Land Area Coverage of the Next 2 Billion People This Century (PART 1)

With this year, 2011, being the year our planet's human population is expected to reach 7 billion strong, I thought hey the last billion mark was approximately during the year 1999. We are growing, growing very quickly and where are we all supposed to live? Where will the new generation of billions call home? In the United States, we've heard arguments from many that we are overpopulated, that something must give. Being one of the least densely populated nations, this couldn't be farther from the truth. I couldn't disagree more strongly with the premise of overpopulation having lived in and visited a few of the world's largest most densely populated cities. I've seen human cooperation and sanity, and concurrently born witness to some of the darker truths of humanity. According to a 2007 report by UNFPA, "Poverty is now growing faster in urban than in rural areas. One billion people live in urban slums, which are typically overcrowded, polluted and dangerous, and lack basic services such as clean water and sanitation." This figure is an estimate from 2007. You can download the report for free from UNFPA. The issue of population in the United States will often be framed in self-centered or family-focused terms such as, "I don't want people living on top of me," or, "my family needs a larger garage and more storage," or "we would like a yard for our children to play in." Some other popular qualms in America are, "cities are dangerous," or, "cities are too polluted," and, "cities are too crowded." We say such things as, "I like my space." Such refrains can only be coming from a lack of information on the contemporary reality of the world, or from the well-informed though lacking a sense of the humanity of the issue.

The UN made a forecast in the year 2004 leading out through the next hundred years, and for my purpose here today, we need only mind the moderate expectations out to about the year 2050. It projects we will likely surmount the 9 billion mark by that time.

Where can 2 billion more people live? Cities such as Seoul, Korea; Manila, Philippines; Mexico City; Tokyo, Japan; Karachi, Pakistan; Jakarta, Indonesia; and about 150 others have at least 1 million citizens already. China, alone has more than 100 cities with at least 1 million citizens each. An increasingly common condition, particularly among those I've named are populations greater even than 10 or 15 million, even 20 million. This is not a problem, yet. These cities are also dismissed as overcrowded by American standards.

In order to preserve recreational and aesthetic open space, wild-life habitat, agricultural land, and land for various other uses the majority of cities in the world have leadership or cultural norms that incidently work to preserve valuable open space, through the key act of living in close proximity to one another. In the United States, the extreme opposite act of preservation takes place; that is in order to preserve open space we subdivide the land into parcels that ensure each household grants its occupants personal private use of a small parcel of open space. This is not in itself a crime, though the result is a social contract of isolation and an enormous consumption of space for housing and automobile transportation. Private automobile transportation is a physical danger to most forms of life, requires enormous spatial allotments precluding most other uses, and promotes further environmental degradation through elevated individual fuel consumption.

Atlanta city limits highlighted in red (about 132 square miles)

In fact, if you view a list of the worlds cities ranked according to population density, as put together here MONGABAY or here LIST BY CITY MAYORS, U.S. cities begin to appear hundreds of places down the column. The truth is that many of our U.S. cities have densely populated cores, though these have in many instances lost their importance to their urbanized surroundings. A few cases such as New York City, Chicago and Atlanta have urban cores of a globally competitive density, but largely depend on their enormous ring cities and suburbs in achieving globally competitive total populations. Take a look at Atlanta, wherein the red area illustrated at right contains approximately 420,000 people at a density of approximately 4,000 per square mile.This figure doesn't reflect the oft cited metro population of Atlanta that is 5,268,860 strong.

Metro Atlanta (covering 8376 square miles)

The metro area looks like this, containing 8376 square miles. These are not to scale, look closely and see that the
area shown above is at the center of the the highlighted area in the lower image.

This phenomenon is repeated, nearly without variation across the United States, representing the vast majority of urban and metro scenarios at work in the U.S. Were we to live in a world without finite boundaries, borders, or resources this wouldn't be a problem.







In order to begin an exploration of the contemporary material conditions of the human population, let us compare Atlanta's twin (3/4 twin) in terms of land area:

BEIJING, CHINA.

Metro Beijing 6,487 square miles (truthfully only 77.45% as large as Metro Atlanta)

The key difference between these cities, in comparing their human impact on the land which they occupy rests with the total portion of humanity housed upon them. Atlanta, houses 5.3 million people on 130% of the land area that Beijing utilizes in housing 19,612,368 people. In other word, the density of Metro Atlanta exists presently at about 629 people per square mile, while Metro Beijing exists at about 3,023 people per square mile. The issue of density expands by an order of magnitude greater even than the extant condition of Beijing. Please, continue with the upcoming post.