Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Gigalopolises: Urban Land Area May Triple by 2030

More than half of the world's expected nine billion people will live in giant urban expanses by 2030 as cities and their hinterlands occupy an additional 1.2 million square kilometers, thereby tripling in size. That's an additional 1.35 billion people living in cities, suggesting that urban areas that currently occupy roughly 3 percent of the planet's surface will continue to expand. By comparison, urban areas increased by just 58,000 square kilometers between 1970 and 2000. In new work published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, urban environment researcher Karen Seto of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and her colleagues first divided the global land area into discrete parcels and, using predicted gross domestic product growth, population growth and urban land area cover in 2000, they projected which parcels had a high or low probability of succumbing to citification over the next few decades. Using that model, 1.2 million square kilometers of land have probabilities higher than 75 percent of becoming citified and nearly six million square kilometers have some probability of going urban. "More than half of the urban land cover on the planet by 2030 has yet to be built," Seto explains. "The expansion of urban areas will have a direct impact on biodiversity hot spots."...more

Laying the groundwork for a planner's paradise.

According to Seto, we evil humans "encroach", urban expansion is "haphazard" and we "need to be more deliberate as a society" in what we want urban places to become.  Seto says we have a "window of opportunity"  and those opportunities should be "consciously and systematically seized."

All that shouts out for one thing:  Government Control.

Government plans may satisfy the control freaks and allow academia to run their little experiments, but they rarely, if ever, obtain the goals which were the rationale for the plans in the first place.

See Randal O'Toole's Why Government Planning Always Fails and his book The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future .

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