The easy answer -and there is always one- is overpopulation. Once more the specter of humanity growing beyond sustainability has become a current issue. We are told that humanity will become such a mass of people that the depletion of the earth’s resources is almost a given, and that is how this dystopian megalopolis of the future comes to be.

The ruling elite uses its military arm to accumulate resources, which squanders in decadent luxury, while the rest lives in survival mode stealing, cheating, gambling, trafficking, murdering or worst; and yet this is a suspicious concept.

If we consider one of the most basic human necessities, food, and take into account the current technology and arable land around the world, it is sufficient to feed at least twice the current global population, and yet there is massive world hunger.

We hear all the time, how in many cities of the globe infrastructure is at the breaking point, and yet much of the terrain in certain regions is virtually virgin, an example is central Russia where there are barley a few cities until you get to the pacific coast.

It would seem that the problem is not so much overpopulation, but density and technology. There are very few areas where people concentrate to live, making them almost unbearable, and although the technology is there to produce more food than we need, it is unevenly distributed, so a few have automatized industrial agriculture, while the majority has to farm as if they lived in the dark ages.

Reading through those paragraphs one may think that the solution is simply better planning. If we could coordinate to develop unpopulated areas, and disseminate technology better, there would be enough food and space for humanity for a long while, and perhaps that might be so, but does that mean such a design would eliminate the dystopian metropolis? My answer is no.

The current migration phenomenon is not fueled by lack of space, as I elaborated before, but by economic forces. Production and services are concentrated very heavily in cities on specific countries, and so are the jobs, this forces people to move to these centers creating the slums, favelas, ghettos, or whatever you want to call them. In a way border rigidity and lack of generalized education, to comprehend the new technologies, seems to be the core of the problem.

The rest of the people which do not reside in major cities are sustained by our global matrix of production, which has given rise, and nurtured, small cities and towns across the world, this has happened before. At the beginning of the industrial revolution and the massive construction of rail systems, communities emerged by the side of the tracks, some of these evolved into cities and many more, the majority, stayed the same, when the transportation concept shifted from the train to the highway all those towns died, in what I call, the first dead of the small town and argue that we are about to live a similar moment.

Today most goods are moved by water first, and then, crucially, by trucks using the highway system, this is what is about to change. The motor vehicle is becoming obsolete, as it can move very small loads of goods and is the main reason why the expensive highways are maintained and expanded, but alternatives are emerging.

The overly exposed drones from Amazon get the attention for the wrong reasons. Their true potential rests, in replacing inner city delivery by improving GPS location, effectively removing cars, motorcycles, small trucks and the like; transforming short distance shipping.

Even more radical, the aereoscraft of Aeros Corp (a return to the old zeppelin or dirigible concept) will change mid distance transportation, by replacing 18 wheelers with a ship that safely moves goods by air between ports, and with time perhaps it will compete with ocean cargo ships in relatively small distances .

Positive as these changes may be, they will displace countless workers, logistics will suffer a technological transformation and it will remove jobs from one sector to another, and not everyone will be able to adapt, creating a first wave of unemployed people in the cities, which will be complemented by a second.

As the highway system becomes redundant and starts to decay all those small towns and cities, which depended on the trucking routes for their survival, will start to fade away and a sea of people will flock to the megalopolis, where there is work, but these individuals will be poorly prepare and will have difficulties incorporating to the job market due to lack of skills.

Finally, if industrial farming ever becomes dominant, it will kill many low paying jobs in developing nations on rural areas aggravating the problem further, even if food supply increases. These forces will result, in the second dead of the small town, and the first of the small city.

In the end, the dystopian future may not come from a direct source as overpopulation. The origin will be more complex, arising from a fundamental change in the transportation matrix, which will create economically displaced populations that will settle in precarious conditions around the megalopolis of the future.

​

Image:

http://demonicclone.deviantart.com/art/Dystopian-future-01-279415094