If you wish to understand the future you need to understand the city, for the human future is an overwhelmingly urban future. The city may have always been synonymous with civilization, but the rise of urban humanity has been something that has almost all occurred after the onset of the industrial revolution. In 1800 a mere 3 percent of humanity lived in cities of over one million people. By 2050, 75  percent of humanity will be urbanized. India alone might have 6 cities with a population of over 10 million.    

The trend towards megacities is one into which humanity as we speak is accelerating in a process we do not fully understand let alone control. As the counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen writes in his Out of the Mountains:

 To put it another way, these data show that the world’s cities are about to be swamped by a human tide that will force them to absorb- in just one generation- the same population growth that occurred in all of human history up to 1960. And virtually all of this growth will happen in the world’s poorest areas- a recipe for conflict, for crises in health, education and in governance, and for food water and energy scarcity.  (29)

Kilcullen sees 4 trends including urbanization that he thinks are reshaping human geography all of which can be traced to processes that began in the industrial revolution: the aforementioned urbanization and growth of megacities, population growth, littoralization and connectedness.

In terms of population growth: The world’s population has exploded going from 750 million in 1750 to a projected  9.1 – 9.3 billion by 2050. The rate of population growth is thankfully slowing, but barring some incredible catastrophe, the earth seems destined to gain the equivalent of another China and India all within the space of a generation. Almost all of this growth will occur in poor and underdeveloped countries already stumbling under the pressures of the populations they have.

One aspect of population growth Kilcullen doesn’t really discuss is the aging of the human population. This is normally understood in terms of the failure of advanced societies in Japan, South Korea in Europe to reach replacement levels so that the number of elderly are growing faster than the youth to support them, a phenomenon that is also happening in China as a consequence of their draconian one child policy. Yet, the developing world, simply because of the sheer numbers and increased longevity will face its own elderly crisis as well as tens of millions move into age-related conditions of dependency. As I have said in the past, gaining a “longevity dividend” is not a project for spoiled Westerners alone, but is primarily a development issue.

Another trend Kilcullen explores is littoralization, the concentration of human populations near the sea. A fact that was surprising to a landlubber such as myself, Kilcullen points out that in 2012 80% of human beings lived within 60 miles of the ocean. (30) A number that is increasing as the interiors of the continents are hollowed out of human inhabitants.

Kilcullen doesn’t discuss climate change much but the kinds of population dislocations that might be caused by moderate not to mention severe sea level rise would be catastrophic should certain scenarios for climate change play out. This goes well beyond islands or wealthy enclaves such as Miami, New Orleans or Manhattan. Places such as these and Denmark may have the money to engineer defenses against the rising sea, but what of a poor country such as Bangladesh? There, almost 200 million people might find themselves in flight from the relentless forward movement of the oceans. To where will they flee?

It is not merely the displacement of tens of millions of people, or more, living in low-lying coastal areas. Much of the world’s staple crop of rice is produced in deltas which would be destroyed by the inundation of the salt-water seas.

The last and most optimistic of Kilcullen’s trends is growing connectedness. He quotes the journalist John Pollack:

Cell-phone penetration in the developing world reached 79 percent in 2011. Cisco estimates that by 2015 more people in sub-saharan Africa,  South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East will have Internet access than electricity at home.

What makes this less optimistic is the fact as Pollack continues:

Across much of the world, this new information power sits uncomfortably upon layers of corrupt and inefficient government.  (231)

One might have thought that the communications revolution had made geography irrelevant or “flat” in Thomas Friedman’s famous term. Instead, the world has become“spiky” with the concentration of people, capital, and innovation in cities spread across the globe and interconnected with one another. The need for concentration as a necessary condition for communication is felt by the very rich and the very poor alike, both of whom collect together in cities. Companies running sophisticated trading algorithms have reshaped the very landscape to get closer to the heart of the Internet and gain a speed advantage over competitors so small they can not be perceived by human beings.

Likewise, the very poor flood to the world’s cities, because they can gain access to networks of markets and capital, but more recently, because only there do they have access to electricity that allows them to connect with one another or the larger world, especially in terms of their ethnic diaspora or larger civilizational community, through mobile devices and satellite TV. And there are more of these poor struggling to survive in our 21st century world than we thought, 400 million more of them according to a recent report.

For the urban poor and disenfranchised of the cities what the new connectivity can translate into is what Audrey Kurth Croninn has called the new levee en mass.  The first levee en mass was that of the French Revolution where the population was mobilized for both military and revolutionary action by new short length publications written by revolutionary writers such as Robespierre, Saint-Just or the blood thirsty Marat. In the new levee en mass, crowds capable of overthrowing governments- witness, Tunisia, Egypt and Ukraine can be mobilized by bloggers, amateur videographers, or just a kind of swarm intelligence emerging on the basis of some failure of the ruling classes.

Even quite effective armies, such as ISIS now sweeping in from Syria and taking over swaths of Iraq can be pulled seemingly out of thin air. The mobilizing capacity that was once the possession of the state or long-standing revolutionary groups has, under modern conditions of connectedness, become democratized even if the money behind them can ultimately be traced to states.

The movement of the great mass of human beings into cities portends the movement of war into cities, and this is the underlying subject of Kilcullen’s book, the changing face of war in an urban world. Given that the vast majority of countries in which urbanization is taking place will be incapable of fielding advanced armies the kinds of conflicts likely to be encountered there Kilcullen thinks will be guerilla wars whether pitting one segment of society off against another or drawing in Western armies.

The headless, swarm tactics of guerrilla war, which as the author Lawrence H. Keeley reminded us is in some sense a more evolved, “natural” and ultimately more effective form of warfare than the clashing professional armies of advanced states, its roots stretching back into human prehistory and the ancient practices of both hunting and tribal warfare, are given a potent boost by local communication technologies such as traditional radio communication and mesh networks. The crowd or small military group able to be tied together by an electronic web that turns them into something more like an immune system than a modern centrally directed army.

Attempting to avoid the high casualties so often experienced when advanced armies try to fight guerrilla wars, those capable of doing so are likely to turn to increasingly sophisticated remote and robotic weapons to fight these conflicts for them. Kilcullen is troubled by this development, not the least, because it seems to relocate the risk of war onto the civilian population of whatever country is wielding them, the communities in which remote warriors live or where their weapons themselves designed and built, arguably legitimate targets of a remote enemy a community might not even be aware it is fighting. Perhaps the real key is to try to prevent conflicts that might end with our military engagement in the first place.

Cities likely to experience epidemic crime, civil war or revolutionary upheaval are also those that have in Kilcullen’s terms gone “feral”, meaning the order usually imposed by the urban landscape no longer operates due to failures of governance. Into such a vacuum criminal networks often emerge which exchanges the imposition of some semblance of order for the control of illicit trade. All of these things: civil war, revolution, and international crime represent pull factors for Western military engagement whether in the name of international stability, humanitarian concerns or for more nefarious ends most of which are centered on resource extraction. The question is how can one prevent cities from going feral in the first place, avoiding the deep discontent and social breakdown that leads to civil war, revolution or the rise of criminal cartels all of which might end with the military intervention of advanced countries?

The solution lies in thinking of the city as a type of organism with “inflows” such as water, food, resources, manufactured products and capital and “outflows”, especially waste. There is also the issue of order as a kind of homeostasis. A city such as Beijing or Shanghai with their polluted skies is a sick organism as is the city of Dhaka in Bangladesh with its polluted waters or a city with a sky-high homicide rate such as Guatemala City or Sao Paulo. The beautiful thing about the new technologically driven capacity for mass mobilization is that it forces governments to take notice of the people’s problems or figuratively (and sometimes literally lose their heads). The problem is once things have gone badly enough to inspire mass riots the condition is likely systemic and extremely difficult to solve, and that the kinds of protests the Internet and mobile have inspired, at least so far, have been effective at toppling governments, but unable to either found or serve as governments themselves.

At least one answer to the problems of urban geography that could potentially allow cities to avoid instability is “Big-Data” or so-called “smart cities” where the a city is minutely monitored in real time for problems which then initiate quick responses by city authorities. There are several problems here, the first being the costs of such systems, but that might be the least insurmountable one, the biggest being the sheer data load.

As Kilcullen puts it in the context of military intelligence, but which could just as well be stated as the problem of city administrators, international NGOs and aid agencies.

The capacity to intercept, tag, track and locate specific cell phone and Internet users from a drone already exists, but distinguishing signal from noise in a densely connected, heavily trafficked piece of digital space is a daunting challenge. (238)

Kilcullen’s answer to the incomplete picture provided by the view from above, from big data, is to combine this data with the partial but deep view of the city by its inhabitants on the ground. In its essence a city is the stories and connections of those that live in them. Think of the deep, if necessarily narrow perspective of a major city merchant or even a well connected drug dealer. Add this to the stories of those working in social and medical services, police officers, big employers. socialites etc and one starts to get an idea of the biography of a city. Add to that the big picture of flows and connections and one starts to understand the city for what it is, a complex type of non-biological organism that serves as a stage for human stories.

Kilcullen has multiple examples of where knowledge of the big picture from experts has successfully aligned with grassroots organization to save societies on the brink of destruction an alignment he calls “co-design”. He cites the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace where grassroots organizer Leymah Gbowee leveraged the expertise of Western NGOs to stop the civil war in Liberia. CeaseFire Chicago uses a big-picture model of crime literally based on epidemiology and combines that with community level interventions to stop violent crime before it occurs.

Another group Kilcullen discusses is Crisis Mappers which offers citizens everywhere in the world access to the big picture, what the organization describes as “the largest and most active international community of experts, practitioners, policy makers, technologists, researchers, journalists, scholars, hackers and skilled volunteers engaged at the intersection between humanitarian crises, technology, crowd-sourcing, and crisis mapping.” (253)

On almost all of this I find Kilcullen to be spot on. The problem is that he fails to tackle the really systemic issue which is inequality. What is necessary to save any city, as Kilcullen acknowledges, is a sense of shared community. What I would call a sense of shared past and future. Insofar as the very wealthy in any society or city are connected to and largely identify with their wealthy fellow elites abroad rather than their poor neighbors, a city and a society is doomed, for only the wealthy have the wherewithal to support the kinds of social investments that make a city livable for its middle classes let alone its poor.

The very globalization that has created the opportunity for the rich in once poor countries to rise, and which connects the global poor to their fellow sufferers both in the same country and more amazingly across the world has cleft the connection between poor and rich in the same society. It is these global connections between classes which gives the current situation a revolutionary aspect, which as Marx long ago predicted, is global in scope.

The danger is that the very wealthy classes use the new high tech tools for monitoring citizens into a way to avoid systemic change, either by using their ability to intimately monitor so-called “revolutionaries” and short-circuit legitimate protest or by addressing the public’s concern in only the most superficial of ways.

The long term solution to the new era of urban mankind is giving people who live in cities the tools, including increasing sophisticated tools of data gathering and simulation, to control their own fates to find ways to connect revolutionary movements to progressive forces in societies where cities are not failing, and their tools for dealing with all the social and environmental problems cities face, and above all, to convince the wealthy to support such efforts, both in their own locality as well as on a global scale. For, the attempt at total control of a complex entity like a city through the tools of the security state, like the paper flat Utopian cities of state worshipers of days past, is to attempt building a castle in the thin armed sky.