Saratoga News

Point of View

Carl Heintze

Urban shift is changing the world

In 1966, for the first time in human history, more of the world lived in cities than in the country. That's a sobering fact. It means that the process of the Industrial Revolution has now engulfed the world, creating new monster metropolises such as Mexico City (more than 10 million people) and Istanbul (about equal in size).

Rural life for the world's peoples more and more is becoming a distant dream. Although the process has been going on in the United States for more than half a century, only recently has it been happening in other places--Africa, South America and Asia in particular.

And in these places, it is not the more gradual transition which allowed us to measure the difference by generations. In Asia, Africa and South America, it is happening almost overnight.

People who have spent their lives growing their own food, hoping to have a little to sell beyond what they need to live, suddenly find themselves without this cushion of subsistence. Instead, they are tossed, pretty much unskilled, into the great cities mushrooming up like viruses across the tropical zones of the planet.

Instead of depending on the land, they now depend on others for life, even as we depend on the supermarket.

But we've had time to recognize and organize for this change. To make myself an example, I can remember growing up in a small town and working summers for my uncles, most of whom were farmers (although we in California called them ranchers). Today not a single relative works the land. They all live in cities and towns. Even the land my uncles once cultivated has become housing. It no longer produces any food.

The family farm, now gone from California, is dying in the Midwest.

Technology has sounded its death knell, even as we have abandoned heavy industry in much of the United States for services and technology. Look no further than the Santa Clara Valley, in which we live. Two generations ago it was filled with prune trees. Now it is full of computer factories.

The move away from the land to cities means many things, many of them bad. It means an end to village life, to living in places where everyone knows everyone in town and their business. It means another separation from nature. We now take it as gospel than although animals must die to give us beef, bacon and lamb, we don't have to kill the animals that yield this meat.

The task is carried out by a few or by no human beings at all, but by machines.

The death of rural life also cleaves us from a responsibility to nature (the environment), or so it seems. In cities, we dump our wastes into the sewage system, into garbage cans, into the street, seldom thinking about where it is going to end, certainly not on our land.

We're still responsible, of course, but we don't often acknowledge it. It's up to "others," our anonymous servants, to take care of the problem.

Cities also concentrate problems. For instance, instead of spreading transport apart, urbanization brings it together, and we have smog in Los Angeles, in Mexico City, in Beijing. A host of other problems come with cities: crime, stress, the dangers imposed by crowding people closer and closer together.

So now the problem has become not national, not even continental, but worldwide.

And the solutions have become more
and more difficult.

This is because industrial civilization requires labor to be closer together. Otherwise it is inefficient. It is because instead of being skilled in several things, urban populations tend to be skilled only in one or two. The assembly line worker must tighten the same set of bolts over and over again through a work shift or place the same things in boxes or bottles over and over again.

Unlike those who once farmed their land or worked in their villages, there is no benefit to having modest skills in several things. That's inefficient. It just doesn't work in a world that concentrates in cities.

And yet it's not that we don't recognize the problem urbanization brings. It's that we don't know what to do about it.

More and more Turks are flooding into Istanbul from the provinces every day. More and more South Africans want to work in the mines or the cities.

And China, which wants to become a great industrial power, is struggling not only with how to feed its millions when they want to come to the cities, but how to retrain those millions of subsistence farmers so they can participate in the new society brought by industrialization.

This is the major problem of the new century, at least as I see it. The world we knew as children is gone. The world of tomorrow has dawned. How bright it may be, how well we may live closer together than ever, remains uncertain.

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