Anyone looking at the US electoral map can see how urbanization manifests itself in the US. A greater number of people lives in small concentrated urban areas (the districts showing up in blue) than in the vast (red) territory in between the coasts and outside the urban centers. The people in the urban areas and those in the rural areas live in two different worlds and they follow different cultures and politics. This article explore this not mainly as a political issue, but also an environmental one and a matter of design.
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| Pieter Bruegel: The Harvester, the countryside in 1565 |
The UN says that global urbanization will continue and that in a few years 70% of the global population will live in metropolitan areas. For Americans who always had split feelings about big cities this is not a happy future. Clearly, the transition isn't free of tension. ...
The linchpin of my argument is the hypothesis that the attributes that explain patterns of urbanizing migration also increasingly account for both party affiliation and growing regional economic divergence. These things are just pulling high-density cities and lower-density exurbs and rural areas further and further apart culturally and politically.(Will Wilkinson about his paper "The Density Divide")
But the binary view of liberals living in dense cities and conservatives in the countryside is too simple. It overlooks....
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Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects