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This is an exciting time to be alive. Currently, over 80% of Canada’s population lives in cities. The same is true of the United States and other developed nations. World wide, over half of humanity is now living in cities. This has never happened before, not ever in the history of our species or this planet. For almost all of the past 10,000 years we’ve been farming, hunting, and gathering, and mostly hunting and gathering for the 200,000 years before then. Now, for the first time ever, we have become an urban species. And it has happened suddenly, just in the last few decades. So here we are, writing history at an unprecedented time in human evolution...
Has our evolutionary past prepared us for this? How are we adapted to live in cities? Since cities are, after all, our own inventions, in what ways have we helped or hurt ourselves by the cities we’ve made? What does our self-made habitat say about us?
Since the majority of us are denizens of the urban world, it’s vital that we all have an understanding of what makes cities work, why cities are built the way they are, and how we impact the world through our lives as urbanites (and unfortunately, suburbanites and exurbanites, too). It’s critical to our survival that we understand how cities can be improved, how they must be changed, and how we are all involved whether we’re aware of it or not.
But it’s not just a case of the environment and natural resources and pollution. It is a matter of cultural evolution as well. 'The city' is just the habitat we have created for ourselves. It is a reflection of how we live, our priorities, and how we see our place in the world. So we build our habitat based on our world-view, and our world-view is in turn influenced by our habitat. As we re-shape our surroundings we re-write our place in the world. In this sense, we are all city-builders. What does your habitat say about you? When you read your surroundings, what does it tell you about your priorites in life? We all must have at least some urban literacy so we can understand the relationships between our day-to-day lives and the course of human cultural evolution. Where are we now and where are we going?
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