Past, Present, and the Future of the City

The evolution of human society and its relations with the ecology of Earth has been a tumultuous process at best. In humanity’s manner of growth, it has taken advantage of a fruitful environment and left behind not only its progress but its waste. If we keep progressing and if we keep tapping from our finite natural resources, where will it end? Will we have a world of stable resources and non-volatile weather patterns? It is evident with our food shortages and ever growing natural extremes (including desertification in large parts of India) that our environment is pushed to the brink and will not respond well to future expansion of city limits.

It began thousands of years ago with the Neolithic (Agricultural) Revolution. The first members of agricultural based society, in places like Catal Huyuk in present day Turkey and Mesopotamia and Sumer in present day Iraq, first utilized its natural surroundings by developing irrigation. Ditches were built to carry water from rivers to farms. This created a boom in farm output, which in turn created surplus of food. The surplus allowed a longer life span for these early people, which led to more innovations such as government, organized religion, and written law. These societies of farmers built into societies of politicians, soldiers, poets, and thinkers. The emergence of philosophy and science continued to expand the boundaries of culture and the way people viewed their surroundings.

The next great revolution was one that accelerated the deterioration of the environment, under the guise of Industrial Revolution. This progression of mechanized and scientific development, along with the growing social problems that came with it, used natural resources at a faster rate than ever before. Primitive technologies in the form of assembly lines, mining, and early rail travel tore its way through the unexplored nature of the American West, as well as polluting the overcrowded regions of 19th century Europe. The people of this time didn’t truly know the impact that their innovation and invention had on their environment, as the natural sciences were still not as advanced as they are today.

These two movements bring us to the modern day Post-Industrial, or Information, Revolution. Our economy has moved from dealing solely in agriculture or in industry and has expanded to information technology, encompassing computers and space age technologies. Our environment, however, is still being adversely affected by industry as well as fiscally conservative manner in which industry deals with its resources. Clean and environmentally safe manners of taking care of waste and production are not economic, instead it is deemed fair by big business to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further degrading the environment and shortening the span of our planet’s finite natural supply.

To right the course of civil development, we have to look upon our past and rectify the error of our ways: innovation cannot take priority over the good of the world in which we inhabit. There are other ways of doing things without sacrificing productivity. In fact, the introduction of green or hybrid technologies (especially cars) can boost flagging industries and provide new jobs for a new generation.