As the Industrial Revolution began, people flocked to cities. City life promised opportunities, a better life, and a better future for people's children. Nowadays, these things more or less remain the same, but a few caveats come with living in a city. Noise, air pollution, ugly architecture, no walkability, and poor planning — for some folks, living in a city of their dreams is no longer worth it.
In some parts of the world, people prefer small towns over big cities. A 2019 survey, conducted in six European countries, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Austria, and Switzerland, showed that young people in particular are prioritizing sustainability over bright lights and excitement. Most folks aged 18-35 claimed they want a different kind of urban planning. Only slightly more than one in 10 would prefer to live in a city that has over a million inhabitants.
What do young people not like about big city life? Most cite overpopulation and waste management as the biggest issues. They want more access to nature, green spaces, and public transport powered by renewable energy.
"Greenery is incredibly important for our cities and we must continue to plan and build it into cities," Helena Paulsson, Head of Urban Development at the Swedish-Finnish engineering, design, and advisory company AFRY, says. "Green areas are important not only for our wellbeing but also because they fill other functions such as biodiversity, temperature regulation, resilience and as a way of dealing with heavy rain."
Modern cities really have expanded at an unprecedented rate. China is perhaps the best example of "urban sprawl,” the phenomenon in which cities expand into smaller towns or undeveloped land. In just 35 years, China moved 500 million of its people from rural areas into cities. The result was the development of over 600 cities that had been small towns just a few decades before.
Today, China has a bunch of megacities like Beijing and Shanghai (cities with more than 10 million people), estimated at around 16 to 18. There's pollution, water shortage, and traffic jams, but according to Dr. Yan Song, the director of the program on Chinese cities at the University of North Carolina, a big city doesn't have to be this way.
"All these problems can be solved – look at Seoul or Tokyo, both megacities with a bigger population, but very well managed," she told The Guardian. "The problem is not population size, it’s a problem of poor urban management."
The trend of people moving away from big cities persists. Some experts note that this move was driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. After all, we saw the largest number of people leaving cities for more rural areas during the WFH boom. The fastest-growing places in the U.S. between 2022 and 2023 were inner suburbs. In fact, people were moving away from metropolises, sometimes 30, 40, or even 60 miles from the closest city's downtown.
So, what is an ideal city? Some say it's chrono-urbanism: the idea that every service a person needs should be within 20 minutes of where they live. French urbanist Carlos Moreno introduced the concept of the 15-minute cities, an idea that many people, exhausted by hellish urban landscapes, saw as their saving grace.
Moreno's idea behind "15-minute cities" is that a resident should be able to reach everything they need in 15 minutes or less on foot or by bike. That includes their house, school, hospitals, shops, restaurants, parks, offices, and cultural event venues. According to Moreno, the pandemic made people discover they had neighbors and parks nearby. He stresses that good urban planning should be like this and that it is doable.
