Distribution of world population. Image: Living in the endless city. Phaidon, 2011
Apparently this week the world population has reached seven billion people. An event that occurs amid a powerful crisis that lasts four years, and affects just those, in recent decades, have been exerting economic leadership, political and military, the United States and Europe.
It is an overwhelming amount, that it reflects the number of those who inhabit the Earth. Curiously, is presented from the media, those machines that draw our attention constantly, molding distracting thought and everyday problems. From that perspective and constantly generated perverse, only possible escape frustration and individualistic to problems like this we perceive boundless in its immensity.
Map of major cities in China
On the other hand, we can not individually or collectively find an adequate response to these challenges as huge. The only attitude that unites us is a constant demand answers without solutions glimpse. Meanwhile, and what is more serious, to those on foot we will gradually stealing the ability to influence, entangled by supposed leaders who are also subject to powers whose understanding eludes them.
According to United Nations data handled by past would grow by more than one billion people in just twelve years old and is expected to 2.050 we have reached the 10 billion. A fact which coincides with the transfer of the strength of the economy to other places is confusing us recognize. Perceiving the strength and scope of these ongoing phenomena should serve to act and shape our response accordingly.
Major cities in the north of the Indian subcontinent, between Pakistan, India and Bangladesh
Driven by this curiosity, I made a few simple inquiries on current demographic conditions of our planet. I extract some data: Just over a third of the world population, or 2.500 million, accumulates in only two countries: China and India. And there, in the first, in an area of few hundred kilometers (en 30 cities, around Shanghai) live 100 millones de personas. Likewise, in the Indian subcontinent live another hundred million more, along a strip that runs parallel to the Himalayas and running from Lahore in Pakistan to Dhaka in Bangladesh.
In yellow toareas urban European continent, African and Asian. Image: Living in the endless city.
Phaidon, 2011
Perforce, those areas and countries of the world are those that are designed to powerfully influence our destinies in the future. What happens there will shape our expectations of human development and quality of life. One such extreme human density, located in environments as concrete, will polarize the carrying capacity of the globe in its entirety. And, following Malthus, the struggle for dwindling resources will intensify relentlessly to the detriment of the weakest.
And, versus, collective constructions, ideological, Western social policies and have been adding complexity and difficulty exercising that global soft power that has characterized the last fifty years. Until it has reached a paralysis and loss of previous hegemony that has held since those other parts of the world who referred to the principle.
Runaway growth of the population is a fact of unparalleled forcefulness, somehow reveals and confirms that loss of American and European influence in favor of other regions and continents, precisely because there is not growing as exaggerated the number of people.
Religious Festival in Bombay coast
The growth we are experiencing Asia is impressive, it shows every day, with each new building, new firm moved to Africa and each new story, eg: that the last great luxury car show held recently in Beijing, where the new rich class seeks to satisfy your appetite consumerist “capitalist”
What China and India knew but perhaps particularly northern India has surprised me…