The Megacity Hoax

If you go into any conference or forum discussing smart cities for the past year, you’ll likely hear that more and more people are moving into what industry has called Megacities. Everyone has someone smart they can reference as well. McKinsey, Frost & Sullivan, Gartner, you name it. Armies of ivy league researchers quantifying the projected influx of humans into dense urban populations usually to the tune of 68% of us by 2050.  Also factor in it is projected we’ll add another 2.5 billion people by this time, mostly from Asia and Africa. Imagine China today, then add two more China’s.

A few thoughts come to mind when I hear this. The first is that I agree with the assessment on this trend. Yes, I can agree we’re heading this direction. The second is why do we want to accept or embrace this as our reality? I think we should all start banding together and asking ourselves why is this actually happening to begin with. Lastly, who is selling Megacities anyways?

The same people who starting selling us “smart cities”. A mix of large corporates, lobbyists, very talented marketing people, and former government workers now turned advocates or sales people. Everyone from Cisco to Microsoft and all the other enterprise players puts something about Megacities on Slide 2 of their sales decks to make sure cities know that they aren’t prepared for the future. They have the supply (products to accumulate data), while this shared and to some extent manufactured fear helps create demand (multi-year contracts funded by taxpayers). The sensors on your traffic lights don’t come free, nor cheap.

These actors share one common denominator. Their jobs become much easier if they can commodify us all into more consolidated buckets enabling them to sell into and extract from with far greater ease if we were all geographically dispersed. For example, why would a utility company want to go rural parts of New York if they can somehow cram everyone into Manhattan? The short answer is they don’t and really never have. Megacities are a good way for them and others to realize their vision of just selling into defined capital rich areas versus continually telling Congress that those that live in the outskirts have no actual interest in their product or service anyways. That’s a lie. Farmers want internet. This has been a reality since FDR enacted the New Deal to combat investor owned utilities not wanting to service rural areas because there was less revenue to be gained. Capitalism, mindset, nor process hasn’t changed since and Megacities only encourage this behavior further.

This isn’t some surprising phenomenon either. We live in a society where companies are revered for market dominance earned through the extractive practices made tremendously easier when the audience is more predictable. Less tactics are required when we’re all jammed together versus spread out.  Big tech players like Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, and others have mastered this playbook with algorithms churning 24/7. They then use this extracted data to place us all into statistical buckets together then figure out how to get us to consume more by clicking, buying, and/or looking at something. Facebook is just the most popular villain at the moment, but they’re really just a replica of others with slightly worse PR and government relations.

We’re simply less social with each other as our loyalty has shifted away from one another and directly to these algorithms. So as are cities are getting more easily sold on a future that doesn’t necessarily improve our lives, in a Megacity we also are more likely to lose our capacity to effectively communicate about our collective future with one another. This has been a growing trend for a while. Ask residents in London.

As Jay Shetty says, as a society we ask Google more questions that we ask each other. We express our thoughts on Facebook, but don’t say hi to our neighbors. People get thousands of likes on Instagram, but have no one in particular to call on a bad day.

Megacities would just be adding more people to a pre existing framework led by the same enterprises with increasing leverage to make the rules. It would just be accelerating a current status quo that doesn’t work for the overwhelming majority of humanity. The more you can populate a city, the less tactics you need to sell to it, and the less differentiated your offering needs to be. The net result is a sterilized culture that pushes out the very people that attracted others to visit or move there to begin with. The scariest part is everyone is buying into this, even at the highest level. World leaders and companies from around the world are convening in Davos this week for World Economic Forum to discuss globalization. My guess is that no leader attending is willing to stand up and say, maybe GDP growth isn’t the main priority in a more globalized world. Maybe we should be less focusing on growing and more focused on thriving. No company spending millions to be there will likely be willing to risk their stock price dropping and no leader would be willing to fall out of the coveted G20 photo. It takes real collaboration and a rewriting of our social contract with one another. Right now we just have an acceptance of a status quo and expensive events to keep check on everyone involved.

This incremental nature of acceptance that this  is our reality makes it more difficult to reject later on. As a society we tend to come together for common good when a problem has become so big that without a unified campaign it is virtually impossible to make a dent in addressing it. Even then, mainstream media and the markets quickly move on. Think Parkland, Katrina, Facebook, take your pick.

Next time you hear about your city becoming a Megacity. Just ask yourself why those from other places want to leave a place where the rent is half and maybe even own acres of land to then trade that all in for a shoe box apartment topped off with a longer commute.

Instead of accepting this and opening up the floodgates, perhaps we can install proven cooperative economic models to open up more opportunities where everyone is fleeing from. Change the math and you’ll change the outcome.