The Coming City:Are We on Our Way to the Universal Pantopolis?

Abstract

The author feels that when faced with the ecological consequences of population and urban growth coupled
with the unrelenting run on planetary means, the 3D forms that could be thought up to solve the problems
of living in the city of the future stand revealed as irrelevant. In the light of this conviction, the paper
considers the thermodynamics of open systems and assays a determining of the maximum mass of population
that this Earth could bear (its maximum carrying capacity) as within that necessarily finite space (its
ecological foot print) this last tempered by what technological skill could make viable. Observed tendencies
in growth are here thought to in some wise ameliorate the previous projections as what must come would
seem to be promising a world in which but 90% of the overall population would be found to be living in the
cities, cities progressively linking up between themselves to create a manner of world-wide web or pantopolis
but this leaving between its lines of linkage enough natural spaces as would be required to sustain the calls
of nature of this maximum carrying capacity of urban population. The paper makes an analysis of the three
hypotheses to any future world picture for its urban population as within the terms of the aforesaid physical
limit with this informed by present day tendencies towards dispersion and expansive diffusion presupposing
when doing so an unstoppable process towards an entropic balance as within a uniform space until a low
average density saturation of useable space establishes itself. The paper is rounded out by a considering of
the contrasted political options to hand apt for a universal governance of such a great built up pantopia and
comes down in favour of the only rational and probable option that any optimistic could offer as an alternative
for the black alternative menace of globalized chaos.