Countryfolk vs Urbanites

As the year draws to an end, the Financial Times has posted a story revealing that Tokyo has been displaced as the world’s largest city by the Indonesian capital of Jakarta…

Alfiyan Elfatah spends four hours each day commuting between Jakarta’s far-flung periphery and his workplace in the heart of the Indonesian capital. The 31-year-old has endured the slog for eight years — but only now is he officially crossing the biggest city in the world. Last month, the UN updated its list of the world’s biggest cities after changing its methodology for assessing huge conurbations. It looked beyond Indonesia’s own 11mn reckoning of Jakarta’s population, sweeping into its calculations a much bigger urban area covering sprawling satellite towns such as Bogor, where Alfiyan lives. As a result, Jakarta is now estimated to have almost 42mn residents…

Alfiyan, who travels to his marketing job at a hotel by motorbike, train and bus, sees little prospect of a halt to the capital’s growth. “Development is uneven. The economy is still centralised here, and we see Jakarta as far more developed,” he said…

This got me thinking. It’s hard to imagine 42 million people in such a concentrated space. That is seven times the population of the island of Ireland living cheek by jowl in the sort of urban megacity that used to be the preserve of speculative science fiction. And with it comes problems we increasingly associate with cities: ever-increasing competition for limited real estate, spiralling housing costs, increasing congestion as infrastructure designed for much smaller populations fails to keep pace with the swelling tide of humanity, pressure on water supplies and higher levels of pollution when compared to the countryside.

It may seem a wonder that the world over urbanisation has been increasing in spite of all those negatives but people are drawn by the opportunities and buzz of city life that the quieter, more sedate countryside cannot match. Though of course country dwellers may prefer that quieter life even if it comes at a cost in terms of available infrastructure or participation in cultural events commuting to Belfast from West Tyrone for the Slugger end of year event took up most of a day for me a few weeks back, whereas for someone living around Belfast it is an evening. Still, on balance (and even risking my life on the treacherous A5 a few times a year) I find I prefer rural life to urban. Neither way of life has everything, so it is up to the individual to evaluate the benefits and trade-offs of each and make their choice.

How the city will evolve in the 21st Century remains uncertain. Remote working could liberate millions of people from the need to live near or commute into cities but those roles also appear to be the most vulnerable to being taken over by AI in the coming decades. How that shakes out may determine if more individuals are able to build lives for themselves out in the sticks, or if the magnetic pull of cities the world over becomes irresistible.