cities are the future

london
I have been reading edward glaeser's triumph of the city, and suddenly, i see essays on the city everywhere. especially in this website i found recently, thebrowser.com 


glaeser's book is the best of the lot, i think. 
there he says cities will have to reinvent themselves from what in the past was successful but is not useful anymore. They started off as hubs of communication or trade etc, but nowadays with swift modes of transport, and the internet, it is not so crucial now. 


I discovered that a lot of his successful cities seem to have reinvented themselves as hubs of financial centres... selling and buying financial instruments. Certainly new york and london seem to have done that.


london position may help it thrive as a financial centre, as it strides between the two time zones of new york and america and china and far east. as well as being in the same time zone as europe. So it gets to be the conduit between all of them. 


What i find interesting is glaeser's idea that in future, it is greener to live in cities than in the countryside. because of car use, and much more to heat single large dwellings than the many tiny flats that city dwellers have to live in. 


in my experience also, cities are warmer than the countryside. and public transport is so good that there is no need to drive. so i tend to agree with him. but it means that the city of the future will have many tall buildings, and people will live vertically. 


i think that will happen. look at that v expensive high rise in knightsbridge. 1 hyde park. flats there costs more than £100 million. it used to be the price one pays for a single large house in its large grounds but the rich are willing to pay that much money for a flat. That more than anything tells me that high rise living is the future in cities. no more will it be associated with the poor. 


they are literally gated communities in the urban environment. 
Wait a bit, all of you who live in new york, hongkong, singapore, who are now shouting out, high rise flats have been around for ages. but i will remind u that high rise in cities with limited land is one thing, but in a place like london where there is lots of land to spread out, it shows the start of a trend. 
You might caution that high rise by itself may not be enough, just look at dubai where there are so many high rise there is a glut. dubai thinks that if u build it, the world will come. but without a free country the world wont come. restrictions in a islamic country with dress, alcohol and sexual behaviour draconian laws will not attract the world. 


Rather interesting to see the future happening in london and we are seeing the beginning of it now. all the world will follow london i have no doubt. it will be a good thing if successful cities rejuvenate their centres, and attract people to live in the city centre instead. 


in the past we have new york, famous for its skyscrappers but no one else have followed to the same extent. people realise new york has limited land, being an island and no one emulated it by building upwards as it has done. 
Even then, new york is restricting any more high buildings because of the success of jane jacobs in fighting against anymore high rises being built, who believed that human communities thrive in low rise buildings like the greenwich village area. glaeser says she is wrong, because we can see in hongkong, which is very built up, u still get very vibrant street life. 


In the past we see everywhere the trend of the cities of the world, to spread out,not up, if there is land. 


but i think glaeser may be right in saying the rich will make cities build up in future. this is because more of us will want to flock to the city as the jobs are there.  


I like london because it is not built up and i can see blue sky above me, practically everywhere in london. even the most built up areas in the city of london is not overshadowed by tall buildings. I think happiness is being able to see blue sky...but if building up is the future, will i live to see london like new york? i will have to replace my blue sky with something else. 


Perhaps air quality will be so bad that we will all be glad to live in a tall building with its controlled air. 
Even london has bad air quality. that is something that surprised me because we dont have factories here sprouting noxious fumes and yet it seems our nitrate particulates is high. It seems it is all from vehicle traffic. 
I look at the blue sky outside, and the clear air, and i cannot believe that our air over london is polluted. something is skewed. i breathe air here and i think it is not polluted. yet we have these studies saying we have high air pollutants... who is right?? my own observation, or some boffin saying i am wrong??
(It seems both of us is right. it is only high pollution in certain busy roads , like the marylebone road. and even then it only just tips over the arbitrary limit imposed by the EU. )
Added. 9.4.12 read here 
For most of the month high pressure systems caused air to slowly re-circulate over the UK and near continent. Without rain to wash it out, particle air pollution gradually built up as the air slowly passed over cities and industrial areas, causing all the UK to experience particle pollution problems.


why these nitrate particulates are bad i have no idea but it seems it is. it has something to do with asthma sufferers, because from what i can gather, they say it caused asthmatics to die. perhaps they would have died anyway, and nothing to do with the particulates.  and we are barking up the wrong tree. it wont be the first time we have got it wrong. 


btw, what about the ozone level, there was a scare about that in the past,  but we never hear of it anymore. what happen to that one. i wonder!
Added. 2.4.12 it seems it is an artificial limit cooked up by the EU, and in some roads in london it just tip into the limit . and so to avoid paying the fine, the mayor has some kind of water spray to bind these particulates and bring them down to earth. well, that is what will happen when u start imposing an arbitrary target. people will try to get round it. i dont know what fining will serve if it impoverish the community.london will be fined 300million Euros.  it might be better to pay the community for low readings, rather than penalise them for high. but of course that would be v expensive and lead to expenditure instead of a revenue generating fine. 
it seems those living near roads with high traffic volumes,( 10,000 vehicles a day) have a increased chance of asthma. i would have thought the solution is to reduce the vehicle traffic along those roads and so bring in congestion charges or timed charges according to peak times will answer the pollution. but that is too simple a solution, i suppose. 
along the vauxhall bridge road, near me, it is the only route across london from north to south that is not subjected to the congestion charge so it gets really busy, and what with victoria undergoing a big renovation, the roads around there are being dugged up and there is a huge traffic jam there. i bet u the pollution must be high. 


added. 30.3.12 here is a comparison of how much tube fares  cost  for the various zones for 2012.


zones 1-2 £1168 a year
zones 1-3 £1368 a year
zones 1-4 £ 1672 a year
zones 1-5 £1992 a year. 
and see this link for the projected cost to  2016
projected costs may not occur, because the tube costs rises with inflation, and we dont really know what inflation will be over those years. 
seems to me it is better to live near the centre or where u work, and walk to work or cycle there, or get a motorbike if u live far away. 


Added. 6.4.12 this article about detroit, shows that some cities will fail. detroit's problem is debt, mortgage foreclosures, so that people who were forced out of their homes left the city entirely and its population decreased to 700,000 now. 
other factors are due to its reliance on one employer, the car industry. It is now taken over by the state.
i see the trend will be that successfull cities get bigger and bigger so that they merge to produce megacities and people get concentrated in these megacities.