Sometime in the early 1960s, a significant thing happened in Sydney, Australia. The city discovered its harbor. Then, one after another, Sydney discovered tots of things that were just sort of there-broad parks, superb beaches, and a culturally diverse population. But it is the harbor that makes the city.
Andrew Reynolds, a cheerful fellow in his early 30s, pilots Sydney ferryboats for a living. I spent the whole morning shuttling back and forth across the harbor. After our third run Andrew shut down the engine, and we went our separate ways-he for a lunch break, I to explore the city.
"I'll miss these old boats," he said as we parted.
"How do you mean?" I asked.
"Oh, they're replacing them with catamarans. Catamarans are faster, but they're not so elegant, and they're not fun to pilot. Hut that's progress, I guess."
Everywhere in Sydney these days, change and progress are the watchwords（口号）, and traditions are increasingly rare. Shirley Fitzgerald, the city's official historian, told me that in its rush to modernity in the 1970s, Sydney swept aside much of its past, including many of its finest buildings. "Sydney is confused about itself," she said. "We can't seem to make up our minds whether we want a modern city or a traditional one. It's a conflict that we aren't getting any better at resolving（解决）.”
On the other hand, being young and old at the same time has its attractions. I considered this when I met a thoughtful young businessman named Anthony. "Many people say that we lack culture in this country," he told me. "What people forget is that the Italians, when they came to Australia, brought 2000 years of their culture, the Greeks some 3000 years, and the Chinese more still. We've got a foundation built on ancient cultures but with a drive and dynamism of a young country. It's a pretty hard combination to beat."
He is right, but I can't help wishing they would keep those old ferries.
As cities around the world try to be smart, some have become stupid instead.
So, what is a "stupid city"? It is a city that gives in to urban sprawl(扩张), with people moving from central areas to less-crowded communities, said Mr. Nicholas You, a director of the Guangzhou Institute for Urban Innovation in China. Such communities are heavily reliant on cars.
Another problem Mr. You stressed is that public administration bodies in "stupid cities'' tend to work alone, refusing to share data that could help develop solutions to urban problems. He made the point during a discussion on urban transformation in Asia, saying, "A real smart city is one that looks at everything as a whole—you can't look at water issues without looking at energy."
A South Korean member, Mr. Jong Sung Hwang, suggested that some of the biggest barriers to creating a smart city are cultural. South Korean society is less forgiving of mistakes, noted Mr. Jong. For example, some in Seoul tried to push for an intelligent traffic system but were met with resistance from the police. He said, "We have ideas, data and even money, but we could not make it happen."
India, however, is not adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to create smart cities for its 1.3 billion people, said a member from India.
In Singapore, which launched its Smart Nation initiative( 行 动 ) in 2014, the authorities fear that technology can worsen the divide between the haves and the have-nots, said Dr. Limin Hee, director for research at the Centre for Liveable Cities here. "Thankfully, many cities are considering such issues as how to make better use of data and technology to create smart cities," she added.
According to a report by the United Nations, 54 percent of the world's population lives in urban areas and it predicts that by 2050, this figure will have increased to around 70 percent. But as more and more people migrate from the countryside to the city to get better opportunities, they can end up with nowhere to live.
This is true in places such as Rio de Janeiro, where migrants can't rent or buy a home, and they end up building their own communities and houses on unoccupied land. These are called shanty towns—poor communities where the houses are built out of cheap materials—and often don't have any electricity or water supply.
These are, of course, not the megacities (大城市)of the future we want to see. Some serious urban planning is needed to make our cities of the future good, safe and modern places to live in. This involves improving the infrastructure (基础设施), the housing conditions and also the opportunities for education and employment.
Something urban planners
are looking at now is the creation of "smart cities". According to
John Rossant, founder and chairman of the
non-profit organization New Cities Foundation, technology is the way forward. He thinks that it's generally
accepted that "cloud computing 
ubiquitous internet, robust 5G networks, etc, will transform our cities." He says technology is really "a game changer" in urbanisation. It would collect large amounts of data about how a city is performing and may improve how a city functions.
This may sound like a utopian (乌托邦似的) view. For now, some big cities around the world are trying out more low—tech schemes to try and make them desirable places to live and work in. Building shared—ownership housing and improving public transport are some ways. And encouraging cycling and building bike lanes can keep the population healthy and cut down on smog. What would make your city a better place to live in?
Last summer, bird-watchers confirmed the discovery of a new species of bird in Cambodia was not an event of particular biological significance, but it was striking for one reason in part. This species of bird was discovered not in an unspoiled rain forest but within the limits Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh – a city the size of Philadelphia.
What the researchers found was surprising in cities. The medium-sized city in the state about 110 species of birds, over 95 percent of which would have been growing there urbanization. Ecologically speaking, cities are different, concrete buildings. Rather, each unique bio-profile – a kind of ecological fingerprint – that is against the idea of an environment dead zone.
Of course, it's also true that in the world of birds and plants, as in human society, there is such a thing as worldwide—the city-inhabitants who feel equally at home in San Francisco, Milan and Beijing. Four birds occur in more than 80 percent of the cities studied, and 11 plants occurred in more than 90 percent of the cities. On the plant side, those are seemingly spread by European settlement. In the air, it's the usual suspects: the rock pigeon and many other birds. “They have become completely adapted to urban life,”Katti says. “That's not much of surprise. But they don't actually dominate as much as we think they do.” Those species—occurring in the cities across the globe—represent only a small part of a city's natural varieties.
Not all cities are equal protectors of native animals and plants, though. One of the biggest predictors for a city's biodiversity is its urban design. Territory as varied as backyards and street trees can lay important roles in greening a city. In fact, the amount of green space is a stronger predictor of the density of biodiversity than a city's size. A metropolis with a sizable network of parks can contain more species per square mile than a much smaller city.
In a world where architecture, food, language, fashion and commerce are increasingly globalized, a city's native animals and plants can be a kind of identity. There may be neighborhoods in London and Paris that resemble Singapore or Hong Kong. Cities are becoming similar, but their natural environments stand completely apart.
With the largest population in the world, China has the most mouths to feed on the planet. Consequently, food waste is a great problem in China. It is reported that more than 6% — or 35 million kgs — of the country's total food production is lost before reaching consumers, in the household and warehouse storage, transport and processing sectors. With an ever-growing population, it's imperative to deal with food waste in China.
Thankfully, policies covering food waste have been rapidly emerging in recent years. Since 2010, the Chinese government has selected 100 cities and encouraged them to explore alternative waste management systems. In 2016,China amended(修改) its Solid Waste Law to stop illegal dumping(倾倒) and promote recycling and reuse of waste, including food. Restaurants will soon be charged a fee for the amount of food waste they produce. And China is using a good food waste processing method called anaerobic digestion, a process that transforms organic waste into biogas, which can be used as energy, or turned into biofuel.
Moving forward, policymakers should consider loss and waste reduction to be as important as increasing production. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the current policy system of agricultural subsidisation(补贴) mainly includes price guarantees and subsidies for crops, production materials, seeds and agricultural machinery, which leads to local governments focusing on crop production while paying little attention to the wastage in the supply chain. There should also be increased investment in the construction of new warehouses and special funds for storage, transport, and processing technologies.
If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitting(排放) country in the world, generating about 8% of total greenhouse gas emissions. This issue is not location-specific, but an issue that affects every living thing on the planet and should therefore be seen as an essential area to take action in.
More than a third of small towns in Georgia lost population in the last year alone, highlighting the challenges of reviving rural areas. New census (人口普查) estimates show that Camilla fell below 5, 000 residents. Sparks fell below 2, 000, and Milan fell to 661 residents for a loss of 7% of its population. All three towns are in South Georgia.
"Many of the young people in these communities graduate from high school and don't come back. They go to college, whatever, they don't come back," said David Bridges, head of its Center for Rural Prosperity and Innovation in Tifton.
Meanwhile, Georgia's cities are growing, having no problem drawing people from small towns and other cities. Atlanta grew more than 1% in the past year and is now nearing the half-million-resident mark.
The trend of people moving from rural to urban areas is hardly a new one——it's been going on worldwide for more than a century. But continued population losses have raised questions about whether rural areas can do anything to reverse the tide.
Rural residents can face a number of challenges including access to good jobs, transportation and health care. Manufacturing jobs have dried up in many places, while modernization and new technology means fewer people are needed for farming. And many people are deciding to have smaller families than was typical a century ago.
"The older generation is dying, the younger generation is moving away, and because there are perceived to be fewer business opportunities, financial opportunities, etc. It's very challenging to get inbound population." Bridges said.
Demographers (人口学家) expect the shift from rural to urban to continue. But there are some bright spots in rural America still. Jackson County near Athens was recently named one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation by the Census Bureau. Amazon opened a large fulfillment center there a couple of years ago. And Young Harris, near the Georgia-North Carolina border, has grown by more than 80% since 2010.
As businesses and governments have struggled to understand the so-called millennials—born between roughly 1980 and 2000—one frequent conclusion has been that they have a unique love of cities. A deep-seated preference for night life and subways, the thinking goes, has driven the revitalization of urban cores across the U.S. over the last decade-plus.
But there's mounting evidence that millennials' love of cities was a passing fling(放纵). Millennials don't love cities any more than previous generations.
The latest argument comes from Dowell Myers, an urban planning professor at USC. As they age, says Myers, millennials' presence in cities, will "be evaporating(蒸发) through our fingers, if we don't make some plans now." That's because millennials' preference for cities will fade as they start families and become more established in their careers.
It's about more than aging, though. Demographer William Frey has been arguing for years that millennials have become stuck in cities by the 2008 downturn and the following slow recovery, with poor job prospects and declining wages making it harder for them to afford to buy homes in suburbia.
Myers, too, says observers have confused young people's presence in cities with a preference for cities. Survey data shows that more millennials would like to be living in the suburbs than actually are. But the normal career and family cycles moving young people from cities into suburban houses have become, in Myers' words, "a plugged up drain."
But unemployment has finally returned to healthy lows (though participation rates and wages are still largely stagnant), which Myers says should finally increase mobility for millennials.
Other trends among millennials, supposedly matters of lifestyle preference, have already turned out to have been driven mostly by economics. What was once deemed their broad preference for public transit may have always been a now-reversing inability to afford cars. Even decades-long trends towards marrying later have been accentuated as today's young people struggle for financial stability.
Investors are already taking the idea that millennials will return to old behavior patterns seriously, putting more money into auto manufacturers and developers. But urban lifestyles, up to and including trendy bars, aren't just hip—they're a part of what powers a city's economic engines, bringing people together to explore new ideas, create companies, and build careers.
From the 1960s to the 1990s, we saw that suburbanization(城市郊区化)also means an economic and social hollowing out for cities. Now that the economic shackles are coming off today's young city residents, cities that want to stay vibrant(充满生机的) have to figure out how to convince them—and their growing families—to stick around.
For the past 3000 years, when people thought of money, they thought of cash. From buying food to settling bar bills, day-to-day dealings involved paper or clinking bits of metal. Over the past decade, however, digital payments have taken off — tapping your credit card on a terminal or using a smart phone has become normal. Now this revolution is about to turn cash into an endangered species in some rich economies. That will make the economy more efficient, but it also poses new problems that could make the change victim.
Countries are eliminating(消除) cash at varying speeds. But the direction of travel is clear, and in some cases the journey is nearly complete. In Sweden the number of retail cash transactions per person has fallen by 80% in the past ten years. Cash accounts for just 6% of purchases by value in Norway. Britain is probably four or six years behind the Nordic countries. America is perhaps a decade behind. Outside the rich world, cash is still king. But even there its dominance is being weakened. In China, digital payments rose from 4% of all payments in 2012 to 84% in 2020.
Cash is dying out because of two forces. One is demand — younger consumers want payment systems that plug seamlessly(无缝地) into their digital lives. But equally important, suppliers such as banks and tech firms (in developed markets) and telecoms companies (in emerging ones) are developing fast, easy-to-use payment technologies from which they can pull data and pocket fees.
In general, the outlook of a cashless economy is excellent news. Cash is inefficient. In rich countries, minting, sorting, storing and distributing it is estimated to cost about 0.5% of GDP. But that does not begin to capture the gains. When payments disappear, people and shops are less fragile to theft. Governments can keep a closer eye on fraud or illegal tax avoidance. Digitalization vastly expands the playground of small businesses and sole traders by enabling them to sell beyond their borders. It also creates a credit history, helping consumers borrow.
Who cares if people think wrongly that the Internet has had more important influences than the washing machine? Why does it matter that people are more impressed by the most recent changes?
It would not matter if these misjudgments were just a matter of people's opinions. However, they have real impacts, as they result in misguided use of scarce resources.
The fascination with the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) revolution, represented by the Internet, has made some rich countries wrongly conclude that making things is so "yesterday" that they should try to live on ideas. This belief in "post-industrial society" has led those countries to neglect their manufacturing sector (制造业) with negative consequences for their economies.
Even more worryingly, the fascination with the Internet by people in rich countries has moved the international community to worry about the "digital divide" between the rich countries and the poor countries. This has led companies and individuals to donate money to developing countries to buy computer equipment and Internet facilities. The question, however, is whether this is what the developing countries need the most. Perhaps giving money for those less fashionable things such as digging wells, extending electricity networks and making more affordable washing machines would have improved people's lives more than giving every child a laptop computer or setting up Internet centres in rural villages, I am not saying that those things are necessarily more important, but many donators have rushed into fancy programmes without carefully assessing the relative long-term costs and benefits of alternative uses of their money.
In yet another example, a fascination with the new has led people to believe that the recent changes in the technologies of communications and transportation are so revolutionary that now we live in a "borderless world". As a result, in the last twenty years or so, many people have come to believe that whatever change is happening today is the result of great technological progress, going against which will be like trying to turn the clock back. Believing in such a world, many governments have put an end to some of the very necessary regulations on cross-border flows of capital, labour and goods, with poor results.
Understanding technological trends is very important for correctly designing economic policies, both at the national and the international levels, and for making the right career choices at the individual level. However, our fascination with the latest, and our under valuation of what has already become common, can, and has, led us in all sorts of wrong directions.
"I have slept on the Embankment (路堤), " wrote George Orwell in 1933, adding that, despite the noise and the wet and the cold, it was "much better than not sleeping at all". Nine decades on and Charing Cross and the Embankment are once again full of rough sleepers, even during the coldest days of December. It is a pattern found in much of the rich world.
However, it does not have to be this way. In post-war America, there was little rough sleeping, and homelessness was falling so fast that sociologists predicted it would soon disappear. Even today, some rich, successful cities, including Tokyo and Munich, have few people living on the streets.
These places offer lessons on how to reduce homelessness. One is that tough love can sometimes work. Conservatives argue that softer policing policies in the 1970s, including careless attitudes to public drunkenness, were in part responsible for the rise in homelessness. The world could learn something from Greece, where strong family networks ensure that those down on their luck find someone to take them in. Many experts argue that it is counterproductive (事与愿违的) to give money to someone begging on the street. Better, they say, to donate to a charity.
Yet, most people believe tougher policies will ultimately do little if housing costs remain high. This is the underlying reason for rising homelessness. So, the state can do something to help. For example, more generous rent allowance might actually save governments money in the medium term—after all, demands on health-care services and the police would decline. Another option is for the state to build more housing itself. In Singapore, a place where there is practically no homelessness, 80% of residents live in government-built flats which they buy at knock-down prices.
The most effective reform, however, would be to make building more homes easier. The problem of rough sleeping in Germany and Switzerland, two countries with minimal real-house-price growth in recent decades, is less acute. Japan has used its fair share of strong-arm policies to deal with the homeless, but then it introduced a big urban reform in the early 2000s.
