Chongqing is a dense and smoky inland city, the heavy-industry, high-rise home to over 30 million people. It is to China what Chicago was to 20th-century America, or Manchester to 19th-century England, and it's growing at an extraordinary rate. Every day a tide of 1,500 new people washes in to Chongqing. Every day an extra 1.5 million square feet of floor space is constructed for new residents. It's a vast megalopolis, a megacity of the sort that will soon take over the world.
I met Mr and Mrs Zhang on the day they first arrived in Chongqing from their rural village. It had taken them almost 10 years to raise enough money to move and required outrageous sacrifice: They pooled together their accumulated cash from years of sweated labour in motorcycle-parts factories, and had paid the full purchase price of 150,000 yuan (£14,000) for a clean and elegant three-bedroom apartment, turning them, legally, into city-dwellers. In the next few months they will bring their parents over from the village, shutting the farm down and ending their family's millennia-long connection to the fields.
The Zhangs are the archetypal people of the 21st century, and we ignore their story at our peril. For the defining force of this century, almost certainly more significant than war, recession and perhaps even climate change, will be the huge and final shift of human populations from rural areas to cities. It's a crucial issue "” one that every politician, every economist and sociologist should be considering. Because the mind-boggling fact is that we will end this century as a fully urban species.
It sounds frightening, especially to the lucky, affluent, Western middle classes who dream of nothing so much and so often as moving to the country. But our urban future shouldn't be an alarming prospect. The migration to cities will create enormous tensions, conflicts and cultural clashes, but it also means a vast reduction in poverty and suffering, and an end to the major ongoing concern of human history: continuous, unrestrained population growth.
In Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan, the move to the largest cities is now fully complete. The rural areas represent between five and 25 per cent of the population, and those numbers have generally been stable for decades. For the most part these people live in villages by choice and not by force of necessity. But what about the countryside? What about farming? Well, fewer than five per cent of Western populations are now employed in agriculture "” sometimes as little as two per cent "” and this is enough to produce more food, at low cost, than their urban populations can consume. Now that the poor half of the world is once again experiencing food shortages, it is desperately important that this high-yield agriculture develop in the poor half of the world.
And, indeed, this is the transformation that is now taking place in South America, in Asia, and gradually but inexorably in Africa. At the moment, only 41 per cent of Asians and 38 per cent of Africans live in cities; the rest are largely subsistence farmers, people whose entire livelihoods depend on the vicissitudes of weather, fertilisation and crude credit relations. They are on the land not because it is a better life, but because they are trapped.
This is changing fast. Between now and 2050, the world's cities will absorb an additional 3.1 billion people.
The population of the world's countryside will stop growing around 2019, according to the UN Population Division's more conservative estimates, and by 2050 will have fallen by 600 million because of migration to the city. India's rural population, one of the last to stop growing, is set to peak in 2025 at 909 million, and shrink to 743 million by 2050. Each month, there are five million new city-dwellers created through migration or birth in Africa, Asia and West Asia.
By the end of 2025, 60 per cent of the world will live in cities; by 2050, more than 70 per cent; and by century's end the entire world, even the poor nations of sub-Saharan Africa, will be at least three quarters urban. And this point, when the entire world is as urban as the West is today, will mark an end point. Once humans urbanise, or migrate to more urban countries, they almost never return.
Why is it so important to think about this now? Well, rural living is the largest single killer of humans today, the greatest source of malnutrition, infant mortality and early death.
Urban poverty may force a mother to send her child into the street to sell goods; rural poverty will cause that child to die of starvation. People do not, as an almost universal rule, die of hunger in cities. Urban incomes everywhere are higher; access to education, health, water and sanitation as well as communications and culture are always better in the city.
Urbanisation doesn't just improve the lives of those who move to the city; it improves conditions in the countryside, too, by giving villages the finance they need to turn agriculture into a business with salaried jobs and stable incomes. These remittances are very much responsible for the decline of poverty and the rise of commercial agriculture in these countries.
The dramatic declines in the number of very poor people in the world around the turn of this century (world poverty rate fell from 34 per cent in 1999 to 25 per cent in 2009) were caused entirely by urbanisation: people made better livings when they moved to the city, and sent funds back to the village.
One last, crucial, calming fact for the anxious. It can feel to a native city-dweller as if the floods of newcomers to a city mean that the population as a whole is expanding wildly, beyond our ability to control it. But when villagers migrate to the city, their family size drops, on average, by at least one child per family. So, the urbanisation of the species will, in the end, be our salvation.
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