The Sigbhu Syndrome

I just saw a TED talk by Paul Romer, who spoke about what he called ‘charter cities’. His entire talk had this vague neo-con subtext, and it was all about ‘us’ bringing things to ‘them’. He has many good points, but I think most of them will not see the light of reality because of the evil capitalist world we live in.

But he did make several interesting points about cities. Here’s a brief, transformed summary :

In complex systems like nations, cities are nuclei of rapid change. And villages and de-centralised habitations have a lot of inertia, and are extremely resistant to change. He advocates moving everyone from the villages to the new cities, to radically transform them into capitalist consumerist pigs. (This is what economists call progress and growth)

But what I’m worried about is that no one seems to see the flip side : when will we start thinking of moving people back to the villages, once we’ve radically transformed them? We can’t — and we shouldn’t — sustain a pace of rapid transformation and change all the time. That said, the City should be viewed as a transient structure.

Given this, it’s interesting — and disappointing — that the urban organism we live in has a skin of indestructible concrete.