A century ago, social theorist Georg Simmel analyzed the appeal of large cities in a landmark essay, The Metropolis and Mental Life. The metropolitan attitude, Simmel concluded, was one that both welcomed and feared the excitement of human density. Nowadays, we use experiments to reach the same conclusion. A widely reported recent study of Swedish city-dwellers concluded that rates of mental illness, including psychosis and schizophrenia, rise as a direct result of urban living.
Earlier studies likewise showed that cities harbour more psychopaths and sociopaths than rural areas. It’s not hard to see why. Cities are happy hunting grounds for power, achievement, dominance, isolation and alleviation of boredom all at once.
In the terms of economics, cities are full of externalities – spillovers to market transactions. I might hate the noise created by the cafés and bars on the busy street near my house, but I welcome the romantic opportunities created by the very same nightspots.
Both positive and negative externalities are everywhere in urban life, and that’s one clear reason humans have been, for centuries now, progressively abandoning other ways of life and migrating to large, sometimes very large, conurbations.
Another reason, as Doug Saunders argues in this timely contribution to the discourse on global cities, is the simple desire of parents to offer their children a better time than they had. Saunders, the European bureau chief for this newspaper, has surveyed a series of 20 urban areas around the world, from Liu Gong Li and North Mumbai to South Los Angeles and Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park, in order to understand “the final migration.” Most humans on the planet now live in cities, and over the next few decades another quarter to a third of the world will join them.
The City of the Dead, known as al-Arafa, in Cairo: A typical arrival city
Saunders calls this shift the most decisive social and cultural change since the Enlightenment and its legacies, including the French and Industrial revolutions, and it is difficult to deny it. Urban migration has not just been massive; it is proving to be one-way, fast and final. “We will end the century as a wholly urban species,” he notes, and the consequences of that fact affect everything from governance systems and financial markets to climate conditions and fuel resources.
Saunders claims that we are not paying sufficient attention to this truth, and so are in danger of the “blindness” that afflicted earlier generations that failed to cope with large-scale social change. But take this rhetorical position, announced on page one of the preface, with a grain of salt. It is the conceit of the age, at least in the world of bestselling non-fiction, that you don’t know what you think you know. Then along comes the book, here to dispel your “misconceptions” with actually obvious examples, to parade arguments as “against-the-grain” or “counterintuitive,” when in fact they are the product of the merest reflection or, worse, have been blithely harvested from somebody else’s real research.
The fact is, global cities and their consequences are being studied as intensively as anything on Earth, and there’s no need to pretend otherwise in order to sell the value of a contribution. Saunders’s contribution is valuable. It combines two virtues not often encountered in the literature: a focus on the margins of very large cities, where new arrivals mostly negotiate their first steps to urbanization, and an immediacy of reportage in the real details of individual stories.
