If you look back into history, you will find that urban sprawl is a very recent development in our tenure here on Earth. The largest cities in biblical antiquity served as trading posts and centers of government, but few people lived there compared to those who farmed and herded outside the walls. This was partly due to the logistical economics of the period, as herding was much preferred to settled agriculture, which is amply evidenced by the book of Genesis. Because herding requires more open space and often shifts with availability of grazing fields, not many people were eager to settle down and construct settlements. The Roman Empire, on the other hand, was almost excessively urban, with their entire society focusing around large Roman and colonial settlements. Now, we have the modern super-metropolis, with cities like Los Angeles housing populations that compare favorably to many countries. Besides the simple fact of our population explosion, there is something else behind these changes. Anyone who has read the last chapters of Gilgamesh can attest to the fact that humanity has longed to build functioning monuments to his own achievements for almost 10,000 years. So far, we seem to have succeeded, but this leap forward also presents some basic problems.
London, the thriving cultural capital of a country that places a societal significance on it's privacy, is now the most monitored city in the world. Sao Paulo, in Brazil, is so large and unruly that it is dangerous to walk the streets in broad daylight if you don't know exactly where you are going. Most Indian population centers are struggling to economize their transportation systems as the country's fleet of automobiles grows and China is trying to figure out how to shuttle the huge rural population into industrial centers on the coast. Societies across the globe recognize the potential of cities- many major politicians in the past years have ascended from Mayorship of major cities, like the current president of Iran and former mayor of it's capital Tehran. For all their disadvantages, cities also provide benefits. Easy consolidation of labor, ease of organization, etc. Everything that goes well put together, does well in a city.
I believe that urbanization is contributing to a tacit change in the minds of young people today. With the rise of the internet as a significant part of social development and expression, new subcultures can form quickly and peter out just as fast. When we live in cities, our physical social network is already compressed, but social networking tools like Facebook work to accelerate the process by giving us the illusion that people are 'right there'. The same thing holds true for universities- those with whom you primarily socialize are immediately available to you. When you look at the modern childhood and adolescence, you see that their physical world is becoming smaller and smaller as the social world becomes more disconnected from physical realities. In the coming years, it will be the responsibility of entering college students to travel as much as possible to counteract this change. There are great thinkers on both sides of the cultural homogenization debate, some say yes and others say no. But for my part, I believe the move towards simultaneous globalization of culture and urbanization of populations will drastically alter the way the next generation perceives the physical and natural world. Already most people's vacations are centered around viewing and experiencing centers of human culture- not that there is anything bad about this, in fact I am dying to do it myself, but it is true that natural wonders and outdoor excursions are becoming increasingly peripheral to trips inside cities. Even I was subject to this when I went to Ireland, where I focused most of my trip on seeing as much of the city of Dublin as I could manage.
Cities are wonderful places to be, despite all of their problems. Putting all the hopes, dreams and efforts of millions of people into one place makes for amazing results, but we cannot forget that cities are built upon earth. The insightful Annie Dillard once noted that cities sink by inches every year into the ground on which they stand. In 200 years Times Square will be buried beneath the ground and Mount Washington will be a few feet taller thanks to dust accretion. We cannot forsake the physical world that allowed us to build the cultural one.
While I think it is important to view other areas and cultures, I sort of regret how fast subcultures seem to be fading. In the United States, each state had its own subculture, sometimes cities as well. Now, people in different areas are becoming more like each other, and I think that hurtseach areas general sense of community.
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/tricia0711