the new cities

The big change was urbanization: more people living in cities than in countryside for the first time in human history.

And the city was a model in constant mutation: its forms, its functions were constantly changing.

Throughout the 20th century there had been the appearance of corporate “skyscrapers”, the proliferation of buildings with —few— floors for the new middle classes, the construction or restoration of pretentious urban centers, the displacement of “good families” towards the suburbs, the abandonment of the centers to marginal populations, their recovery by the young bourgeois of the end of the century.

At the beginning of the XXI, in the rich countries,

City centers had once again become expensive spaces where the majority of well-paid professionals lived who preferred to be close to their jobs and enjoy the consumption and leisure alternatives that these enclaves offered.

In each of these urban “blocks” — squares of about a hundred meters on a side and an average of 40 buildings — between three and ten thousand people could live: the population of a large town or a small city.

Never have so many people lived so close together.

This piling up must have created interactions about which we know nothing particular, because the documents of the time comment on it little.

It is something that happens to them a lot: they do not comment on what they do not know how to consider extra-ordinary.

In each of these urban “blocks” — squares of about a hundred meters on a side and an average of 40 buildings — between three and ten thousand people could live: the population of a large town or a small city.

Never have so many people lived so close together.

This piling up must have created interactions about which we know nothing particular, because the documents of the time comment on it little.

It is something that happens to them a lot: they do not comment on what they do not know how to consider extra-ordinary.

In each of these urban “blocks” — squares of about a hundred meters on a side and an average of 40 buildings — between three and ten thousand people could live: the population of a large town or a small city.

Never have so many people lived so close together.

This piling up must have created interactions about which we know nothing particular, because the documents of the time comment on it little.

It is something that happens to them a lot: they do not comment on what they do not know how to consider extra-ordinary.

In those first years of the century, however, the urban centers were in a phase of depopulation.

The classic cycle in rich countries was that "successful" young people - well integrated - settled in these centers when they entered the labor market and stayed there after marriage, but often moved further afield when the arrival of the children took them to look for more space —which, there, was scarce and too expensive.

Many, then, migrated to suburban neighborhoods where they could have more space and, hopefully, their plants and waters, but had to endure long commutes to get to their duties.

In those days that also changed: the improvement in communications favored teleworking (see chapter 15) and reduced the need to live near offices that, thanks to it, were beginning to become useless.

All of which was abruptly accelerated in 2020 by that irruption called “

” (see chapter 7).

Because of him, scores of well-to-do people left the center again and headed for the suburbs and even more remote towns.

Cities were becoming more and more administrative centers —not even commercial anymore, because the great market function took refuge in the peripheral “shopping malls” and, above all, in virtual commerce.

The most classic cities, the most “lucky”, also became the main product sold by that widespread form of leisure and business of those years that they called “tourism”.

In them, the houses were destined to the temporary accommodation of the "tourists", the shops to their ephemeral consumption.

In the medium term, this trend was emptying those places, stripping them of their original meaning without offering any solid replacement.

The cities of 2022 were surrounded by two types of suburbs: on the one hand, the expensive neighborhoods where those who could live lived, complete with those shops and good private health, education, security, transportation infrastructure reserved for them.

And on the other, at the same distance from the center of the city but in other quadrants, the disastrous suburbs that received and contained the poorest who had migrated from the rural interior or the needy exterior.

In many countries, these agglomerations, more similar to an ancient city than a rural village, used to lack hospitals, schools, sewers, streets—which the states did not always provide.

The juxtaposition of such contrary habitats provoked, of course, fears: the richest tried to avoid them by hiring private security battalions - which had become, in many countries, one of the most profitable industries.

(It was flagrant: the cities also reproduced on their scale the most decisive division of that world, the dichotomy between those whose economic position allowed them to enjoy all the advantages and those who did not always manage to eat what they needed. The Rich World and the Poor World, to call them with a terminology that ended up prevailing at the time, they were two perfectly different realities —and, therefore, one of the biggest complications when it comes to establishing the data and the facts that we are trying to tell.)

Some boys play soccer in a park in the neighborhood of La Ventilla, with the towers of Plaza de Castilla in the background.Álvaro García

* * *

In any case, 2022 was still a time of huge urban concentrations.

Of course, these oversized cities —“megalopolises”— did not resemble the classic ones: with populations of 20 or 30 million people, they were no longer what would once have been called a city but rather a “conurbation”, an aggregate of urban spaces assembled without a single center, a collection of neighborhoods and more neighborhoods piled up and interrelated, connected by trains and highways, whose inhabitants could live in one and work in another hours away on collective transport that was always deficient or individual transport that, due to its proliferation, did not they just got stuck on those roads.

Those incontinent cities concentrated criticism and mistrust.

Every once in a while the feeling that they were hostile spaces reappeared, repositories of millions that were not connected to each other.

Stories endorsed it from time to time: for example, in those days, the story of the death of a French photographer of some fame, resident in Paris - a classically "civilized" city -, who, at 84 years old, fell in the street one winter night and there he stayed nine or ten hours without anyone coming to help him.

The next morning, when someone dared to see what was happening to him, he was already dead.

The episode was told as another evidence of those lives in which no one cared about their neighbor, where everyone lived their own with disdain and fear for others: it was the kind of story that sustained the bad reputation of those spaces where no one felt contents.

City critics, meanwhile, stood firm in their defense of an innocent, unbelievable "better past": some relied on the experiment of an American ethologist, John Calhoun, who had installed rats in a closed, high-density space. density, similar to a city.

The result, he said, was that his rodents became a mess: youngsters stopped fulfilling their obligations, mothers abandoned their children, older men subjugated others to their power, their sexualities became complicated and violent.

That, Calhoun said, is what the city did to rats—and thus to people.

The argument, which put us in a not very prestigious league, was, curiously, widely used.

But, even without rats involved, it was clear that the city form was in crisis—and booming at the same time.

Specialists announced that above ten million people everything was inconvenient, and estimated the ideal city at less than one million, enough to maintain all the necessary relationships and services without gigantism hindering daily life.

All this, we said, would be modified by the expansion of

—which would influence as much as the technification of agriculture in the redesign of demographic balances.

One of the main utilities of the city —the concentration of the necessary workforce in an accessible radius— ceased to be necessary if a significant number of workers could provide their services from anywhere.

Or, even, if work ceased to be the center of lives (see chapter 15).

(The city had always been considered the ideal broth for the development of culture, of progress. Thus, a mostly urban world should have been a more cultured and progressive world. Two issues, at least, prevented it: on the one hand, those Unstructured cities did not have much to do with classical cities. And, on the other hand, the advance of virtual life increasingly relocated its practitioners: in front of a screen, it did not matter whether you were in a city or in the middle of the desert.)

Those flood cities had been formed according to two very different models: in China, above all, they were the result of great state plans that had foreseen their smallest details, and carried them out with the control and power of the State to concentrate in them the workforce that their new industries required.

They were somewhat monstrous spaces because of their precision and order: large extensions full of similar buildings of 15 or 20 floors, crossed by identical streets and provided with the basic services necessary so that their inhabitants could arrive punctually to their new jobs, rest, regenerate their work force.

Shanghai, which appeared as the model to imitate or hate, had the largest number of buildings over twelve stories in the world: it was already over 25,000.

Seoul, the second, threatened with 17,000.

In general, the new, more or less upper middle classes lived there—the higher the better.

The new Eastern powers insisted on creating mega cities while the old European impotence preferred to try small cities, where nothing was more than a 20-minute trip away — if possible by bicycle or one of those rare blood-powered vehicles that were proliferating at the time.

Jingying Zhao (Getty Images)

In them —on their outskirts— the richest of the richest countries built perfectly isolated houses that used to accumulate previous architectures in happy disorder: the time had passed when those powerful ones promoted a certain idea of ​​the aesthetic avant-garde —or, at the same time, least of a period style—and in those days they built faux castles that could mix a bit of character Italian with French with Greek with Japanese with Indian with a Turkish mosque dome.

They were curious to see, according to the photos: as if, aware of something, fearful of something, they had wanted to preserve the history of humanity in their dwellings.

Against the fear of the future, their houses were a compendium of all the past.

But the most notorious buildings were not houses but offices: another example of corporate hegemony.

In the year 2000 there were some 600 corporate “super skyscrapers” in the world;

in 2020 they were more than five times more: 3,250.

His style was a consequence of the new mastery of materials: engineers and architects had learned to twist both steel and glass as well as cement – ​​their basic material – and took advantage of it.

It was very difficult, then, to see the lines and right angles that had characterized the great buildings of the 20th century;

everything was curve, whim, volute, spiral.

Builders had gone from Euclidean geometry to the Moebius strip.

* * *

In the rest of what some still called the Third World—the Poor World—megalopolises were the opposite of any planning: they accumulated, without any program, successive layers that grew at the rate of internal migration.

The newcomers settled in the outskirts, in previously empty lands —swamps, ravines, garbage dumps—, of difficult access, without services, that their enthusiasm or desperation made habitable: that they civilized, in the strict sense.

This is how chaotic neighborhoods were built, dirt streets, few sewers, gross pollution, tremendous garbage dumps, little presence of the state in any of its forms —hospitals, schools, police— although, even so, that presence used to be greater than in the countryside.

And it appeared, many times a cruel paradox:

those very cheap or free lands that the migrants had occupied became more expensive thanks to their occupation and their improvements and entered the real estate market;

thus, eventually, the time would come when their meager income would not allow them to stay in them and they had to abandon them —and go out in search of new vacant land to repeat the process.

The sum of these neighborhoods formed circles that surrounded the traditional city: a refuge for the poorest, sometimes they functioned as a breeding ground for crime and insurrections.

The inhabitants of the center and the rich suburbs were indignant and terrified – they often had the impression or the certainty of living under threat – but at the same time they took advantage of the existence of these reserves of abundant and unskilled labor to obtain very cheap services.

Meanwhile, the states used to respond to the demands and threats with handouts and subsidies that tried to keep calm – until something exploded.

These flood cities were probably one of the most distinctive phenomena of that time: it was estimated, without great precision, that in 2020 some 1.3 billion people – one in six worldwide – lived in these blighted neighborhoods.

In general, the peasants who arrived created, in addition to an urban layer, a social layer: they became the poorest —poorer than the poorest—, locked up in those enormous ghettos that surrounded the classical cities.

At first it used to be assumed that they were places of passage, from where its inhabitants would manage to "go up" to the city;

already in those days the governments and the neighbors used to accept that there would be no way out.

In these spaces, slightly improved by state intervention or community initiatives, generations of former migrants succeeded one another,

That habitat change had many effects.

One was the drop in the birth rate.

Urbanization used to imply a decrease in fertility: people in the countryside must have thought that it was easier to feed and support many children—and, on the other hand, in the cities they had access to contraceptive methods that they did not have before.

And, furthermore, by having more health options and, therefore, reducing the mortality of the youngest, they gave birth less: in those years it became clear that there was no better argument to reduce the birth rate than to convince mothers and fathers that their children would still be alive when they reached adulthood.

Families got smaller and the usual threat of the population bomb subsided for a few years.

But the migrations and the installation in those confused habitats put an end to the stable, consolidated relations of the neighbors in the towns.

Their cultural roots, the product of centuries of transmission from person to person, were also diluted: life in these slums established a more confused belonging, more permeable to the action of the big media and the political and religious leaders who frequently took advantage of of this uprooting.

And, at the same time, this assembled, innovative mass began to have its own cultural production that, in many cases, became the standard of the cities or countries on the margins of which they lived (see chapter 20).

There were other consequences, and we will see them.

The main fact remains that the fields of the world ceased to be the main habitat of humans.

They were depopulated and became a space for production —basically food— that required less and less labor.

We already know the effects of that change.

* * *

Housing has always been a decisive indicator of the state of a society, which history has never studied well.

Perhaps it is a handicap of the old archaeology: the houses of the common—made of fleeting materials—never survived and historians were reduced to working with the temples and forts and palaces that they could recover.

About houses, usually, they knew little: they had to imagine them.

We, thanks to our proximity and the avalanche of information that could be preserved, know what the houses of that Third Decade of the last century were like.

Of those 8,000 million, a quarter lived crowded in houses that did not deserve the name: without the minimum necessary services, in such precarious habitability and maintenance conditions.

Among the almost 6,000 million who lived in more dignified dwellings, more than half did so in houses planted on the ground;

the rest, in those room devices called apartments, apartments, flats —which basically consisted of superimposing one living space on another and another and another, in such a way that ten, twenty different families were accumulated vertically on the same segment of ground.

The idea of ​​walking half a meter above other people's heads, half a meter below other feet had already been working for many years and did not seem to bother them then.

Except in certain places in certain countries—China and Korea, above all—tall buildings were exclusive to cities.

In no country in the world did so many people live in apartment buildings as in Spain: they were three out of four, compared to the United States or Holland or England, where they were less than one in four.

It was another example of relativity: for the inhabitants of the richest countries, living in a house was a luxury;

for those in poor countries, luxury was access to a building.

(After millennia in which land ownership was the elementary form of private property, that ownership had been modified during the 20th century, engendering a misleading concept: "horizontal property" meant that whoever owned it did not own that land but a minimal proportion of it, its surface divided by the number of layers that were installed on it.)

For the most part, the houses were private property—of their inhabitants or of the owners who rented them.

The amount of common housing that the states maintained was negligible —non-existent, in many cases—, with which the house or flat used to be the main wealth of billions of people.

Of course, even among those who had formal housing, conditions varied dramatically: in the absence of any regulation, a few had homes of a thousand square meters for two people and many lived in fifty meters by many.

In times characterized by inequality, the one shown by the dwellings was extreme but it was not usually the most criticized or resented:

The design of a “normal” house —except for the extreme ones— was very repeated: the house was one of those devices that seemed to have found its precise format and still did not consider the need to modify it.

At that time, almost all of them had a kitchen —which increasingly occupied more space as a place of family life, equipped with specialized tools—, a living/dining room where the “television” (see chapter 17) still reigned supreme, a room for the sleep of the owner or owners of the house —individual or couple—, one or more rooms for the sleep of their children if they had one, one or two “bathrooms” —where the bodily functions of the inhabitants were concentrated: cleaning , physical care, dressing, evacuation of their various excrements.

In the living/dining room there used to be a more or less large armchair, generally installed in front of the television and,

The rooms were intended as receptacles for "beds," a wooden or metal base that supported a rectangular bag filled with foam or rubber called a mattress.

The inhabitants of the house slept there, alone or in pairs.

The walls of the different areas, usually painted in light colors, used to display photos and drawings —fixed, printed on a material base—;

the inner doors generally didn't use keys—which would have been unfriendly or suspicious—but the outer one had more than one latch and was often connected to a centralized security system.

The kitchen, meanwhile, functioned as a machine room: four or five appliances for cooking —direct heat, surrounding heat, microwave cooking, toasting, boiling—, two for preserving with different cold temperatures, one for washing instruments,

another to wash and/or dry family clothes, and a multitude of little machines to cut, grind, mix, beat, liquefy, infuse, sharpen instruments, extract juices and other functions.

It was surprising to see how, in those times of natural food, they had not been able to concentrate their entire process in one or two devices.

But it is that the houses were, in general, very old devices.

Most were decades old—if not centuries old—and not built using recent techniques.

They were not prepared for digital innovations but, above all, their construction and maintenance defects —outdated enclosures, thick walls, various deteriorations— resulted in large energy costs to heat them.

For which, in general, fossil fuels were used, the extraction of which caused significant environmental damage —and yet, for obvious reasons, no one had yet considered the reformulation of hundreds of millions of homes and, above all, their concept.

3. The gross differences Inequality was the most defining feature of that world, and it did not stop growing.

Did you manage to bear it?

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