City Planet: Stewart Brand's Views on Urbanization

Last night I attended a talk given by Stewart Brand at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco exploring the concept of “City Planet,” or the urbanization of the earth's populations that is and has been occurring at an unprecedented rate. Stewart has always seemed to be at the forefront of thought provoking ideas and concepts that have interested me, starting with his stint as the publisher of the Whole Earth Catalogue (from 1968 to 1972), one of the defining publications of the environmental/back to the land movement and continuing as the founder in 1974 of the CoEvolution Quarterly, another particularly relevant and environmentally savvy magazine covering diverse topics, many with a decidedly sustainable/whole systems flavor—-WAY before sustainability was cool! So Stewart has been providing platforms for the exploration of alternative thought for years, and judging by this discussion he hasn't slowed down a bit.

My interest in renewable energy (specifically Solar) and organic gardening is traceable to the WEC and I remember rushing to the nearest bookstore to pick up a copy when a new one came out and spending hours (and days) leafing through the oversized “well” of ideas and information on new tools and technologies.

Not surprisingly, Stewart also co-founded The Well in 1985, one of the first online communities and a kind of online extension of the WEC, as well as the Global Business Network in 1987. He founded The Long Now Foundation in 1996 to “provide a counterpoint to what it views as today's "faster/cheaper" mindset and to instead promote "slower/better" thinking, and has been involved in numerous other projects and causes over the years too numerous to mention here.



I have photographed Stewart several times over the years, first for an article in The Pacific Sun newspaper in Marin County (the subject of which escapes me), then at a reunion (I think it was for the Whole Earth Catalogue folks, but I’m not sure) that took place in the Marin Headlands sometime in the 80’s. He’s lived and worked in and around the Sausalito houseboat community for years.



I pretty much lost track of Stewart over the last 20 years, though I was aware of his participation in The Well, so I was interested in discovering what this Renaissance man has been up to. Stewart views cities as profoundly trans formative both to individuals (particularly women) and to societies in general. Outlining civilization’s drive to urbanize, he ran through a slide program heavy on facts and figures showing clearly that statistically there is no longer a back-to-the-land movement (that he catered to with the WEC), rather people are fleeing the countryside in droves and, combined with births and transplants from other areas, some 1.3 million folks are being added to urban communities worldwide each week, or almost 70 million a year. This is having, and will continue to have, profound impacts for all of us well into this century in terms of urban planning, creation of wealth, increased globalization, poverty services, education, and even creativity and innovation.

This movement represents a significant shift from the past. In 1800 just 3% of the world population lived in cities. Currently about 50% do, and projections show some 61% will be city dwellers by 2030. A huge percentage of this urban growth is going on in the east, and the southern hemisphere—both in South America and Africa. And most people moving into cities worldwide are joining the burgeoning squatter communities such as those in Kibera, Nairobi or Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro. According to Brand, 1 billion people currently live in such slums, with an estimate 2 billion more expected by 2070. Those are huge numbers which have the potential to redefine the cities themselves, strain city services and utilities, and which will no doubt add to the frictions inherent in large populations of "have-not's" bumping up to a much smaller group of "haves." According to Brand, rather than being hotbeds of crime, however, many of these squatter neighborhoods are teaming with people trying to better themselves and work their way up and out, fostering enormous “informal economies” that are not tracked by traditional economic measures but which make up about 60% of the employment in developing countries. Again according to Brand there is a surprising amount of money already circulating in these communities, and since cities give women and families better access to increased economic opportunities there is reason to believe that many will eventually be able to pull themselves up and out and into the traditional economy.

One last interesting point Brand made is that urban young people tend to delay child rearing and also have fewer children when they do have them. There is already zero population growth in many developed countries, and this will also be true of the developing countries as the trend towards urbanization continues. This will lead to a point later this century when the worldwide population will peak at 8 or 9 billion, then actually start to recede—very good news from a planetary perspective.

Stewart recommended several good books for further information:

SHADOW CITIES: A BILLION SQUATTERS, AN URBAN NEW WORLD by Robert Neuwirth
THE FORTUNE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PYRAMID: ERADICATING POVERTY THROUGH PROFITS by CK Pralahad
THE EMPTY CRADLE: FALLING BIRTHRATES THREATEN WORLD PROSPERITY AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT by Phillip Longman
SHANTARAM by Gregory David Roberts and Alejando Palomas