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Page added on December 5, 2012
Chinese Urbanization in Context
Commenter Don Johnson raised the question of how the speed of Chinese urbanization compared to other countries. Above are some relevant comparisons – with the US, Japan, and South Korea. Data are from the UN and the US Census Bureau.
China is urbanizing much faster than the US did, and probably Japan too, but not as fast as Korea. Of course, these are relative comparisons. The absolute scale of China’s urbanization is completely unprecedented.
The Korean example doesn’t seem to provide much support for my speculation that very fast urbanization processes end earlier due to running out of young people. Instead, all three precedents seem to have slowed down sharply around the 75% point. In the US case, this was reached in the 1960s, and we are still only 82% urban. Some of us just like living in the country.
China will reach that 75% point in about 2025 in my projection, but not until 2040 according to the UN which has them slowing down more smoothly starting soon:
11 Comments on "Chinese Urbanization in Context"
ken nohe on Wed, 5th Dec 2012 10:36 pm
Urbanization is an aggregate number which says very little. It is just what it is based on what local circumstances are. The US is the average of Los Angeles and Wyoming. Korea has been urbanized drastically because there is so little land available. In China there is another phenomenon at work: Huge chucks of the countryside becoming urban by the shear increase of population all along the Eastern coastline.
Then there is the last ultimate question: What is “urban” and how do you define it? Is it just a density level or a lifestyle? Exurbs vs Rural communities. Eventually we can all be defined as “urban”.
BillT on Thu, 6th Dec 2012 1:21 am
Then there is the Philippines where millions come in from the suburbs every day to their jobs in the city. Makati has about 500,000 permanent residents, but swells to about 2 million during the day. (Yes, it is a crazy rush hour here if you have to do that…lol)
The question is: How long can any country maintain their cities when oil gets too expensive and scarce to move all of the goods in and the trash out everyday? Answer: Not too much longer.
ken nohe on Thu, 6th Dec 2012 2:32 am
Bill, there is one solution that will become obvious for many people: Work from home! More and more jobs can be done from home or almost anywhere provided you have access to a computer and a connection. This is my case, most days whenever I do not expressly need to meet a client. I would readily work from the beach but it’s actually more complicated than it seems without even mentioning the lack of focus 🙂
GregT on Thu, 6th Dec 2012 5:07 am
Ken,
If we all worked from home, we would have no computers, no connections and no food. We can only live off of the backs of other’s labour for so long before the system becomes overburdened with debt. Kind of like what is happening all over the world as we speak.
The real economy is based on production of goods or GDP.
BillT on Thu, 6th Dec 2012 7:39 am
Ah yes Ken, work from home for whom? You are thinking that today’s internet is forever? hahahahaha… I doubt it will even be for another 10-15 years, for more reasons than I have space to list here.
And how does all of the things in the city happen on-line from home?
Answer: IT DOESN’T!
Enjoy your current situation, because it ain’t permanent either. It is a blip in history soon to be past-tense.
The problem with younger (under 50) people today is they cannot imagine their world being anything much different than it currently is. They only expect it to get better. I don’t.
I was born at the end of a World War and the Depression. I know where we are going and it is not an internet-on-the-beach-working-from-home world. It is a physically-working-for-the-local-whatever and worrying if the train with the next load of food from Canada gets there before you starve. I’m being dramatic? Maybe … but I think I am understating the years to come in the Western countries especially. Wait and see.
ken nohe on Thu, 6th Dec 2012 2:01 pm
Now I feel like the guy who cracked a joke at the funeral. Worse: A fart during silent prayer at mass! How dare I voice a glimmer of optimism on the highway to hell? How indeed?
OK, let me try to articulate half the beginning of an answer.
We are doomed! Sure enough. All the civilizations who preceded ours have turned to dust in the deserts or melted back to green in the forests. Will ours be different? Possible but unlikely; the odds are not in our favor. Far worse; individually we are even more doomed! The dead rate of humans is very, very close to 100%, if you exclude the few guys who ascended into the sky… and Kurzweil’s promises to be able to download your mind whole into a computer on February 30th 2046. (Have a look, it’s fun: http://www.kurzweilai.net.)
But let’s agree that life is what happens between birth and death. That’s an easy one to start with! It may well be that an asteroid with our name on it will strike on Friday 21st. Some Aztec priest may have seen it in the still palpitating hart of a not yet quite dead prisoner. But let’s hypothesize the asteroid is 10 seconds late and misses the earth. Well, then peak oil in a year. But let’s suppose we consume a little less gas, (that will be easy at double the current price,) and somehow we survive. A little less flying, hybrid cars consuming half the average of today’s gas guzzlers… Now the derivative bubble will get us in two years. More inflation, massive bank restructuring and bingo, we survive that too. Now it’s the sea’s turn. It was going up at the not so quite rash speed of 1.7mm a year in 2012 and suddenly it’s 5mm. We do need to run to the hills but somehow the snails make it too.
So we are now in 2020 and your bet for the future “me” is no job, no computer, no communication. I beg to disagree. First my job: I have survived the last 10 years by being extremely flexible, leaning completely new technologies and tricks to survive. My income was divided by two then went twice all the way to zero, for almost a year in 2009 and again 6 months in 2011 after the tsunami. I survived both and bounced nicely each time although it was quite painful while it lasted. I am confident I can do it again. Now my computer. I have 2 brand new ones and my oldest is 17 years old and still working. (It is of course obsolete.) So I expect at least one to be working in 2020 provided I haven’t been able to buy a new one in between in spite of the crashing prices. And because they are all laptops, I should be able to secure a small (solar?) generator to power it. Now communications. Well, here I am even more confident. 10 years ago there was no Wi-fi. In 10 years, rfids will have advanced so much that “every” machine will talk to every other piece of plastic for 1/10 of a cent! (Frightening but that’s another story!) I will then be able to talk to you by just jumping from hardware to hardware. Based on all this, I can say with some confidence that you are far too pessimistic.
Yes, there are risks ahead and it would be wise to address them. But social collapse does not start at the center of society. In other words, although I am not saying it will never happen, the US and other advanced countries will not look like Somalia any time soon. We still have time and there are lives to be lived in-between. Cheer up 🙂 As the Monty Pythons at the end of The Life of Brian: “Always look at the bright side of life!” (Watch it on YouTube if you haven’t yet.)
Bor on Thu, 6th Dec 2012 2:52 pm
Decline of the West will not look like a catastrophic event. It will be a process of slow dying. One after the other the system components will get some what broken, then get disabled and finally disappear. One (and probably bad) example may be a gas station with full-service. Just thirty plus year ego self-service was an exception. Today full-service is a rarity, The gas stations are disappearing. Some of them cannot survive anymore – we drive different cars and we drive differently. The gas price will go up and up and up again. It is inevitable. And then there will be fewer gas stations. And finally no gas station as we know them. People will start stilling gas. The system will get broken and will disappear eventually.
Internet is wonderfully available for everybody because it is well supported by advertisement. It is in ‘full-service’ mode. But we will pay for its service when the advertisement river will get dry. The result – few users, few e-mails and, eventually…
the end of Internet.
One can say the same thing about any system components. If resources are depleted then there is no usage of resources..
GregT on Thu, 6th Dec 2012 5:05 pm
I would argue that, just as our population has grown exponentially, the systems that support that growth have declined, and are declining exponentially.
It is not hard to find evidence of this. All one needs to do is look at a graph showing the decline over time, of any single non renewable resource that we exploit, or every individual ecosystem. They all exhibit the same characteristics.
Over time everything is speeding up. Every day more components of the system will become broken than the day before, until we reach the tipping point where the components can no longer support the system as a whole.
When that point is reached the system does not slowly peter out, it collapses, and we are much closer to that point than most people realize.
BillT on Fri, 7th Dec 2012 1:30 am
Ken thinks he will be the exception to the collapse. Denial in huge lumps. Reset ken and think about the whole system, not just the very tiny part you have been attached to. Do you know a life skill that doesn’t require a computer? I hope so because you will need it before you die.
ken nohe on Fri, 7th Dec 2012 11:52 am
My point is not to say that you are wrong, just that you are far too pessimistic. It probably comes from the fact that you mostly read articles on the net that confirm your bias. I am pretty sure that would we discuss these subjects point by point, we would probably agree on most of them. Where I differ is that I also try to take other more positive factors into consideration.
Under stress humans are unbelievably creative. We can consume less, earn less and it is not the end of the world. That is exactly what will happen. Our incomes will shrink, what we took for granted will disappear, our life will change, most probably drastically. But we will find new ways to enjoy ourselves and live productive lives.
And technology will occupy a larger part of our lives. Slowly computers will become ubiquitous, think Google glasses, then will merge will us, augmented reality. Machines will become intelligent and microscopic self assembled devices. Factories will disappear, you will just download a blueprint and produce whatever you need in your home. Don’t believe it? It’s all there already. Our lives will again and soon change completely, and probably not to go back to the caves. But not everybody benefit; that too is more and more obvious. Can our social structures support the strain? We will see. But I am still optimistic… for now.
deed on Wed, 10th Jul 2019 5:52 am
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