th edition since it was first published in 1895 - the phenomenon is a mark of a global population in the grips of rapid urbanisation, where close to 50 per cent of the population now lives in cities.
Indeed, the latest estimates predict that urban dwellers will outnumber the rural population for the first time by 2007.
And Tokyo is leading the way. A Landsat 7 image of the city, included in the atlas, shows the city's growth, a spreading grey cancer whose spiralling tendrils can be seen sucking in neighbouring cities and towns and even reclaimed sea.
The rise of the world's mega cities is one of the most marked trends noted by the atlas in recent decades. In 1950 New York City was the only one of the world's cities with more than 10m inhabitants. By 1975 that number had grown to five. By 2015 it is estimated there will be 21.
It has been a process driven largely by Asia - the continent boasting 10 mega cities by 2000, while North America had managed two (New York City and Los Angeles).
But the mega cities are not the only major human impact noted by the atlas. There has also been a catastrophic impact on the environment. The atlas's authors estimate that 90,000 square kilometres (35,500 sq miles) of forest are being lost each year, the equivalent, since the last edition of the atlas in 1999, of an area the size of the British Isles.
But the greatest impact has come through global warming, with successive editions of the atlas showing shrinking ice fields and evaporating lakes.
It reveals the rapid retreat of the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, once the world's fourth largest lake and now the tenth. Since the 1967 edition of the atlas it has shrunk by 39,994 sq km (15,800 sq m).
Since the 1975 edition, the surface of the Dead Sea has dropped by a massive 17 metres.
It is the availability of new digital satellite technology that has made the changes so shockingly apparent.
The atlas's chief cartographer, Sheena Barclay, said: 'We are seeing things that you would not have seen 10 or even 15 years ago, changes that we can see by overlaying versions of our satellite images. And we are seeing a lot of concerning things.'
Perhaps the most compelling evidence of global climate change has come not between editions of the atlas but during the preparation of the present volume when the cartographers had to redraw the coastline of Antarctica after the Larsen ice shelf, which is the size of Luxembourg, disintegrated last year.
In 2100 AD, the global population is in the grips of de-urbanization, where close to half the worlds people now live in tree's...
blah blah
Slow?
The Eaters are breeding like the lice they are, and moving to the cities because they are of no possible use anywhere.
We need to prohibit the sale of modern pharmaceuticals to the third world until they can learn to control their populations.
Until WW II the four horsemen did a fine job of maiintaining a balance.
So9
LOL. You're talking about human beings here. Humans just like you. If they're lice, you're a louse as well. We're all just lice. Breeding, breeding, breeding.
No, I and most Americans try to limit our offspring to the number of possible jobs that will be available when they grow up so there will be something more for them than mooching off of others.
So9
In an ever changing earth, it amazes me that all the recent changes are man made. Lakes never came and went before man had the power to do so.
Uhm...if that were true, then we would have run out of jobs decades ago. Add more people, add the need for more forms of entertainment and dining, thus restaurants, bars, grocery stores, etc, etc. As population grows, jobs will grow.
Generally speaking, it will take quite a number of children to pay the massive taxes that will make your care-free retirement possible. Where do you think Social Security, Medicade, and free drugs are going to come from? Who will supply your Depends? Who will do all of those things that make it possible to live day to day in a body that loses capability to help itself?
Since you have an interesting assessment of Turd World types as being unskilled, uneducated "lice"; won't these bugs need managers and handlers? If they out-reproduce the beautiful people three to one, wouldn't the demand for capable handlers and managers be even greater and you and your spouse ought to use your superior genetic material to produce huge numbers of advanced and perfect leaders?
If you know the future enough that you can tell how many jobs there will be (and how many for particular individuals), why don't you just invest in the next Microsoft and leave them with a fortune?
Or are you making a virtue of not doing what you wouldn't do anyway?
What I did know is about what it would cost to give a kid a superlative education, and how many children I could afford to educate.
Having children you can't afford to feed, cloth and educate to the limits of their abilities is a form of child abuse and a sure way to produce crime and poverty.
So9
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