Have you ever wondered why things are the way they are?
In this case, I mean why we live and work the way we do.
During the Stone Age people began to seek safety in numbers, protection from wild animals, and to communally store grains and other resources produced by the development of agriculture. Towns and cities began to grow bigger.
By the Bronze Age we were starting to seek protection behind city walls from the armies of our enemies. Towns and cities, once again grew bigger.
By the Iron Age our populations started to concentrate around major religious and political centres, local rulers and their armies. Some civilisations developed basic sewage systems, aquaducts and other resources. Cities began to reach into the several hundreds of thousands.
During the Middle Ages there was an increase in communal industry, and a concentration of pouplations around shipping ports and trade. More specialists emerged, people who produced one single thing, and we started to move away from family units who produced everything they needed for themselves. The biggest cities were beginning to reach the millions.
Enter the 1st Industrial Revolution: The rise of manufacturing centres powered by water and steam see mass migration to urban areas for jobs. Industrialisation begins to create health problems based on overcrowding, contamination, and poor sanitation. But nontheless, cities grow bigger.
By the 2nd Industrial Revolution, electricity and transportation accelerates everything. Manufacturing increases. Telegraph and rail networks, and more sophisticated sewage systems, allow increasing population density and transportation of goods from manufacturing centres out to the world. Specialised production increases. Cities. Grow. Bigger.
The most recent, the 3rd Industrial Revolution: The internet and digitalisation. It’s now possible to communicate and do business with the world. Robots and automation begin to change the face of manufacturing. The ability to communicate and sell to anywhere in the world allows companies to grow bigger and bigger creating mega job hubs which force people into population-dense locations where cost of living is only going up. The sharing economy begins to emerge. Cities are still growing bigger.
And now we’re entering the 4th Industrial Revolution, the technical revolution where technology becomes nearly symbiotic and blends seamlessly into our lives. We can do almost anything from almost anywhere. Robots and automation can do the majority of manufacturing work, logistics, and are even beginning to be embedded into agriculture.
We can communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world, see their faces, work collaboratively, and have suffered a global pandemic due in part to population density and mobility.
Its time for cities to finally start growing smaller. The future of work is remote-first, but that doesn’t mean work from home. It means gender equality, equal access to opportunity, and a reversal of the population distribution trend for the very first time in human history.
Physically moving to central locations for jobs was essential before, a matter of survival. That’s not the case any more. So why, in the face of increasing cost of living and decreasing quality of life in areas with accelerating population density, are we still acting like that’s the only logical way forward?