The Cities of our Digital Age

Giles Crouch | Digital Anthropologist

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4 min read

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Aug 28

Image by ThankYouFantasyPictures from Pixabay

There are some estimates that by 2030, over 60% of the global population will live in cities and that by 2050, it will reach over 70% in cities with over 500,000. In Saudi Arabia, the kingdom is building NEOM, a 170 kilometre long city stretching out from the Red Sea into the desert. American billionaire Marc Lore is planning a utopian city in the middle of the desert. There are similar ideas in Singapore and South Korea.

Will we actually want to live in these cities? Their proponents claim they’ll offer equal healthcare, be highly walkable with mass transit. There will be jobs for all. Certainly, they are ideal. We’ve been here before. It never quite worked out. Could it this time?

The Aztecs, Olmec and the Mayans built incredibly complex cities over 1,500 years ago in what is now Latin America. They were what we’d call today highly socialist. Even the idea of NEOM and similar cities are, at their core, a socialist ideal.

One of the oldest cities in Europe was in Ukraine, part of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture. These tended to be round in shape with buildings quite close together and stretching back over 5,000 years! Far longer than we thought cities had been created.

Courtesy “Science News”

The ideals, governance and way these cities operated so very long ago, are not too different from the ideas put forth for the future. In a way, everything in human society is a remix.

Hominids (not us Homo Sapiens) began living closer together and building shelters, we estimate, about 400,000 years ago. Other animals do too, just not as complicated as Homo Sapiens, what we term as modern humans.

As our societies became more complex, so did our structures, eventually leading up to cities, which have continued to grow in complexity. A human from 10,000 years ago might wonder in awe or likely disgust, at today’s cities, but they would understand them. To a degree.

But cities have always risen and fallen. Sometimes because of natural disasters and disease, sometimes because of politics and conflict. Often times new research suggests, we just grew rather tired of whoever called themselves the boss and we packed up and walked away.

The Difference With Cities of the Digital Age

Even ancient cities were often complex systems with irrigation, crop management on the edges, markets, rules for living and various customs and traditions. These have evolved over the millennia, but sewer systems are still around, so is water delivery. Markets are now shopping malls. We park cars in massive lots rather than tie up horses, wagons and chariots. The streets at least, smell better.

Today, we often throw out the term “smart city”, which essentially means anything we can stick a sensor in, camera on and chip in, we will. All of which generates vast amounts of data, which we turn into information and then knowledge, which is used to make decisions about how we live in our cities.

This means everything will be surveilled. We say that we live in a world of surveillance capitalism today and we do. This takes it to another level. How much water you use, from cooking to toilet flushes. As private transportation will be unlikely, all ones movements will be tracked.

How then, is free agency protected? How are human rights governed and protected in such a system where if you don’t abide by the rules, your water, power and access to where you live and transportation can simply be turned off until you comply. China is very near to this state of being already.

One can slip and slide down that slippery soapy dystopian slope rather quickly. Some cultures may adapt reasonably well to such cities. Others will outright reject them.

Already, we are beginning to see people move out of cities, sooner than was anticipated. Both Canada and the USA have seen this happening post-pandemic. The city of Brasilia in Brazil was supposed to be a teaming metropolis. It isn’t.

The currency and the laws of these digital cities is information. Whomever controls it, controls the city.

The promise of these futuristic cities can be alluring at first, a golden promise for peace, harmony and an easy lifestyle. The question will be what price are we willing to pay? If history has a lesson for us, it is that we always, eventually, leave a city. If not because of the impacts of nature, but because we decide that the promise made didn’t quite turn out.

Cities around the world are becoming ever more complex sociocultural systems. They are as much in a state of flux as they always have been and as societies and cultures begin to re-shape the digital technologies of today, cities too will evolve in new ways. The more exciting opportunities may well be in the cities we have, not imagined new utopias. We know that while a utopia is a nice ideal, it is not a human reality.