[This includes a brief update in June 2023, at the end, responding to an article in The Economist]

The dramatic economic growth of the last 250 years happened simultaneously with equally dramatic increases in population and concentrations of C02 in the atmosphere.

The specific question I address in this post is: What might happen with economic growth now that it has become clear that total fertility rates are dropping well below replacement levels in all high income countries and that the use of the atmosphere over the past three centuries as a free way to dispose of carbon generated by economic and population growth is now leading to rapidly increasing costs as a result of disasters caused by extreme weather.

Long-term parallel paths
Graphs of changes over the last two millennia in global population, economic well-being (represented by GDP per capita) and concentration of carbon in the atmosphere all show a dramatic increase beginning in the 18th century and continuing to the present. These have been world-historical changes. Before the middle of the 18th century annual growth rates were about 0.01%, in other words scarcely changing. Then somewhere between 1750 and 1800 they all began to accelerate and since have grown at rates exceeding 1.5% a year, doubling every forty-five years or so.

(NOTE: many of the graphs I use here are screen captures from Our World in Data, an excellent source of data about many different topics. On their website many of the originals are interactive, allowing the horizontal time scale to be adjusted and/or different countries to be represented. These tools are not active here, and some embedded captions may be incorrect).

In terms of economic growth, regardless of what its origins are thought to be, there is no question, as the Bank of England has noted wryly, that it is quite a new thing. Before the 18th century overall standards of living, as well as populations and CO2 concentrations had scarcely changed for several millennia.

However, if they are considered just over the last 250 years, these changes seem more like smooth slopes than cliffs. Populations, initially in industrialized countries and later in less developed ones, began to edge up in the late 18th century and then to gradually accelerate until the mid-20th century. GDP per capita and CO2 concentrations followed a similar growth curve, though they lagged population growth by about half a century.

Interconnected growth
It seems to be the case that each of these three trends has contributed to the more or less simultaneous growth of the others.

Populations began to grow in European nations at about the same time the paradigm of economic growth associated with capitalism came to be adopted, and the same time as innovations in science enabled ideas about growth and progress to be translated into technologies that took advantage of the free good of the atmosphere as a way to dispose of CO2 emissions and increase productivity.

That increase in productivity led to higher GDP per capita and less poverty, which contributed to a decline in child mortality, which led to faster population growth, which (together with colonial expansion and global trading), provided larger markets for industrial goods, the production and use of which led to more carbon emissions, and so forth up the last quarter of the 20th century. In other words, population growth facilitated economic growth even as it was itself facilitated by the benefits of economic growth.

There was concern in the early 19th century that rapid population growth would lead to deprivation because food production could not keep pace with it. This turned out to be unwarranted because after about 1850 annual rates of economic growth (as reflected in GDP per capita, increased life expectancy and reductions in poverty) came to exceed rates of population growth. By 2006 global rates of annual increase in GDP per capita, at 1.94%, were almost three times the population growth rate of 0.76% per year.

What this suggests is first that population growth was, and in some places still is, an important initial stimulus to economic growth, and secondly that at some stage economic growth begins to occur independently.

Now, however, it seems possible that this independence might be threatened, partly because of falling population growth rates and declining populations, and partly because of the rapidly increasing costs of climate warming that are a consequence of carbon concentrations.

Population Decline
Rates of world population growth peaked at just over 2% a year in 1968, have declined since to about 1%, and are projected to drop precipitously to 0.1% by 2100. The time lag between rates of growth and actual populations means that world population is still rising, but the following graph, based on UN projections, suggests that the global population will gradually slow and stabilize at about 10.9 billion in 2100 as birth and death rates come more or less into balance and the global demographic transition is completed.

Two other population projections offer a different view. The Wittgenstein Centre takes into consideration improved levels of contraception, female education and fertility rates, and suggests that global population will peak at 9.4 billion around 2070 and then begin to decline because of pronounced drops in Asia, though these will be partially offset by continuing increases in sub-Saharan Africa until the end of the century.

The apparently gentle curve for global population decline masks what are likely to be substantial changes for individual countries, as indicated below. Populations in China, Russia, Japan, Italy and Spain are already beginning to shrink, and Germany and Vietnam will soon follow.

A third population projection, published in The Lancet in 2020, forecasts even earlier and greater levels of decline than these graphs show. It anticipates that global population will peak in 2064 at 9.7 billion, and then fall to 8.8 billion by 2100. More specifically, it suggests that populations of 23 countries will decline by about half over the course of this century. These include Japan (128 million to 60 million), China (1.4 billion to 732 million), Spain (46 to 23 million; Italy (61 to 31 million).

The reason for these steep declines, revealed in tables accompanying the article, is that total fertility rate, the number of children born per woman of child-bearing age, has already fallen well below the replacement level of 2.1 in those countries, and indeed in every country in Europe and North America. India and Latin American will soon follow, and by 2100 only a handful of countries will be sustaining their population. The authors of the Lancet article do not expect fertility rates to recover to replacement levels.

Consequences of Population Decline
The consequences of global population decline are half a century or more in the future. But for some countries declines are already underway, and within one or two decades will amount to reductions of many millions. It is not entirely clear what the consequences of this scale of population loss will be. It has been argued by some that fewer people should mean a reduction in environmental impacts, less congestion, and higher wages because there well be fewer people working. However, if GDP per capita continues to grow in spite of population decline, then environmental impacts could actually increase because wealthier individuals have larger environmental footprints than poor people. Moreover, there are strong indications that urbanization is increasing even as populations decline, which means that congestion in cities is unlikely to diminish. And some economists have made a compelling case that lower fertility rates are associated with growing economic inequality because inherited wealth is concentrated among fewer children.

If GDP per capita does not continue to grow at a rate that can offset the loss of population, a falling tax base will lead to a decline in basic services, and probably reduced technological and other innovation because that usually come from the young. But if GDP per capita continues to grow faster than the decline in population, as it has recently in Japan, standards of living will actually improve as populations fall.

The authors of the Lancet report think that shrinking and aging populations will pose substantial economic problems as governments struggle to cope with smaller working age populations and fewer taxpayers to provide funds need to meet the growing needs of the elderly, including health care and pensions. Some countries, such as Canada, are expected to continue to maintain or grow their populations through liberal immigration policies, but in others “the desire to maintain a linguistic and culturally homogeneous society will outweigh the economic, fiscal, and geopolitical risks of declining populations”. In other words, population decline could lead to intensifying nationalist and exclusionary political views.

Charles Jones, an economist at Stanford, has made what thus far seems to be the most sophisticated theoretical investigation of the economic impacts of declining populations. In his paper “The End of Economic Growth?” he pursues the idea that in many economic growth models the size of a growing population plays a crucial role because it leads to the growth of new ideas. When he introduces population decline (he refers to it as “negative growth”) into these mathematical models, the result is that innovation and the stock of knowledge stagnate and economic growth grinds to a halt. His conclusion is that if this happens standards of living will stabilize at a reasonably high level, but the population will continue to fall.

At least one commentator, Robert Harding in the Financial Times, suggests that in fact these processes may already be at work in Japan where, even though GDP per capita has risen, almost all recent income growth for working people has been soaked up by tax rises and higher house prices, factors that suppress fertility and therefore contribute to the ongoing population decline.

Under such conditions it will become increasingly difficult to maintain infrastructure and services such as public transit, first as individual buildings are abandoned, and then as neighbourhoods and rural communities become increasingly deserted. Unless the drop in fertility is offset by immigration from places where populations continue to expand, the enormous legacy of built environments created for peak populations will become a growing burden for aging and smaller populations.

The Costs of Climate Warming
Since the 1980s it has become obvious that treating the atmosphere as a convenient and free way to dispose of CO2 emissions has contributed to a steady rise in global mean temperature. This has serious implications for causing changes in climate and weather, especially extreme weather, for the rest of this century and beyond.

I will begin this consideration of the costs of climate change with evidence of recent trends in natural disasters.

In spite of this increase, since 1970 there has only been a modest increase in the number of annual globally reported natural disasters (especially floods and extreme weather), and suggestions of a slight decline since 2006.

Global damage losses from extreme weather, also suggest an upward trend, but if those are considered as a share of GDP this is not the case, presumably because GDP has grown at least as quickly as those losses. On average about 60,000 people a year die from natural disasters, about 0.1% of all deaths.

However, these data on economic losses have to be interpreted carefully because there is confusion in the way losses from weather disasters are calculated, and there is a tendency to underestimate long-term effects (Botzen, Deschenes, Sanders, 2019). Nevertheless, it seems to be the case that, although natural disasters get national and international media coverage, their economic losses tend to be regional and fairly short-lived. In smaller nations, such as those of the Caribbean that are prone to major hurricanes, impacts on GDP may still be substantial, and have a significant opportunity cost because funds used for reconstruction might otherwise have been used for development initiatives.

In countries with large diversified economies, such as the United States the costs of natural disasters are relatively minor (usually less than 1% of GDP, though in 2020 the $450 billion damages were about 2.25% of GDP, which was about $21 trillion). Nevertheless, they are a growing concern. Detailed records of the costs of major disaster events (by NOAA, shown below) indicate an upward trend. The number of events has grown from 2.9 in the 1980s, 5.4 in the 1990s and 6.3 in the 2000s, to 12.3 in the 2010s, and so far in 2020 and 2021alone there have been 20 major events. If this trend continues losses from climate related disasters will suppress annual growth rates in GDP, which have averaged about 3% for the last fifty years, and are declining in higher income countries.

This trend also needs to be put in the context of projections of global warming. Global mean temperature has already risen about 1.2C above pre-industrial levels. How much further it will rise depends on mitigation measures and political will. The most optimistic outlook, according to Climate Action Tracker in November 2021, is an increase to 1.8C, but current policies and actions suggest something closer to or more than 2.5C. Increases of these magnitudes could lead to catastrophic losses from extreme weather in many regions of the world.

This, together with the evidence that temperatures and CO2 concentrations are greater than they have been in human history, indicates that recent trends of the number and costs of weather related environmental disasters offer few guides about what is to come. It is inevitable that the costs of dealing with climate change will climb rapidly and possibly exponentially, not only because of the damage they will cause, but also because of the transformative changes required to move closer to net zero, and because of the need to implement adaptations to handle more extreme weather that will include major expenses such things as protecting cities from rising sea levels and relocating climate refugees. It is possible that growing costs of weather disasters could almost negate annual growth in GDP.

Does this mean the end of economic growth?
When I began to think about the relationship between economic growth, population decline and climate change, my assumption was that the costs of coping with climate disasters, coupled with steadily aging and shrinking populations would be huge brakes on economic growth. However, what I have learned is that is not necessarily the case. It seems that economic growth has broken free of population growth, and one of its main drivers is now innovation, which can allow GDP per capita to be maintained even as populations decline. And it seems that the economic costs of natural disasters, at least in large diversified economies, thus far have amounted to a small percentage of total GDP, and the reconstruction following those disasters can count as contributions to GDP. While this percentage will grow in the future, I have found no indications or opinions that climate change, alone or in combination with population decline, will bring an end to overall economic growth and increases in per capita GDP.

However, from the perspective of particular places matters look rather different (as I have discussed in previous posts here and here). In some regions of the world, rural communities, small towns and even cities, face a future that involves a combination of slowly withering away as people age and the young move away, and the possibility of acute disasters of heatwaves, droughts, floods, and wildfires. Economies may continue to grow, but over the next hundred years geographies will change dramatically and everyday life in places everywhere will become more challenging.

[An afterthought, two days after posting this. I can’t help thinking that I have understated the possible impacts of the combined effects of population decline and climate related disasters, which could be much greater than the sum of their parts. The evidence so far is that a modest drop in population may be offset by innovation that results in growth in GDP per capita, and on average the costs of weather related disasters may only be a small percentage of GDP. But as populations drop by half, and if the costs of disasters regularly come to exceed annual growth in GDP as global temperatures climb, matters could take a very different turn ].

[An update 02 June 2023. The Economist has a leading article today “Global Fertility has collapsed with profound economic consequences: What might change the world’s dire demographic trajectory?” This is, for The Economist, a rather breathless consideration of global population decline that will occur later this century, written as though it is something that has just become apparent even though their writers have frequently discussed the current declines in Japan and Italy and elsewhere. It includes the remarkable comment that “The world is not close to full…” without any supporting argument, and argues, as the subtitle indicates, that we need to get population growth back on track in order to ensure economic growth (though it acknowledges that efforts in individual countries, such as Hungary and Singapore, to boost higher fertility have failed). Environmental concerns are blithely dismissed (“Whatever some environmentalists may say, a shrinking population creates problems.”)

I think this leader fails to identify the profound and clear demographic indications that economic growth and economic theory for the last three centuries or so have been tied to population growth, and that population decline will require a radically revised approach to economics, and indeed how life will be lived. The key questions are: What will economics without growth be like? How will economic systems, and for that matter urban planning, adapt to shrinkage? What will be abandoned and what retained? Or, from my perspective on place, how can places be adapted to an abundance of stuff that is no longer useful – empty houses, abandoned neighbourhoods in cities, expressways and airports and container ports that will be far too large for future needs? This may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s probably less than fifty years away.]

I have the strong impression that there are social, political and environmental shifts underway that affect places almost everywhere. Their consequence is that how places have been experienced in the past bears little relationship to how they are being experienced now and will be experience in the future as climate change, social media, and globalization intrude ever more deeply into everyday life.

These shifts are the context for Changing Senses of Place: Navigating Global Challenges, an edited, academic book published by Cambridge University Press (2021). This post provides a synopsis of that book because I think it pulls together important threads about the importance of understanding change through the lens of place and its messages are worth sharing . I contributed one of the chapters so I am probably biased about its merits, but I knew nothing about the other twenty-four chapters until I received a published copy. I should also add that the book is both interdisciplinary and international in its scope  The 25 chapters were written by about 60 authors from over a dozen disciplines and involved research in at least 25 different countries and six continents.

In short, I think Senses of Place provides an excellent foundation for thinking about place as we move towards the second quarter of the 21st century. An Initial Clarification This book takes the view, as Maria Lewicka and Olena Dobosh put it in their chapter on Ethnocentric Bias in Perceptions of Place, that: “Sense of place refers to the way a place is experienced. It is a mix of the sensuous reactions, cognitive images, memories and feelings that people associate with a place” (p.179). It is, in other words, a complex human faculty for making sense of the world. to be absolutely clear, this book is not about sense of place as an inherent quality of somewhere, which is an idea widely used in architecture, place branding and tourist literature. Plural Senses of Place and Global Challenges The central argument, apparent in the title and reinforced in some fashion in every chapter, is that there are plural senses of place. This revises a conventional idea that sense of place involves a relatively stable, socially shared set of attitudes about a particular place, and that these are revealed by continuity of local traditions. The research described in the chapters of this book shows that even apparently stable places are experienced in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways A second argument, no less significant, is that it is necessary to understand the multiplicity of senses of place in order to grasp the ways places are being challenged by global processes such as climate change, constant mobility, transnationalism, social media and territorial contestation. The basis for this argument is, first, that we are all ’emplaced’, which is to say we cannot avoid looking at the world and experiencing its problems except through the lens of the places we know and where we live. And secondly, while challenges may be global in scope their effects happen in particular places and particular places are where adaptive responses to the uncertainty of those challenges have to happen. It follows, though I don’t think any of the contributors put it quite this bluntly, that efforts to deal with global challenges without paying attention to the idiosyncracies of places are doomed to failure. Global Challenges and Senses of Place Summarized The book is organized around seven global challenges to place, each of which is considered in several chapters. I have slightly revised the wording for clarification, but the challenges are: • Climate Change and Environmental Degradation • Migration and Mobility • Transitions to Renewable Energy • Nationalism and Competing Territorial Claims • Urban Change • Technological Transformations • Planning Strategies Except perhaps for renewable energy, which at first glance doesn’t seem to fit, there is nothing very remarkable in this list. What I do find remarkable are the detailed discussion in individual chapters and the variety of contexts that are examined through the lens of place. The following summaries of chapter in each section attempt to give a sense of that variety. Climate Change and Environmental Degradation: The challenges presented by climate change, and indeed all change to natural environments, are experienced through diverse senses of place specific to local circumstances and their history. For example the Great Barrier Reef in Australia elicits place feelings that include attachment, aesthetic pleasure, appreciation of biodiversity, and acknowledgement of its scientific value. But following the coral bleaching events of 2016 and 2017 that were caused by global warming those feelings were accompanied by a sense of grief at the deterioration of an exceptional place. This insight into the variety of senses of place associated with natural environments is amplified by case studies of places in Alaska and the American mid-west which reveal that attitudes to climate change reflect very different ‘temporalities’ or local perspectives on time. And an environmental disaster in Valparaiso in Chile demonstrates the importance of identifying this sort of variety of local knowledge and senses of places in reconstruction; without it mistakes in planning are likely to be repeated. This is also suggested by the non-linear, dynamic character of senses of place in Bengaluru in southern India where lakes that have a long history of providing water supply are now disregarded as the region rapidly urbanizes and pipes in water from 100 km away. On a more positive note, attempts at prairie restoration in the American mid-west have proven to be more successful when efforts at place-making recognize that there are plural, regional senses of place to be taken into account. Migration, Mobility and Belonging. The modern acceleration of mobility has undermined what, until about quite recently, was a prevailing sense of place that was mostly sedentary because for most people travel was dangerous or expensive and most lives were spent in just one two locations. Isolation and a sedentary sense of place facilitated the continuity of tradition and offered a strong sense of belonging somewhere. This feeling lingers in attitudes about place attachment, for example, in the relatively isolated Faroe Islands the tourist now coming to experience unspoilt landscapes are regarded ambivalently by residents because their presence threatens established ways of living even as it enhances the local economy and connections with the rest of the world. On the other hand for people in post-colonial Benin in West Africa isolation is something that is better escaped. Home is generally regarded as a place a person has to leave in order to succeed, though transnational migrants who work elsewhere develop an extroverted sense of place that incorporates many diverse experiences and includes a continuing commitment to their home place to which they send remittances. An almost mirror image of this transformation of sense of place happens with rural migrants to cities in China, who traditionally were not given full access to social spaces because it was always assumed they would return home. Official efforts are now being to change this assumption that rural migrants do not belong even though they live permanently in the city, a process that has to deal with very different conceptions of what constitutes belonging. This is not the issue in the township of Diepsloot in South Africa where upheaval and mobility seem to have resulted in a denial of most conventional notions of sense of place. It is a sort of non-place where deprivation and insecurity are omnipresent, everyone seems to be just passing through, and narratives of belonging perversely seem to be based on a psychology of non-belonging. Transitions to Renewable Energy. Renewable energy projects, both wind and solar, are so visually intrusive that they create new types of places and invoke divergent interpretations and contestations between senses of place. In New York State the installers of turbines regard them as wind farms, which suggests a positive addition to rural landscapes and places, but for protesters they demonstrate the industrialization of those landscapes. Research in the UK suggests that such contested attitudes about the impact of renewable technologies on places requires fitting them to senses of place by presenting proposed projects as nested among different scales of place. In this manner their manifest local impacts on places can be mitigated by indicating their benefits for place understood at larger spatial scales. Nationalism and Competing Territorial Claims. Nationalism involves assumptions about who belongs where and a politics of place-belonging that involves issues of identity, social justice, inclusion and exclusion, and potential violence. Parts of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine lie at conjunctions of many national histories where political boundaries have often shifted. In these historically confused regions people have mostly adopted ethnocentric rather than national ways of understanding the places where they belong. Ethnocultural sense of place is also apparent with the Bodo, an indigenous group who live adjacent to the Manas Tiger Reserve in north-east India. However for the Bodo this involves a blend of self-identification and environmental practices that actually brings into question simplistic assumptions about indigenous cultures and sustainability because official recognition of the Bodo as indigenous forest dwellers has been used by them as a way to opportunistically occupy land in the Reserve and to extract lumber from it. Their conveniently shifting interpretation of place attachment has led to conflicts with other communities in the region. For Palestinians the issues of belonging to a place are immediate rather than historical because their communities are effectively under siege. The systematic destruction of homes has led to deeply ambivalent senses of place that somehow blend feelings of safety and oppression, stability and loss, rituals of everyday life that continue in spite of everything, belonging that is constantly infused with uncertainty, and resistance against displacement. Palestine, rather like Diepsloot, demonstrates extremes of just how multi-facetted and complex senses of place can be. What is clear is that it is impossible to make sense of their challenging political and social issues without attending to the ways they are experienced as places. Urban Change: Urban growth transforms places in ways that are frequently contested. Gentrification, commodification and marginalization in cities variously accelerate contested senses of place. These are continuously being reformulated and negotiated as urban neighbourhoods are redeveloped and as social and political circumstances shift. For instance, in Barcelona gentrification involves the exploitation and commodification of symbolic elements that are drawn from the sense of place of displaced previous residents because this can ensure that redevelopment and renovation are profitable. A not dissimilar process of simplification of sense of place for ulterior purposes has occurred as a way to characterize urban change in Seattle, one of the fastest growing cities in the United States, with the additional aspect that divergent political perspectives are involved. The city has been variously presented for different political ends as a prosperous centre of technology (headquarters of Amazon, Microsoft, etc), and as a dying city because of the levels of homelessness and street communities that are consequence of rapidly rising house prices caused by the technology boom. For the ‘urban invisibles,’ the marginalized street communities of Brazil, the places they have to appropriate in order to survive are often exactly the same places where they are rejected as undesirable. There, as in Seattle, the competing senses of place have led to political infighting about how best to manage injustices associated with urban change. Technological Transformations: Perhaps the most widespread transformation in modern culture is the global adoption electronic communication and social media. By shrinking distance and connecting us more or less instantly with other people elsewhere, electronic media have radically altered senses of place by adding layers of information and new possibilities for experience that enrich both personal and social senses of place by making a wealth of information available and collapsing the barrier of distance. They have also diminished senses of place by distracting us from the places where we actually are, diverting our attention to virtual elsewheres, and generating echo chambers that exacerbate views that promote exclusionary senses of place. However, there are indications from case studies in Melbourne and in Denmark that social media, such as distributing images of natural settings on Instagram, can facilitate the development of a broad range of affective bonds between people and places that have proved valuable as a way to engage citizens in the development of strategies for managing the urban forest and urban food production. Design and Planning Strategies: The usual notion in urban planning is that sense of place is something that can be enhanced by design. At one time the conviction was that this could be represented on maps showing some sort of ideal end state, or perhaps by quantifying urban dynamics into measurable patterns that could be manipulated. Those approaches fail to take into account the rich variety of senses of place that people have of cities. To acknowledge and take advantage of that richness requires collaborative approaches that can accommodate and mediate diverse senses of place. Because cities are now unavoidably caught up in global flows and networks, those diverse local senses of place have to be integrated with global ones such as the international planning initiatives of the UN Habitat programme. One example of how this can be done is demonstrated in a case study of Vredefort Dome World Heritage Site in SA where participatory research and focus groups were used to identify plural local senses of place and the ways these could be incorporated into international frameworks. This study has some parallels with research in the very different context of BlueCity Lab in Rotterdam, which is an experimental site in a former swimming pool that is now used for exploring innovative approaches to sustainability and placemaking through collaborative learning. The BlueCity Lab, which is itself a symbol of urban change, provides an excellent setting to investigate place-based experiences and how they can contribute to “transformative topophilia” or a sense of how change can happen through place. But some entirely different processes involving transformations of urban senses of places are happening in cities in China, where IKEA catalogues and products seem to be encouraging a culturally fluid sense of what constitutes home. The catalogues, which are globally standardized yet subtly modified to accommodate Chinese tastes, have a transformative capacity that lies in promises of translocal inclusion or being part of a global culture. The effects of IKEA may understood as “transcultural odourlessness” but they have been widely welcomed by urban Chinese people and have to be understood not so much as placeless as actually enriching and pluralising senses of place. A Concluding Comment What Senses of Place makes clear is that place is implicated in many of the challenges of the present century, and that it has to be approached as a multi-layered, multi-dimensional phenomenon that both shapes perceptions of global challenges and in diverse way is threatened by them. It is an academic  book, and some of the discussion is challenging, but it sets the stage for future thinking about place. In the concluding chapter the editors draw attention to “the plurality of place-related meanings” and discuss the importance of finding possible ways of navigating between relatively stable and more fluid attachments to places. I think this captures neatly the ambiguity in how most people now experience places, continually navigating both intellectually and in practice between local, regional and national places, between a desire for stability and a wish for change, sometimes at home, often on the move, constantly informed and connected electronically, mostly uncertain about the future.    C.M. Raymond, L.C, Manzo, D.R. Williams, A. Di Masso, T. von Wirth Ieds) Changing Senses of Place: Navigating Global Challenges, Cambridge University Press, 2021. 

This post is a summary of some ways place has been discussed in literary criticism that may have relevance for a broader understanding of place experience. Though it refers to a few books that are often considered to be based in particular places (such as Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels, or Thoreau’s Walden)  it is not a review of them. It is really just a synopsis of interpretations about the role that place plays in literature that I come across and think are interesting. It elaborates remarks I made in previous posts on writing about places, and Islandia (a novel that is about sense and love of place)..

Place as Context or Background
The most straightforward use of place in fiction is as a background to a story. William Zinsser puts the matter neatly: “every hu­man event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that ‘somewhere’ is like” (p.88). This is so even the place has nothing much to do with characters or the plot. A simple description of the setting , perhaps done in broad strokes in the first few pages, allows readers to fill in details with what they know from their own experiences or knowledge of real places. Something similar is done in movies and TV series, often with little more than a place name and a few shots of landscapes.

In this sense place is a backdrop, not unlike stage scenery, that has minimal significance for the story or the characters involved in it.. The story could happen almost anywhere, but the place where it happens provides a bit of incidental colour and interest.

Place Integration and/or Metaphor
This is a more sophisticated literary use of place, in which it serves a symbolic role that embroiders the story. Linn Ullmann, a Norwegian writer (who I cited in the post on Writing about Places) suggests: “Before you can write a good plot, you need to write a good place.” To support this contention she refers to a comment in a story by the Canadian author and Nobel prize winner Alice Munro: “Something had happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only one place, where something has happened.  And then there are the other places, which are just other places.” The settings where something happened are where meaning resides and they contain and embroider the story and amplify the characters. In effect, for writers such as Munro  without a place there is no story.

Leonard Lutwack discusses place in more literary terms in The Role of Place in Literature. He takes a broad definition of place as “all inhabitable space,” which includes all forms and scales of scenery, setting and location, and considers the various ways the particular identities of these have been used throughout the history of literature in order to reinforce personalities and plots. He pays considerable attention to the rhetorical and metaphorical purposes place can serve.  

Regardless of whether places in works of literature are rooted in fact or not, Lutwack’s view is that they serve a symbolic function.  He argues that a core element in much American writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries were the distinctive places and regional settings that provided challenges and opportunities. Since then there is evidence of increasing placelessness in literature associated with the implications of dislocation, disorientation, detachment from home and the restless mobility of modern life. Lutwack also notes  “If there is any place at all in the lives of this new breed of character,” he writes, “it is the highway itself.” p 227

This is, however, often ambivalence in this place:story relationship – bucolic landscapes do not necessarily mean mellow personalities, and undifferentiated spaces do not always mean placelessness. Virginia Woolf, for example, wrote in a celebratory tone of the anonymity and whirling flow of the city.

Place is also integrated into literature in more immediate ways that have to do with the author’s own experience of  places either as a record or an invention of human experience. Jason Finch indicates that fiction of the English author E.M. Forster approximated real places, in some cases where he had lived, yet they were modified and given different names. Thomas Hardy did much the same in his novels of Wessex, in some cases using real places, and sometimes substituting invented place names for otherwise recognizable places – thus Oxford he called “Christminster.”

Jeffry Herlihy-Mera notes that Hemingway’s novels depend on the displacement that expatriation provided him. The places in which they are set are principal components of the narrative. Yet while Hemingway had lived in them, he always wrote about them when he was living elsewhere, a role he explicitly referred to as “transplanting” – he needed some distance to capture through his memories the traits he regarded as valuable for his writing. Incidentally, Hemingway also evaluated and esteemed the places where he worked “Madrid was always a good place for working,” he wrote. “So was Paris, and so were Key West, Florida, in the cool months; the ranch, near Cooke City, Montana; Kansas City; Chicago; Toronto; and Havana, Cuba. Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.” (cited in Herlihy-Mera, p. 56-7).

Circularity
While particular places often inspire authors, who then incorporate those into their stories with some fictional elaboration or modification, the relationship between places and literature often can involve a sort of circularity between places, authors, readers, authors and places.

Biographers of authors and artists almost always explore the personal landscapes of their subjects, where they grew up, where they chose to live, because without knowing the places that have mattered to them, biographers can’t form a complete sense of their work. Childhood environments, places and memory all are aspects of the foundation of prose and poetry.

In addition, novels, movies and works of art can shape how we see and interact with the places where they are set. The American writer Walker Percy wrote a novel The Moviegoer that is centred on a character for whom a place only became truly real when he had seen it in a movie. A rather version of this reinforcement occurs in literary tourism that involves visits to the places where authors once lived, or wrote about, and have in some cases have been rebranded to celebrate their fictional identities. Shakespeare and Stratford-Upon-Avon; the Globe Theatre reconstruction in London; Hobitton, which was built as a set for the movie of the Lord of the Rings and is now a tourist attraction in New Zealand. More broadly, but less easy to illustrate, is the effect fiction has on popular interpretations of places and landscapes. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to visit Walden Pond without seeing it through the writing of Thoreau.

There are also instances in which authors engage with the real places in which they have based their stories. Jason Finch observes that the rural part of Hertfordshire in England that was where the writer E.M. Forster had lived in childhood, and which he represented in fictional form in his novel Howard’s End, is also where the first post- Second World War new town of Stevenage is sited. After spending several decades elsewhere Forster returned to Hertfordshire during the war, and despised and actively protested the plan that was being prepared for Stevenage as “a meteorite town, fallen from a blue sky” (Finch, p.384) created by “plansters” and unwelcome intruders (Finch, p.395).

Place as Nature and a Moral Imperative
Barry Lopez, a widely admired author of novels and non-fiction works about nature and environment, wrote a short essay “A Literature of Place” in which he suggests that there is a long tradition in American writing about “the impact nature and place have on culture.” This tradition includes Thoreau, Melville, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. For Lopez the literature of place is a genre that has to do careful observation of the particular qualities of natural environments, and then explicitly raises questions about technological progress and modern economic development that threaten these natural places.

In his essay Lopez argues that to write about a place in this sense requires that you become intimate with its history and that in effect you establish an ethical conversation with it about what is a good or bad way to treat it. In other words the literature of place reflects this intimacy and involves a moral imperative to protect it and protest how it is threatened.

This moral imperative probably originated with the Romantic movement. It was, for instance, part of the association between landscape and literature for those who lived in and wrote about the Lake District in England. “The world is too much with us,” William Wordsworth wrote in 1807 as the Industrial Revolution gained momentum. “Late and soon, getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Little we see in nature that is ours.”

Place in Literature as Parochial, Exclusionary and without Historical Perspective
Roberto Dainotto in Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities offers a rather different and more academic argument. He is critical of the role of the conventional interpretation of place in literature because “it is fundamentally a negation of history.” It is tied to regionalism, which is “the idea of place as a fixed background of human sensibility” and assumes that places have their own positive, local traditions., which are mostly divorced from social and economic history.

Implicit in literature that celebrates place, he suggests, is the idea that different place traditions are the basis for happy coexistence. “The goal posited by the literature of place “is therefore an ethical one: to replace the ‘insufficient’ historical remedy with the geographical cure – a cure that…will let tradition survive and be honored, sheltered in the boundaries of place” (p.14). Issues of class, power and political economy, which Dainotto from his political economics perspective regards as primary, are mostly ignored if not suppressed. According to his interpretation the literature of place is exclusionary, inward looking, avoids the realities of social change, technological progress and political struggles.

He supports this with interpretations of Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence and the philosophical writing about home of Martin Heidegger. These represent  place as free from the contingent imposition and crises of what know as history. For instance, in Hardy’s Return of the Native each main character is the personification of a place, and it is set in the fictional rural region of Wessex in the 1840s and 1850s where there are no railways or evidence of modernity, and distant cities are filled with vice and corruption.

Dainotto acknowleges that “nations are monstrous inventions, with a tendency to violence”,  (p.169), but his view is that the literature of place with its “archaic and more pervasive dream of placeness” presents a much more more serious problem because it can, as Heidegger’s roots in and celebration of peasant life in the Black Forest demonstrated, lead through rural regionalism to fascism. (See the post on Power and Place for some discussion of this criticism of Heidegger).

Dainotto’s critique of place is broadly consistent with the thinking of others, such as Doreen Massey, who have taken a rather narrow interpretation of place as bounded, permeated by tradition, and anti-urban, and then condemned it for being parochial and exclusionary. Though examples of this view of place can certainly be found in literature, it is a selective interpretation. There is also a literature depicting societies that are so caught up in universality and equality that they negate place, including Zamiatin’s We and Huxley’s Brave New World, with the consequence that they promote placeless forms of authoritarianism.

My view is that the best way to understand literature through the lens of place is to consider the ways in which it reveals the often ambivalent tensions between what is local and specific, and what is universal or widely shared. In this view, which is I think is widely represented in works of fiction, events and lives in particular places are inexorably caught up in processes of historical and social change.

References

Dainotto, Roberto, 2000 Place in literature: regions, cultures, communities, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press.

Finch, Jason, 2011 E.M. Forster and English Place: A Literary Topography, Abo Akademie University Press, Finland

Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey, 2011 In Paris or Paname: Hemingway’s Expatriate Nationalism, Amsterdam: Rodopi (see especially Chapter 2 “The Role of Place in Literature’.

Lopez, Barry, 1997 ” A Literature of Place,” University of Portland, Portland Magazine, Summer 1997. Available online here

Lutwack, Leonard, 1984 The Role of Place in Literature, Syracuse University Press. 

Ullman, Linn in Joe Fassler, “Before you can write a good story your have to write a good place”, The Atlantic April 2014. Available online here.

Zinsser. William, 1990  On Writing Well, Harper and Row.

This second post updating my earlier speculations about the future of places in the 21st century summarizes the five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways [SSPs] that inform the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2021), and considers the possible implications of these for places. The SSPs, or “narratives”, can be understood as sets of well-informed assumptions about ways societies might unfold up to 2100, and are supported by projections of population, education, urbanization and economic activity that are consistent with the assumptions of each narrative. In effect, they are forecasts of different social contexts that could impact the future character of places.

The SSPs have been developed since 2010 (see Moss et al 2010) to complement physical climate change models, notably the Representative Concentration Pathways or RCPs that have been used by the IPCC since 1990. In the Sixth Assessment Report the concentration pathways and socioeconomic pathways are integrated as a way to recognize that any assessment of the severity of climate impacts depends in part on the social, economic and political willingness to take measures to mitigate carbon emissions and to implement adaptations.

The five different pathways are an attempt to span a range of uncertainties about future relationship between political choices, greenhouse gas emissions, and temperature changes. Because their end date is 2100 it’s important to note that all projections become increasingly uncertain the further they are from the present.

The Five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways
The diagram below, which is an elaboration of the original in O’Neill et al in Global Environmental Change, 2017, provides a useful visual summary of the five SSPs. I have abbreviated and paraphrased the descriptions given by O’Neill in order to emphasize aspects that have relevance for places. I have also drawn on Jiang and O’Neil, Global Environmental Change 2017 which offers projections of global urbanization to 2100 and Riahi et al, Global Environmental Change 2017, which offers projections of GDP including GINI measures of inequality.

SSP1 assumes a move towards sustainability and improved management of the global commons, with economic growth shifting toward an emphasis on human well-being and compact urban forms.This pathway is the best one for dealing with climate warming, presenting low challenges for both mitigation and adaptation.

SSP 2, which has been described as Dynamics as Usual, or Current Trends Continue, or Muddling Through, assumes social, economic, and technological trends do not change markedly from recent patterns of uneven growth, imperfectly functioning markets, with modest progress in sustainability. This is perhaps the most likely of the SSPs – a middle of the road in which governments dawdle, doing something about climate change, but putting off difficult decisions for as long as possible.

SSP3 assumes a resurgence of nationalism and geopolitical rivalries, with countries increasingly focusing on achieving their own energy and food security, and limited cooperation on global concerns. Slow economic growth and poor urban planning are expected to make cities unattractive.

SSP4 foresees a future of increasing disparities in political and economic opportunity that lead to increasing inequalities both between and within countries. The gap widens between an internationally-connected society that contributes to knowledge sectors of the global economy, and lower-income, poorly educated societies that are labor intensive. Environmental quality is a concern mostly for the affluent and where they live. Social conflict becomes common.

SSP5 assumes that continuing exploitation of fossil fuels will support rapid growth of the global economy and energy intensive lifestyles. This allows substantial investments in health, education, and institutions and encourages innovations, including geo-engineering for adaptation to global warming. Of course, it will greatly exacerbate the processes of climate change.

Projections Related to the Five SSPs
The five SSPs have been elaborated quantitatively by teams of scientists from IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis), NASA and other research institutions. These elaborations include data bases and projections of population, education levels, GDP and urbanization, both globally and for individual nations, and they refine previous projections by the UN and other institutions, in some cases extending them from 2050 to 2100. The diagram below, for example, projects that with the fossil fueled growth of SSP5 there will be a global population decline before 2100, but substantial growth in GDP and urbanization. However under the regional rivalries of SSP3 there will be continuing population growth in the 22nd century, but slow economic growth and urbanization. The middle of the road, business much as usual future of SSP2 falls in between those extremes.

These projections do not take into consideration the environmental and climatic impacts that would be associated with the various scenarios. This has been done by Zeke Hausfather, who was involved in the research on SSPs and carbon emissions that informs the Sixth Assessment of the IPCC. His analysis, reported on his website Carbonbrief from which the following graphs are taken, shows that in all SSPs, even Sustainability, fossil fuel use will continue to play a role. And because of time lags in the effect of carbon emissions, under all scenarios global mean temperature is projected to rise by 2100 well beyond the target of the Paris Accord of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Even with in the Sustainability Pathway (SSP1) the increase could reach 3.1C, and with continued development based on fossil fuels (SSP5) it could be as high as 5.1C .

It is worth noting that independent projections by Climate Tracker suggest that with the continuation of current policies (roughly the Middle of the Road SSP) the global mean temperature could increase by somewhere between 2.1C and 3.9C by the end of the century, and even if all the current pledges and targets for mitigation are achieved the temperature increase is likely to be between 1.9C and 3.0C.

[Addendum: I recently came upon a 2018 paper by Kai Kuhnhenn, “Economic Growth in mitigation scenarios: A blind spot in climate science,” which points out that all five SSPs assume continuing economic growth. He advocates the consideration of scenarios that acknowledge the possibilities of no growth or “degrowth.” Given both the decline in greenhouse gas emissions that reflected a drop in economic production during the first year of the covid-19 pandemic, and the association since about 1800 between population growth, economic growth and carbon emissions, this does seem like a serious omission.]

Possible Direct Impacts on Places
Regardless of which SSP (or combination of SSPs, or some entirely different pathway) happens, the indications are that the impacts of climate warming will, in the absence of transformative modifications to current climate policy, progressively effect everyday life in places almost everywhere. Conversely, if transformative modifications are made, those too will impact life in places as they adjust to a low or zero carbon way of life. In either case, the effects will become more intense and widespread as global temperatures continue to increase over the course of this century.

Nevertheless, as I noted in a previous post, much of the legacy of present places – by which I mean all the roads, parks, buildings, towns and cities, industrial estates, names – will very likely endure in some form for many decades regardless of climate warming, and measure to mitigate or adapt to it.

However, this is not the case for places that are directly in the path of extreme weather. This was made apparent by the events of the summer of 2021, when there were heatwaves and extensive wildfires in California, British Columbia, Greece and Turkey that destroyed communities, and hurricanes and unprecedented rainfall that caused extensive flooding and disastrous damage to places in America, Belgium, Germany, and China.

For all the local damage and displacement of populations that these sorts of extreme weather events cause, they are a remote concern for the great majority of people. And given the general character and global scale of the SSPs and climate models it is difficult to grasp how they might impact particular places. In large cities, a few more extremely hot days every summer, more rain in winter, sea levels that rise a few centimetres a decade, can go largely unnoticed. So for the next two or three decades, regardless of which SSP comes closest to real life, the combination of the legacy of existing buildings and streets, slow and intermittent changes to the weather, and mostly unseen though critical mitigation strategies such as conversion to electrical generation from coal to renewables, means that most places and everyday life in them will stay much as they are now. Inconveniences caused by changes in weather and climate will seem incremental.

As the century progresses this will cease to be the case. Temperatures will rise, extremely hot days will stretch into weeks and months, intense rainfalls will overwhelm drains and flood walls, extreme weather will become more erratic. Consider that the extreme events of the summer of 2021 were a consequence of a global mean temperature increase of just 1.2C over pre-industrial levels. The SSPs and various analyses of current policies indicate a possible increase in global mean temperature of between 3.0C and 5.0C by the end of the century. A reasonable assumption is that extreme weather events will become far more intense, widespread and impossible to predict, and will have devastating impacts on everyday life in places. Nowhere will be immune from them.

Indirect Impacts
Economic projections associated with the SSPs project a growth rate of between 1% and 2.8% a year in global GDP to the end of the century. However, the growing costs of damages associated with extreme weather, and the expenses incurred by governments for emergency assistance that will not be paid off for the last event before the next one happens, raise doubts about this optimism. The costs of climate change will eat into government resources available for dealing with other social and economic priorities, such as housing, public health, heritage preservation and the arts. The gap between what people expect of federal or regional governments, and what those governments can provide is likely to grow, and responsibility for what happens in specific places will shift to more local levels.

Global Trends 2040, SSPs 2100 and the future of places.
A combined total of ten different scenarios of the future are suggested by Global Trends 2040 (summarized in a previous post) and the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Of those ten narratives only two suggest a possible improvement in the quality of everyday life in places.

A Renaissance of Democracies associated with a revival of civic mindedness, especially if combined with technological breakthroughs to combat climate change, could involve a resurgence of pride of place that is also attentive to the necessity of global responsibility. In such circumstances, even as cities grow, populations age and economic growth slows, the physical forms and services of many existing places could be improved to reduce inequities, provide more security and maintain continuity with the legacy of the past.

In contrast, a Sustainable future necessarily requires transformations to current ways of living in order to give priority to conservation over production and consumption. There will be changes to food production and generation of electricity, which are the largest sources of carbon emission, but those that most obviously effect the places where the majority of people will live include larger cities with denser, walkable and bikeable neighbourhoods, more public transit, wide tree-lined sidewalks, green roofs, and a way of life that is more attentive to local and regional circumstances.

The message of all the other narratives is not encouraging. Socially, environmentally, politically and economically the prevailing sense they convey is that life almost everywhere will become more difficult as challenges expand, and opportunities shrink. Even proposals for positive change will be increasingly contested and difficult to implement. The uneven impacts of climate change will reinforce political divisions as those in climatically disagreeable places attempt to migrate to places where the weather is relatively benign and they will probably not be very welcome. Silos will emerge and inequalities intensify.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that as climates warm over the course of the 21st century daily life in places almost everywhere is going to become progressively more challenging.

I last posted to this site several months ago. Since then there have been several exceptional extreme weather events, and the publication of Climate Change 2021, the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC, which integrates projections of carbon emissions and Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs)- scenarios of the ways the world might change up to 2100. In addition  a report by The National Intelligence Council of the United States, Global Trends 2040: A More Contested Future, outlines possible ways the world could change over the next two decades.

These two reports supplement and revise my previous posts about the future of places. In this post I summarize Global Trends 2040, and in the next post is a summary of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways [SSPs] , and also recent extreme weather events. In each post I consider relevance for the future of places.

Global Trends 2040: A More Contested Future
Global Trends 2040 is a report for politicians and policy makers which assesses trends that might shape a range of possible futures. Although directed at American concerns, especially security, it provides a comprehensive perspective that is based on wide consultation with academics and others in Africa, Europe, and Asia. It has three main sections: structural forces, emerging dynamics, and scenarios of possible futures. As the subtitle suggests, its major theme is that proposals for change will be increasingly contested.

Structural forces are  trends in demographics, environmental processes, economics and technology that provide a foundation for making projections about the future.
Demographically, population growth will slow but urbanization will increase. The report suggests that almost everywhere governments will struggle to meet the needs and expectations of more urban, educated, aging and connected populations.
Environmentally, climate change will impact every country and will be exacerbated by environmental degradation associated with poor land management, air pollution and water shortages. Emissions cuts to mitigate warming will be difficult because the pay-off runs counter to short-term political incentives. Furthermore, the uneven distribution of costs and benefits associated with reducing emissions and making adaptations is likely to increase political cleavages both within and between countries.
Economically, these cleavages could be compounded by disruptions associated with rising national debt, more complex trading conditions, the global spread of services that are delivered across borders, joblessness, and the continuing rise of very big business firms. All of these could have manifestations in everyday life in cities and their neighbourhoods.
Technologically, innovation will increase in pace and reach, it make for a hyperconnected world. This could help to mitigate the challenges of climate change, aging populations and economic upheaval. But it may also pose problems of security and privacy, and hyperconnectivity could result in “distortions of truth and reality that could destabilize societies at a rate that dwarfs current disinformation challenges.” Digital communications inform, yet confuse and divide communities.

Emerging dynamics are apparent in social and political shifts already underway, but whose outcomes are not easily projected. At individual and societal levels it seems people are becoming increasingly distrustful and pessimistic as they struggle to deal with disruptive economic, political, technological, and demographic trends. Information about these is increasingly available but it is often siloed as people retreat to like-minded groups. Some of those are rooted in places, and exclusionary, but others transcend borders, may be transnational and associated with a resurgence of cultural identities. Both will challenge civic minded attitudes and foster contestation, and at the international level could create more confrontational geopolitics.

A likely consequence of these emerging trends is that governments at all levels will face mounting pressure from economic constraints, aging populations, the costs of climate adaptation, and more empowered but fragmented communities. At all levels of government there could be a growing gap between popular expectations and what governments can deliver.

Five scenarios of the future are derived from the directions and uncertainties of forces and dynamics. The first three are based on various possible shifts in the international relationship between the US and China. The last two assume substantial global discontinuities.
Renaissance of Democracies – the US takes the lead in this. Democratic government provides better service provision, and restoration of public trust in institutions with strong differences of opinion resolved democratically.
A World Adrift – China takes the lead but is not dominant as the international system becomes directionless, there slow economic growth in developed countries following the Covid pandemic, and deepening social divisions and political paralysis. The costs and consequences of aging populations and repeated extreme climate events crowd out other initiatives, and promote political polarization. Climate change and instability in developing countries are largely unaddressed.
Competitive Coexistence – China and the US prosper and compete for leadership, strengthening economic interdependence, though long term stability remains at risk because climate change is ignored in favour of short-term economic gain.
Separate Silos – a world in which globalization has broken down because of cascading challenges of joblessness resulting from global trade, environmental deterioration and health problems, and in which nationalism and economic blocs emerge to provide protection from mounting threats through self-sufficiency.
Tragedy and Mobilization – bottom up revolutionary change in the wake of a global, devastating environmental crisis and the collapse of fisheries and food production. Political power is rechanneled to deal with immediate challenges and to promote sustainability. Countries dependent on fossil fuel are the slowest to adapt, while NGOs and multilateral organizations develop unprecedented ability to set standards and directions.

Implications for Places
Over the next 20 years particular places, by which I mean the neighbourhoods, towns, villages and regions where people spend most of their everyday lives, will mostly endure much as they are now in spite of globalization, economic booms and busts, hyperconnectivity, aging populations, and extreme weather events. Nevertheless Global Trends 2040 indicates that their could be substantial changes in the quality of life in them and their social/political character as public demands and government capabilities move in different directions.

Increasing urbanization in developing countries will pose challenges for provision of transportation, services and food unless there is substantial simultaneous economic growth. This suggests that quality of life in those urban places is likely to deteriorate and some of the gains made over the last few decades in eradicating deep poverty in them will be lost. In more developed countries the main concern is that age. Where a decline in the working age population is offset by immigration from less developed nations this will probably lead both to changes in the cultural character of places and to more racial discord.

The uneven distribution of the impacts of climate change, especially extreme events that cause disastrous damage in particular places but leave most others unscathed, will add a geographical dimension to political divisions, especially because it seems to be the case that less advantaged places are those that will suffer much of the damage. It also seems likely that the costs of mitigation and adaptation will be an increasing economic burden that will require trade-offs with other political priorities, such as the provision of affordable housing. that will be obvious in specific communities.

Of particular relevance for places is the suggestion that local governments and cities are likely to become more consequential because proximity and flexibility allows them to address problems that impact everyday life, including international issues such as climate change and immigration (see page 88). In other words, relatively local places will exercise increasing initiatives in dealing with problems that may be global in scope, and their attempts will be facilitated by digital connectivity. At the same time, local proposals for dealing with aging populations, climate adaptation and higher densities of urbanization, will be increasingly contested, partly because of nimbyism and partly because of the emergence of locally vociferous silos of disinformation.

If there is a revival of democracies, which currently seems unlikely, it would be manifest in revival of pride in place associated with processes for finding modest but acceptable approaches to adapting places to the diverse challenges that will emerge in the next two decades. If, however, the future is one of a world adrift, local places could become microcosms of the national and international discord.

Competitive coexistence seems to be an extension of how the Covid pandemic has been handled – a global problem addressed separately by individual nations, and in many cases by provinces or states within those nations, using different strategies to do the best for themselves. A common thread will be to put short-term economic gain above longer term social benefits, and this could easily result in things being worse off everywhere. In a future of Separate Silos places would be determined by ideas of exceptionalism, with local and regional fiefdoms doing their own thing regardless of broader consequences, where versions of nimbyism will be ascendent.

Tragedy and mobilization would means a very substantial shift of power and practice to the local level, because sustainability can only be successful through local initiatives that take into account regional, national and international patterns and processes. However the transition to this locally based but globally responsible awareness will involve profound upheavals and discord in everyday life in places as the character of jobs and businesses are changed, and as much political power shifts down from the level of the state to regions and municipalities.

Whichever scenario or combination of scenarios prevails over the next twenty years, it appears that everyday life in local places is going to become increasingly challenged as the effects of climate change and aging populations, which are currently in their initial phases, plus political discord, siloed views, and as deep disagreements about what should be done to address these and other challenges become more pronounced.

Hecataeus of Miletus published a map of the world about 500 BCE, and Eratosthenes of Cyrene is the person credited with creating the word “geography” about 225 BCE. In ancient Greece individuals were named for and identified by the place they had been born. More than two millennia later the novelist Lawrence Durrell (1969) claimed that: “as long as people keep getting born Greek or Italian or French their culture productions will bear the unmistakable signature of the place.”  

Whether you agree with Durrell or not, it always seems to have been accepted that people’s personal and social identities somehow reflect the identities of the places they come from or live in. In this post I consider what is meant by identity of and with place and how these meanings have recently begun to get increasingly varied.

Three Aspects of Identity
A “law of identity” in logic holds that everything is identical with itself. This may not seem very helpful, but it lies at the root of the legal assumption that identity is what makes each of us distinct from everyone else, something confirmed when we are required to provide proof of our identity. Similarly, the identity of a place is what makes somewhere different from everywhere else.

The notion of identity in mathematics takes this a step further because it refers to instances where apparently different things can be shown to be identical (as in proofs in algebra). While this sort of strict equivalence does not translate well to what happens in everyday life, it suggests that aspects of individual identities can be shared. In psychiatry personal identity is said to involve both a persistent sameness within oneself and a persistent sharing of some characteristics with others. Similarly, characteristics of the identity of place are shared between different places.

There is also a social form of place identity – the identity of persons with places. Both individually and as groups, we identify in some way with places, for instance where we were born (essential for proof of personal identity), or the region or city where grew up or now live.

Identity of A Place
The identity of a place consists of the unique combination of intrinsic characteristics that make it distinctive. This apparently straightforward definition is in fact elusive because “a place” can refer to anywhere from a room to a region to a nation. Fortunately it is easier to get a handle on identity because regardless of the size of place it is made up of three interrelated components that cannot be reduced to one another.

• Forms consist of topography, buildings, spaces and things. They are whatever would remain if people and all their activities were removed.

• Activities, or what goes on somewhere, including processes of ecological and other changes, land uses, and movements of traffic and people. Some of these can be observed and measured objectively.

• Meanings. Aesthetic, spiritual, political, cultural and ethical values associated with places, including memories, histories, traditions, symbols and plans for the future. These may be revealed in and reinforced by certain built forms and activities, perhaps most obviously in heritage, but are difficult to deduce from them. You have to know about the values people attach to places in order to see evidence of them.

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Three places that respectively stress forms, activities and meanings in their identities. The chapel at IIT in Chicago, designed by Mies van der Rohe. A system for measuring pedestrian flows outside stores devised by the survey firm Placemeter (see References at the end of this post). The grave of John McRae, who wrote the remembrance poem In Flanders Fields, in a WW1 cemetery near Ypres.

The identity of every place, no matter what size and no matter how bland or spectacular it seems, is comprised of these components. The relative weight of them varies. In some cases spectacular forms are dominant, others (for instance sports stadiums) may be little more than empty spaces until filled by events, and some otherwise innocuous places (for instance, military cemeteries) are filled with meaning though their forms are minimal and they have almost no activities.

The identities of places change over time as buildings are added, trees grow, new technologies are introduced, fashions shift, and events happen that are incorporated into place memories and meanings. These changes are mostly incremental so that place identity, somewhat like personal identity, has continuity and persistent sameness. In addition, aspects of the components of place identity, such as landforms, architectural styles, types of land use, festivals, and religious beliefs are widely shared, so that different places have enough in common to make them more or less comprehensible even if their environments and cultures are unfamiliar.

Identity with Place
The identities of places can be considered quite dispassionately, especially if the focus is on forms and activities, for example, in planning reports. In contrast, identity with place involves emotions and feelings. The composer Frédéric Chopin identified deeply with his homeland of Poland. He left in the 1830s because of political upheavals there and never returned, but always carried a jar of Polish soil with him.  When he was buried in Paris, his heart was, in accordance with his wishes, taken to Warsaw for burial.

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Such intense identity with place may be rare, but where we come from is a basic fact of existence that enters in our personality. For some it may be little more than a line in a passport, but for others it is essential to self-identity, reinforced by memories of landscapes and events, accents, attitudes, and beliefs that comprise an individual’s geographical past. Elena Liotta, a psychoanalyst, writes in her book Soul and Earth” (2009): “A place takes on meaning as a result of the sensations and emotions elicited and the consequent attachments formed…External space becomes interior space, a subjective space and time of experience, memory and emotions” (p.6). And…“If one knows how to look the beginnings hold everything” (p.41). In other words, where we come from echoes through our subconscious.

Shifting Attachment to Place
Identity with place overlaps with the idea of what environmental psychologists and others have called “place attachment” (see Lewicka 2011, Manzo and Devine-Wright 2014, Seamon 2014). Their research demonstrates that for an individual place attachment is rarely static. It changes character as circumstances and intentions change, emerging out of involvement in typical daily goings on somewhere, and growing into becoming a member of a community in a place.

There is always a tension between mobility and place attachment, between roaming and putting down roots. Over a lifetime these processes of forming attachments to a place may be repeated several times in various locations. This is the case for migrants who form identities with very different places that are separated by oceans and continents. For groups of migrants this process of identifying with a new place often involves changing the identities of a place by grafting names, temples, stores and restaurants, and culturally specific activities onto the forms and landscapes of the places they have moved to.

Decline of the Born and Bred Narrative of Identity with Place
The tension between mobility and attachment has been clarified by Stephanie Taylor’s research (2010) into the relationship between women’s identities and place in contemporary societies. This brings into question what she refers to as the “born and bred cliché” that home town, home country, or native land “produces a sense of belonging and sense of identity as a person of that place” (p.22). This link has been weakened by increased mobility and changes in the character of place attachment

Place, she argues, is shifting from its former meaning as a geographical context to a community constructed through choice.  Place now is as much chosen as it inherited. Retirement communities in locations with pleasant climates, the choice of place to go to university, and gay villages are indications of this. Taylor suggests that for the women she studied identity with place has evolved to become an open-ended process, partly personal and partly related to changing social contexts. A place, she suggests, is chosen because it matches who a woman want to be.

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Diversification of Identity and Place
That identity with place is shifting away from the born and bred narrative  is reinforced by an annotated bibliography prepared by Marco Antonsich (2014). This focuses on work by geographers, but also includes contributions by philosophers, psychologists and others. It demonstrates the increasingly wide range of recent research on identity and place, which he puts into three broad categories.

• Phenomenological accounts by humanistic geographers and the empirical research of environmental psychologist into place attachment that stress aspects of belonging to a physical environment such as a home or neighbourhood.  In various ways these tend to contribute to the born and bred narrative.

• Geographies of difference associated with gender, sexuality, race and class that raise issues about inclusion and exclusion in place identity. This research emphasizes the roles of society and politics rather than a geographical setting in place experiences, and that for some groups these can mean identity with place can be a negative rather than a positive experience. For refugees and migrant workers living in camps, prisoners, the homeless or poorly housed, women experiencing violence at home identity with place involves unpleasant necessity, drudgery, disconnection, tension rather than belonging.

• Investigations of globalization explore how processes of global economic flows transnationalism and cosmopolitanism challenge the role of geographical contiguity in place identity because they involve attachments and relationships to several different places. For migrants these can be profoundly different, both environmentally and culturally. However, electronic communications, international travel and social media have facilitated identity with many places, eased the intensity of differences, and made choice of places increasingly possible, not for everyone but for many.

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On the left, “A place where people want to be” is Mississauga, a city adjacent to Toronto. “Vote Green because we love this place” was an election poster in British Columbia, 2018.

Comment
It’s obvious that the identities of actual places, both large and small, have undergone huge changes in the last half century. Skyscrapers, suburbs, big box stores, tourist resorts, container ports, deforestation, homeless camps, deindustrialization, gentrification, industrial scale agriculture, mass migration from less to more developed countries, international airports. These may have change the identities of places. They have not undermined the logic of place identity. The basic components of forms, activities and meanings still apply, and sharing aspects between places has simply intensified with increased international travel and communication.

It is less obvious how changes in the identities of places have affected and been affected by shifts in how people identify with places.  Inherited, born and bred identities with places, which prevailed for much of history, have recently given ground to attachments with many places, either because of migration or through options to work in or travel to different parts of the world. Over the course of one or two generation, identity with place has for many people become a matter of choice rather than necessity. 

Lockdowns and travel restrictions because of the Covid-19 pandemic have halted this trend.  The identities of places have changed little, but our relationship to the places where we live has been abruptly brought in sharp focus as the choice to move elsewhere has been dramatically reduced.  My sense is that responses to this are mixed.  There is support for whatever is local – businesses, outdoor recreation, volunteering for those in need, street performances by musicians. But there is also a frustration with, in effect, being confined to a place and with lost opportunities to travel.  As the pandemic subsides the outcome seems likely to be a surge of enthusiasm for travel to other places, a return to trends previously underway  to form identities with many places and to choose places with communities of like-minded people. My hope is that these trends might be tempered by an enhanced identity with the places we live in them because we have learned out of necessity to appreciate their value.

Antonsich. M., Identity and Place, 2013 in B. Warf (ed.) Oxford Bibliographies in Geography, New York: Oxford University Press, available online here.

Durrell, Lawrence, 1969 Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel,  London: Faber and Faber.

Lewicka M,. 2011 “Place Attachment: How far have we come in the last 40 years?” Journal of Environmental Psychology, 31(3), 207-230

Liotta, Elena. 2009 On Soul and Earth: The psychic value of place. London: Routledge.

Manzo, Lynne and Devine-Wright, Patrick (eds), 2014 Place Attachment: Advances in theory, Methods and Applications, New York: Routledge.

Placemeter was a company that from 2013 developed “computer vision and machine learning algorithms to transform video streams from public cameras into data about the volume and direction of pedestrians, bicycles, bikes, and vehicles.” I believe it was acquired by Netgear in 2016.

Seamon, David, 2014 “Place Attachment and Phenomenology: The Synergistic Dynamism of Place” in Manzo, L. and Devine-Wright, P (eds) Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications, New York: Routledge

Taylor, Stephanie, 2010 Narratives of identity and place, London: Routledge,

In a previous post I provided a synopsis of what I think are the four most important interacting trends that will affect the future of places – the place legacy, demographic changes, urbanization and climate change. To keep my discussion concise I abbreviated some data that supports my argument and did not refer to all the sources I had used.  This (and two other posts, on place legacy and population, and on urbanization) are really long footnotes or appendices to that previous post which provide background material, data, and details about sources I used.

This post considers climate change (an issue on which there is a constant flow of material updating models and projections), shifts in world views that could have implications for places, and offers some concluding comments about the future of places.

Climate Change
Much of my interpretation of the impacts of climate change on places is based on the 2018 IPCC Special Report on the impact of 1.5C global mean temperature increase and the importance of taking significant actions before 2030. This report indicates what is required to meet the 2016 Paris Accord on climate change to keep the warming below 2C.

All IPCC reports are challenging, partly because the scientific models are complex, and partly because they have, in effect, been written by committees and have to be approved by almost two hundred participating nations. This particular report is a sort of literature review, the diagrams are complicated and much of the information is so carefully qualified it is difficult to grasp.

The clearest statement on the implications of global warming I have identified is Cross Chapter Box 8, Table 2, in Chapter 3, Impacts of 1.5C warming on Natural and Human Systems, near the end of section 3.7 Knowledge Gaps. This offers three scenarios of possible futures, one in which there is immediate strong international support for achieving net zero emissions; a second in which actions are delayed beyond 2030 but implemented after the effects of climate change become apparent; a third in which actions are uncoordinated and not taken until late in the century and the global temperature increases to 3C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

In the latter two cases the consequences will be considerable. A 3C rise, the report suggests, will mean that from the perspective of 2100 the world as it was in 2020 is no longer recognizable. Migration and forced displacement will be extensive in some countries, the well-being of people will generally have decreased, and levels of poverty increased. See also this discussion at new cities about climate migration.

This Special Report was written in the context of a well-argued assumption that a doubling of atmospheric C02 will lead to a global mean temperature increase of between 1.5C and 4.5C. Recent research re-examining this assumption has concluded that the range of probable warming will be narrower than this, probably somewhere between a minimum of 2.6C (which is higher than the preferred Paris Accord value) and maximum of 3.9C. Less than was feared, but more than was hoped. With a global mean temperature increase of 2.6C there will still be an array of serious impacts and emissions need to be sharply curtailed to prevent anything more than that.

The IPCC Special Report is clear that: “There is no single 1.5 C warmer world.” This is because the effects will differ from region to region. In addition, there are varying degrees of uncertainty about the consequences of climate change, partly because they are so complex, partly because they interact with other environmental, social and economic processes, and partly because the effects of actions taken to mitigate them could be delayed. There are also possibilities of overshoot and tipping points that lead to a cascade of consequences that cannot be reversed. To acknowledge these uncertainties the report is filled with terms such as Likely, Very Likely, High Confidence, Medium Agreement etc. Nevertheless, the overall and clear conclusion is that the effects of climate change are going to be severe unless substantial mitigation measures are implemented very soon.

These effects can seem obscure when they are stated in general terms about degrees of warming or migrations. A straightforward indication of their impact on specific cities in Canada is indicated in a forecast of the increase of the number of very hot days (exceeding 30C). Several cities will go from under two weeks of very hot weather to about two months, which greatly increases heat related health problems. See also this interactive website about weather condition in  cities in 2100.

A particularly pessimistic indication the future effects of climate warming is suggested by research about increases in heat and humidity that will result in conditions too severe for human tolerance. This has suggested that there is evidence that wet bulb temperatures exceeding 35C (the upper physiological limit for prolonged exposure), which climate models projected to happen initially in mid-century, have already been reached or approached in localized cases in South Asia, coastal Middle East and coastal south east North America.

A recent article in the New York Times by Abrahm Lustgarten suggests that currently about 1 percent of the world experiences temperatures that make it barely livable, and if current trends continue by about 2070 as much as 19 percent could become an unlivable hot zone spreading across Africa from Nigeria to Ethopia, plus most of India and Pakistan, large parts of Indonesia, an a section of northern Australia. I can’t find another source for this particular projection but if it is accurate many of the places in these regions will have to be abandoned. Even if things turn out to be less severe, there is still a very strong possibility that climate warming and sea level rises will lead to mass migration. The article provides strong evidence that crop failures caused by climate change in Central America have already led to migrations, and that sea level rises and increasing salination could cause severe problems in the Mekong Delta, the Nile Delta and Iraq. Some recent research suggests 300 million people could experience annual flooding by 2050 if there are no significant reductions in C02 emissions, many of them in China and Indonesia, but Miami, New Orleans, New York, Boston and San Francisco are probably among the top ten cities that will be most impacted.

On the other hand a recent report about successful adaptations to climate change in the Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100 offers a promising instance of how successful warning systems and evacuation procedures can be. A typhoon during the pandemic caused very little loss of life because effective procedures are now in place. Even so, the monsoons in 2020, perhaps the heaviest in a decade, have resulted in one third of the country being underwater and have displaced 1.5m people.

From a different perspective a recent article in The Atlantic makes that important point that it will be necessary to transition several countries, including Nigeria, Algeria, Libya, Mexico and Iraq, from economies dependent on oil to economies that are climate friendly and this will not be easy. In Nigeria half government revenue is dependent on oil; recent price declines already mean a substantial loss of income in a country where 80 million people live on less than $1 a day. The consequences of failing to manage a smooth transition will increase the fragility associated with weakened governments, economic depression, international migration, severe violence and terrorism.

Changing Worldviews
In a previous blog I discussed the way that rationalism has lost its once privileged position. Some philosophical sources for this are the various writings of Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, and Stephen Toulmin. Not every philosopher agrees of course, but it has become very difficult to maintain that an objective, materialist view of the world is the only valid or most correct one.

As rationalism loses its privileged position other perspectives are emerging, including, for example, those that emphasize gender and racial inclusion. From the perspective of place I think the following are particularly important.

Ecology and Environment. I am not aware of anyone else who has made my argument that the idea of working with natural processes rather than subjecting them to human domination is an innovation of the last 150 years, initially manifest in the creation of national parks (and at about the same time coining the word ‘ecology;), followed by the conservation movement, environmentalism, ecological planning, and most recently sustainability. It seems clear that this ecological view has become increasingly widely accepted and is certainly in the background of the Green New Deal. It can only become stronger as the impacts of climate change become more apparent.

Electronic Communications: Marshall McLuhan’s argument that the medium is the message means that the prevailing medium of communication has a powerful affect on enduring social practices and values. In other words, how things are communicated is, in terms of social processes, more important that what is communicated. As one example, the linearity and straightforward clarity of printing provided a mostly visual medium that has made possible scientific rationalism and linear, orderly thinking. In contrast, electronic media have characteristics of oral media that promote more emotional forms of communication with an emphasis on feelings and opinions rather than objective evidence.  Although electronic communication began with the telegraph in the 1840s, it has only since 1990 and the invention of the world wide web that it has acquired a popular and almost omnipresent presence.  In less than 30 years it has been adopted by most people in the world (over 50 percent use the internet in some way) and its impacts on social life and politics have been extensive and intensive.  

Place-based localism is a relatively recent phenomenon, especially in the current form that involves electronic links between specific places, though its roots as an explicit idea go back to the 19^th century.  See my post discussing electronic media and place here.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz in Local Knowledge (Basic Books 1983, p.16), wrote that:: “To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. …. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others as an example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.”

The importance of localism in a global context has been recognized by UNESCO, while the 2018 IPCC Special Report refers frequently to the importance of local mitigation and adaptation in concert with international, national and regional actions, including the possible need for lifestyle changes and shifts in urban planning (see especially SR 1.5C Chapter 4). The Atlantic has had a series of articles about the achievements of local initiatives in the United States, in some cases in spite of federal and state indifference (for instance here).

While a turn to localism has many potential benefits for places, including improved sustainability, independence and self-sufficiency, and shorter supply chains, it does require cooperation between different levels of government if it is not to deteriorate into exclusionary attitudes and survivalist communities.  My main point is that, for good or bad, there seems to be a shift towards thinking about the world in terms of localities and places. This is an important rebalance from what has all too often been centralized policies and standardized practices that pay scant attention to whatever is local.  Localism now means understanding how places are interconnected electronically and through travel, and recognizes places in their regional, national and international geographical contexts.

Overview
My point in this series of posts about the history and future of places, and indeed this entire website, is that place is not some sort of incidental amenity.  Its value spans generations and cultures, and is manifest in attachment, belonging and dwelling somewhere, in acknowledging genii loci – the spirits of places – through the creation of sacred or protected sites, in putting down roots, and in a commitment to home and efforts to defend it and to rebuild after disasters. Although this value is not universally shared (some pay little attention to place because their interests are focused on economic gain or other matters), evidence from archeological sites and historical records shows that places always seem to have been important aspects of how people everywhere have experienced and modified the world. 

The conclusion I take from this is that people will find a way to make places that are relatively distinctive and meaningful regardless of the circumstances, no matter how bleak or difficult. Some aspects of those places are personal – gardens, decorations, memories. But their larger forms and appearances in villages, towns, neighbourhoods and cities are determined by prevailing social and cultural beliefs, circumstances and practices. While these constantly change in small ways, from time to time they have undergone substantial changes as populations have grown, civilizations have expanded or shrunk, technological innovations have happened, and new ideas about what is valuable and beautiful have emerged. Each era has left a place legacy that is a record of its more or less distinctive practices of placemaking, a record that is biased towards wealth and power because those are vested in structures such as pyramids, temples, castles, and palaces that were usually built to last.

Given this historical record, it is to be expected that the future of places will consist in part of a legacy of existing places, and in part of placemaking responses to changing social and environmental circumstances that, according to current projections, will include the considerable challenges of population decline, increasing urbanization, and the diverse impacts of climate warming, all of which are global in scope but local in both cause and impact.

At the present time it is far from clear how these challenges will be met and therefore what associated changes to the character of places where people live will be like. This is partly because so much attention is focused on short term concerns and the absence of any widely shared vision of the future. In the current moment this means coping with the covid-19 pandemic in the broader context of political partisanship, the apparent decline of democracy, geopolitical realignments, faltering globalization, the disruptive effects of social media and electronic communication, growing inequality, and in the background concerns about genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. These are problems that are actually or potentially interconnected in ways that are so complicated that they resist straightforward representation or understanding.

This complexity makes it impossible to predict what or indeed whether substantial changes to the character of places will happen in the course of this century. There is no obvious emerging worldview or philosophy, equivalent for instance to rationalism with its companion renaissance aesthetic and notions of progress in the seventeenth century, or industrialization in the early nineteenth century, that might provide hints about how urban neighbourhoods and places in 2050 or 2100 might differ in appearance and character and the patterns of everyday life from those of 2020. What can be said with a reasonable degree of confidence is that places will be mostly in very large cities, some of which in the developed regions of the world will already have declining populations and many of which in less developed areas will be slums of some sort. And unless very substantial actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are taken in the next few years, which seems increasingly unlikely, almost all of them will experience hotter and more extreme weather, in some cases so extreme that large sections of their populations will be forced to migrate to places in more moderate climates, where they are unlikely to be very welcome.

To put it succinctly, projections of population, urbanization and climate change, which are probably the most dependable projections available, suggest that the future of places in the twenty-first century, will for many people, be filled with increasing and unprecedented challenges for which past practices offer few solutions. There is currently little to suggest that new ways of making places will develop to address these challenges.

In a previous post I provided a synopsis of what I think are the four most important interacting trends that will affect the future of places – the place legacy, demographic changes, urbanization and climate change. To keep my discussion concise I abbreviated some data that supports my argument and did not refer to all the sources I had used.  This (and two other posts, on place legacy and population, and on climate change and worldviews) are really long footnotes or appendices to that previous post which provide background material, data, and details about sources I used.

Urban Places and Urbanization
My main source of information on urbanization is UN World Urbanization Prospects [>data in Excel Files>Urban and Rural Populations>File 3, and >Urban Agglomerations>various files]. I have supplemented this with the illustrations and interpretations at Our World in Data Urbanization (based mostly on UN information).

	1950	1960	1970	1980	1990	2000	2010	2020	2030	2040	2050
World Urban Population in millions	751	1024	1354	1754	2290	2868	3595	4379	5167	5938	6680
% Urban	29.6%	33.8%	36.6%	39.3%	43.0%	46.7%	51.7%	56.2%	60.4%	64.5%	68.4%
More Dev in millions	446	560	674	762	830	884	954	1004	1050	1090	1124
% Urban	54.8%	61.1%	66.8%	70.3%	72.4%	74.2%	77.2%	79.1%	81.4%	84.0%	86.6%
Less Dev in millions	305	464	680	992	1460	1984	2641	3375	4118	4848	5556
% Urban	18.1%	21.5%	25.3%	29.4%	34.9%	40.1%	46.1%	51.7%	56.7%	61.3%	65.6%

Although there is limited consistency in definitions between countries of what constitutes “urban,” (municipalities? metropolitan regions? built-up agglomerations?), so precise numbers are open to question, the trend towards increasingly urban populations and places is unarguable. The present is and the future will be overwhelmingly in towns and increasingly large cities.

The pattern of growth of urban populations in developed countries varies. Japan’s urban growth surged in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, but dropped to zero in the 2010s, and is expected to decline by 5 to 6 million a decade to 2050. In Germany and Spain urban populations grew rapidly in 50s and 60s but since then have stabilized at 1 to 2 million a decade. Growth of urban population in the U.S. has ranged from 15 million in the 1970s to 33 million in 1990s, and is expected to continue at about 25 million a decade to 2050. (Note that The Lancet population projections suggest faster declines and slower growth).

The 2020 Data Booklet on the Global State of the Metropolis by UN Habitat notes that what is significant about recent urban growth everywhere is that it has been increasingly concentrated in very large cities, urban agglomerations, metropolitan regions that have multiple centres (often an old core surrounded by several peripheral newer ones). This is expected to continue.  Even in countries where overall population decline is projected, such as Japan and Spain, the largest cities are expected to at least maintain current populations.  In 2020 the UN indicates there are 1934 towns and cities with more than 300,000 people (now referred to by the UN as “metropolises”), with about 60 per cent of the world’s urban population.  Projections indicate that there will 429 additional metropolises by 2035 (or, as a recent Data Booklet by UN Habitat puts it dramatically, one every two weeks for 15 years). Almost all of these will, of course, be in Asia and Africa. By 2035 about 39 percent of the world’s population (3.47 billion) are projected to be living in metropolises with 300,000 or more people; cities of less than that will have about a quarter of the global population.

Population	>10.0m	5.0 to 10.0m	1.0m to 5.0m	500,000 to 1.0m	300,000 to 500,000
1950	2	5	69	101	129
1960	3	9	93	132	164
1970	3	15	127	190	225
1980	5	19	174	247	297
1990	10	21	243	301	416
2000	16	30	325	396	456
2010	25	39	380	439	494
2020	34	51	494	626	729
2030	43	66	597	710	827
2035	48	73	639	757	846

CITY	2020 Population	2030 Population	Growth 2020-2030
Delhi	30.3 m	39 m	8.7 million
Mumbai	19.3 m	24.5 m	5.2 million
Shanghai	27.0 m	32.0 m	5.0 million
Dhaka	21.0 m	28.0 m	9.0 million
Kinshasa	14.3 m	22.0 m	7.7 million
Lagos	14.4 m	20.6 m	6.2 million
Kampala	3.3 m	5.5 m	2.2 million
Dar es Salaam	6.7 m	10.8 m	4.1 million
London	9.3 m	10.2 m	0.9 million
Melbourne	4.9 m	5.7 m	0.8 million
Toronto	6.2 m	6.8 m	0.6 million
Atlanta	5.8 m	6.6 m	0.8 million
New York	18.8 m	19.9 m	1.1million
Paris	11.0 m	11.7 m	0.7 million

The UN Habitat Data Booklet indicates that between 1990 and 2015 urban land expansion rates were about double urban population growth rates. In other words, as populations were increasing densities were declining as metropolises spread outwards in relatively low density suburban, exurban and peri-urban settlements. This phenomenon is also apparent in the animations at the Atlas of Urban Expansion.

On New Cities in Africa and Asia:
Information about these is scattered. The ones in China are too numerous to mention here; there are also dozens in India, and many in other Asian countries and in Africa. Here’s a list in no particular order

Konza Technopolis, Nairobi
Gujarat International Finance Tech City (GIFT)
New Town, Kolkata
Gurgaon, New Delhi
King Abdullah Economic City, Saudi Arabia
Diomniadio, Senegal
Colombo Port City, Sri Lanka
Forest City, Malaysia.
Appolonia, Ghana
Hope City, Gracefield Island, near Lagos, Nigeria
Nova Cidade de Kilamba, Angola
Vision City, Kigali, Rwanda.
Putrajaya, Malaysia
Rawabi, West Bank Palestine
Duqum, Oman
Nurkent, Kazakhstan
Songdo, South Korea

Two general articles about the sameness or placeless character of these new cities are in Far and Wide, and The Guardian 2016:
For commentaries about new cities in India see this and this. The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Development Corridor includes 8 new cities in Phase 1 and eventually perhaps more than 20. There is a YouTube video on India’s 20 New Cities here.

On African new cities see “Which way for livable and productive cities in sub-Saharan Africa” from the World Bank; Africa’s New Billion Dollar Cities; Non-Places; and Jane Lumumba “Why Africa should be wary of its new cities”. who offers cautions from the perspective of a planner and cautions: “What is worrying is that there is little recognition of place, economy, context and even poverty in these cities”.

On Slums, Informal settlements and Poverty:
An academic overview and consideration of differences between formal and informal (slum) urban areas in Africa, how African urban dwellers actively enliven and shape their cities, is available here, (especially from paragraph 13 on, and the discussion about the lack of a clear line between formal and informal settlement). The growth of slums is described by UN Habitat in its Slum Almanac 2015, and in OurWorldinData-Urbanization see Urban Slum Populations.

In spite of huge strides since 1990 that have reduced the world’s proportion of people living in slums from 46 percent to 30 percent, the actual number of people in slums has not kept pace with population growth and has increased and perhaps stabilized at about 900,000 (Slum Almanac 2015, page 84). The Slum Almanac has concise case studies of 28 countries; in the Democratic Republic of the Congo 75 percent (22 million people), and in Nigeria 50 percent (42 million) and a decline from 75 percent in 1990 live in slums; in India the proportion is estimated to be 17 percent (about 100 million) and a decline from 55 percent in 1990.

The World Bank Strategy for Fragility, Conflict and Violence 2020-2025 estimates that by 2030 two thirds of the world’s extreme poor will live in cities threatened by fragility, conflict and violence. Violent conflicts have increased to the highest level in three decades; there are also the largest forced displacement ever, rising inequality and lack of opportunity, climate change, and violent extremism that are often interconnected.

The implication is that the places of the hundreds of millions of people living in deep poverty will be increasingly challenged by deteriorating environmental and political circumstances. They will be little more than temporary refuges, somewhere to hope and struggle for survival.

On Cities with Slow Growth and Incremental Change
My comments on places of slow growth are based mostly on my own observations of cities in More Developed Regions and how they have changed over the last fifty years.

Here some interesting details:
Densification: The City of Toronto is landlocked by other municipalities, so can only grow through densification.  In terms of coverage it was almost fully built over by about 1990, when the population was 2.3 million. But by 2018 the population had grown to an estimated 2.9 million, mostly because of the construction of high rise condominiums in the core (where there are some 90 story condominium towers) and along arterial roads. A projection by the Province of Ontario suggests that the population will be 4.3 million by 2046. I lived in Toronto for several decades and have no idea how this increase can be accommodated.
The urban agglomeration of the Toronto region, which is enclosed by a Greenbelt, is projected to increase from 6.5 million n 2108 to 10.2 million in 2046.
In neither case are there indications of substantial changes in placemaking practices and how this additional growth is to be accommodated.  Presumably more of the same, squeezed together and pushed up.

Flow through: Many world cities are destinations for international immigrants, many of whom then move elsewhere. In London natural increase contributes about 73,000 annually, domestic out-migration is means of loss of about 81,000, but international in-migration is about 79,000. So annual population growth is about 70,000. The population of London in 2020 is 8.9 m, and expected to rise to 10.4m in 2041.

Redistribution There has been speculation in the context of Covid-19 that there will be flight to the suburbs away from high density central parts of cities. Whether this is the case or not, the evidence of urban land expansion at faster rates than urban population growth noted above suggests that central city densification will be matched by suburban expansion. There is some indication more compact and higher density suburban residential developments. The development of peripheral city centres in suburban municipalities may be ways to achieve some mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions by reducing commuting to central areas. This certainly appears to be the case in the Toronto region, which is developing as a polycentric metropolis.

The range of challenges of urban planning for a slow growing but changing cities: The Chicago Plan is a helpful model. It acknowledges the need to respond to decreasing federal state and local revenues, decaying infrastructure, climate change, and aging and diversifying populations

On Immigration and Hybrid Places:
A report by the US Census Bureau in February 2020 provides population projections under alternative immigration scenarios – zero, high, and low, as a supplement to standard projections that assume a continuation of present policies and trends. The standard projection (main series) is for a total population of 404 million in 2060. With high immigration the population is projected to reach 447 million by 2060, an increase of 124 million; in the low scenario it would reach 376 million. But with zero migration population will peak in 2035 at 333 million and decline to 320 million by 2060. In all scenarios the non-Hispanic white population will decline, but in the zero immigration strategy it would decline most – by 35 million.
(For comparison: the UN medium variant population projection for the US in 2060 is 395 million, and for zero immigration it is 333 million).

The implication is clear. If the population in the US is to grow it has to become more racially diverse. This is, in fact, the case in all countries in Europe, North America and Australia and New Zealand. And because immigration is concentrated in cities, the places and communities in those cities will become increasingly hybrid.

On Shrinking Cities:
There is a Shrinking Cities Research Network that has been mostly concerned with rustbelt cities in Germany and North America. As a specific case Detroit has coped with shrinking population for several decades and has a Demolition Department that has demolished 20,000 houses since 2014, and boarded up 21,000 more – a process that helps to protect and even enable the renovation of remaining dwellings. 
Additional discussions of shrinking cities are at available here and there is an interesting examination by Francisco Sergio Campos-Sanchez et al, 2019, “Sustainable Environmental Strategies for Shrinking Cities based on successful case studies” in the International Journal of Environment and Public Health.

I am, however, aware of no discussions of the problems that will be presented by overall population decline in the second half of this century for urban and regional planning, and what this will mean for places and communities.  The population forecasts published in July 2020 in The Lancet, discussed above, consider the health, social and possibly beneficial environmental consequences of sharp population declines that they identify as having already begun in 23 developed countries, and of peak population globally in 2064.

But there is no consideration in the Lancet article or, to my knowledge anywhere else, of what a 50 percent reduction in population will mean for the places where people live and no likelihood of future growth. From the perspective of place this amounts to something like a slow progression into a post-apocalyptic future of abandoned buildings and neighbourhoods being gradually overwhelmed by decay and invasive vegetation. At the very least it requires planning for the sorts of problems currently faced by Detroit – strategies for the ad hoc demolition of abandoned houses and apartment buildings. Should remaining inhabitants be clustered in compact settlements? How can that be accomplished? Or should some sort of very low density, dispersed pattern of places be permitted? But in this case, how can infrastructure of sewers, water supply and transit be maintained? What will happen to networks of expressways and hundred story skyscrapers that are no longer needed? Will places crumble like Rome in fifth century CE or be overtaken by vegetation like Mayan cities? Or will some sort of new, sustainable approach to places emerge?

In a previous post I provided a synopsis of what I think are the four most important interacting trends that will affect the future of places – the place legacy, demographic changes, urbanization and climate change. To keep my discussion concise I abbreviated some data that supports my argument and did not refer to all the sources I had used.  This (and two other posts, on urbanization, and on climate change and worldviews) are really long footnotes or appendices to that previous post which provide background material, data, and details about sources I used.

In this post I discuss existential risks and tipping points (which I only mentioned briefly in the synopsis of the future of places), and data and sources supporting both my suggestion that last seventy years created the largest ever legacy of places, and projections for peak population and decline later in this century.

Existential Risks and My Approach
In November 2016 the New Scientist, to acknowledge the 60^th anniversary of its first edition, speculated about what the next sixty years might hold. The editors noted sagely that thinking about the future will be bound to get most things wrong but nevertheless noted that there are growing environmental, economic and political threats, artificial intelligence could go rogue, and civilization is a complex adaptive system potentially subject to catastrophic failure.  

This mostly bleak view of the future is widely shared, but there are some optimists who stress the incredible accomplishments in science and technology, and in reducing poverty and improving health and well-being, over the last two centuries and see no reason to assume that this sort of progress will not continue { e.g. Matt Ridley The Rational Optimist  http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/best-decade-in-history/; Johan Norberg Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future; Stephen Pinker Enlightenment Now).

My approach to the future of places falls somewhere between those extremes of bleakness and progress. It is based mostly on projections of trends (population, urbanization, climate change) for which strong evidence is available, and the possible interactions of these. There are, however, three ways these can be wrong that I scarcely mentioned in my post on the Future of Places.

First, while projections for the next decade or two are reasonably dependable, they become increasingly uncertain the further they are from the present. This is made very clear in the UN diagram showing the range of population projections for 2100 (see below under Population Growth).

Secondly, trends can be upset by exceptional events such as nuclear conflicts, the possibility of artificial intelligence becoming self-reproducing in ways beyond human control, or widespread political and social upheaval (and perhaps more pandemics). These are unpredictable and their consequences for places are uncertain. Concerns about them are expressed in the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock (which currently shows how dire are the combined threats of nuclear war and climate change, compounded by possible cyber enabled warfare and weakening international security), The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

Thirdly, there is the possibility of tipping points leading to a cascade of unexpected changes.  These are much discussed in models of climate change but the idea has wider application (see this article in Nature).

A tipping point occurs when change, whether rapid or slow, become irreversible as it passes a threshold that leads to a different stable state (for instance, melting of Arctic sea ice could lead to a shift in the circulation of Atlantic Ocean currents which will not revert to its previous condition even if processes that led to the change are removed).  For places social and political revolutions and technological innovations (such as the invention of the city, and automobiles and mass production) have been critical tipping points. It is possible that the development of electronic media will lead to a social tipping point in this century, as could rapid climate warming.

There also appear to be growing possibilities of major political and social shifts in the 21^st century – including the decline of democracy (e.g. Anne Applebaum’s recent book The Twilight of Democracy), the end of capitalism as we know it (even the World Economic Forum is speculating about a great reset), and increasing inequality (e.g.Thomas Piketty, see his World Inequality Database), that could separately or in combination lead to revolutions and violence both national and international.  These would obviously have profound impacts on place experiences, and perhaps on placemaking and the character of places as institutions and social relationships are reorganized.

Legacy of Present Places
In my post on the Future of Places I claimed that the unprecedented scale of recent changes to places plus the fact that this scale of change will never be repeated because rates of population growth have peaked, has the consequence that the legacy of present places will inevitably play a major role in the future of places. Without pressure to rebuild and expand much of what we have now will stay much as it is.

Here are some population data that support this assertion, taken from UN Population Prospects 2019 (go to>Data Files>Standard Projections>Total Population Both Sexes which provides populations for the world, more and less developed regions, and individual countries from 1950 to 2100. Forecasts to 2100 are on separate sheets in the Excel Spread Sheet). I have used the Median Variant Projection, which is the considered the most likely one.

	1950	1960	1970	1980	1990	2000	2010	2020
World Population (billions)	2.5	3.0	3.7	4.5	5.3	6.1	7.0	7.8
	2030	2040	2050	2060	2070	2080	2090	2100
Projected World Population (billions)	8.5	9.2	9.7	10.2	10.5	10.7	10.8	10.9

The time sequences (animations) of urban growth in 30 major cities in different parts of the world available at the online Atlas of Urban Expansion effectively convey the scale of recent place growth cartographically. I find the animations for Beijing, Sydney, Cairo, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Paris particularly interesting.

My key point is that because population is a driver of placemaking, the last 50-70 years have seen the greatest expansion of and changes to places that is ever likely to occur.  From now on population pressure to build more places and expand existing ones will decrease, especially in the developed world. Only in Africa will place creation driven by population growth continue until the end of the century. And by 2100 it seems very probable that, for the first time ever there will be no overall population increases driving placemaking practices.   

Population Growth
Population projections are based on assumptions about fertility, mortality and migration that become increasingly uncertain with time from the present. The UN provides a number of projections using different assumptions. For 2100 the range is from a low of 7.5 billion to a high of over 15 billion, a range roughly equivalent to the current global population. In between these the median variant is considered the most likely and is the one most frequently cited.

Excellent summaries and illustrations of population growth (based on the UN data) are available at ourworldindata. This website also illustrates the population forecast of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography, which has a median forecast showing global population peaking about 2070, thirty years sooner than the UN forecast.  The difference is mostly because of different assumptions about growth in Africa.

To understand the impact of population growth on places it is helpful to look at where and when most recent growth has happened and is forecast to happen. One way to do this is to compare population added per decade using the categories of More Developed Regions (Japan, Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand) and Less Developed Regions (everywhere else), that the UN has used since 1950.

	1950-59	1960-69	1970-79	1980-89	1990-99	2000-10	2010-20
World	499m	665m	758m	869m	816m	813m	838m
More dev	102m	92m	75m	62m	43m	46m	39m
Less dev	397m	573m	683m	807m	773m	767m	799m

	2020-29	2030-39	2040-49	2050-59	2060-69	2070-79	2080-89	2090-99
World	754m	650m	536m	416m	308m	215m	136m	66m
More dev	13m	1m	-7m	-13m	-13m	-8m	-3m	1m
Less dev	741m	650m	544m	429m	321m	223m	139m	66m

In Less Developed Regions (and the world as a whole) growth per decade peaked in the 1980s and will continue at slowing rates until the end of the century (or sooner if the Wittgenstein and Lancet projections are correct). Growth per decade in More Developed Regions peaked in the 1950s and will slide into absolute decline in the 2040s, possibly stabilising at the end of the century. The UN population projections for individual countries show that most of the decline will be because of drops in Japan and some European countries, while North America and Australia are expected to continue to grow slowly. 

	Russia	Japan	Poland	Ukraine	Italy	Spain	Greece
2020	145m	125m	38m	43m	60m	47m	10m
2030	143m	120m	37m	40m	59m	46m	10m
2050	135m	100m	33m	35m	54m	43m	9m
2100	126m	75m	23m	24m	40m	33m	6m
Total Decline 2020-2100	-19m	-52m	-15m	-19m	-20m	-14m	-4m

The Lancet projections, which assume low fertility rates, indicate more substantial declines – with 23 countries showing a population of decline of 50 percent between now and 2100, including Japan, Thailand, Ukraine, Spain, Hungary, Poland, South Korea, Greece and Italy.

In some countries in More Developed Regions, for instance Germany and the U.K., populations have been maintained or increased slowly by immigration. Population forecasts in these countries have to make assumptions about continuing immigration policies. In the United States the Census Bureau offers a series of projections based on assumptions about zero, low, high and present rates of immigration. With zero immigration the present population of 330 million could drop to 326 million by 2050, and with high immigration it could increase to 420 million.  With continuation of present immigration policies the population should increase to about 380 million in 2050.

Peak population followed by decline raises numerous issues for social and health planning. The population projections in The Lancet consider these and also economic implications and impacts on GDP. The conclusion is that these are variable, so Italy and Spain may see a drop in GDP but this will not be the case in Japan. A more fundamental question is whether overall economic growth is dependent on population growth, and population decline will have to involve the development of a new sort of economics based on sustainability without growth. (See: Wesley Peterson, 2017, “The Role of Population in Economic Growth.) If this is the case there is bound to be an impact on the character of places. However, there is no consistent answer, not least because Japan, where the population is aging but the total has not changed much for 20 years (about 127 million), has increased its GDP per capita faster than the United States, where the population has increased by 50 million since 2000. 

A Note on Approach
It has taken me longer to post this discussion about the future of places that I anticipated. This is partly because the coronavirus intervened but mostly because what I had naively expected to involve quite straightforward projections of current trends I had identified in previous posts turned out to involve unlikely outcomes and complex interactions. I spent some time lost in a maze of speculations about technological, political and economic possibilities, and then decided to focus on just five overarching factors that I think offer a reasonable degree of certainty about what will happen to places this century, especially in the near future. These factors are: the place legacy of the present, peak population, urbanization, climate change, and, somewhat more speculatively, shifts in a shared view of the world.

Speculations about the future frequently tend either towards dystopian bleakness or utopian marvels. My approach falls somewhere between these. It is based mostly on projections of existing trends. However, in order to keep this post as concise as possible I have compressed or omitted material and data that supports or qualifies my arguments. These I detail in three other posts that serve as footnotes or appendices to this one: 1. Legacy and Population, 2. Urbanization, and 3. Climate Change and World Views.

Definitions and Assumptions
First, however, I want to re-emphasize that what I mean by places are those aspects of the world, especially built environments, which have their own names and which we know directly because we encounter them in the course of daily life and travelling. Places in this sense include our homes, neighbourhoods, cities and regions. In our daily encounters with them it is their distinctiveness that is usually regarded as significant. However, for all their apparent uniqueness, the identities of places are in some respects the product of broad social, technological and environmental processes that sweep around the world like epidemics affecting everywhere in broadly similar ways, yet with distinctively local manifestations. These processes were once slow, taking decades or centuries to spread across continents, but in the recent past they have become increasingly fast moving and far-reaching. Here I am interested in the broad, large-scale processes that are likely to affect place identities over the course of the 21^st century.

My focus in previous posts on history and trends has been on Europe and North America. This corresponds reasonably well to the category of ‘more developed regions’ (Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan), used by the United Nations in its population and urbanization projections, and which informs my discussion here. My discussion also broadens to a worldwide scale both because most future growth will be in ‘less developed regions’ (everywhere else), and because, as the Covid-19 pandemic has shown so clearly, global connectivity is now a fact of everyday life.

The pandemic has also shown that established practices and expectations can be disrupted by unexpected events. In the 21^st century these include are two widely identified, potentially catastrophic disruptions to places: nuclear conflict and runaway artificial intelligence. I do not consider these, nor other unpredictable existential risks and possible technological misfortunes. I also do not consider possible tipping points when change, whether rapid or slow, become irreversible as it passes a threshold that leads to a different stable state. These could be environmental (particularly associated with climate change) or political (such as the decline of democracy and rise of autocracy, or revolutions), but are unpredictable and avoidable if appropriate measures are taken. My focus is on projections of current trends.

The Legacy of Present Places
The built environments of places are enormous investments of time, effort and money that tend to survive political and economic upheavals, at least those that are short-lived events, and last as long as they continue to have value. The consequence is that every generation inherits a legacy of places and leaves its own legacy to the future.

The place legacy of the present age, which I define as beginning about 1970, is the largest there will ever be. Never before have so many places been made to accommodate so many people, more than four billion, in such a short time. And a legacy of this scale will never be repeated because for the first time in the history of humanity the growth rate of global population is now in steep decline with no likelihood of reversal.  

Since 1970 a frenzy of placemaking in the developed world has produced new towns, vast suburbs, downtown skylines transformed by skyscrapers, social housing projects, shopping malls, commercial strips, industrial parks, resort developments along coasts and in mountains, plus all the related infrastructures of expressway networks, airports, communication towers, container ports, high speed railways, and sewage treatment plants.  The present age is also the first to bequeath to the future thousands of heritage sites and environmental areas deliberately protected from change for the foreseeable future.

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Downtown and suburban Toronto. As far as I can tell the oldest thing visible in either of these photos is one of the black skyscrapers (designed by Mies van der Rohe) to the right of the CN Tower that was completed in 1968.

This legacy is so new and so extensive it is unlikely to be modified in a major way any time soon, which means there are unlikely to be many surprises in the near future in how places will be made and experienced. In the longer run, of course, the place legacy will age, and incremental changes made in response to fashions, technological innovations and climate change will accumulate. But if the legacy of the 19^th century to the present is any indication (railway lines and stations, institutional buildings, residential districts, entire towns), much of the legacy of the recent past is likely to be around for a very long time.

Peak Population and its Implications
The 21^st century is demographically exceptional. Projections (by the UN here, by the Wittgenstein Centre here, and most recently in The Lancet in July 2020 based on careful analyses of fertility rates and the impacts of education and contraception) show global population growing by about another 2 to 3 billion, which is much less than the growth of the last 50 years, then peaking and beginning to decline (the Lancet article suggests global population will peak at 9.7 billion in 2064, the UN suggests a peak 10.9 billion about 2100). The huge implication of this demographic reversal after millennia of continual growth will be a shift from needing more places for more people to fewer people in shrinking places.

Global population projections mask considerable unevenness in both time and space. Almost all future growth will happen in Asia and Africa, and after 2050 mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. For those regions the short-term challenge will be one of making new places and expanding existing ones. But in most of the more developed countries population growth through natural increase (i.e. internal growth because the number of births exceeds deaths) has already peaked and begun to drop (the U.S is an exception; there this is not expected to happen until about 2030). This drop has been offset by immigration, particularly from less developed countries, and this has led to the recent cultural and racial diversification of populations and especially urban places.

In countries where immigration has been limited, for instance Japan, Russia, Poland, Italy and Spain, total populations are beginning to decline. The Lancet projections are that populations in Japan, Spain, Italy Thailand, Poland, Hungary and about 20 other countries will by 2100 drop to half of their present numbers. These are the forerunners of the demographic transition associated with aging populations that will increasingly affect everywhere, including less developed nations. This transition will lead to widespread adjustments to places, including fewer children and schools, more hospitals and long term care facilities, and all the attendant social problems of an ever smaller working population supporting more elderly people. More speculatively, after peak population there could be to a transition to fewer, smaller places that are environmentally and demographically sustainable.

Urban Places and Future Urbanization
Regardless of whether overall populations grow or decline, the places of the future will be increasingly urban and in large cities, continuing trends that have been accelerating for some time.  There are five main aspects of this.

Urban Areas are Expanding Faster than Population: The UN Habitat Data Booklet indicates that between 1990 and 2015 urban land expansion rates were about double urban population growth rates. In other words, as populations were increasing densities were declining as metropolises spread outwards in relatively low density suburban, exurban and peri-urban settlements. This phenomenon is also apparent in the animations at the Atlas of Urban Expansion.

More People in More Urban Places: The UN, which has measured populations of ‘urban agglomerations’ since 1950, projects that at the global scale the proportion of people living in them will increase from about 55% now to almost 70% in 2050. Urban agglomerations include everything in some way urban – towns, cities, slums and shanties, suburbs, exurbs, satellite cities. This overall increase mask major differences between less and more developed regions.

New Cities and Slums in Less Developed Regions:  Almost all future urban growth, about 95%, will be in less developed regions, mostly Africa and Asia, where about 2.1 billion additional people will be added to urban areas by 2050. To put this in perspective, it is equivalent to building 10 megacities the size of London or Jakarta every year for 30 years. In fact, several hundred much more modestly sized cities are already under construction or planned, more than 100 in India alone (e.g. see here and here). Most are satellites of existing urban areas. They give a sense of what future places in new cities might be like. The preferred model seems to be new cities in China (which has invested heavily in African new cities) – skyscraper offices and apartment towers, wide boulevards with ample space for vehicles, an emphasis on hi-tech industries, a mixture of moderately dense residential areas, both high-rise and low-rise, and attention to sustainability and low carbon emissions. Nothing very remarkable in terms of place identities: an article in The Guardian expressed it this way: “The bland look of nonplace is perceived by local elites to be sign of successful modernity.” According to one observer many the of new cities built thus far in Africa do not pay much attention to the socio-economic realities of local people and appear to be “planned without inhabitants in mind.” Jane Lumumba, a planner, cautions that: “What is worrying is that there is little recognition of place, economy, context and even poverty in these cities.”

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Three new cities in less developed regions. Gurgaon, India; Konza Techno City, Kenya; Nova Cidade do Kimbala, Angola.

New cities will only meet a fraction of projected growth in less developed countries, much of which will be probably be accommodated in slums (places defined by the UN as lacking running water, sanitation, infrastructure, and sufficient dwelling space). There have been remarkable recent accomplishments in reducing poverty in many of these countries, but these have not been able to keep pace with population growth, and the scale of slums and informal settlements has actually expanded. In Nigeria 42 million people currently live in slums, in India about 100 million, numbers that can be expected to grow substantially. It is doubly unfortunate that many of these disadvantaged places and vulnerable populations are in regions of Africa and Asia where the consequences of climate change are expected to be especially harsh because of rising temperatures and more intense rainfalls.  

Incremental Change in Slowly Growing Cities in More Developed Regions:  The annual growth rate of urban populations in more developed regions has been declining for half a century. In the 1960s, when about 110 million people were added to cities and towns in Europe and North America, it was 2%. It is now about 0.5% and is expected to drop to 0.3% a year by 2040. In other words, overall urban growth in developed countries will slow to little more than a crawl by mid-century. This slowdown might seem to be belied by reality if you live in a city in Europe, Australia, or North America with a skyline crowded with cranes, and suburbs that always seem to push outwards. The explanation is that some larger cities and a few smaller ones seem to attract most of the limited growth, perhaps because of the quality of their environments or their role in the network of world cities. Other places will stagnate. Selective urban growth is expected to continue, and will happen even in countries where there will be overall population decline. It seems that bright lights are irresistible.

The character of future places is already established in plans and policies. This billboard projects change along a planned rapid transit route in a satellite city of Toronto. While change locally may be considerable, the character of the change to place is predictable.

Where growth does occur it seems unlikely that the character of urban places will alter quickly or significantly even though particular places may be substantially redeveloped. This is partly because of the enduring place legacy, partly because growth will be slow, and partly because current plans and policies will guide development along well-established lines for the next two or even three decades. Changes to built environments will be piecemeal and incremental, the result of individual projects. Their cumulative effects may in due course be considerable, but at the moment there is little evidence of radical architectural or planning approaches to suggest that they will hold any great surprises. In city centres there will probably be more densification with tall apartments and more bike lanes because these contribute to reductions of greenhouse gas emission. At urban fringes there will be more place branded, master-planned suburban developments, especially around satellite cities, where, unless something remarkable happens, personal motor vehicles of some sort will continue to be the preferred form of transport, continuing recent worldwide trends (including Europe).

The greatest changes will be social and demographic. Populations will age considerably, with fewer workers supporting more retirees, fewer child-care centres, more long-term facilities, and more elderly people complaining about the pace and character of change.  Places will become more racially and culturally diverse, reinforcing the hybrid identities of urban neighbourhoods that have already developed in many world cities as immigrants from less developed parts of the world make up for shortfalls in natural increases. Increasing diversity has large political and social consequences. In the U.S. the Census Bureau projects that with current immigration policies by 2060 the  “non-Hispanic White population“  will have shrunk by 19 million people while every other racial group will have increased.

Shrinking Cities: In regions and countries where immigration is not encouraged, such as Japan and Spain, or which are simply by-passed by growth, urban places will begin to shrink in population (though the largest cities such as Tokyo and Madrid are expected to maintain their magnetic properties and maintain or even increase their populations even as everywhere else declines). Without radical changes in immigration policies and attitudes regarding racial differences, shrinkage will accelerate towards the end of century as people age in place and peak population looms.

There really is no precedent for understanding the consequences of shrinkage on this scale and its political and economic consequences. But recent instances of shrinking cities in the rustbelts of America and Germany give some idea of what it might involve in detail (see here) – boarded up buildings, abandoned neighbourhoods and failing infrastructure. In a few cases, such as Youngstown in Ohio, a smaller future has been accepted and strategies for greening abandoned spaces have been created.

But I know of no discussions of what a 50 percent reduction in population on a widespread scale will mean for the places where people live and no likelihood of future growth. From the perspective of place this amounts to something like a slow progression into a post-apocalyptic future of abandoned buildings and neighbourhoods being gradually overwhelmed by decay and invasive vegetation. Should remaining inhabitants be clustered in compact settlements? How can that be accomplished? Or should some sort of very low density, dispersed pattern of places be permitted? But in this case, how can infrastructure of sewers, water supply and transit be maintained? What will happen to networks of expressways and 100-story skyscrapers that are no longer needed? Will places crumble like Rome in fifth century CE or be overtaken by vegetation like Mayan cities? Or perhaps some sort of new, sustainable approach with very different sorts of places will emerge.

The Place Consequence of Climate Change
Climate change permeates the future of places. It is a slow moving version of the Covid-19 pandemic. Both are global in range, ignore national boundaries, put the poor and vulnerable at greater risk than wealthy elites, involve exponentially increasing consequences that are easily dismissed before they become obvious by which time it is too late to do much to mitigate them effectively, demand forceful actions by governments, and have intense but erratic local effects.

Climate change has three distinct types of consequences for how places are likely to be experienced, managed and made in the future: changes in local and regional weather, mitigation measures, and adaptations.

First, it will affect regional and local weather patterns, most likely by making them more severe and erratic. These can take decades, perhaps centuries, to reveal themselves, though some are already apparent in record temperatures, floods and droughts. The 2018 Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which considers what needs to be done to keep the increase in global mean temperature to no more than 1.5C, offers a bleak overview prognosis for 2100 if no actions are taken and business continues much as usual – decreased life expectancies, huge reductions in outdoor labour productivity because it will be too hot to work and almost everywhere a lower quality of life [Chapter Box 8 Table 2]. Subsequent research indicates that large parts of Africa and South Asia, and parts of the Middle East and even the coastal United States, may well become uninhabitable because of intolerable combinations of heat and humidity. Rising sea levels and associated storm surges and salt-water incursions could impact 300 million people by 2050, not only in China, Indonesia, the Nile and Mekong deltas, but also cities that include Miami, New York and San Francisco. These regional impacts will almost certainly lead to substantial population displacements, especially in South Asia and Africa where population growth is projected to continue for several more decades.

An example of widespread shifts in local conditions that are occurring and will intensify as a result of climate change. Source, The Economist.

In short, if climate change is not kept within reasonable limits by stringent measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it seems probable that many places around the world may, by the end of the century, have to be abandoned. And even where changes in weather are more moderate the character of everyday life could become very different. For instance, in the number of days when the temperature stays above 30C in Toronto is projected to increase from about 12 in the 1980s, to 40 in 2050 to 55 in 2100.

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A Projection of the number of days above 30C in Canadian Cities (Winnipeg and Toronto could increase from two weeks 1961-1990, to more than two months 2080-2100); a student Friday Climate Strike in 2019. Source of Hot Days: Health Canada

Secondly, climate change can impact places  through measures that are implemented in an attempt to reduce global warming. The main purpose of the IPCC 2018 Special Report is to argue that if “far reaching” mitigation measures to reduce carbon emissions are taken before 2030 this should limit future temperature increase to 1.5C and this bleak future can be avoided. Many places around the world are already applying mitigation measures, for instance, replacing coal and oil energy production with renewables, and increasing residential densities to reduce urban sprawl, and implementing programmes to retrofit old building to make them more energy efficient. Some of these have had an obvious impact on places, such as fields of solar panels. Some such as retrofitting buildings to be more energy efficient are largely invisible. Others such as densification are often combined with other planning strategies, such as finding ways to accommodate growth, so their impacts on built environments are difficult to distinguish.

In spite of these measures substantial gaps remain between what has been done, what governments have promised to do, and what appears to be necessary to prevent potentially severe and irreversible consequences of climate warming. The far-reaching mitigation measures needed to achieve the 1.5C goal require more extensive wind farms and solar fields, an end to deforestation, greatly reduced beef and dairy farming, and radical changes to the character of urban places including much greater densification, limited use of personal vehicles, doubling urban forests, and somehow redistributing employment and commercial activity into local centres in order to reduce commuting. These sorts of urban initiatives might be possible in the new cities of Asia and Africa, and indeed some are being adopted. They will be much more difficult to implement in existing cities, regardless of whether these are in less or more developed regions, because substantial places legacies have a rigidity that make anything more than incremental measures both difficult and expensive. However, shrinking populations and cities could provide some measure of mitigation. 

Furthermore, there are already indications that these sorts of measures, for all their benefits, could be insufficient. The IPCC Special Report was based on the assumption that the build up of greenhouse gases over the last two centuries will lead to a temperature increase, thus far about 1.0C, somewhere between 1.5C and 4.5C.  Subsequent research re-examining this assumption has concluded that the range of warming will be narrower than this, but that the best case is a minimum increase of 2.6C, an increase that suggests a bleak future of challenging weather conditions for many places in the world.

Thirdly, regardless of the effectiveness of mitigation measures, place-based adaptations to more severe and erratic weather events resulting from climate warming will be necesssary. The IPCC Special Report refers to them as “transformational adaptations” and though they are not elaborated in detail they will have to be adapted to the environmental circumstances of particular places, for instance, sea walls to combat rising sea levels in coastal cities, and innovative building technologies to deal with melting permafrost in the Arctic. It is apparent from current practices that some, such as larger storm water drains to deal with intense rainfall events, or the warning systems and evacuation plans for floods and storm surges caused by typhoons in Bangladesh, will have few obvious impacts on the physical characteristics of places. However, others could involve major construction projects, for example barriers to prevent damage from storm surges, or installations for carbon capture. The most significant adaptations will involve the relocation of entire places from areas rendered uninhabitable because of extreme temperatures or because they are prone to sea level rise and flooding The latter include a number of world cities or at least large sections of them. As many as 13 million people in America might have to move elsewhere; more than 100 million in Africa (see here). Where they might relocate is not clear. Perhaps they could move to shrinking cities, but the increasingly exclusionary politics of many countries suggest that this is an unlikely outcome.

The Covid-19 pandemic has shifted attention away from climate change, and even though several countries have indicated that it remains a priority the likelihood is that it has been pushed down political agendas at the very time that mitigation measures are urgently required. A probable outcome is that measures already being implemented will continue to be made – shifting to renewable sources of energy, increasing densities, adding bike lanes, retrofitting old buildings, building sea walls, and so on.  However, if the assessments in the IPCC Special Report are correct, these will be insufficient to keep global warming under 3C by 2100. Long before then the challenges of population growth and urbanization in Africa and Asia will have been exacerbated by extreme weather, and more intense droughts and heat waves around the Mediterranean will have accelerated shrinkage and abandonment of places. Climate induced mass migrations seem inevitable. The brief and blunt forecast is that over the course of the 21st century extreme and unpredictable weather caused by climate warming will make everyday life increasingly stressful in places almost everywhere .

Indications of A Changing Worldview.
Any chance of finding ways to mitigate the severe outcomes of the combined effects of climate change, aging populations, uneven growth and shrinking places (as well as plastic accumulation, overfishing, species extinctions, etc) must depend on a widespread change in attitude away from the current business-as-usual, rationalistic, economic growth model. In the past changes in places and ways of placemaking have often been preceded by a shift in how the world is viewed, and from this perspective there is, I think, evidence that a different set of attitudes is emerging that could have implications for the future of places.

First, rationalist interpretations of reality and truth, which have prevailed for several centuries, and lie at the base of many modern institutions and practices, have been challenged both by philosophers of science, and by movements for gender equality and racial equality such as Black Lives Matter.  The supposed objectivity of rationalism is no longer universally accepted and has come to be understood as a product, at least in part, of white, patriarchal, European and North American elites. It may have practical value but also reflects significant biases. The implication is that there are cracks in the foundations of business-as-usual, conventional assumptions about the world works and should work. Ai Weiwei has expressed this eloquently: “Abandonment of rational thinking leads to a collapse in which fear and joy, ignorance and wisdom, all blow in the wind.”

Secondly, there is a long-term trend to environmental responsibility that has come to challenge age-old convictions that nature needs to be dominated and exploited. This shift began in the late 19th century both with the emergence of the idea of ecology and with the creation of national parks to protect wilderness. More recently it has been reinforced by the environmental movement that began in the 1970s, and involves the protection of threatened species and natural areas, ecosystem planning, the widespread acceptance of the importance of sustainable practices, and awareness of the human causes of climate change. While it is far from being a truth universally acknowledged that natural processes should be worked with rather than against, the historical evidence of a trend towards environmental responsibility is clear, though it may be too fast for those with vested interests in environmental exploitation and too slow for those with an environmental conscience. Nevertheless it seems very likely that this trend will be accelerated by the need to cope with climate warming, declining populations and expanding cities.

Thirdly, the incredibly rapid adoption of electronic communications and international travel has shrunk the world and made universal, rapid global connectivity a fact of everyday life. Electronically there are no isolated places, everywhere is connected. These are insights consistent with ecology that are reinforced by the fact that our food and most other things depend on worldwide supply chains, racial diversity in cities, and the way a viral mutation in a bat in a remote cave in Asia has consequences that swirl around the globe.

Connectivity has reorganized how people relate to places because it demonstrates that what happens here, in this particular place, can contribute to broad effects that rebound onto other places and back to this place. Connectivity has practical significance. The IPCC Special Report on climate warming notes that: “local knowledge, the understanding and skills developed by individuals and communities specific to the places where they live, is necessary to inform decisions about adaptations to climate warming.”

What this suggest to me is that a new basis for ways of making and relating to places could be emerging, one that is informed by environmental contexts and ecological implications, is socially inclusive, understands that there really are limits to growth, and acknowledges that places are simultaneously both open to the world and openings to the world. Its diffusion will continue to be challenged by interests vested in fossil fuels and by illusions of perpetual economic growth. There will continue to be electronically connected non-place communities promoting discrimination and exclusion. There will continue to be inequalities between places that grow and the others that stagnate or shrink. But the realities of the consequences of climate change and slowing growth will become increasingly difficult to ignore because they will play out in the places of everyday life. As this happens connectivity will ensure that local experiences and knowledge about new ways of managing places should come to be widely shared.

This developing worldview might in the long term affect how future places will look and function, but that is mostly a matter of speculation. In the meantime it can offer valuable insights about finding ways to deal with the challenges presented by peak population, aging and more diverse communities, shrinking cities and the exigencies of climate warming, ways that think from places outward.

Postscript to the Future of Places
My assumption behind this post and those on the history and future of places, has been that place is not some sort of incidental amenity.  Its value spans generations and cultures, and is manifest in attachment, belonging and dwelling somewhere, in putting down roots, in being part of community that shares responsibilities, in a commitment to home and efforts to rebuild it after disasters. Although this value is not universally shared (some pay little attention to place because their interests are focused on economic gain or other matters), evidence from archaeological sites and historical records shows that places always have been important aspects of how people everywhere have experienced and modified the world. 

One conclusion to take from this is that people will find a way to make places that are relatively distinctive and meaningful no matter how bleak or difficult circumstances might be. Some aspects of those places are personal – gardens, decorations, memories. But their larger forms and appearances in villages, towns, neighbourhoods and cities are determined by prevailing social and cultural beliefs, circumstances and practices. While these constantly change in small ways, from time to time they undergo substantial changes as populations have grown, civilizations have expanded or shrunk, technological innovations have happened, and new ideas about what is valuable and beautiful have emerged. The consequence is that each historical era has left a place legacy that is a record of more or less distinctive practices of placemaking, albeit biased towards wealth and power because those attributes are vested in enduring structures.

Given this historical record, it is to be expected that the future of places will consist in part of a legacy of existing places, and in part of innovative placemaking responses to changing social and environmental circumstances that, according to current projections, will include the considerable challenges of population decline, increasing urbanization, and the diverse impacts of climate warming. All of these are global in scope but local in both cause and impact.

It is, however, not clear how these challenges will be met over the course of this century and therefore what changes will happen to places. This lack of clarity is in part because of the absence of any widely shared vision of the longer-term future as attention is focused on short-term concerns, such as elections and the Covid-19 pandemic. In a addition there are concerns about the possible decline of democracy, geopolitical realignments, faltering globalization, the disruptive effects of social media and electronic communication, growing inequality and concentration of wealth, and genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. All of these could have impacts on life in places and the ways places are made, but there is really no way of anticipating these or how or when or if they might happen.

This complexity and uncertainty combined with a lack of a general long-term vision restricts what can be said about the future of places to the relatively predictable but limited ground of forecasts about population, urbanization and climate. My hope is that a latent, emerging worldview which conflates environmentalism and localism is emerging, and that this will in due course inform how places are made. But this not equivalent, for instance, to the rise of rationalism with its renaissance aesthetic and notions of progress in the seventeenth century, and provides few hints about how urban neighbourhoods and places in 2050 or 2100 might differ in appearance and character and the patterns of everyday life from those of 2020.

What can be said with some degree of confidence is that places in the future will be mostly in very large cities. In more developed regions their character looks as though it is going to be more of what exists now until about 2050, and then will be marked by forms of abandonment as populations slide into decline. In less developed areas some places will be in characterless new cities, but many will be slums of some sort. Unless very substantial actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are taken in the next few years, which seems increasingly unlikely, almost all places everywhere will experience hotter and more extreme weather or problems associated with rising sea levels. In some cases this will be so extreme that large parts of the population will be forced to migrate to elsewhere in more moderate climates, where they are unlikely to be very welcome.

To put it succinctly, projections of population, urbanization and climate change, which are probably the most dependable projections available, suggest that the future of places in the twenty-first century, will for many people, be extensions of what exists now, but increasingly filled with unprecedented difficulties for which past and present practices will offer few solutions.