oncoming de-urbanization — Tarik Yildirim

Why do we live in crowded cities? The answer is simple: Network effects. When we live literally on top of each other, it is easier to meet people and do business. Density creates optionality as well. Serving the long tail becomes a possibility, because there is a critical mass that is interested in all sorts of weird things, ranging from fusion cuisines to underground parties.

But cities also take a toll on you. Air pollution, noise pollution, light pollution. Stupid neighbors, inconsiderate pedestrians, maniac drivers. You name it.

Istanbul, the city I happen to live in, has especially turned into a fucking nightmare. Decades long corruption, short-termism, populism, distastefulness and sheer ignorance have achieved the impossible and turned one of the most beautiful cities in the world into an unlivable place.

There are no common spaces left, no green areas neither. People have no option but to go to shopping malls and get sucked into a giant blackhole of timeless, contextless, blood-sucking sameness. Everywhere is gray, a nasty dirty brutal tone of gray, and a substantial majority of the buildings look plain disgusting. There are no regulations, no shared patterns, no aesthetic commonalities.
There are no laws neither. You can get run over by a motorcycle while walking on the fucking sidewalk. Taxis will not stop for you if you have a kid or if you do not look like a clueless Arab tourist that they think they can rip off.
Sidewalks are generally so thin that people who come out to light a cigarette can not help but blow their smoke right in your face, and they are so irregular that if you do not pay attention you can easily trip over and land on your face (or press on something loose and get all wet).
In popular places, you constantly have to dodge street sellers and beggars. Most beggars (especially the young ones) will follow you until you give up, or until they give up and curse at you.
The entire city has become a giant billboard. You get grabbed by the eyeballs while driving, walking, standing in public transportation, waiting for public transportation, literally everywhere… Unless you are flying over the city with a private helicopter, you are guaranteed to be brain fucked by the time you arrive home. As usual, corporations ask you to buy their brand new shit. But that is not enough. Municipalities also have to inform you about their recent achievements. (Yes, you heard that right. Municipalities boast about things they are supposed to do as part of their job description.) Eventually you become so visually desensitized that even the nasty gray color that has encapsulated the entire city starts to look adorable.

Insane, right? I guess it takes a very long time for people to realize that they have gone insane when they do so both slowly and collectively.

Anyway, today I see a lot of people taking action (or at least displaying the will to take action). There seems to be two very different forms of de-urbanization happening.

There is a growing number of people who live in the city but just go from point to point, without interacting with any strangers or encountering anything unplanned. They get chauffeured from meeting to meeting, from one air-conditioned special-purpose location to another. When they take their family to a theatre, they land directly inside the theatre and then get beamed back into their living rooms. These people have managed to achieve a pseudo transcendence from local conditions. I view this de-fragmentation and the subsequent decoherence of the single unified social texture into many co-existing social textures as a form of de-urbanization. (In other words, I define de-urbanization abstractly, as a process that leads to a decrease in the physical connectivity of the social texture.)
There is a growing number of people who leave the city and head for the country side, simply because they can. Their jobs have been completely digitalized and all the network effects they need for social and commercial purposes can now be mediated by the internet. They often work from home, for companies with (globally) distributed (permanent and temporary) work forces.

Those who hate the city but can not give up on to its cultural vibrancy usually fall into the first bucket. However, more and more of them are transitioning into the second bucket by virtualizing their cultural needs as well. (Do you really need to go to the theater to watch a movie?)

My belief is that the de-urbanization trends, in both forms, will become increasingly stronger for two reasons:

Software is eating world and the entire economy is becoming more and more digitalized. This is not a short term trend. It is a fundamental phase shift that will continue to affect each and everyone of us. In the digital world, distances do not matter since information travels at the speed of light. There is no long tail problem neither. (In fact, the rise of the internet has resulted in a vast proliferation of subcultures.) In short, the cities are no longer needed. They are archaic remnants from the times when the world economy was going through its physical phase. Network effects can now be mediated by actual networks.
Cities are designed to mediate network effects. This means that they are viral in many ways. News travel faster, but so do diseases. This makes the cities particularly vulnerable to outbreaks. (Remember, viruses travel through physical networks, not digital networks. You do not get sick when someone sneezes on your face during a video conference.) Why do I even bother to point this out? Because there is another major technological transformation underway, a transformation that will soon force everyone to revize their entire pros-and-cons tables. Recent breakthroughs in genetic engineering (like CRISPR) are enabling easy, cheap and accurate engineering of DNA. This is a great development for precision medicine but also great news for school-shooting freaks and suicide-bombing terrorists. Are you panicking about Coronavirus? You have not seen anything yet. Not too far in the future, we will be worrying about the fast-evolving viruses engineered and unleashed by deranged high-school kids working from their bedrooms. Cities will suddenly and completely become unlivable. Just look at what is happening in China today. The entire social texture has become pulverised in a matter of a few weeks. (People are not leaving their apartments, at all.)

Here we have two very different technologies, one creating the problem and the other one dissolving it. Cities will soon become both unviable and irrelevant. So, in order for us to make this grand sociological phase transition with the least amount of damage, we should do our best to make sure that cities become irrelevant before they actually become unviable.

Many people think that urbanization will continue forever. Futurists, as usual, simply interpolate the current trends to infinity. May be they are right. May be we will all end up living inside a single monolithic megalopolis, but I believe that the shell will a lot thinner and spread-out than they imagine.