The World Goes to Town

The majority of people live in cities. Human history will increasingly become urban history., says John Grimmond.

Wherever you think the human story began, it is clear that humans did not start life as urban creatures. Man’s original habitat was governed by the need to find food; hunting and by collecting things to eat were rural activities. Not until the end of the last ice age, about 11,000 years ago, did humans start building anything that might be called a village, and by that time aman had beena roud for about 120,000 years. It took another six millennia for cities to grow to mor than 100,000. Even in the 1800s only 3% of the world’s population lived in cities. That figure has now risen to over 50%. so, wisely or not, humn beings have become homo ubanus.
Living together meant security, but historians also point out that a settlement drew people to it as a meeting place where they could trade. Around 2000BC, metal tokens, the forerunners of coins, were produced as receipts for grain, and cities began to take shape at the same time.
The city soon became the centre of exchange, learning, innovation and sophistication. It was life in the city that made it possible for man to acquire skills, learn from other people, study, teach and develop social arts that made country folk seem very uneducated.
Of course, not all cities were the same. As they developed some were known as the hub of an empire (Constantinople), for learning (Bologna), or commerce (Hamburg). Some were very successful, some died, depending on factors as varied as war, disease, misgovernment or economic failure.
Whatever the particular circumstances of a city, thoug, its success was likely to be governed by technological change. For example, it was improvements in transport that made the growth of trade possible. Then in the 19th century there was the invention of engines, which brought about a huge increase in technology.
The industrial age was born. As more factories were built, multitudes of rural inhabitants left the land looking for work. B 1900, 13% of the world’s population had become urban.
The latest leap, from 13% to over 50% (in little over 100 years), also owed something to science and technology. Improvements n medicin, including ways to avoid disease, meant that more and more people could live together without succumbing to diarrhoea, tuberculosis, cholera and other such pestilences. And these same developmens in medicne also lengthened lives in the countryside, leading to a huge increase in rual population. As a result, even more cities, and the speed and scale of current urban growth, parituclarly in countries such as China and India, are unlike any other big change in hisotry to date; by 2050 an expected 75% of all human beings will live cities!