The Megacity Era

What are megacities? Why are they so difficult to define? We explore the future of cities with 10 million people or more in them.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey then, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
the podcast that looks at the future and says, when
you're alone in life is making you lonely, you can
always go downtown. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren, and I'm

(00:23):
Joe McCormick. And I've got a question for you guys.
You do what's the biggest city you've ever been to? Uh?
New York City? Yeah? New York? Are you sure you actually?
I haven't. London might be bigger as London, bigger significantly,
So yeah, yeah, that was kind of a surprise to me.
When we were doing research for this episode. I assumed

(00:45):
London was bigger than it actually is. Well, part of
the problem is defining what a city is, right, because
the perception of what a city is versus what it
legally is are two different things. Just as a quick
aside before we even get to the topic, So Atlanta,
for example, not that big of a city. I live.
I live actually in the city limits of Atlanta, all right,

(01:08):
So we're all three in the city limits of Atlanta,
But about five years ago I lived just outside the
city limits. And the thing about it is that I
would still tell people I live in Atlanta. I still
thought of it as Atlanta. And in fact, I noticed
something interesting that the further away from Atlanta a person lived,
the bigger the city seemed to be. So, for example,

(01:31):
you might you might live inside what we call the perimeter,
that's to eighty five. It's a highway that circles not
just the city of Atlanta, but some of the metropolitan
area immediately around it, and uh, someone outside of that
would refer to anything inside two eighty five is Atlanta.
So when living in say, part of Decatur, might say, oh, well,
I live in Decatur. Uh, Atlanta. The city of Atlanta

(01:54):
is down the street. But you know, when I lived
in Decatur, if I was talking to somebody who didn't
live in town, I would just tell them I lived
in Atlanta, so that the answer made sense exactly. And again,
the further out you would go, the bigger the city
would be. So I know people who live uh, pretty
far up in northern Georgia who would think of Gwynette,
which is a suburb of Atlanta, as being Atlanta. That

(02:16):
is also Atlanta, and it's not people who live in
Atlanta and Gwynette is where you like get lost looking
for a flea market you heard about, or a Chinese
restaurant or etcetera. Yeah, it's it's where you go and
you drive to eight different chain restaurants, all of which
have a forty five minute wait, and you think, what
where am I? I apologize, I didn't mean to slam Gwynette.

(02:39):
I'm sure it's it's just full of absolutely lovely people,
but it is. Yes, it's way out there. Yeah, and
our point being that even all of us who live
within the city limits, I think there's at least seven miles.
Is the crow flies between each of our houses. Yeah,
And so it's it's one of those things where defining
what is the actual city is a is a bit
of a tricky situation. And the reason why we're even

(03:02):
talking about it, why this the seemingly weird tangent is happening,
is because we're going to talk about mega cities today.
Now these are giganto enormous cities, and the same problem
of defining what is a mega city exists on that
scale as it does with something like Atlanta, which does
not merit it is not a mega city. Sure, because technically,

(03:24):
a mega city has to have a population of over
ten million people to be considered a mega city. But
but right, But where do you draw those lines? Because
as as it turns out, when we call it something
a mega city, it's not necessarily the political or or
you know, the boundary of a city. It's it's the
urban development around it. Where from an outsider's perspective, you

(03:46):
you know, you come into the outside areas of that sprawl,
that's where you start saying, this is the city of whatever.
And a mega city can also be not just a
single entity, but it could be two cities that have
grown outward so that their edges now meet. A lot
of what you're talking about actually points to a larger

(04:07):
principle that might be something that's good to start with here,
which is that in many ways, the cities we live
in today's are largely accidental. Yea. You know, they grew
out of settlements that arose for some reason. They might
have been on a river where there was a good

(04:28):
place to load and unload cargo, or they might have
been at the center of where some railroad lines met,
or at the end like Terminus, which is the old
name for Atlanta, sure where they might have been at
a good port where there was a place to again
load and unload cargo. It seems to be mostly based
around economic transportation. But right, so there are these kind

(04:50):
of strange ways in which many of the cities we
live in today are the result of this strange growth
process that we don't even fully plan or under stand
all the time. Like we we live in an urbanization age.
This is the age of moving to the big city.
And it's not just where we live. This is a
trend that's happening all over the world. Yeah, more all

(05:13):
over the world than right, Like, if you go back
a couple hundred years to like eighteen hundred, what percentage
of the people on earth were living in urban areas,
like in cities three percent of the hum of the humans.
We're living in places that you would not describe as

(05:35):
an urban area. So not a city or a large town.
We're talking people who are living out in small villages
or even on you know, individual farmland, real one Starbucks
town kind of places. Yeah, right where where if you're
equivalent of Starbucks, it was a horse. I think if

(05:56):
your town had a horse in it, that was a
big deal about those one horse town. Yeah. So if
you go a hundred years after that and go to
nineteen hundreds, so now the industrial revolution is underway right
where we're seeing people who are meeting each other on
the road like do you have small yet? We have small?
Let me show you. So by then a hundred years

(06:18):
going by, it went from three percent to fourteen percent
of the world's population. And at that time about a
dozen cities had populations of a million or more people
in it. So now we're talking about an era where
we've got some some pretty large cities for the time
and just we're starting to see this trend of people
seeing an opportunity to make a living doing something uh

(06:43):
in a city. Also, mechanization is starting to take some
of the load off of agriculture, meaning that there are
fewer jobs out in the more remote areas. So you've
got a double incentive to try and find your way
possibly moving to the big city. Right. But new to
types of jobs are coming into being, and a lot
of these would be urban based jobs, like some manufacturing

(07:06):
type jobs or new knowledge based jobs. So if we
move up to nineteen fifties and now now we're just
going fifty more years, uh, it had more than doubled.
We're talking about thirty of the world's population exactly. Yeah, yeah,
And in ninety to the world's population was about seven

(07:27):
forty six million people. And that also happens to be
when the growth of rural population started to officially slow. Uh,
it hadn't quite peaked yet, but the UN expects it
to begin reversing. Today there are fifty four percent of
the world's population living in urban areas. So how many
is that? Some three point nine billion three point nine

(07:51):
billion people living in urban areas. Now, whether you define
that as a city or the suburb of the city
or a large town, that sort of stuff. So World
Health Organization actually predicts that between twenty and twenty will
have a growth rate of urban population of one point
eight four percent. Uh, that's global. Like if you were
to average everything out, and then that would actually slow

(08:13):
down and continue to slow down over the next few years.
So between twenty five the growth rate would be one
point six and twenty five to thirty would be one
point for four percent. And if you look at the
globe that these different regions have um very different percentages,
like the overall percentage of the globe, like Lawrence said,

(08:36):
has of the population living in urban areas in North America,
it's excuse way more to the urban areas. It's two
of the population of North America lives in an urban area.
But if you look in areas like Asia and Africa,
it's closer to So it all depends on where you
are looking. Um So, yeah, it's it's it's a trend

(09:01):
that is going to continue, and it's going faster in
some places, some some places significantly faster than yeah, absolutely so.
So in we said that there were twelve cities that
had populations of a million or more. How many is
it today? More than four d more than four hundred
cities with a population of a million or more people.

(09:22):
And uh, there are the mega cities like you mentioned, Lauren,
those are the ones that have ten million people in them.
We now have about twenty eight of those. By we
may have as many as forty estimations, very because it's
very difficult to predict exactly how sustainable some of these

(09:44):
growth trends are. UH. And there's some who think that,
you know, Chicago, which has been hovering just beneath mega
city levels, like they have around nine million something uh
in their population may top that by twenty twenty. But
other cities like London, which has also been hovering just
under mega city for for the actual city, well not

(10:07):
the actual city of London, for greater London, um, they
might also hit that level. Yeah, there was another estimate
I found that was according to the u N again,
there are going to be a predicted forty one mega
cities on Earth with populations exceeding ten million by right. Yeah,
So again the estimations obviously their estimations, so they vary

(10:27):
depending upon what data people are looking at and how
they are are breaking that down, and they change from
year to year. So that's exciting, Yeah, because I mean
all sorts of stuff. Factors can things like you know,
natural disasters, weather patterns, wars, I mean, all these very
complex issues will clearly make a huge impact on these
growth rates. Also, what's interesting to me is that while

(10:49):
fifty four percent of the world's population live in cities,
if you look at just mega cities and say, all right,
well what percentage of the population lives in mega cities,
it's six point seven percent. So mega cities, while they
are huge, and you know, you look at this and
you're like, wow, ten million people or more are living
in this mega city. It still represents um six point

(11:11):
seven percent population, but that number is growing, Yes, it is,
and we will expect that to continue to grow, both
as existing mega cities grow larger and new mega cities
come into being as the smaller I hate to use
the word smaller. That doesn't even make sense. These these
already large cities boom into mega cities. Uh so, it's

(11:37):
there's other some other predictions that are really interesting to me.
The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs says
that by nearly seventy percent of the world's population will
be living in urban areas, so we'll continue to see
that increase from up to seventy percent, and that at
that time, the population is expected to be somewhere in
the neighborhood of ten billion people. So that means the

(12:00):
number of people who are living in cities by the
year will be the same as the number of people
who are alive on the planet right now. So if
we took everyone who's alive right now and put them
in a city, that's essentially the number of people who
will be living in cities by according to the United Nations,
well let's start busting people in and see you feel fit. Yeah,

(12:21):
we could fit another twenty or thirty people in this
room alone. Yeah, I mean as long as they don't mind,
you know, not touching the floor, and then we just
be stacked on top of one another. But but no,
I mean, I mean that's that's a joke, but also
a kind of horrifying actual question of how are we
going to fit all of these people into these areas
and what on earth are we going to do with them? Right?

(12:43):
And I would say it's not so much a question
of physically fitting, like you're packing a trunk in some
In some areas, it kind of is, but we're we're
lucky enough to not really have that problem in middle
class Atlanta. But yeah, I think that the issue is
more thinking about what a city is. I mean, a
city is not your resource production landscape. It is your

(13:06):
resource consumption landscape. And it makes lots of things. It uh,
you know, it makes knowledge, It creates economic value in
plenty of ways. But the raw resources that your population
uses don't typically come from cities, and how could they.
You You need farmlands to create food, your quarries to
to mind stuff exactly. Yeah, and that's going to come

(13:28):
from the wider landscape. So as you think about cities,
it's kind of interesting to think about. Basically, you're moving
more and more consumption into tiny areas farther and farther
away from where resources are produced, and beyond that, you're
also expanding outward the borders of the urban That's that's

(13:51):
why a lot of these these studies talk about urban
environments as opposed to cities, because the term city has
a very specific meaning. If you are being really you know,
strict about it, you're talking about the borders of a municipality.
And when we say the city of you know, when
we say New York City, we're really not just meaning
the New York City like where the borders would stop.

(14:12):
We mean the entire metropolitan area around New York City.
In fact, if we were to limit ourselves to just
the definitive this you know, city, then the numbers would
be totally different when you start looking at the you know,
the the top mega cities that are out there. Um So,
whether it's an a a concentrated urban environment around a

(14:36):
large city like New York City is, or it's um
more of a kind of a convergence of two different cities.
We've got different terms for that as well to kind
of explain those. Okay, what's Dallas fort Worth? Is that
just one city? Now that would be I would argue
that Dallas. I guess it all depends on your your perspective, right,

(14:59):
You've got like the metroplex. A metroplex would be a
an urban environment made up of two different cities that
are more or less or two or more cities that
are more or less on the same level already. So
you wouldn't say that one city is predominantly you know,
this was the big anchor city and these other ones

(15:20):
just got swallowed up by the sprawl. Yeah, it's like
a binary star system. Yeah, exactly. And it's just that
the spheres of influence have now overlapped one another. So
Baltimore and Washington, d C. This is absolutely the case, Lauren.
I remember we went up to when we went up
to visit the Discovery headquarters back when How Stuff Works
was part of Discovery Communications. We took a bus from

(15:43):
or I guess it was a cab from the DC
area all the way into Baltimore to where or actually
beyond Baltimore to too um, silver Spring. I think it
was left town the whole time. You're just like, Okay,
I see now there's more city, and now there's more city,
and now there are different monuments and more city. There's

(16:05):
no differentiation. Really, you know, you didn't You never felt
like you had left one city and now you're entering another.
You just free landscape. Yeah, so that would be a metroplex.
Raleigh Durham Chapel Hill is another great example. You know,
that's a that's sometimes called the triangle, and but it's
the same sort of thing. Then you've also got a conturbation,

(16:25):
which is where that's the best word. I've got to say,
it's the least awkward best word ever, conturbation, conbation. Yeah, yeah,
it doesn't. It doesn't make me think that. I'm like,
there's gotta be a different way to pronounce that, right.
Um No, I can see that. It's it's con so
with and then urbation. Yeah. And so it's it's more

(16:46):
or less continuous urban environment. Yes, so we're talking about city, suburbs, towns,
everything getting swallowed up that I would argue metro Atlanta
falls into that category. Um, it's it's obviously it's not a.
It's it's not a mega city. We don't have a
population that would put us into that category. But if

(17:06):
you look at a map of the metropolitan Atlanta area,
there are a lot of little towns that are essentially
swallowed up by the city. Oh yeah, absolutely, the same
thing with with Boston or San Francisco. So let's take
a look really quickly about the two at the top
five cities by population. Now, this is according to the
World Atlas. Again, look, depending upon what resource you use,

(17:28):
you may see different a different ranking. And it's also
because it's all on how you define the city. So
if you're defining it as the metropolitan area around a
particular core, that's going to give you a different number
than if you limit yourself to a specific city. So
number one on the list is Tokyo, Japan. It is

(17:49):
the largest mega city with thirty seven million, one d
twenty six thousand people in it. I do not even
understand that number. Yeah. Now, to be fair, this again
doesn't just mean the the established historical borders of Tokyo.
It it also is the metropolitan area around it. Now,

(18:09):
the population density is six thousand, thirty eight people per
square kilometer, or fifteen thousand, six hundred people per square mile.
Every square mile is a lot. Yes, as someone who
walks a few miles each day, the thought of, uh,
you know, if I were to walk a square mile

(18:30):
and think fifteen thousand people are inside of that, that
would be pretty incredible. However, that's not as incredible as
it gets, it gets more so. So again, the city
is number one. If you look at Tokyo and its
surrounding areas, the actual population within the established borders of
what is Tokyo is closer to nine millions. So if
you were being really super strict and saying no, I'm
just talking about traditional Tokyo, it would not even be

(18:51):
a megacity. It would be nine million people. It wouldn't
quite uh, it wouldn't quite count. But no one reasonable
would ever say that, because again, it's not like as
soon you cross the border you go into like, oh
now it's pastoral Japan. That's not the way that works.
So Tokyo itself is a collection of twenty three smaller cities.
They are called wards, and each of those has its

(19:12):
own independent administration. This also makes it complex when you
start talking about mega cities, because you're off often talking
about lots of different political entities, all working within uh
kind of vaguely defined areas. Like you know, there are
actual borders that if you look on a map you
can see them, but when you are a person just

(19:34):
moving through that environment, you may not see that distinction. Also,
the like material necessities of life don't necessarily obey the
administrative borders that you've put up. Because so you've created
a mega city and you just say, oh, we'll just
divide it up like a pie into a bunch of
smaller things that are easier to manage, you still have
to get all the resources that a city this size

(19:56):
needs to the area, and you still have to find
a way to provide all of the overlapping services a
city of this size needs within the area, right, And
you can't just put water pipes for for one ward
of a city in that ward and have them not
connect to any of the other water pipes in the area,
for example, does the perfect example, because anyone who has

(20:18):
ever seen anything about water rights knows this is incredibly complicated,
and even neighboring towns that are technically within the same
urban environment can have vicious fights over this sort of stuff. Understandably,
because this is a necessity, right Oh yeah, yeah, Well
neighboring states have that argument sometimes, so yeah. And as

(20:39):
these mega cities grow, we're likely going to see more
and more examples of mega cities across state lines start
to merge where you can't see the difference between one
city and the next even as you're going from one
state to the next, And that gets complicated. Man, I
bet it's no fun to be a mega city that's
literally down river of another mega city. Probably not great.

(21:02):
So uh to to kind of sum up with Tokyo,
one of the things I wanted to point out is
that some of the wards, you know, keeping in mind
that that number, that population density number I gave earlier,
the six thousand, thirty eight people per square kilometer that
was an average across Tokyo. Obviously there's some words that
have a much higher density and some that have lower.
One of the highest is uh Setagaya, which in two

(21:26):
thousand seven, uh there was a census that listed at
having a density of fourteen thousand, seven or twenty eight
people per square kilometer. So if we convert that to
square miles, that's thirty eight thousand people in a square mile.
So twice more than twice what it is throughout the
rest of Tokyo. Yeah, if you were to you know
the average, it's more than twice what the average is. Now.

(21:46):
The other four cities that are in that top five,
I don't I'm not going to break them all down,
but I'll tell you know what they are and what
their populations are. You have Jakarta, Indonesia, which has twenty
six million people, Seul, South Korea two million, five d
forty seven thousand, Delhi, India, which is two million, two
forty two thousand, and Shanghai, China twenty million, eight hundred

(22:08):
sixty thousand. New York City, which is in fact the
largest city I have ever visited, ranks at number eight,
So it is is a little bit further down on
the list. It has twenty million, uh four hundred sixty
four thousand people living in the city and surrounding metropolitan
area Los Angeles, which I've also been to, number seventeen. UM.

(22:28):
But yeah, you know, London doesn't even count in mega
cities because of defining what is an actual city. UM, London,
in fact is is a particularly interesting one. If you
look at the city of London, you want to be
super official and really pedantic and say just the city
of London. The city of London is tiny. It is

(22:49):
about one point one two square miles in area. It's
basically inside big ben kind of uh, kind of. I
have walked through like from one edge side to the other,
the city of London. It is not a big deal,
but it's it is the core of the city. This
is what what had been establishes the historical city of London,

(23:10):
and then everything else grew up around it, but it didn't.
That was what had been established as the city. So
within that that very strict city limit, how many people
fewer than twelve thousand, eleven thousand, seven hundred. So definitely
not a mega city, right, I mean you didn't. They
just really dropped the ball on that. But when we're
talking about Greater London, yeah, you're looking at Greater London.

(23:31):
That is around seven million, two thousand and thirty six
people from a two thousand one census. So obviously that
has changed since then. And if you look at the
London metropolitan area again, depending on where you draw the line,
where do you say, all right, well this is now
outside the metropolitan area. It's between twelve and eighteen million.

(23:51):
That's a big gap, right, that's a big difference on
the low end in the high end. So clearly it
gets complicated saying all right, this still counts as part
of the mega city versus this is now not part
of the mega city. This is this is either too
far out or separated by too many you know, miles
of uh only partially developed area or whatever however you

(24:14):
want to you know designated. Um. So, yeah, if you
were to, if you were to look at the London
Metropolitan Area and consider that as a whole, it would
fit under mega city. But no one on any of
the lists I looked at does that. They all look
at more of the greater London area. Uh and uh. Yeah,
this this is a big deal because, like we were saying,

(24:37):
you know, when you have different areas of the same
urban environment under the direction of different political entities, whether
it's a city government, of town council, whatever it may be,
it makes the whole integration really complicated, especially when it
comes to things like infrastructure and and this is affecting

(24:58):
more and more people. It's officially over half of the
world's population is affected by this kind of urbanization. Yeah,
you can really think about this is that we're living
in a period of transition, that we're actually fundamentally changing
the way humanity occupies space, and it's happening very quickly
from a historical time scale. Sure. Yeah, And in fact,

(25:20):
it's happening faster than what policy can keep up with.
And uh, you know, not that that's surprising. That happens
all the time. We talk about that all the time
on this show, where technology or other advances science, that
kind of stuff can can quickly outpace legislation for example.
So I would imagine that this mega city trend is

(25:44):
going to not only continue, but it's going to continue
to be problematic. Oh absolutely, because you know, some of
the cities that we've been talking about, like like New York,
have had really in the scheme of the universe, I
suppose a short time, but but in the scheme of
a city along time to kind of develop infrastructure and grow.
But but some of those established cities are are absolutely

(26:07):
not the fastest growers right now. Sure. Didn't you say
in nineteen fifty New York was the biggest metropolis on
the planet. Yeah, I mean it was. It went from
number one to today it's like number eight. So yeah,
it's and the ones that have UM surpassed it, they're
all in uh In essentially in Asia. That's where the
top seven are uh In fact, number seven UM is Karachi, Pakistan.

(26:31):
And it grew by eighty percent over a decade, I mean,
an eight percent growth in ten years. Can you imagine
imagine that you moved to Atlanta and within ten years
I moved to Atlanta about ten years ago, imagined the
population that grown by you'd be moving away from Atlanta. Well,

(26:52):
I mean when you think about that, that's not even
that seems more than just a city growing. That's essentially
like a new city has been creative. In fact, it's
great that you say that, because there's another example. The
Chinese mega city of Shenzhen has twelve million people in
it now. In nineteen seventy nine, it had thirty thousand
people thirty nine today. Yeah, so even more than than Karachi. Yeah,

(27:19):
and it grew so fast and changed so much that
it is often referred to as a city without history
because it didn't have a chance to establish any It
was just when you think of you know, we talked
about the singularity, how that's going to be an era
of constant change where it is difficult to have a
meaningful conversation about the now this is it, this is

(27:42):
this is the it in city form. Yeah, and and
it's uh, it's problematic because a lot of these very
fast growing areas are also some of the poorest, yes,
in the in the you know, most struggling developing parts
of the world. Yes, and and we'll we'll talk more
about that in a little bit and the host of
issues that come with that, and also some of the

(28:03):
reasons why that is happening and their understandable reasons. But
that doesn't make it any less problematic. So uh, some
of the mega cities that you know, like like New
York City, Tokyo, some of them, their growth rates have
slowed over time, Like they're still growing. It's not like
they're getting smaller or or maintaining, but that percent that

(28:24):
growth rates started to drop, whereas they're ones in other
parts of the country. Are parts of the world that
country that are increasing, like Asia and Africa in particular,
So uh, we will likely see that those those impoverished
places are going to continue to have growth as people

(28:45):
try to move to cities in an effort to chase opportunity. Yeah,
this is a thing that I think can be easily misunderstood.
One of the things that I've read about mega cities
is that people often look at large urban areas and say, oh,
we see a lot of poverty here, and then they
interpret that as being that the large urban area is
the cause of a lot of poverty. But that might

(29:07):
not necessarily be the case. Another way of looking at
it would be that the large urban areas where people
come seeking economic opportunity, right, And so it could be
seen as drawing people from poverty who are trying to
find a way to escape it, right. And And in fact,
the two main contributors to mega city growth in these

(29:31):
developing nations tend to be migration from rural areas or
smaller cities into larger ones with the hope that those
larger cities do have this opportunity. And also high birth rates.
Those would be the two things together we're seeing in
more developed nations, especially places like Japan, we're seeing not
just a decrease in birthrates, but to a point where

(29:53):
we're seeing negative growth a decrease in population. Right, So, uh,
that those are both factors. But like you were saying,
It's exactly that case where one of the stories I
was reading was about how in Nigeria you would have
people who would live in uh in a city go

(30:13):
once a year to go back to where they came from,
and everyone had a story to tell to make it
sound like they're doing well, which would perpetuate this idea
that the city was a place of opportunity. Even if
the person wasn't doing well in the city, they didn't
want to come back to their home and say they
weren't doing well, and that perpetuated this idea of I

(30:35):
can escape poverty, I can make something of myself, I
can be a success by moving to the city. And honestly,
in a lot of cases, we're talking about cities that
just get so flooded by people there's just no way
to to to deal with that. There's not enough opportunity
in that time span. Like perhaps if it were over

(30:57):
a longer time frame, it would be more manageable, but
in a compressed time frame and in a manner of
a couple of decades, that's just not realistic, right, So
you can think of this as a lot of people
who travel to cities seeking economic opportunity. Really the reality
is they end up sort of waiting in line for
economic opportunity in cities. All of these, all these musings

(31:21):
and predictions that we're making about the ways that these
populations might change and how people's lives might change because
of them, raise a few questions about about what is
going to happen in the cities. Cities and how they
are going to adapt this kind of stuff. There's another
question that comes up when we're considering the role of

(31:42):
huge cities in the future, and and this question is
sort of related to Atlanta. So when I think about
the state of Georgia that Atlanta is in, yes, it's
kind of like you have Atlanta and and you've got
the rest of the states. So it's like a little
island inside of a larger like ocean. Yeah, and if

(32:05):
Atlanta keeps growing, it's going to be kind of strange
to think about it. So imagine a scenario where I
don't know, in the future, the population of the Atlanta
metro area is three times the population of the rest
of Georgia. Okay, in that case, what happens to the

(32:29):
balance of power between the city of Atlanta and the
state of Georgia. That is technically a part of and
subject to. And you can extend that question basically to
to any kind of like power dynamic between cities and
states or cities and countries. What happens when a city

(32:49):
becomes so big and so powerful, and it's economic negotiating
power is so large, and its population is so large
that it might be seeved as a threat to the
authority of the jurisdiction in which it technically resides. Sure,
and this isn't a new question. Even one analogy might
be like city states in ancient Greece, where so you

(33:12):
could have Athens or something, and that's not really like
there is a country of Athens. It's a city state.
It's a city, yet it has enough power to exert
a sphere of influence and project its power to the
area around it. That's madness, No way, that's sparta. Well
I do wonder, I mean, could we see a return

(33:32):
to this kind of model? Well, modernly, I mean we
kind of already are in some cities if you take
New York City as an example, as Swedish PhD candidate
Kristan young Fist did in her doctoral thesis for Uppsala
University in teen and I really hope I pronounced those
things correctly. Nice Swedish listeners. I tell me, if I

(33:54):
was wrong, you're way better at it than I would
have been. I would have probably end up saying something
like Kirsten Lungfish and that we've just been terrible. You know,
I do love that name. Young. It's okay, it's all
great that I said it wrong, like nineteen times before
I got that one right at any rates. The thesis

(34:14):
is called the Global City two point oh an international
political actor beyond gnomism, economism, question mark well but but
in it she she argued that the powers wielded by
such densely populated, strong economy cities like New York have

(34:35):
have gone global. Their powers have gone global, that they
make policies that affect climate change and pandemics and transnational
crime and global poverty and terrorism. And she was saying
that in New York City in particular, following nine eleven,
that the local government there has developed a security force
that's larger than that of many countries, complete with ground

(34:58):
to air defense systems and intelligence force with permanent staff
in Asia and the Middle East, in Europe, And okay,
if that just plain old freaksy out. Then here's a
gentler example, um cities adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, which
is a U N emission reduction plan that was written
up way back in young Vist says Toronto was the

(35:20):
first place in the world to adopt these emission reduction
targets while lots of national governments were still trapped in debate.
So she she says that lots of cities have been
able to pass better laws of this sort. It implies
that modern cities, being more nimble and having more specialized interests,

(35:41):
are capable of making and implementing far reaching decisions a
lot faster than larger governmental bodies. And this is interesting
to me specifically because we've been pointing out the complications
that come into the fact that you know, when we
say city, we may be talking about a collection of
different governments. And in some cases it may just be

(36:02):
that the one that is at the core of the
city makes a decision and that's going to cascade outward
from there. In other cases, it may be a collaboration
between the various kinds of bodies of political officials to
bring something like this to fruition. Yeah, another thing that

(36:22):
seems interesting is a possibility to me, is what about
the idea of merging mega cities that transcend larger borders,
like like between two different states in the United States
or two countries. And yeah, so imagine one example might
be the I eighty five corridor. You know what if

(36:43):
Atlanta eventually merges with the major cities of North Carolina
and it really just kind of becomes continuous between them.
I mean, it's a long time until something like that
could happen, but I just needed to imagine in like
science fiction, and yeah, that or or you could imagine
the bridging of say Atlanta and Chattanooga across the border

(37:03):
from Georgia and Tennessee what happens then? Yeah, And then
I mean we already have examples of that, like Baltimore
and d C. You know, we already have these examples where, uh,
you have this this imaginary dotted line that only exists
on paper and uh, but not in reality. And then
you know, how do you resolve those things things that

(37:23):
where if one municipality were to make a decision, it
would it would obviously affect the other one. So at
what point do you say, listen, we have to come
together and have this discussion, because now we're no longer
talking about something that's just going to affect us, It's
going to affect you as well, So you should have
a stake in this decision. Yeah, yeah, or even even

(37:46):
across country borders. You know what if Toronto and Detroit
like just filled in that little gap. These are really
interesting questions and it and it is not just you know,
a hypothetical or thought experiment, nothing like that. I mean,
it's it's becoming reality and the idea of these really
powerful cities kind of not necessarily throwing their weight around.
I mean, the example you gave about Atlanta and Georgia

(38:09):
is a great one. The if you look at the
political leanings of the state of Georgia, you'll see that
Atlanta tends to go one way, in the State of
Georgia tends to go another way. So right now, the
the rural population of Georgia is larger than the city
of Atlanta. So ultimately, the people who live in Atlanta

(38:30):
can sometimes feel in state or national elections like they
aren't truly being represented. If that were to change, if
the city of Atlanta's population were to exceed that of Georgia,
of the rural parts of the state, we might see
that flip, and then we would have a situation where
people in the rural parts of the state would feel
like the big city folks are the ones making all

(38:54):
the decisions. Yeah, and I'm sure it's already like that
in a lot of states, right where you've got big
enough cities where you know, there are lots of rural
parts of the state of New York, right, but New
York cities, New York City, and it's gonna outweigh almost
any kind of concern that rural New York has, at least. Yeah.
I mean when people say New York, I think almost

(39:14):
nine times out of a hundred in casual conversation, if
you're not in the state of New York, can you
say the words new York you you, Yeah, you're referring
to New York City, which ironically might beat New Jersey.
So uh. At any rate, this was really kind of
an interesting conversation. We've got so much more to say,
and we knew going into this that we were going

(39:35):
to divide this up into two episodes, and in our
second episode we're going to explore more of the issues
that mega cities have. Also, we're gonna look at some
science fiction scenarios, one in particular, and discuss what would
it take for it to become possible or is it
even possible? So you can tune into our next episode

(39:56):
for that. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes
of Forward Thing, maybe there's a topic that you've just
been dying to have us tackle. You gotta let us
know about it. Send us an email the addresses FW
thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us
a line on Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus. And Twitter
and Google Plus we are f w Thinking. Just search
FW Thinking and Facebook search bar. We will pop right up.

(40:18):
You can leave us a message there and we will
talk to you again about negatidies really soon. For more
on this topic in the future of technology, I'll visit
forward Thinking dot com. H brought to you by Toyota.

(40:44):
Let's go Places,