The History and Future of Places – Part 13: A looming demographic reversal

I want to re-emphasize what I have meant by “places” in this series. Places are those aspects of the world which have their own names and which we know directly because we encounter them in our daily lives and travels. Places, in this sense, include our homes, neighbourhoods, cities and regions. In our daily encounters with them it is their distinctiveness that is usually regarded as significant. However, for all their apparent uniqueness, the identities of places are in some respects the product of broad social, technological and environmental processes.

These processes sweep around the world like epidemics, affecting everywhere in broadly similar ways, yet with distinctively local manifestations. They were once slow, taking decades or centuries to spread across continents, but in the recent past they have become increasingly fast moving and far-reaching. In concluding this series, I am interested in the broad, large-scale processes that are likely to affect place identities over the course of the 21st century.

My focus up to now has been on Europe and North America. This corresponds reasonably well to the category of ‘more developed regions’ used by the United Nations in its population and urbanization projections, and which informs my discussion here. My discussion now broadens out to a worldwide scale. This is partly because most future growth will occur in ‘less developed regions’, but also because global connectivity is now a fact of everyday life. The Covid-19 pandemic has clearly shown this to be true.

The pandemic has also shown that established practices and expectations can be disrupted by unexpected events. In the 21st century these include two widely identified, potentially catastrophic disruptions to places: nuclear conflict and runaway artificial intelligence. I do not consider these, nor other unpredictable existential risks and possible technological misfortunes, but focus on continuing trends. These trends are: the place legacy of the present; peak population; urbanization; climate change; and, somewhat more speculatively, shifts in a shared view of the world.

My main argument in these concluding parts of the series is that future changes to places are likely to be incremental, with few big surprises. That reflects of an underlying assumption that trends offer the most reliable guide to the future; trends imply continuity. However, I should take this opportunity to acknowledge the disruptive influence of tipping points (which are especially important in discussions of climate change) and turning points. Such disruptions might stem from the pervasive impacts of electronic communications, political transitions such as the decline of democracy, widespread environmental crises, pandemics, or social justice movements.

Specific instances of turning and tipping points are impossible to predict. They could turn the relatively slow linear changes associated with the above-named trends into abrupt shifts.

The Legacy of Present Places

The built environments of places are products of enormous investments of time, effort and money. They tend to survive political and economic upheavals – at least those that are short-lived events – and last as long as they continue to have value. The consequence is that every generation inherits a legacy of places and leaves its own legacy to the future

The place legacy of the present age, which I define as beginning about 1970, is the largest there will ever be. Never before have so many places been made to accommodate so many people in such a short time. A legacy of this scale will never be repeated. For the first time in the history of humanity, the growth rate of the global population is in steep decline, with no likelihood of reversal.

Since 1970, a frenzy of placemaking in the developed world has produced new towns and vast suburbs. Downtown skylines have been transformed by skyscrapers, social housing projects, shopping malls, commercial strips, and industrial parks. Resort developments have sprung up along coasts and in mountain ranges. These have been complemented by related infrastructures of expressway networks, airports, communication towers, container ports, high speed railways, and sewage treatment plants. The present age is also the first to bequeath to the future thousands of heritage sites and environmental areas deliberately protected from change for the foreseeable future.

This legacy is so new and so extensive it is unlikely to be modified in a major way any time soon. That means there are unlikely to be many surprises in the near future in how places will be made and experienced. In the longer run, of course, the place legacy will age, and incremental changes made in response to fashions, technological innovations and climate change will accumulate. But if the legacy of the 19th century to the present is any indication, much of the legacy of the recent past is likely to be around for a very long time.

Peak population and its implications

The 21st century is demographically exceptional. Projections show global population growing by about another 3 billion then, around the end of the century, peaking and beginning to decline. The implications of this demographic reversal will be huge. After millennia of continual growth, we will see a shift from needing more places for more people, to fewer people in shrinking places.

Global population projections mask considerable unevenness in both time and space. Almost all future growth will happen in Asia and Africa, and after 2050 mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. For those regions, the challenge will be one of making new places and expanding existing ones. In most of the more developed countries, population growth through natural increase (i.e. internal growth because the number of births exceeds deaths) has already peaked and begun to drop. This drop has been offset by immigration, particularly from less developed countries, and this has led to the recent cultural and racial diversification of populations.

In countries where immigration has been limited, for instance Japan, Russia, Poland, Italy and Spain, total populations are beginning to decline. These are the forerunners of the demographic transition associated with ageing that will increasingly affect every place. In the short term, it will be apparent in more developed countries, spreading to less developed nations but by the end of the century. This transition will lead to widespread adjustments to places, including fewer children and schools, more hospitals and long-term care facilities. With this will come all the attendant social problems of an ever-smaller working population supporting more elderly people.

More speculatively, after peak population, there could be to a transition to fewer, smaller places that are environmentally and demographically sustainable.