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More than half the world’s population are concentrated in urban areas, and this is having an effect not just culturally, but biologically too. And advances in technology are adding an entirely new dimension to people’s lives.

Cities cover just 3% of the planet's land surface, but are already home to more than half of its people. That means cities are bringing people into ever greater contact, where collectively they act as a giant physical, biological and cultural force. Transport links and communication between cities, from superhighways to express trains and planes, allow businesses to operate planet-wide, shrinking the human world and making the global local.

The great homogenisation of the Anthropocene includes human culture and lifestyle as much as any effect on the natural ecosystem. And cities are the biggest expression of that. They truly are universal...they essentially provide the same experience. Some are more violent, or more sleepy, or more wealthy, but the urban environment is at its heart the same. There is not the vast diversity of landscape and experience that exists across the natural world.

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It is having an effect not just culturally, but biologically: urban melting pots are genetically altering humans. The spread of genetic diversity can be traced back to the invention of the bicycle, according to geneticist Steve Jones, which encouraged the intermarriage of people between villages and towns. But the urbanisation occurring now is generating unprecedented mixing. As a result, humans are now more genetically similar than at any time in the last 100,000 years, Jones says.

And the tight concentration of people in a city also leads to other tolerances and practices, many of which are less common in other human habitats (like the village) or in other species. For example, people in a metropolis are generally freer to practice different religions or none, to be openly gay, for women to work and to voluntarily limit their family size despite – or indeed because of – access to greater resources.

Now that the technology exists for individuals to communicate instantly with companies, government departments, to broadcast to millions or to specific groups over the internet, the city has gained an entirely new dimension. This “virtual city” of communities formed online, using social networks like Twitter or Facebook, is incredibly powerful and not necessarily limited to the geographical contours of the real city.

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Those petitioning for social or political change can hold governments and companies accountable in a manner never possible before. Instead of ploughing through books of corporate ledgers in libraries, vast amounts of data are now published online and can be searched and filtered in minutes with algorithms, allowing journalists and other groups to discover corruption, tax evasion or other information of public interest. Such information can be self-published in seconds, where it is available for billions to see.

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The virtual city provides a way of shrinking and filtering the real megacity, saving time and energy on real journeys across complicated spaces, of accessing multiple conversations with relative anonymity, and of individually helping steer humanity through collaborative creativity and problem solving. It enhances but doesn’t replace the real city with its face-to-face social cues, physical exchanges and wealth of information humans use to make judgements about trustworthiness and other value-laden decisions.

The virtual city does have a more problematic side, however. Never has there been so much information about so much of our lives in such an accessible form. In the course of a day, the average person in a Western city is said to be exposed to as much data as someone in the 15th century would encounter in their entire life. Governments, groups, individuals and corporations can access data about us and use it for their own purposes.

This erosion of individual privacy can be benign or malevolent, but it is already a part of life in the Anthropocene. Customer data collected by the US supermarket Target allows it to identify with a high degree of accuracy which shoppers have recently conceived and when their due date is. The store uses this information to target such women for advertising of its pregnancy and baby products in a timely fashion, even if she has not yet told anyone else. Sinister? Maybe. What about police officers identifying householders as marijuana growers by analysing energy use data? Or neighbours targeting individuals for cyber or physical bullying because of information they discover online? We’re all generating data, every time we make an ATM transactions or log onto a website. In the Anthropocene, we will have to decide who owns our data and whether it can be shared. Excerpts from http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130516-how-city-life-is-changing-us/
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It is having an effect not just culturally, but biologically: urban melting pots are genetically altering humans. The spread of genetic diversity can be traced back to the invention of the bicycle, according to geneticist Steve Jones, which encouraged the intermarriage of people between villages and towns. But the urbanisation occurring now is generating unprecedented mixing. As a result, humans are now more genetically similar than at any time in the last 100,000 years, Jones says.

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
"Green acres is the place to be. Farm livin' is the life for me. Land spreadin' out so far and wide, keep Manhattan just gimme that countryside."


A nice home in the suburbs ain't bad either, but living in a big city?..... never.

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Or a nice house in a gated community, with a bar-b-que patio and a swimming pool, in a nice clean suburb.

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A nice home in the suburbs ain't bad either, but living in a big city?..... never.

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