De-Urbanization

Some sociologists say that the single event most influencing American life in the 20^th century was not the atomic bomb or the computer but the mechanical cotton picker.  For, like the enclosure movement in 17^th century England,  that invention drove the southern poor, black and white, off the land and into the cities, where they have languished in ghettos ever since.  The cotton picker was aided in its transformational effects by World War II, including its aftermath GI Bill and Baby Boom, which created work and opportunities in cities but not in the countryside, generating in the process the vast tracts of “ticky-tacky” suburban houses that surround our city cores.  The inter-country migrations of the desperate poor created by globalization have only accelerated the process.

America was not alone in that transformation.  Future historians may look back on the 20^th century as the century of the sprawling city.  In ancient times, only one city, Rome, was known to have over one million inhabitants.  In 1950, there were 83 cities over one million, with only one, New York, over 10 million.  In the early 21^st century, there are 468 cites over one million world-wide, with 20 over ten million and 7 over 20 million.  Only one of those, New York, is in America. And those megacities all include their ghettos and suburbia, only now ghettos are called shantytowns.  In some, people rent large cardboard containers to sleep in.  If you have the money and leisure, city life is a cornucopia of art, music, fine dining, and interesting people; “How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen Paris?”  But for large portions of urban dwellers, it remains a life of quiet misery, especially when compared with memories of better times in their home villages.

The 21^st century may see the end of that.  Solar technology, satellite communications, cloud computing, and robotic manufacturing all may signal the end of the urge to group large masses of cheap labor together in miserable living conditions for economies of scale.  In developing countries, village solar power generators and wind turbines as well as satellite ground stations are replacing the need for construction of enormously expensive national power and communications grids.  Cloud computing and broad-band internet are already advancing at-home professional work and education in industrialized countries and will spread rapidly to the developing world.  A geographically much less concentrated world is possible, though it will be years in evolving.  Life outside cities is once more being seen as valuable.  The “buy local” food movement in America is a sign of coming times. 

When my wife and I were last in Greece, a drive across the countryside revealed countless deserted villages, where whole towns had picked up and moved to Athens for work and modern comforts.  A third of the population of Greece was said to live in Athens or its suburbs.   The same scenario was being replicated in places from Mexico to India.  Now, the EU financial crisis is causing a movement back to the land, and Greece, as it led the way into the crisis, is leading the way out.  Now in Greece, young workers, jobless in the city and facing losses from austerity of traditional urban services, are returning to their former land and villages. They are cultivating their grandparents’ farms, only now with modern tools and methods.  Schools have been set up to retrain them in rural living.  Crisis is being turned into opportunity.

What are needed are public policies that enable these movements back to the land.  Current agricultural policies such as subsidies favor large commercial farms in the U.S. at the expense of the small one-family farm; that needs to change.  The current Obama initiative to promote broad-band internet across the country is a big step forward and needs a bigger push.  Health policies favoring nurse practitioners, remote diagnostics and robotic medical technology in remote places need encouragement.  Solar and wind technologies support greater decentralization and need emphasis.  Public broadcasting support of arts and music will make rural life richer.  Land use policies need to move away from strict zoning to mixed residential and small business environments.  We need consciously developed laws and regulations supporting the family farm.  As our GDPs have climbed, our happiness indices have gone down, and a big part of that are the inhumane urban environments we have created for ourselves.  A saner future is ours for the taking.