Category FAQs Search : Urban Farming
Question: URBAN AGRICULTURE AND SUSTAINABLE CITIES
Answer: At the end of the 20th century, humanity is involved in an unprecedented
experiment: we are turning ourselves into an urban species. Large cities, not
villages and towns, are becoming our main habitat. Urban growth is changing the
face of the earth and the condition of humanity. In one century, global urban
populations have expanded from 15 to 50% of the total, which itself has gone up
from 1.5 to nearly 6 billion. The size of modern cities in terms of numbers as
well as physical scale is unprecedented. In 1800, there was only one city with a
million people, London. By 1990, the world's 100 largest cities accommodated
540 million people and 220 million people lived in the 20 largest cities, megacities of over 10 million people, some extending to hundreds of thousands of hectares. Urban agglomerations and their resource uses are becoming the dominant feature
of the human presence on earth, profoundly changing humanity’s relationship to
its host planet and its ecosystems. The cities of the 21st century are where human
destiny will be played out, and where the future of the biosphere will be
determined. It is unlikely that the planet will be able to accommodate an
urbanised humanity that continues to draw upon resources from ever more
distant hinterlands, or which uses the biosphere, the oceans and the atmosphere
as a sink for its wastes at the current accelerating rates. The challenge faced is
whether cities can transform themselves into self-regulating, sustainable systems
- not only in their internal functioning, but also in their relationships to the
outside world. Is it possible to make a world of cities viable in the long term –
socially, economically, as well as environmentally? The answer to this question
is critical to the future well-being of the planet, as well as of humanity. There can
be no sustainable world without sustainable cities.
(Source: , 23 Sep 2021)
Source Link: https://urban.agroeco.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/urban-ag-and-sustainable-cities-1.pdf