The Human Squeeze

In just 50 years, earth has became the home to 3.5 billion people and it's growning fast. Robert Wolfgramm looks at the problems over population may create.

From whenever humankind began, it took until the year 1800 for Planet Earth to host the first billion of us. By 1900 our population reached 2 billion. This acceleration of growth continued into the 20th century. The result was that in just 50 years, earth became home to 3.5 billion. In five years time, an estimated 7 billion of us will be around. Some 8 million persons are added to the total every five weeks, mostly Indian, Chinese, Indonesian, Pakistani and Nigerian.

Annually Europe’s population has been declining by 0.1 per cent, as Africa’s increases by 2.5 per cent. In 1950, Africa had half the population of Europe, but by 2025, it will be triple.

Some 78 per cent of world population is African, Asian and Latin American. And where do they live? In cities.

In 1810, 20 per cent of Britons lived in towns and cities; by 1910, with the Industrial Revolution passed, 80 per cent were citified. Whereas in 1960 only one-third of the world’s population lived in cities, this year, for the first time, more of us will live in cities than in rural situations.

Most are in cities in the developing world: Mexico City, Mumbai, Kalkutta and Shanghai. By 2025, an expected 4 billion people will be living in them and other developing world metropolises. Seventeen of the world’s 20 megacities with populations greater than 11 million are in the developing world.

Cities form because things are possible in them that are not possible outside of them. In the book of Genesis (chapter 11) we hear the call to build a city and a skyscraper that will reach into the heavens. Primeval cities sprawled outward rather than upward, reflecting their hierarchical social structure, with the richest toward the centre; the poorer on the margins. By definition, cities centralise people with their knowledge, expertise, wealth and culture. With this concentration, humans achieve social progress that’s individually impossible or difficult in smaller communities.

Extract from Signs of the Times, November 2004.

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