In London, Brexit and the pandemic have fused to expel its population at alarming rates, including countless highly educated and ambitious Europeans who have lost the right to work in the U.K. For years, Tokyo grew while the rest of Japan’s population waned, but that countercurrent has weakened. Paris, with little new building in the city’s core, became too expensive for middle-class families, especially as apartments were slurped up by Airbnb. But the data is easier to observe than explain, partly because a worldwide phenomenon makes room for lots of local rationales. It’s tempting to draw facile conclusions from such trends, or to formulate a Unified Theory of Anti-Metropolitanism. “Cities have doubled their population several times in the last 70 years but are not scheduled to do that again.” “The urban population-growth rate has been slowing down, and in developed countries it’s at a standstill,” says Shlomo Angel, a professor at the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University. It’s an old story: As the poor crowd together, the affluent spread out. These drops in the major metro centers of the richest countries are all the more striking in the context of the massive global urbanization that has been driving the world’s population into ballooning megalopolises like Mumbai, Lagos, and Mexico City. Paris, Sydney, Philadelphia, Hong Kong, Tokyo: All have either shed population or seen growth slow to a standstill. Global cities all over the developed world started losing some of their magic years before the first COVID-19 case cropped up. These are tough times for city lovers, and not just if you’re in New York, or the Northeast, or San Francisco, or even the United States as a whole.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |