SimCity 2100

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I have been thinking about the approach to SimCity 2100.  Since the trend is toward fully automated (robotic) manufacturing facilities, the idea of Rush Hour is pretty much down the drain.  The trend would be to work from home.  Collecting people into office suites could easily be a thing of the past when meetings can take place using holographics over the Internet (very much faster than now). 

The potlatch excesses of management offices should be a thing of the distant (20th century) past.  Cities, if any are left, would be museums and climbing walls.  True civilization will have migrated into smaller clusters spread out comfortably across the food production areas using non-arable land.

The game (if it remains a game) would be the simulation of this civilization with a push to keep the whole planet fed and comfortable.  A world government would need to be in place and not failed experiments like the EU.  Local sovereignty would be a thing of the past.

Main efforts for the population besides food production: exploration of space; advancement of science, especially physics and non-rocket propulsion systems; social programs with everyone encouraged to reach his ultimate capacity as a human being.

[dkempel 3]

Hehe.

Cities are here to stay, civilization and cities are inseperable. And with the unabated urbanization and all I'd say Sim City 4 is pretty much already of the future.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I think you will find that the present situation is unsustainable.  The infrastructure of large cities seems to get only lip service when it comes to maintenance and there will be more and more major failures as 200 year old cities start to crumble.  This may be a North American phenomenon considering the age of some cities (Warsaw for example), but remember many of these cities have been rebuilt after being reduced to rubble in war after war.  And Lutetia (Paris) seems to be fairly static, while London has taken on a modern architecture with which I am not in love.

As world population grows, more and more arable land will be interdicted from development due to the need for food production.  Don't bet on the continuation of the urban blot.

[citycowboy 183]

The cities will all be here. That's all that there will be. 100 years ago, 11% of the US population lived in a city. Today, 11% of the US population lives on a farm, and that trend isn't letting up. In the 1850's, downtown Chicago was filled with wooden shops and buildings, and then they had a drainage problem. Almost magically, engineers lifted the entire city up a floor using jackscrews. City block sized concrete and brick buildings were hoisted ten feet into the air. The old wooden shops and buildings were literally rolled away and carted off to nearby towns. Flash forward to Chicago in the 1950's. A fairly clean and organized city. Look at it today. Buildings jammed in wherever an engineer can figure out where to build one. The best word to describe the Loop I'd say is cluttered. The western world gives extreme value to certain land areas. Its about the value of that particular space. We know $2000 a month rent will buy you a studio apartment in San Francisco, or a four bedroom house with a pool in Iowa City. There's an entire generation of hipsters who are abandoning the suburban lifestyle to cram into rowhouses close to downtown. The city life of the future will just be taller buildings, stacked roads, and lots and lots of skywalks, taking you from your apartment to your office, with a starbucks in between. The biggest frustration I have with Sim City 4 is the leveling. The bridge from Portland, OR to Vancouver, WA is two levels. Wacker Drive is two levels. Half the city of Seattle is underground, and so is Grand in LA. The big city loves multileveling, and in the future I think you'll have roads stacked on top of the roads that are in place now. Similar to the el, but just another street. Engineers in the future will figure out how to jam a million people and businesses into a city block. 

[Samness 104]

Nonny, I think your future of the world is far too idealistic. Technology will progress of course, populations will explode, and certainly the food crisis will forever become a greater and greater issue (unless some penicillin-like 'miracle cure' is developed). All of this progress, however, will alas be equal to the progress of people developing better ways to kill other people. WWIII is inevitable, as is WWIV and WWV. "Science is a key that can unlock the gates to heaven, but can also open the pits of hell."

My image of the human landscape of the future will be that eventually we will run out of arable land from the spread of our cities. Hopefully by then we have been able to establish colonies on other planets and moons, and these colonies can either serve as population centers or as major food producers (ideally the latter). Perhaps we will be able to establish a world government by then, though probably not. Either way, wars and conflict will rip through society every generation or so, because history has proven that pacifism is far from sustainable. Society will probably be less focused on the individual, and more so on the society as a whole (especially with the inevitable food crisis, which will probably get bad enough to force even the greatest enemies to work together to solve it. Or it will cause the rich to hoard all of the food, causing mass war and terror).

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

A lot of people live in the unknown hope for the Ghaldron-Hesthor generator so that we can go plunder other time-lines in the multiverse.  I think this is more likely than that we will be able to get to other earth-like planets in our current universe simply because such a breakthrough is more likely than all the scientific ostriches stuck on Goddard-style reaction drives.  At the rate they are going, we won't get off this ball of dirt before some catastrophic collapse.  The time for playing with fire crackers is over.

There probably are no Arisians, so don't hope for a Bergenholm generator to make FTL travel possible.

Current experiments with the beefed-up LHC might give us some insight into magnetism and/or gravity (wouldn't be surprised if they were two sides of the same coin).  The question is whether the back end of the cat will wind up in the trophy case first.

For those who are a little slow on the uptake, that's cat's-ass-trophy.  Most people at least admire a good pun

 

  Edited August 8, 2015 by A Nonny Moose  

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

And, of course, it you must live in a people heap, why not get the most out of it?

OK, you BATters out there, here is a challenge:  Make those buildings with green roofs.

[Terring 6,476]

Some of my predictions about the future. Until 2115:

Nanotechnology and 3D printing will obsolete the need of heavy industries, since everybody will be able to create anything she/he wants.

More and more people will be living in arcologies, floating cities and orbital colonies, reducing the need of building space and relieving the land-based population pressure.

Most of the electricity worldwide will be produced by clean sources such as geothermal, solar and wind energy, as well as nuclear fusion reactors and solar power satellites.

Advantages in genetics and cybernetics not only will make possible the cure of most of the sickness (including death), but they will also give us exotic abilities suck as telepathy and telekinesis.

The Theory of Everything will be discovered, unlocking new secret of the Nature and allowing the development of technologies that today we can't even imagine.

Computers will be everywhere. Everywhere! Everything you'll see will be fused with quantum computers, making the human race and even the whole planet an intelligent superorganism.

The monetary system will die. Yes, I said that! If not our generation, the next one will see the collapse of the monetary system and everything related to it, like the need of wars and governments. Instead, the economy of 2115 will be a resource-based one (https://www.thevenusproject.com/en/about/resource-based-economy), in which all goods, resources and services will be available to everybody without the need of money or credit cards. As about them, they will be serve only as museum exhibits, making our children and grandchildren of the 22nd century think what were we thinking by worship them as if they were gods back in 20th and 21st century.

Radical changes, just like in the past

[MandelSoft 2,775]

What I think what will probably happen is that cities will become more compact. The suburbs will die out, and row-homes, mid-rises and high rises will become more dominant in cities all over the world. Because the compactness of the city, car-ownership and car-trips will go down (car-ownership is going down in Europe for quite some time); walking and cycling will become more widely used modes of transport. Internet shopping, conversations and 3D printing limit the use of using any transport at all. With self-driving cars, cars may become a service instead of something you own (and it will be much more efficient, since those cars will always be driving around instead of being parked, taking up space).

When is this going to happen? Probably within 20 or 30 years. You may even be able to witness it yourself, Nonny. The "future" may be closer than you think

Cities are here to stay. They will get more populous, but not much bigger (or even smaller!).

[TekindusT 3,809]

Again we Euro guys are falling, inadvertently, in our very own Eurocentrism. Remember that for each European 3-million-inhabitants city there will be a Chinese, Indian or African 10-million-inhabitants metropolis.

A bunch of studies are already pointing at a current de-suburbanization of the North American metro areas, especially of those with more dynamic and diversified economies. In Europe, living in a inner-city district was quite "a thing of the poor" until 10-20 years ago, I'm thinking of the before-working-class-now-gentrified districts in a variety of European capitals, there is at least one example on each large city.

The ideas exposed above will happen in our own little universe, but the endless shanty towns, with insufficient mass transit systems, defect sanitation, will sadly keep being the norm in Kolkatta, Dar es Salaam, Dhaka... See them all here: http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/urban_2020_1.html. Note that most of the cities listed here are ten capitals of so-called emerging economies. Please think twice before predicting world-wide trends on urbanism. Our cultural and regional bias tends to be particularly influential on our views.

  Edited August 15, 2015 by TekindusT  

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

Some of my predictions about the future. Until 2115:

Nanotechnology and 3D printing will obsolete the need of heavy industries, since everybody will be able to create anything she/he wants.

More and more people will be living in arcologies, floating cities and orbital colonies, reducing the need of building space and relieving the land-based population pressure.

Most of the electricity worldwide will be produced by clean sources such as geothermal, solar and wind energy, as well as nuclear fusion reactors and solar power satellites.

Advantages in genetics and cybernetics not only will make possible the cure of most of the sickness (including death), but they will also give us exotic abilities suck as telepathy and telekinesis.

The Theory of Everything will be discovered, unlocking new secret of the Nature and allowing the development of technologies that today we can't even imagine.

Computers will be everywhere. Everywhere! Everything you'll see will be fused with quantum computers, making the human race and even the whole planet an intelligent superorganism.

The monetary system will die. Yes, I said that! If not our generation, the next one will see the collapse of the monetary system and everything related to it, like the need of wars and governments. Instead, the economy of 2115 will be a resource-based one (https://www.thevenusproject.com/en/about/resource-based-economy), in which all goods, resources and services will be available to everybody without the need of money or credit cards. As about them, they will be serve only as museum exhibits, making our children and grandchildren of the 22nd century think what were we thinking by worship them as if they were gods back in 20th and 21st century.

Radical changes, just like in the past

Kind of like my idea of where we will be in a hundred years time: fusion power, nanoreplicators, genetic medicine, cybernetics and a monetary system rendered obsolete. My own quibble is the Theory of Everything since it must describe everything, including all that we don't know about the universe which is infinite- it will take forever to discover everything about the universe. Thus a Theory of Everything simply cannot happen.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Well, some of that seems a little far fetched.  One of the important things that is happening now is a trend in the cities for green rooftops that are actually growing produce for local consumption.  For example, the roof garden at the Royal York Hotel has been used by the chefs for years to grow fresh herbs and veggies for consumption in the growing season.  Newer buildings are being designed with greenhouses on top.

By 2115 I certainly hope someone in the physics world has said the last rights over reaction engines.  It is high time we stopped playing with firecrackers that were invented by the Chinese over 5000 years ago.  I hope the current experiments with the LHC will point the way for this by finding out the mechanisms for gravity and magnetism.  They might even find out how to tweak the Higgs particle to cancel its inertia.  Inertial dampers would go a long way towards a non-reaction space drive.

Quantum computers?  Will probably be a thing of the past.  Digital computing is inaccurate and no matter how fine you work it you can never convert many numbers into binary, let alone the transcendentals.  Engineers, after all, are used to approximations, but that is not what is really wanted.  I want a return to analogue in computing with the nanosystems leading the way.  Has anyone noticed that the HiFi aficionados these days are returning to vinyl?  The quality with good playback gear is simply better because no matter how you digitize that signal there are losses.  When it comes to technology, there probably has to be a shortening in the upgrade interval in Moore's Conjecture.

Don't be surprised if something comes out of left field that makes the unified field theory look obvious.

"Everything's up to date in Kansas City.
"They've gone about as far as they can go."
       Rogers & Hammerstein in "Oklahoma!" (1943 - but the in situ time is just before Oklahoma became a state)
 

  Edited August 16, 2015 by A Nonny Moose  
Update annotatation

[APSMS 1,893]

I think we run into the issue where the current idealist outlook for 2100 (or really, any "reasonably close" future prediction), is that we assume that humanity is basically good, and that any advances made will weave their way into the entire world for use. Cities a thing of the past? Not likely when jobs still require people to be in reasonably close proximity to a regional HQ, and interviews for those w/o internet still require personal appearances, or at least the use of a phone line. The internet, for all it's "good", has introduced a new form of anonymity, and a lot of jobs will only trust you as far as they can throw you.

The issue with robotics is that it requires a sufficiently advanced manufacturing process to become profitable. It also requires a large infrastructure, and even the most automated of assembly lines in Detroit and elsewhere (for non-automotive manufacturing) have workers on the line to make sure that the robots don't have system failures and screw up the rest of the line as a result (read: people are still needed). Robots also require power, and we haven't solved how the ever-increasing energy demands of 1st world and developing nations are going to be satisfied. Assuming that global warming isn't an issue (for argument's sake), the fossil fuels won't last forever, and currently only developed nations possess easy access to renewable resources on a massive scale.

If someone were to solve the energy problem, this would probably remain a state secret for a long time by the nation of the inventor/discoverer, and ransomed out to the remaining governments that were willing to pay, internet and cooperative spirit be darned! Anything that valuable would be held onto like weapons-grade plutonium, only with far more fervor. Could you imagine if Russia discovered the secret to sustained nuclear fusion before the rest of the developed world? Who really thinks they'd freely share such information with the rest of us? (or vice versa with America)

Admittedly, World War seems more likely now than it did 15 years ago, but still potentially far off. Too many people have too much to lose, and even Russia, with Putin at the head, understand what is at stake even if a fully conventional 3rd World War were to break out. But numerous regional conflicts? Probably going to see a lot more of this in the future. Putin may be headstrong, but he can be because he knows everyone else doesn't want full-out war either, and we are afraid he might be crazy enough to try.

As for the rest of the technology, I recommend the movie Elysium as an illustrative example of tech sharing. Not my favorite movie, but likely how events would play out if some wunder-science were discovered regarding nano-tech, or fusion, or computers, etc.

There's also the issue of developing nations with populations growing far faster than their land can ever hope to sustain. Africa's population is booming thanks to modern advances in farming, and western lifestyles and medicine weaving their way through the populace. Africa's population was traditionally low, but had quadrupled over the last century, and unfortunately Africa lacks the wide swaths of arable land that the Chinese, Europeans, and Americans had to support the population growth. Not sure what the plan is going to be there in the coming years, but it's not going to be pretty, and no amount of new farms (which destroy the ecosystem and displace native peoples, causing further food shortages) is going to solve the problem.

The next hundred years is likely going to be one of the ugliest yet. I don't think we're going to like how it looks when we come out of it. All the science and technology in the world won't save us if we continue to pretend that people are inherently good. People forget that Electric cars were invented before Otto's 4-stroke engine was successfully used in a road car, and disc brakes were invented before drum brakes (how come disc brakes still aren't the standard everywhere, and we fawn over E-cars like they're the latest fad?). Solar energy, Wind and Hydro power were all a thing before the turn of the century (1900), and things were looking up (well, relatively). How new is new? I'd like to think that fusion and nano-tech is possible, and that we solve the energy problem, but even if we could, who would be altruistic enough to spread these "gifts" to all of humanity?

I suspect in 100 years, the only differences might be a very smoggy outlook, and electric cars everywhere, since we have enough coal to last, and oil will have long been depleted. I have no idea what the Middle East will look like, but I will say that cities will still be here. Can't say much about the cities without native water supplies, though.

[truelitistnot 0]

Urbanization in the future faces some serious and difficult challenges, and those challenges and directions that urbanization take are very dependent upon the politics of the region under question.  Technology, culture, language, personal preferences, innovation, trends, and whatever all take second place to politics and politics can change radically within short time spans at times.  An engineer is constrained by politics (the will of the city council, the will of regional law, the requirements of building codes, etc).  Engineers, developers, planners, etc are not free agents in the sense that they only limited by imagination.  They are heavily limited and constrained and some even argue that having an imagination is a waste of time as you'll almost never be allowed to use it.  To a great degree structures are already conceptually designed based on location (politics of the region, geography of the land, geology, etc).   The only thing to imagine is the athletics of the structure (architectural qualities).  The nature of design, under today’s constraints doesn’t leave for a lot of imagination anyway, especially in urban environments where those constraints are plenty.

 

There are many factors at play here and far too numerous to cover in a simple post.  However, if I were going to go out on a limb and predict the future I would probably generalize a lot and say something along the lines of;

 

The future will suck big time.  As is the general trend line for the past 50 to 100 years in most places.  Your personal living space will grow smaller and smaller until you basically live in a cereal box that costs an unbelievable amount of money.  You lifestyle will have to incorporate thinking about resource allocation.  For example, how much water are you using?  And this won’t be purely due to watching your bills.  It will also encompass severe penalties and threat of prosecution and jail time.  So, water, food, electricity, gas (natural gas – methane), and any fuels you need for whatever reasons (if cars still run on petroleum based fuels or some other type of fuel) will be heavily controlled.  It may not be recognizable to the current generation, but to a generation or two or three already past, if you were to bring them to today’s way of living, they would tell you that you are already in a tyranny.

 

So, each generation will learn (in school, on television, through social media, and through other forms of media) to live a more and more rationed lifestyle.  This will be perpetuated and brought about as the ‘cool’ way to live, when in actuality, it is simply driving people more and more into resource tyranny and control.

 

The two main reasons for this will be lack of resources (such as water in many parts of the world, or cost of water in many parts of the world [transportation, desalinization, filtration, treatment, and so forth]), and Agenda 21 (which basically comes down to the super elite of the world who control trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of wealth, want to reduce world population).

 

So, in urban environments, things will become much more compact and vertical, if the region allows for it (politics, geology, seismic activity, and so forth) and they will become much more slum like in many parts of the world, including the US and other developed nations.  However, don’t confuse ‘slum like’ for cheap.  These will not be cheap slums.  They will in fact be technologically advanced ghettos that cost tremendous amounts of money.  That’s that how you manipulate people into acceptance of such a lifestyle and is contrary to their physical and mental health.

 

The cost of upkeep of infrastructure will become, and already is, prohibitively expensive.  The United States for example averages between a C and D grade for most of its infrastructure and much of it is outdated and near or beyond its design life.  So, look forward to a dangerous future with very high rates of taxation.  Many countries are in similar situations as well.  In addition, most developed nations are very deep in debt without any reasonable means of escaping that debt.

 

The current trend of gentrification will continue for some time and is the direct result of cost of living as many people no longer want a family (due to cost of having and raising children) and due to lack of time for family (due to needing to work so much) as they are rarely ever really off the clock (thanks to technology such as cell phones, email, texting, etc).

 

Those who manage to obtain enough wealth will drive up prices, eventually in extra-urban areas (areas beyond the suburbs) and this is already being seen in many areas where rural choice locations are prohibitively expensive already.

 

International competition for housing will become a massive factor in the future as foreigners compete with locals for housing and other properties.  There will be many factors that influence this.

 

Technology won’t make things better as it is not in the nature of those who run and control the world to make anyone’s life better.  It is in their nature to control you and tax you as a commodity or resource.  If you fail to be useful you will find yourself struggling, homeless or dead.

 

Which brings up the next issue.  The future will be hordes of homeless people, hungry people, thirsty people, struggling people filling these cities full of hipsters and autonomous morons who dedicate themselves to corporations in exchange for housing, and internet enabled vacuum cleaners and dildos.

 

Cars will be a thing of that past and reserve only for the upper class.  I don’t really care if they are gas or electric or cow $%&^! powered.  It makes no difference.  The issue here isn’t pollution, although that will be the reasoning used upon the people to convince them to stay away from cars.  The real issue is two fold; 1) control (confined people’s movement to less than a 5 mile radius on average) and 2) infrastructure is ungodly expensive and why spend your tax money on infrastructure when it can be stolen instead?

After a generation or two or three or whatever of this, people will attempt to escape to the rural locations, however, than will become prohibitively expensive and likely very difficult.

 

You see, an engineer can design almost anything and a contractor and build it.  Your real issue here is will the local government give you permission to do it?  And the trend line has shown us that gaining permission to build never gets easier… it always gets harder and harder and harder and more and more and more expensive.

 

Government simply only has to set in place a national policy to grant building permission for extremely high density construction in existing city locations whilst, at the same time, curtailing granting building permission in rural areas in the name of conservation, global warming, feeling green and whatever the hell you want to call it.

 

Most people, in the future, will be stuck in these hell hole cities eventually.  The elite know this, that is why they own vast tracks of undeveloped rural land already and keep acquiring more and more of it.  Much of it is deemed as working farms, preserves, conservation areas, and so on.  Even if you have funds and permission to travel it likely will be from urban hell hole to urban hell hole.

 

You can argue the merits of conservation all day long, and there are some valid merits.  But, that doesn’t stop it from being used as a means to compact people into urban hells like sardines.  And this situation exists already in many parts of the world, and is eventually coming to every part of the world.

 

So, the really smart people are not moving to cities, they simply buy up the cities and rent them to the masses of idiots who want to live there to get jobs.  The smart people collect money and live in rural locations or at least keep estates in rural locations and they can be grandfathered in once moratoriums and other legislation come in.

Now, about that technology that so many consider great.  Really just mass distraction from the life you are really living instead of the life you should be living.  Expect that trend to continue as technology serves two important purposes; 1) pacification of masses of idiots, and 2) easy big-brother monitoring of masses of idiots.

Soon, big brother will know many slices of toast you eat and what degree of browning you prefer on that toast with your new internet enabled smart toaster that talks to the rest of your home network.

Then there is the issue of robotic continually replacing people and this will become much more a problem in the future.  Robotics coupled with software is a very bad situation for the population at large and creates redundancy at unprecedented rates.

 

Someone in here mentioned war… and that will, unfortunately, continue to be a problem and will likely increase as it is a very good means of destroying human liability (notice I didn’t say human capital and humans are very rarely viewed as capital anymore).

 

That’s the future.  So let’s summarize;

 

1)    Urban areas grow ever expensive (barring those points in the economic cycle of recession/depression, etc).

2)    People in urban areas will be compacted both horizontally and vertically.

3)    People in urban areas will be heavily legislated.

4)    Urban areas will become futuristic high-technology urban slums.  Techno-ghettos.

5)    Technology will become pervasive into everything.

6)    Technology will become (already is) the networked mass surveillance system.

7)    Rural areas will become difficult to get building permission for in the name of conservation and preservation.  Leading to an elite class that enjoys space and freedom outside the urban hell holes.

6)   Infrastructure will continue to be neglected while your tax money is continually stolen.

9)    Education (indoctrination) and media will be used as a means to train people to like or at least accept their urban hell.

10) Pharmaceuticals and psychological counseling will become a major part of urban living to counteract the natural negative psychological and physiological effects of urban living.

11) Population levels will be minimized, or at least maintained with little or no growth, through various means (economic being a major one).

12) Your job will go bye-bye to software and robots.

13)  Homelessness will be a major problem all over the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

^ A prediction of a combination of the Caves of Steel (Asimov) and Brave New World (Huxley) and the Shape of Things to Come (Welles).  So there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes)

We are always running our technology ahead of our ethics.  A glaring example of this is WW II.  Germany had very advanced war technology and used it to great effect.  This, in turn, spurred a huge development cycle in the Allies, much of which remains classified today.  In the end, Germany was bludgeoned to death, and the Japanese were stabbed though the heart using this nice new knife the Allies had invented.  The whole scene was atrocious, and I was there.

We are still doing the same things.  We employ chemical techniques to improve our crops without looking at the long term effect that there may be no crops as the effort enables the death of the pollinators.  Will we invent nano-bees to go around and pollinate the crops before it is too late?  And this is only one example.

Before the European incursions into the Americas, the people living here lived with nature.  Now we either compete or try to coerce the natural order.  It works for a while, but nature ignores us and continues on its merry way.  Some scientists have recently reported that nature is in a kill-off cycle for vertebrates (that includes us).  We are at the nadir of the ice age cycle and into the period of serious warming that precedes the slide into the next ice extension.  When the stored methane in the muskeg and the oceans is released, the greenhouse effect will cool the planet and initiate the next ice age.  We can't stop it no matter how much carbon dioxide we add blathering about how to do so.

We continue to play with Chinese toy rockets, and after 5000 years we should have found something better than reaction engines.  Notwithstanding all the neat physics theory, we are still using Newtonian mechanics to get around the solar system.  For shame!  We have only ourselves to blame.  How many centuries were lost with barbarian incursions that destroyed libraries?  How many centuries were lost to religious superstition?  How many good minds were killed on the battlefields over trivial greed?  We deserve what is going to happen as nature moves to remove vertebrates from the long term experiment.  Hang on to your suspenders.  It is going to be a rough ride.

  Edited August 16, 2015 by A Nonny Moose  
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[dkempel 3]

The big city loves multileveling, and in the future I think you'll have roads stacked on top of the roads that are in place now.

I think this is the best prediction. It is also the most modest.

[crishy 57]

Largest cities in 2100 predictions (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth):

 

Ranking	City	Inhabitants 2100 (millions)
1	Lagos, Nigeria	76.60
2	Dar es Salam, Tanzania	73.68
3	Mubai, India	67.24
4	Kinshasa, DRC	63.05
5	Lilongwe, Malawi	57.43
6	Delhi, India	57.33
7	Blantyre, Malawi	56.78
8	Khartoum, Sudan	56.59
9	Niamey, Niger	55.24
10	Kolkata, India	52.40

 

For comparison, Tokyo, the largest today, has around 36 million now, and will drop to around 15.5 million in 2100, while NYC will increase from 20 million to 27 million, London and Paris will remain fairly stable at around 9 million, and Sao Paulo will decrease from 21.4 million to 13.8 million. In the western world, the only cities seeing significant growth all the way to 2100 are in the US, while East Asian cities, Japan in particular, are all expected to lose a significant amount of inhabitants.

 

That is just one of many scenarios from http://media.wix.com/ugd/672989_62cfa13ec4ba47788f78ad660489a2fa.pdf, but the top 10 cities in all scenarios are all in India + sub-saharan Africa and most see 50+ million people in 2100 (in some cases reaching even 100 million), while Tokyo unilaterally loses from a third to two thirds of its current population by then, with NYC the western city to see the most significant growth.

  Edited August 24, 2015 by crishy  

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Interesting.  Do these numbers take into consideration the effects of climate change?  Most of these cities are in the warm zones and it is possible with the current warming trend that these sites will be uninhabitable by 2100. 

There seems to be an assumption of unlimited growth, also.  What limits to growth were considered?  Plague?  War?  Famine?

[crishy 57]

Mostly fertility, mortality, and immigration rates, taking into consideration growth rates in the past decades, education rates and rural population. These countries have much higher growth rates, as well as plenty of people living in rural areas, so plenty of people to feed growth to their cities. No other constraints to growth presented apparently, though feeding 13+ billion people by then will be invariably more of a challenge than it is now.

But yea, things are already hot enough in these areas these days, I cannot imagine how it would be 85 years from now on, especially as these areas start industrializing and increasing their share of greenhouse gases as well.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Sorry to say, but I think those statistics are simply pie in the sky.  If there are no controls on this there will undoubtedly be natural controls such as a famine or a plague.  Our current penchant in the western world to sterilize everything in site and bubble wrap our children will eventually produce a pathogen that is totally immune to all our measures.  Kids will have no built up immunity, and the anti-vaccinators will have assured that herd immunity will be weak.

Expect a world-wide plague sometime before 2100 which will reduce the world population to something more manageable.

[crishy 57]

Maybe, maybe not. Nigeria managed to 4x its population from 1950 to 2000 from 37 to 122 million, and it stands now at 182 million, so there is no reason to doubt why it could not possibly increase to 450 million in 2050, and 500-1000 million by 2100 like UN statistics projections (which I would assume, without looking in detail at its report, offer an even more reliable population projection than the one I offered above) predict. Its population remains very young at a stable 44% under 14 years old, and with a very high and only slowly decreasing fertility rate so at least there is decent backing to these numbers. Same thing for other countries in the continent. Industrialization and education are much more reliable and key indicators of limiting population growth rates in the future, in my opinion.

A billion people in a relatively small country seems unlikely, but Bangladesh has already 160 million people crammed in a space less than a sixth of the size of Nigeria, so if you multiply 182 million by roughly 6, you can see Nigeria could support in theory that one billion people, or at the very least, much higher numbers than people assume these countries could. Speaking of which, in the Indian subcontinent, even with significantly less population growth (courtesy of higher education and govenrment intervention), they still have a very large rural+small town population who is bound to eventually move to the large cities, as people did (and still do) in the western world a few decades ago. So Indian cities with 50+ million people is nothing farfetched, and at least the region is better prepared to cope with overpopulation issues than African countries are.

The problem with the possible effect of disaster assumptions over population growth is that they are even harder to predict. We can barely forecast the weather two weeks from now, let alone the effects of a ~2C global average temperature increase over the next 85 years (other than the logical flooding due to sea level increases and some sort of adverse effect over the existing biomass, but these are mostly separate issues altogether). I disagree with plagues as health care and education advances will likely limit the extent of them - remember, African countries have endured things like malaria, diarrhea/cholera, AIDS, etc, for decades, killing millions there a year, and they still have had the largest population increases on a % basis for quite a while. It will take something extremely drastic - far higher than a pie in the sky - to substantially reduce worldwide population, and that is a guess as any from one from science fiction. Of course, if anything, your said invincible germ would likely initiate here in the developed world first since we are the ones least exposed to pathogens, right?

Famine has more credibility, but if a "Green Revolution" managed to address major food issues in India in the past, similar ventures could put this issue at bay in Africa for some time. In the past decades, worldwide food production has actually increasing at a faster pace than worldwide population - as standards of living increase, people eat more and waste more food - so food security/availability and socio-economical balance is as important or more as addressing future agricultural output, as many people there are shut down from food access because of high socio-economical inequalities. Nigeria already needs to import food, but then again, their agriculture technology is not the best at the moment, and it has available vegetation area that will likely be turned into farms sooner or later.

Of course Earth has a cap on how many people it can sustain, but estimates of that cap nowithstanding, tell that to the people making children up. One surefire outcome of this population growth is continuing loss of vegetation and biodiversity, as people in the developing world develop their natural areas (forests, parks, etc) in lieu of farms and cities, people in the developed world like it or not.

Anyway, Lagos has now 21 million people in its metro area, from ~300k in 1950. So even if in the best best case scenario, Nigeria goes the way of Japan in industrializing itself in the next few decades, caps its population very rapidly at 300-400 million, Lagos will still have a very large pool of people to draw its growth from, as more than half of its people live at the moment in the rural areas, not to say the doubling of that population. Worst case scenario, Nigeria remains mostly poor (even though it is already one of the richest in the continent, courtesy of oil) goes to upwards of a billion+ people, with many going to a crowded Lagos composed mostly of crowded slums with a young population, much of it which dies young but still with enough people who survive long enough to reproduce and maintain its population at that level. It is bound to cap eventually due to some sort of limitation, of course, but not before likely skyrocketing past 50+ million.

If historical background is of any usefulness, Brazil's population increased from 52 to 170 million from 1950 to 2000, and SP metro (which had to compete against multiple other metros, notably RJ, spread over the country, unlike Lagos) increased from ~3 million to 18 million in that time, and that is with better socio-economic indicators and faster urbanization transition.

  Edited August 30, 2015 by crishy  

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Speaking of Bangladesh, squirrelled away in the top corner of the Hind.  Their land is very low and is being overtaken by the rising sea level.  Where will all those people go?  I am sure that Pakistan doesn't want them, and India is very crowded even if there is a lot of jungle (with lions?, tigers, and bears -- oh, my!).

[crishy 57]

That is a good point but hopefully they will pull off a Netherlands semi-quasi solution by then. A very basic but good addition to SC2100 (or before) would be flooding disasters, though. Better than this robot crap we get in SC4. Stuff like space elevators and maglev trains too. Speaking of which, more mass rail transit everywhere and more densely built up cities to match.

I agree with much of the original OP, but definitively not with the shrinking cities, barring shrinking populations. People working from home could be the norm by then, but young people have a tendency to prefer the large cities, where the fun (and, at the moment, education opportunities, that may or may not change, though I do not see a reputable university like UofT offering full 3-4 year degrees online) is, even if smaller communities have easier and well paid job openings - as I experienced in Northern Ontario - and most never come back again, not to say that regions need clusters of logistical infrastructure, like hospitals, the aforemented universities, airports/long-distance rail stations, etc, something that a number of smaller communities cannot competitively offer.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I really do think cities will either become dispersed or become very concentrated in smaller spaces.  In either case urban farming is necessary, and the infrastructure must be present to support it.

As an educator, I can predict that only those disciplines requiring laboratory participation will survive the urban dispersal model.  Degrees in the arts do not, generally, require personal presence at a central location.  Post graduate studies may require congregation, but this is moot.

[dkempel 3]

Aren't we overlooking, as (virtual) city builders, what is special about the city, namely concentration. The most scarce in SC4 is urban space, as I think I read A Nonny Moose write sometime. Having played SC4 from the empty green field we know that this urban space is relative, it is defined by the relations between things such as residence, workplace, public service, utilities etc. Historically, the nature of the city has been to create urban space by concentrating crucial functions. From the innermost: the court, the temple, the market place, soldiers' quarters behind the inner wall of the citadel; residential quarters, manufacturing, infrastructure protected by the outer wall of the city. Pasture and fields beyond. In this concentration the city achieves something, that cosmopolitan personality which is necessary for a higher pitch of civilization.

I fear this might be lost without a proper physical city. Being in a city with more souls and turn of events than you can ever know forces a certain acceptance of differences (but also of indifference). This leads to pragmatism and fends off parochialism and dogmatism.

This is not to say that the rural and provincial have no importance. The rural rythm with nature and provincial modesty are perhaps values that are particularly needed in the future.

[crishy 57]

Land in SC4 is potentially infinite, limited only by the time you have to play and develop your regions and the specs of your computer.

Urbanization is a trend that will continue to dominate in the incoming century. There will be a trend towards densification in the developed world - especially the US - and metropolises in the developing world are already rather concentrated - expect more sprawling as modern transportation infrastructure is built - but urban flight/dispersal is not occuring. Even in countries losing population like Japan, the burden of this loss is on smaller towns, even with lower fertility rates in the large metropolises, as the loss of population in small towns is felt not only short term, but over long term as well, due to heavy loss of women of reproducing age.

The closest equivalent would be a very sprawling but still large urban metropolis based off smaller cities with plenty of rural and park fillers in between, like Rhine-Ruhr or Randstad. In some cases, especially in the US, the suburbanization of cities did affect the core cities very heavily (noticeably, Detroit), but these areas are still part of a larger but less dense urban area nonetheless.

 

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

One must always remember that no amount of "factory farming" can feed everyone.  Not only must there be strict limits placed on consuming arable land, which changes with the climate, but consideration must be given to the actual land use.  Running beef cattle is very expensive, as is running sheep.  Yet H. Sap. is an omnivore, so needs must.

More urban agriculture on roofs is at least a step in the right direction, but it is doubtful that even a heavy use of these techniques could sustain a city.  Perhaps conversion of smaller centres into arcologies is possible, but can you image trying to roof over New York, Toronto or Paris? 

How about undersea arcologies?  As the shoreline disappears, it is one of the solutions to the present climate trend.