The Apollo 11 moon landing 40th anniversary is currently underway. An entry at Cosmic Log, “Apollo 11: Where are they now?”, has this interview excerpt with Michael Collins (who remained in lunar orbit):
As seen from the moon, Earth looked fragile 40 years ago and probably would look even more fragile today, Collins said:
…When we flew to the moon, our population was 3 billion; today it has more than doubled and is headed for 8 billion, the experts say. I do not think this growth is sustainable or healthy. The loss of habitat, the trashing of oceans, the accumulation of waste products – this is no way to treat a planet.
Nice to see at least one astronaut has environmental sensibility!
A letter from The Age, 18/7, argues that high-density living decreases the risk of street violence because there are more people around:
The very high price of urban sprawl
Yesterday’s Age had two articles on the front page. One showed a perplexed Premier struggling to comprehend the spiralling street violence. The other told us what we have known forever: urban sprawl is costly and fraught with social problems.
The answer to the first article lies in the second. Higher-density cities are more able to manage day-to-day street violence than cities with satellite suburbs sprawling across the urban edges.
When density rises there is a blending of economic, social and cultural traits. Conversely, these traits are prised apart when new, isolated suburbs are constructed far away from the central activity areas where cultures and belief systems become secondary to personality.
There is often a cultural bias in these new suburbs and, in isolation, there is a far greater likelihood that violence will be used as a means of expression. For some, it replaces social, academic and economic deficiencies. Tolerance is more likely when cultural interaction is part of everyday life. Higher densities aid that interaction.
High-density cities are easier to police; to transport the population and to manage economically. Hong Kong has a density of 6400 persons per square kilometre, Paris 21,000, and Tokyo 33,650 – cities that people love visiting and living in.
Melbourne, by contrast, has a population density of about 1600 people per square kilometre and dropping. The contrast is significant.When Melburnians venture out, they are generally alone, especially at night. If our perplexed Premier wants to solve our urban crime problem, he will first need to resolve the issue of urban sprawl and low-density living.
– Graham Wines, Glen Iris
In my observation, crowding thousands of people together leads to more stress and thus violence, as humans are not evolutionarily adapted to live this way. This was the opinion given in the article “London’s a rat hole” (21/1/2009 entry). High-density cities also drain the landscape around them of resources.
