Urbanization

Here’s a short video that presents the populations of the world’s largest cities as they’ve changed over the past 500 years.

Doesn’t it make you think about the human drama associated with all those changing numbers? As the population of London exploded and receded, followed by New York as the fledgling United States grew in the generations that immediately followed, it’s hard not to think of all those young people, some deeply in love, carrying with them their unique mixtures of hope, worry and desperation, as they made their way to these sites of economic boom.

Now we have a huge trend towards greater urbanization, driven by job opportunities that are increasingly specialized, and unrelated to farming, which has largely been addressed with agribusiness and 21st Century technology.  Of course, this brings with it its own set of issues: public health, urban planning, smart-grid, public transportation, and all the rest. Also, high population densities are less conducive to distributed energy generation, as rooftop area per capita continues to shrink.

Fun fact: 22% of all gasoline combusted in cities is used by people looking for parking spaces.  Thus, here’s just one new app: parking meters that tell smart phone users when they’re unoccupied.

Look for thousands of good ideas like this one as the years go by.