
Researchers contest widely-accepted UN's predictions on urban population growth - zprickett
http://www.thisisplace.org/i/?id=0150beca-e3f5-47e0-bc74-9ccc5ef1db8a
======
vanderZwan
What I want to know is how it is possible that we have comments claiming the
title is misleading/overblown, or that this is a matter of definitions and no
big deal. I'm sorry, but what article have you read exactly?

Current estimates puts urbanisation at 55% of all humans, and it's expected to
grow to 70% by 2050, more than thirty years from now. And these researchers
now claim the current level of urbanisation is already over 84%.

In which field would an error of more than half the current estimate not be a
huge deal? Or already being 14% over the projected number of a generation
away?

As the article mentions, these numbers matted a whole lot to policy makers and
international decision making. It may feel abstract and uninteresting to the
average nerd but this stuff has serious consequences.

~~~
swebs
The title right now is:

>Researchers contest widely-accepted United Nations' predictions on urban
population growth

Which is a pretty good description. About an hour ago, the title was:

>‘Everything we’ve heard about global urbanization turns out to be wrong’ -
researchers

Which is ridiculous clickbait. Since your post is only a few minutes old,
you're probably commenting on the new title, whereas others are commenting on
the old title.

~~~
vanderZwan
Thank you for clarifying.

EDIT: even so, it's still a direct quote of one of the researchers, and
indicated as such in the title. Clickbaity, but not misleading.

Plus, adding up all the issues raised about how urbanization has been measured
so far, all the in which ways politics muddles up the data, and the resulting
gigantic error in measurement together, the problem does seem so fundamental
that I don't find the quote that overblown either.

------
brailsafe
I'm not fond of this title but did find the article to be intriguing.

I didn't see a paper or anything linked, so at the moment it remains a
superficial interview. I'd like to know more about which remote sensing
techniques they're using and how they're classifying population. Like the
dissenter in the article, I wonder about informal settlements which can
sometimes make up the majority of an urban centre. Do their models include
these? The implication seems to be no, but there isn't much to go on.

~~~
SiempreViernes
Here the author being interviewed gives a short summary of the project:

[https://unhabitat.org/the-tale-of-broadville-and-
narrowtown-...](https://unhabitat.org/the-tale-of-broadville-and-narrowtown-
why-we-need-a-global-people-based-definition-of-cities-and-settlements-lewis-
dijkstra/)

Details in the method can be found in a 2016 report about the "Atlas of the
human planet" project, where they produced something called the "Global Human
Settlement Layer" (there are a lot of plots labelled GHSL in the talk linked
above). Starts at page 22, infographic at page 26:
[https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/documents/Atlas_2016.pdf?t=147...](https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/documents/Atlas_2016.pdf?t=1476360675)

~~~
brailsafe
Super valuable, thanks.

------
tjoff
For new readers, the HN title has changed. Since the majority of comments do
point out the title specifically do know that it was for a previous title.

I can not understand why HN mods do this. Doesn't matter if X is a better
title than Y, changing it is by far worse than either - at least once it has
hit the front page. And everyone that has already clicked on the discussion
will click on it again with the new title because naturally one would believe
it was another related article spawned by the first one.

~~~
dsr_
Or HN could gain the ability to pin a mod note at the top of the comments.

"We changed the title from Aliens Ate Your Code to Problems with Managing
Remote Contract Programmers."

~~~
tjoff
Doesn't solve the problem of rediscovering it because of the new title.

If so I'd rather have the pin just say "We think a better/more descriptive
title would have been X".

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Animats
The article doesn't give their threshold for "urban". From satellite imagery,
you can measure what percentage of an area is roofs and roads. That's an
objective measure of urbanization. But they don't tell you what their
threshold is. A graph of percentage of area covered by roofs and roads would
be more useful. Then you're not arguing over defintiions.

This is a good problem for a classifier. A big-data problem for some grad
student. A good thesis project. Or an overlay on Google Earth.

This metric has some correlation with population density. It's not direct;
multistory buildings get underrated, and large greenhouses might be mis-
identified as an urban feature. Another job for a classifier.

~~~
SiempreViernes
The definition for urban is a grid cell, one kilometre wide, with 1500 people.
A "urban centre" is a contiguous collection of urban grid cells that totals at
least 50 000 people.

A city is then the set of municipalities that have at least 50% of their
population in that urban centre.

I think the article is just summer filler, the results are at least a year
old. Here Dijkstra talks about them:

[https://unhabitat.org/the-tale-of-broadville-and-
narrowtown-...](https://unhabitat.org/the-tale-of-broadville-and-narrowtown-
why-we-need-a-global-people-based-definition-of-cities-and-settlements-lewis-
dijkstra/)

------
non-nil
This primarily seems like a matter of definitions, no? Humans congregate, so
villages tend to expand over time. Apparently there are different definitions
to what an urban area is around the world, which to me seems kind of
reasonable in itself as conditions vary.

But yeah, if you take photos from space, it clearly shows most of Earth's land
area isn't actually occupied by humans dwelling there. Most of the humans have
apparently congregated into what we now like to call urban areas, for which
there may or may not be a new definition. Great.

~~~
CompelTechnic
The first time I flew in an airplane, from North Carolina to Michigan, I was
amazed that I saw no portion of land that was completely undeveloped.

~~~
wincy
I was amazed when I flew into Phoenix at night that so much of the desert was
completely undeveloped. Like at night once you get outside the city it's just
absolute blackness. It was so dark I thought we were over a lake or something.

------
hexadecimal7e
Not to forget, in many rural areas in developed countries, more and more
houses are abandoned. Next of kin is not interested in moving to there
relatives house in the country side.

------
wonderwonder
As technology improves, fewer people are required to work on farms. Lack of
work then drives people towards urban areas. Globalization and automation are
affecting the world in ways that are difficult to predict. I see something
dramatic happening in the next 15 years as wages stagnate, inflation rises and
wealth is concentrated in the top .1% of the worlds population.

~~~
StavrosK
As technology improves, fewer people are required to work in offices. I
predict people moving back to smaller towns with cheaper towns, while working
remotely and achieving a much better quality of life for a given salary.

~~~
BlackFly
I would like to contest the idea of living in rural areas as having a higher
quality of life.

As an analogy, we live in houses with refrigerators because this is a higher
quality of life than farming or foraging for food and huddling under trees to
get out of the rain.

We live in concentrated environments because walking down the street is a
higher quality of life than needing to travel tens of kilometers to buy
necessities. A smaller house is easier to maintain and clean.

~~~
xtreme
> We live in concentrated environments because walking down the street is a
> higher quality of life than needing to travel tens of kilometers to buy
> necessities. A smaller house is easier to maintain and clean.

I see this sentiment often on HN, but so far I have not seen strong evidence
to support it other than anecdotes. Have there been studies that show that
most people would prefer to live in dense cities if employment wasn't a major
deciding factor?

~~~
nojvek
I don’t think it has to be dense cities like Tokyo. Plenty of suburbia in US.
God I love suburbia.

~~~
scarecrowbob
"God I love suburbia."

It gives me a lot of hope to hear that there are people who do like that kind
of thing, given how many folks I know who live in such situations.

Personally, I don't like it-- at least in Texas it's the worst of all worlds:
everything is far enough apart that you still need to drive most places in a
car (and public transportation / biking are afterthoughts) but you're still
living almost on top of each other.

But if folks like it, good on them. I'm trying to figure out how to get out of
it. I like being in places like manhattan where I can get on a subway and
access some much amazing things, and I like to be out in the hills where have
some space and quite. But that in-between space isn't good for me, and that's
not taking into account the various cultural and economic issues that I find
in living in "suburbia".

------
jononor
Title is overblown and misleading

TLDR: using satellite imaging instead of relying on self reporting,
researchers found that the world is already 80%+ urbanized

------
forkLding
Title is a bit over-exaggerative. World is only 80%+ urbanized based on
European Commission definitions of city and urbanization standards. Situations
differ based really on interpretation, specific country policies for cities
and population density and infrastructure. Certain cities that the European
Commission include might not have certain core structures like a police
station as the article itself pointed out with Egyptian villages that have
grown into cities which in turn means that European Commission standards are
not comparable to places outside Europe because the living standards etc
aren't comparable.

~~~
linuskendall
In this way it almost seems appropriate to rely on country statistics - sure
there may be political motivations to label certain places a certain way, but
they are also more likely to capture local variations as to what is considered
urban and not. I live in a place that is semi-rural by Indian standards but
which definitely qualify as urban by EU standards.

~~~
itsmenotyou
That really depends on what goal you're trying to achieve. If your goals are
efficient distribution of aid, or tracking city sustainability across
countries, it probably doesn't matter to you what the local variations in the
definition of "urban" are.

------
hexadecimal7e
Because of environmental issues (better to live close to work, less carbon
pollution) and globalisation agenda, the rural areas of the world are lost
forever. The rural areas will become as in the movie Mad Max, totally without
and control from government.

Politicians will never address the rural areas in a positive way, because they
know they will loose city votes. That’s why you always here generic promises,
like “more police” and such, then they also get the city votes.

~~~
systemtest
The Veluwe area in The Netherlands already has a civilian patrol that even has
multiple helicopters. This is a direct result of the police closing down
stations in rural areas.

[https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/veluwse-knokploeg-met-
helikopte...](https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/veluwse-knokploeg-met-helikopter-
jaagt-op-criminelen~a915d9a3/)

