It turns out that while density equals efficiency, “megacity” does not necessarily equal density. Many megacity dwellers live outside those hyper-efficient city centers, Kennedy explains. Look at New York—if you live in Manhattan or parts of Brooklyn and Queens, you’re probably getting around on the subway. But if you live in Westchester, New Haven, or Newark? You’re probably driving your car—maybe not into the city center, but around it. And there are a lot of you. That’s why New York is almost off the chart in its consumption of transportation fuel, despite all its great rail.
But not all megacities consume as many resources as New York. Look at the ones clustered at the bottom end of transportation energy use: Mumbai. Karachi. Lagos. Cairo. Delhi. These are also some of the cities that use the least amount of electricity per capita. Unfortunately that’s not because their electrical grids are super-efficient. It’s because not everyone living there has electricity. “There’s huge disparities between the amount of resources being used between the wealthiest megacities and the poorest ones,” Kennedy says. In the latter, the resource inputs aren’t enough to support a basic standard of living for all citizens…
So while developed-world megacities should consider reining in their gasoline and electricity use—or expanding center-city style efficient infrastructure to the ’burbs—growth (combined with smart policy) may be the answer to developing-world megacities’ woes. Which is good, because if one thing’s for sure it’s that megacities are growing, and they’re not going to stop.
So the issue may not really be density but a higher order issue of social class. In other words, efficiency is the result of different processes depending on the wealth and development of particular cities and countries. In wealthier countries, individuals have the resources to spread out and can afford to consume too much. On the other hand, poor countries have big cities with lots of residents who can’t afford to consume what they need.
The nation’s foreign-born population is projected to reach 78 million by 2060, making up 18.8% of the total U.S. population, according to new Census Bureau population projections. That would be a new record for the foreign-born share, with the bureau projecting that the previous record high of 14.8% in 1890 will be passed as soon as 2025.
Yet while Asian and Hispanic immigrants are projected to continue to be the main sources of U.S. immigrant population growth, the new projections show that the share of the foreign born is expected to fall among these two groups. Today, 66.0% of U.S. Asians are immigrants, but that share is predicted to fall to 55.4% by 2060. And while about a third of U.S. Hispanics (34.9%) are now foreign-born, the Census Bureau projects that this share too will fall, to 27.4% in 2060. These declines are due to the growing importance of births as drivers of each group’s population growth. Already, for Hispanics, U.S. births drive 78% of population growth…
The U.S. today has more immigrants than any other nation. As the nation’s immigrant population grows, so too will the number of children who have at least one immigrant parent. As of 2012, these second generation Americans made up 11.5% of the population, and that share is expected to rise to 18.4% by 2050, according to Pew Research Center projections.
This is the first time in 14 years the Census Bureau has made projections of the foreign-born population. Predicting future immigration and birth trends is a tricky process, and the bureau has substantially changed its projections from year to year in light of reduced immigration and birth rates.
While these numbers are sure to contribute to political debate about current policies, they continue trends started in the late 1960s where immigration policies were changed. Additionally, the projections suggest the United States is still a desirable place to immigrate to and that the growing foreign-born population is a significant contributor to the overall growing population of the US.
I would be interested to hear about the discussions behind the scenes regarding the 14 year gap in making such projections. How much of this was guided by politics? What are the upper and lower bounds of the confidence intervals for these projections? Have our projection abilities improved significantly?
Megacities like Tokyo and Sao Paolo grab headlines, but the fastest population growth is happening in a group of global second-tier cities, which are easier for rural populations to reach and are safer and less intimidating than the megacities, many of which are surrounded by vast slums, Sassen said.
Three of the world’s fastest-growing cities with populations over 5 million are in Africa. Four are in China, two are in India and one in the Middle East. (One megacity, Beijing, is growing at a rate of 4.6 percent a year).
They are places like Suzhou, China, Surat, India and Kinshasha, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Or, take Luanda. If Americans have heard of it, it’s probably from images of a nearly 30-year-long civil war that overtook the southwest African country after independence from Portugal. After 10 years of peace, Angola’s oil, gas, diamonds and other mineral resources are fueling a building boom…
The fastest-growing cities are adding hundreds of thousands to their populations each year. Luanda, for instance, is expected to grow again next year by 4 percent, according to a United Nations report. That’s more than 400,000 people, or about the same number who live in Miami.
Not everyone can live and work in the biggest global cities. Mid-sized cities can contain a large number of people while offering some of the features of urban life without the largest-scale populations and problems. Take the United States as an example: the top three cities may get a lot of attention but most Americans do not live in these regions. (Roughly 42 million live in the New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago regions combined.)
It would be interesting to know how these second-tier cities are then connected to the biggest cities around the world. Do they also have concentrations of the finance industry? Do they act more as regional centers that provide needed services and goods for their own geographic area? This article suggests such cities are unique business opportunities; while everyone else flocks to the most well-known places, there are emerging markets in these second-tier cities.
Gadanho invited six teams of architects, urban planners, and researchers to propose tactical urbanisms, or urban planning solutions that draw on existing (and not always legal) infrastructure and patterns in human settlement. Each team spent 14 months on scenarios for one of six cities: New York, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Lagos, Hong Kong, and Istanbul. Each city is growing rapidly, and each has tremendous inequality. The teams were selected based on their work and methodology. “I cherry picked practices that were already on the terrain, doing their own take on the idea of tactical urbanism. So they were already working with committees, researching how people were appropriating space, and proposing models for a different kind of city,” Gadanho says. “Many of these proposals are based on the idea that top-down planning has been failing people in many aspects.”
In scale and ambition, the results run the gamut. For instance, 85 percent of Hong Kong is surrounded by water, yet the city’s population is expected swell by 50 percent. MAP Office, Hong Kong Network Architecture Lab, and New York’s Columbia University reasoned that with so little land, the city has three options: develop sanctioned natural parks, extended the shoreline further into the water, or building artificial islands near the coastline. They ultimately proposed building eight new islands, each dedicated to an economic or social activity unique to Hong Kong, like fishing. Naturally, building these would create jobs.
In Istanbul, housing development in the 1970s led to a city where the middle class mostly inhabits TOKI buildings, or clusters of towers in gated communities. For the people of Istanbul, acquiring a TOKI apartment is part of a middle class dream, one that also includes owning a car, and the latest gadgets. As Superpool and Istanbul Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée see it, that consumer-driven culture could soon become a society in debt. They propose a new kind of utopia, where the TOKI clusters get retrofitted with micro-farms, solar panels, and shared car services. Called R-Urban, the services would be open-source and connected through a series of apps. It builds a sharing economy layer on top of the TOKI clusters, which reinforces, rather than destroys, the sense of community that drew inhabitants there in the first place.
After 14 months of gestation, each project is still highly hypothetical and probably only viable under a certain set of circumstances, like municipal cooperation, or the availability of funds for construction. They’re all pie-in-the-sky utopian ideals. In that light, the exhibit is a mental exercise, one that considers how to build according to what people are already doing. Governments might want to eradicate favela housing, because they can’t control it, but that improvisational style of living exists in part because of the skills and community values that already live in a city. That’s an opportunity, not an obstacle.
There will be a lot of urban planning opportunities in the future in major cities. However, there are also some major issues at play:
1. How much redevelopment is possible? This typically requires displacing people and this is difficult on a mass scale.
2. Related to #1, how much undeveloped land is available for new ideas? One of the projects at MoMA goes so far as to create new land off the coast of Hong Kong.
3. Who gets to make decisions about these new urban planning ideas? Top-down approaches from governments will not always be met with happiness. How connected are planners and others to people on the ground?
4. How are such major projects going to be funded? Even if change is desirable, the costs of major redevelopment or new land creation could be steep.
These issues aren’t insurmountable and I suspect that would be tackled uniquely in different places. Yet, going from the design stage to implementation to completion can be quite the process.
According to the Census Bureau, however, the resident population of the United States increased from 300,888,674 in April 2007 to 317,787,997 in April 2014.
Several quick thoughts:
1. I had a conversation earlier in the day with several colleagues about population stagnation in a number of industrialized countries around the world. The United States is unusual compared to Western Europe which has lower birth rates and lower rates of immigration.
2. It is hard to imagine 17 million people. In other terms, the United States added more than the metropolitan population of London.
3. I’ve had the thought lately that perhaps part of the political morass in the United States these days is due to a political system that is simply difficult to maintain with 317 million residents. Providing for all of these people adds to the difficulties of maintaining bureaucracies (and you need quite a few with the population). A two party system makes it very difficult to represent all of the competing concerns and interests. Reaching consensus can be difficult within a country that prizes individualism.
The latest estimates put the population at more than 1.6 million people, up slightly from the 2010 census.
According to NYU’s Furman Center, in the last year alone, Manhattan lost nearly 3,000 rent-regulated apartments…
In many cases, those stabilized, often affordable homes are being replaced by “market rate” units.
From 2002 to 2012, the number of stabilized or controlled apartments in the borough plunged more than 19 percent. The number of “market” rate and ultimately significantly more expensive apartments soared more than 19 percent…
Nearly 29 percent of the borough’s population is foreign born, but experts say the wave of change could drive that number down even in traditionally immigrant neighborhoods.
“It doesn’t happen all at once; what happens is that neighborhoods change in pieces,” says City College of New York Sociology Professor William Helmreich.
The wealth flowing through Manhattan is incredible so it is little surprise that real estate prices are going up. This isn’t a phenomenon limited to Manhattan: the ultra-wealthy are developing and buying real estate in numerous big cities like London and Miami. The bigger issue is what happens to these cities. Do they become primarily the province of the wealthy or is there still space for average residents and immigrants? This discussion or struggle has been illustrated in recent years in San Francisco where actions by tech companies to bus employees to Silicon Valley has been met with resistance. The answers are not easy as many politicians need to keep and attract the jobs and wealth that help keep the city coffers full as well as look attractive to other firms. In other words, it is hard to fight growth machines.
Western suburbs “McMansions” should be converted into apartments to help deal with Perth’s population growth, an expert says.
Leading WA environmental scientist David Kaesehagen said walls or divisions could be built within big properties in the most affluent suburbs to add to housing stock in a rapidly growing market…
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has forecast Perth’s population will grow from 1.8 million to 4.2 million in the next four decades…
Mr Kaesehagen said with the right laws and incentives, owners of large mansions could be persuaded to divide their properties. “This is a way of using existing built form to increase density without introducing high-rise or changing the aesthetic of these established suburbs,” he said.
This is not the first time this has been suggested but I have yet to see a community or significant number of people push for this. I suspect it would be really difficult to do this kind of retrofitting in suburbs often so concerned about property values and density: who would want to be the first resident to have your house subdivided as your neighbors look on and wonder about their housing values? How much would it cost to convert larger homes into multiple units when they were originally intended for single families? This might work best in McMansion neighborhoods that are abandoned or not yet opened (each of these would pose their own set of problems) so there would be no community members in opposition. But, then why not build higher density developments in the first place?
The residential population in the downtown of a number of American big cities grew between 2000 and 2010 and Chicago led the way:
The report found that the number of people living within two miles of Chicago’s City Hall rose 36 percent from 2000 to 2010. Though many of the largest U.S. cities experienced a similar trend in the last decade, Chicago outpaced them all in that category.
More than 48,000 moved to downtown Chicago in the last decade, according to the report. New York City saw a 9.3 percent increase in its downtown population, or about 37,000 people…
Rob Paral, a Chicago demographer, says the city’s downtown population growth reflects several underlying economic factors, including downtown revitalization and an expanding job market.
But though places like the South Loop and West Loop have benefited from the trend, Paral says, its effects quickly fade the farther out you go.
“There’s a big difference between what you see in downtown and what you see in other parts of the city,” he said. “We wish it would be happening within 20 miles of City Hall, but no city has that kind of prosperity.”
In other words: one of the wealthy areas of the city continues to grow while less well-off areas struggle to tackle social problems while facing declining population. I assume this report will be spun by Mayor Emanuel and others to suggest that Chicago is resurgent even in tough economic times. However, a city is not just its downtown.
While digging through some 2010 US Census reports, I came across this table of the most populous and fastest growing counties between 2000 and 2010 (page 9 of this PDF):
Two thoughts came to mind at seeing this list of the fastest growing counties:
1. Kendall and Loudoun are the only two counties in the top ten not in the Sunbelt. While this isn’t a complete list of counties, it does suggest that the most rapid growth continues to take place in the Sunbelt. Similarly, look at the list of the most populous counties: the three non-Sunbelt counties barely grew or even lost population while some of the Sunbelt counties gained quite a few people.
Between 2000 and 2010, the total U.S. population grew about 10 percent, from 281 million to 309 million. Over that same time, the exurban population grew by more than 60 percent, from about 16 million to almost 26 million people, according to the analysis. As this chart shows, rates of growth are significantly higher in exurban areas than in more urban or densely populated areas.
A new interactive map from the Urban Institute shows how the growth rates in exurban areas have been higher – and in some cases much higher – than the growth rates in their corresponding metropolitan areas. The map is based on an analysis by U.S. Census Bureau researchers Todd Gardner and Matthew Marlay, who looked at census data from 2000 and 2010, and American Community Survey data from 2005 through 2009. Their data is also available in a sortable table.
The exurbs of Las Vegas, for example, saw an average annual growth rate of 17.2 percent between 2000 and 2010, while the metropolitan area as a whole had an average growth rate of just 3.6 percent. Phoenix’s exurban growth rate was 14.7 percent during that time, compared to its metro-wide rate of 2.6 percent. Omaha’s exurban rate of 11.9 percent also outpaced its metro-wide rate of 1.2 percent. Ninety-six of the 98 most populous metropolitan areas saw higher growth rates in the exurbs than in the metro areas as a whole between 2000 and 2010…
But it wasn’t all just pre-crash exurban booming. Some metro areas continued to see their exurban populations grow between 2007 and 2010, after the crash and through the recession. From 2007 to 2010, metropolitan areas grew about 2.4 percent, while exurban areas grew by 13 percent. Some exurbs even out-performed their pre-recession selves. “In 22 of the largest 100 metros, the average annual growth rate in the exurbs from 2007 to 2010 was higher than that of the previous seven years,” the researchers write.
As you might expect, the majority of the fastest growing exurban areas were in the South and West.
By definition, the exurbs are on the metropolitan fringe. However, once they reach a certain population or development moves past them, they are no longer really the exurbs as further out communities then take up the label. How long does the “average” exurb last before it simply becomes a suburb? I suspect this might differ city by city as they expand at different rates. For example, the cities of the Northeast and Midwest have a longer history and much of their explosive growth has already concluded.
Legally Sociable 