What I want to know is how it is possible that we have comments claiming the title is misleading/overblown, or that this is a matter of definitions and no big deal. I'm sorry, but what article have you read exactly?
Current estimates puts urbanisation at 55% of all humans, and it's expected to grow to 70% by 2050, more than thirty years from now. And these researchers now claim the current level of urbanisation is already over 84%.
In which field would an error of more than half the current estimate not be a huge deal? Or already being 14% over the projected number of a generation away?
As the article mentions, these numbers matted a whole lot to policy makers and international decision making. It may feel abstract and uninteresting to the average nerd but this stuff has serious consequences.
>Researchers contest widely-accepted United Nations' predictions on urban population growth
Which is a pretty good description. About an hour ago, the title was:
>‘Everything we’ve heard about global urbanization turns out to be wrong’ - researchers
Which is ridiculous clickbait. Since your post is only a few minutes old, you're probably commenting on the new title, whereas others are commenting on the old title.
I'm not fond of this title but did find the article to be intriguing.
I didn't see a paper or anything linked, so at the moment it remains a superficial interview. I'd like to know more about which remote sensing techniques they're using and how they're classifying population. Like the dissenter in the article, I wonder about informal settlements which can sometimes make up the majority of an urban centre. Do their models include these? The implication seems to be no, but there isn't much to go on.
Details in the method can be found in a 2016 report about the "Atlas of the human planet" project, where they produced something called the "Global Human Settlement Layer" (there are a lot of plots labelled GHSL in the talk linked above). Starts at page 22, infographic at page 26:
https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/documents/Atlas_2016.pdf?t=147...
For new readers, the HN title has changed. Since the majority of comments do point out the title specifically do know that it was for a previous title.
I can not understand why HN mods do this. Doesn't matter if X is a better title than Y, changing it is by far worse than either - at least once it has hit the front page. And everyone that has already clicked on the discussion will click on it again with the new title because naturally one would believe it was another related article spawned by the first one.
The article doesn't give their threshold for "urban". From satellite imagery, you can measure what percentage of an area is roofs and roads. That's an objective measure of urbanization. But they don't tell you what their threshold is. A graph of percentage of area covered by roofs and roads would be more useful. Then you're not arguing over defintiions.
This is a good problem for a classifier. A big-data problem for some grad student. A good thesis project. Or an overlay on Google Earth.
This metric has some correlation with population density. It's not direct; multistory buildings get underrated, and large greenhouses might be mis-identified as an urban feature. Another job for a classifier.
The definition for urban is a grid cell, one kilometre wide, with 1500 people. A "urban centre" is a contiguous collection of urban grid cells that totals at least 50 000 people.
A city is then the set of municipalities that have at least 50% of their population in that urban centre.
I think the article is just summer filler, the results are at least a year old. Here Dijkstra talks about them:
This primarily seems like a matter of definitions, no? Humans congregate, so villages tend to expand over time. Apparently there are different definitions to what an urban area is around the world, which to me seems kind of reasonable in itself as conditions vary.
But yeah, if you take photos from space, it clearly shows most of Earth's land area isn't actually occupied by humans dwelling there. Most of the humans have apparently congregated into what we now like to call urban areas, for which there may or may not be a new definition. Great.
A lot of people hear urban and think Manhattan, San Francisco, central London, etc. The reality in the US (where 80% of the population is "urban") is heavily suburban. The town where I live surrounded by 100 acres with 2 or 3 other houses is also considered urban. I'm not going to be walking to a corner grocery store or taking mass transit anywhere.
Definitions are usually important though, because they show up whenever one speaks of rights for example.
The context Lewis Dijkstra operates in is that of global development goals, so trying to improve the lives of people across the world by seeing who has it bad. Obviously having varying definitions is simply fatal to that effort.
He explains:
> For example, a narrow definition focussed on the city centre will lead to poor scores on air quality and the presence of open or green space, but it will give better scores for access to public transport. Also measuring changes over time will be influenced by where the boundary is drawn as most growth occurs at the fringes of a city.
Not to forget, in many rural areas in developed countries, more and more houses are abandoned. Next of kin is not interested in moving to there relatives house in the country side.
As technology improves, fewer people are required to work on farms. Lack of work then drives people towards urban areas. Globalization and automation are affecting the world in ways that are difficult to predict. I see something dramatic happening in the next 15 years as wages stagnate, inflation rises and wealth is concentrated in the top .1% of the worlds population.
As technology improves, fewer people are required to work in offices. I predict people moving back to smaller towns with cheaper towns, while working remotely and achieving a much better quality of life for a given salary.
> I see something dramatic happening in the next 15 years as wages stagnate, inflation rises and wealth is concentrated in the top .1% of the worlds population.
I'm really not trying to be on the attack here, but this kind of vague melodrama is pervasive on the internet and is really exhausting.
For all of earth, I assume the biggest trend in city migration is actually global warming. Desert expansion, failing crops, ... with all the fallout of consequentially destabilized villages/societies, civil wars, and so on, leading to mass immigration, ..., it's rather easy to see how global warming might be a big factor. It's just less obvious, because the regions hit hardest by global warming, are probably rather far away from western societies.
> As technology improves, fewer people are required to work on farms. [...] I see something dramatic happening in the next 15 years
I'm perplexed reading this. The number of people required to work on farms is already very low. Is there something particularly revolutionary happening with farming technology right now that would lower it dramatically again?
Title is a bit over-exaggerative. World is only 80%+ urbanized based on European Commission definitions of city and urbanization standards. Situations differ based really on interpretation, specific country policies for cities and population density and infrastructure. Certain cities that the European Commission include might not have certain core structures like a police station as the article itself pointed out with Egyptian villages that have grown into cities which in turn means that European Commission standards are not comparable to places outside Europe because the living standards etc aren't comparable.
As the article mentions, a place inhabited by 100,000 people should not be classified as a village only because the local authorities don't have enough money to built a new courthouse and police station.
If anything, this only proves the authors of the study right, as in development aid should be re-prioritized to fulfill urban-like needs (i.e. helping build a courthouse and paying the adjacent salaries) instead of continuing pumping money into things like agriculture, pretending that those 100,000 people are in the majority agricultural workers.
>Title is a bit over-exaggerative. World is only 80%+ urbanized based on European Commission definitions of city and urbanization standards. Situations differ based really on interpretation, specific country policies for cities and population density and infrastructure.
Well, local "specific country policies for cities and population density and infrastructure" shouldn't matter.
We should pick one definition and stick to it, not just consider an 1M people place a "village" just because some country calls its so.
What interests us is how many cities etc there are population wise -- not name-wise. Whether they're called "cities" locally is irrelevant if they still function as such for our criteria.
In this way it almost seems appropriate to rely on country statistics - sure there may be political motivations to label certain places a certain way, but they are also more likely to capture local variations as to what is considered urban and not. I live in a place that is semi-rural by Indian standards but which definitely qualify as urban by EU standards.
Because of environmental issues (better to live close to work, less carbon pollution) and globalisation agenda, the rural areas of the world are lost forever. The rural areas will become as in the movie Mad Max, totally without and control from government.
Politicians will never address the rural areas in a positive way, because they know they will loose city votes. That’s why you always here generic promises, like “more police” and such, then they also get the city votes.
The Veluwe area in The Netherlands already has a civilian patrol that even has multiple helicopters. This is a direct result of the police closing down stations in rural areas.
>Because of environmental issues (better to live close to work, less carbon pollution) and globalisation agenda, the rural areas of the world are lost forever. The rural areas will become as in the movie Mad Max, totally without and control from government.
Not necessarily -- at the first sign of disruption, e.g. a large economy crash, a peak oil related problems, climate change related catastrophes, it's the cities that will become like in Zombie movies.
Rural areas can be much more self-sustainable when it comes to the essentials.
(Someone feels invested enough in city life to downvote a pretty standard argument. And yet this is how people survived major wars and famines in the city in my country -- by having an outlet to grow vegetables etc. in the countryside).
[+] [-] vanderZwan|7 years ago|reply
Current estimates puts urbanisation at 55% of all humans, and it's expected to grow to 70% by 2050, more than thirty years from now. And these researchers now claim the current level of urbanisation is already over 84%.
In which field would an error of more than half the current estimate not be a huge deal? Or already being 14% over the projected number of a generation away?
As the article mentions, these numbers matted a whole lot to policy makers and international decision making. It may feel abstract and uninteresting to the average nerd but this stuff has serious consequences.
[+] [-] swebs|7 years ago|reply
>Researchers contest widely-accepted United Nations' predictions on urban population growth
Which is a pretty good description. About an hour ago, the title was:
>‘Everything we’ve heard about global urbanization turns out to be wrong’ - researchers
Which is ridiculous clickbait. Since your post is only a few minutes old, you're probably commenting on the new title, whereas others are commenting on the old title.
[+] [-] brailsafe|7 years ago|reply
I didn't see a paper or anything linked, so at the moment it remains a superficial interview. I'd like to know more about which remote sensing techniques they're using and how they're classifying population. Like the dissenter in the article, I wonder about informal settlements which can sometimes make up the majority of an urban centre. Do their models include these? The implication seems to be no, but there isn't much to go on.
[+] [-] SiempreViernes|7 years ago|reply
https://unhabitat.org/the-tale-of-broadville-and-narrowtown-...
Details in the method can be found in a 2016 report about the "Atlas of the human planet" project, where they produced something called the "Global Human Settlement Layer" (there are a lot of plots labelled GHSL in the talk linked above). Starts at page 22, infographic at page 26: https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/documents/Atlas_2016.pdf?t=147...
[+] [-] tjoff|7 years ago|reply
I can not understand why HN mods do this. Doesn't matter if X is a better title than Y, changing it is by far worse than either - at least once it has hit the front page. And everyone that has already clicked on the discussion will click on it again with the new title because naturally one would believe it was another related article spawned by the first one.
[+] [-] dsr_|7 years ago|reply
"We changed the title from Aliens Ate Your Code to Problems with Managing Remote Contract Programmers."
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
This is a good problem for a classifier. A big-data problem for some grad student. A good thesis project. Or an overlay on Google Earth.
This metric has some correlation with population density. It's not direct; multistory buildings get underrated, and large greenhouses might be mis-identified as an urban feature. Another job for a classifier.
[+] [-] SiempreViernes|7 years ago|reply
A city is then the set of municipalities that have at least 50% of their population in that urban centre.
I think the article is just summer filler, the results are at least a year old. Here Dijkstra talks about them:
https://unhabitat.org/the-tale-of-broadville-and-narrowtown-...
[+] [-] non-nil|7 years ago|reply
But yeah, if you take photos from space, it clearly shows most of Earth's land area isn't actually occupied by humans dwelling there. Most of the humans have apparently congregated into what we now like to call urban areas, for which there may or may not be a new definition. Great.
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
A lot of people hear urban and think Manhattan, San Francisco, central London, etc. The reality in the US (where 80% of the population is "urban") is heavily suburban. The town where I live surrounded by 100 acres with 2 or 3 other houses is also considered urban. I'm not going to be walking to a corner grocery store or taking mass transit anywhere.
[+] [-] SiempreViernes|7 years ago|reply
The context Lewis Dijkstra operates in is that of global development goals, so trying to improve the lives of people across the world by seeing who has it bad. Obviously having varying definitions is simply fatal to that effort.
He explains: > For example, a narrow definition focussed on the city centre will lead to poor scores on air quality and the presence of open or green space, but it will give better scores for access to public transport. Also measuring changes over time will be influenced by where the boundary is drawn as most growth occurs at the fringes of a city.
https://unhabitat.org/the-tale-of-broadville-and-narrowtown-...
[+] [-] CompelTechnic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hexadecimal7e|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wonderwonder|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjr225|7 years ago|reply
I'm really not trying to be on the attack here, but this kind of vague melodrama is pervasive on the internet and is really exhausting.
[+] [-] 738472527784|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mehrdadn|7 years ago|reply
I'm perplexed reading this. The number of people required to work on farms is already very low. Is there something particularly revolutionary happening with farming technology right now that would lower it dramatically again?
[+] [-] gadders|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jononor|7 years ago|reply
TLDR: using satellite imaging instead of relying on self reporting, researchers found that the world is already 80%+ urbanized
[+] [-] forkLding|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paganel|7 years ago|reply
If anything, this only proves the authors of the study right, as in development aid should be re-prioritized to fulfill urban-like needs (i.e. helping build a courthouse and paying the adjacent salaries) instead of continuing pumping money into things like agriculture, pretending that those 100,000 people are in the majority agricultural workers.
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
Well, local "specific country policies for cities and population density and infrastructure" shouldn't matter.
We should pick one definition and stick to it, not just consider an 1M people place a "village" just because some country calls its so.
What interests us is how many cities etc there are population wise -- not name-wise. Whether they're called "cities" locally is irrelevant if they still function as such for our criteria.
[+] [-] linuskendall|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hexadecimal7e|7 years ago|reply
Politicians will never address the rural areas in a positive way, because they know they will loose city votes. That’s why you always here generic promises, like “more police” and such, then they also get the city votes.
[+] [-] systemtest|7 years ago|reply
https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/veluwse-knokploeg-met-helikopte...
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
Not necessarily -- at the first sign of disruption, e.g. a large economy crash, a peak oil related problems, climate change related catastrophes, it's the cities that will become like in Zombie movies.
Rural areas can be much more self-sustainable when it comes to the essentials.
(Someone feels invested enough in city life to downvote a pretty standard argument. And yet this is how people survived major wars and famines in the city in my country -- by having an outlet to grow vegetables etc. in the countryside).