By Edwin Heathcote - FT
Published: June 20 2011 09:13 | Last updated: June 20 2011 09:13
The world is changing. The torrent of grainy films beaming in from mobile phones showing unrest and protest in the public spaces at the centres of some the world’s biggest and fastest-growing cities is a stark reminder of the attraction of the city not just for refugees from impoverished villages, but as a concentration of all the most severe crises facing populations. Pictures from Tahrir Square in Cairo, one of the world’s biggest megacities, foreshadowed the collapse of a seemingly solid Egyptian regime. Film of riots in Athens, the west’s oldest metropolis, depicts another furious population in revolt, as do the fuzzy pictures from impoverished Yemen’s Sana’a, or those from wealthy Manama in Bahrain or the fast-growing industrial cities of China.
Cities are bursting at the seams, and the exponential growth due to immigration has set previously simmering tensions to boiling. But what is the shape of the new demographics – and the developing dynamic between the new city and a depopulated countryside?
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