It will change a little. After being inundated in recent weeks with astronomical figures one after the other, billions of euros or dollars presented as indispensable remedies to the financial crisis, let’s quote a number that finally concerns humans: in 2008, more than half of the men and women living on the planet reside in cities. In its fourth biennial report dated October 23, 2008, the UN-Habitat Programme reviews the developments in urbanization phenomena, from mega-cities with more than twenty million inhabitants to the striking contrasts that still exist between industrialized countries and developing ones: stagnation of demographic growth, or even a decrease in urban population for the former, and a strong increase in this growth with an absorption of five million “new urbanites” every month for the latter. And it concludes, in a phrase that André Malraux would not have disdained, that the “21st century will be that of cities.”
An “inevitable and irreversible urbanization,” estimates Anna Tibaijuka, the Executive Director of the program in an interview given to the daily newspaper “Le Monde.” However, this statement should not be misleading when she specifies: “economic development pushes the population towards cities in search of a better life that many will not find.” Indeed, looking more closely, this report along with other recent international publications gives the curious feeling of a crossover, certainly more qualitative than quantitative in nature, between North-South populations, one of these large cycles all the more delicate to grasp as the effects of the economic crisis and climate changes are not always measurable in terms of immediacy: the city in which some believe they play for their survival, others aspire to leave.
If, in search of an improvement in their standard of living and a “natural increase,” two-thirds of the urban population in 2050—5.3 billion individuals according to the indications provided by this report—will live in Asia and a quarter in Africa, the inhabitants of developed countries seem to have drawn the consequences from the vicissitudes of urban life. To the point of moving in the opposite direction: “more than half of the cities do not exceed 1% demographic growth, and 40% of them are losing population.” To shed light on this phenomenon, the OECD, which includes thirty modern and industrialized countries, acknowledges in its report from October 21st last year, a significant increase over the last twenty years in poverty and widening inequalities. Human factors, typical of an urban environment, constitute the primary explanations: an increase in the number of people living alone, the development of precarious work—75% of jobs created in Europe in 2007 fall into this category—and faster salary increases for those already at the top of the social ladder. Meanwhile, if the International Organization for Migration announces a doubling by 2050 of the number of international migrants, potentially reaching 200 million, it simultaneously notes over the past year the return to their country of origin of 200,000 Mexican migrant workers established in the United States due to early anticipations of the American recession. As noted by the UN-Habitat report, there are major cities in the United States where “levels of inequality are comparable to those in Abidjan, Nairobi, or Buenos Aires.”
So many indicators pose a simple question for the next forty years: will the “City,” the object of all desires, be the hoped-for antidote to all the ills of modernity? Might it ultimately be just an illusion, and akin to that ghost Spanish town on the outskirts of Madrid, supposed to accommodate 34,000 inhabitants but, a victim of the housing bubble, only counting 382, a sort of “Valdeluz” on a planetary scale?
