From outer space, water, to the Anthropocene, the story of the earth through the eyes of a geographer

Klan uses 6 short stories to lead us to explore the earth we live on. From the perspective of the universe, the earth is a beautiful and bright planet. Mountains, rivers and land participate in shaping this material world, where life thrives. The rise of mankind, whether it is climate warming, environmental pollution, population pressure, resource depletion caused by humans, or satellite communications, urbanization, and ecological protection heading into the future, these issues all point to the same macro knowledge—geography. Every human action will have far-reaching geographical impacts. Scientists call this era the "Anthropocene." Physical geography and human geography are converging today, and the geography of the future will be the fate of the earth that humans are about to write.

Nicholas Crane is a writer, geographer, and cartography expert. He has won the "Mongo Parker Award" of the Royal Geographical Society of Scotland for his outstanding contributions to geographical knowledge. He won the "Nass Award" from the Royal Geographical Society for his work in popularizing geography and his understanding of Britain.

He has presented Map Men, Town, Britannia and Coast on BBC 2 and a series of acclaimed documentaries, and served as President of the Royal Geographical Society from 2015 to 2018.

Chapter 3 Cities: The Source of Human Wisdom (Excerpt)

Babu Banji escaped from his home in rural Bihar and embarked on a journey to Mumbai journey. In Mumbai, he slept on the sidewalks at night and queued in front of public toilets with a tote bag containing a collection of poems. Babu Bangi appears on page 510 of Suktu Mehta’s popular book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which describes “India’s largest, The fastest-paced and richest city”—Mumbai is “an island of hope…the popular dream of all the people of India.” At the same time, Mumbai is also one of the most congested cities in Asia. The sidewalks were crowded with vehicles, street vendors and people sleeping rough. The neighborhood, less than a square mile, is packed with factories, tanneries, bakeries and sweatshops known as zopadpattis. With a population of about 1 million, Dharavi is the most densely populated urban area in the world. Mehta asked, "Why do you want to leave your hometown and come here when you have two mango trees next to your brick house in the countryside and you can see the hills to the east?"

To millions of people. For many, life outside cities has become unsustainable. While rural poverty, shortages of education, health and recreation, lack of opportunity, and environmental crises such as drought and floods push people away from their fields and homes, cities themselves exert an attraction: they promise more Good housing, jobs, opportunities and services – a higher quality of life. There are some factors behind these push and pull forces: improvements in transportation and communication conditions have made it easier for people to learn about urban opportunities, and the Internet, radio, television, etc. are also disseminating relevant information about urban employment. Changes in cities have also made them more attractive to rural migrants. As Bob Dylan sang, "I'm heading to the city, the road isn't far away."

Most people on this earth find themselves in confusion, and Babu Bangi is one of them. Cities tend to be densely populated, highly mobile and interconnected, but the increase in population, mobility and interconnectivity has forced people to leave their own geographical environment and become a decisive component of the world system.

The numbers below are mind-boggling. Two million people walked the Earth in the early centuries of this mild interglacial period, and after thousands of years of hunting and gathering for food, by the time agriculture developed in Europe, Earth's population had grown to about 18 million. At that time, there were already cities in the Fertile Crescent. By 1000 AD, the world's population had grown to 295 million people. Cities such as Kaifeng in the Yellow River Basin and Baghdad in the Euphrates River Basin have about 1 million residents; the population size of European cities such as Paris and London is 1/50, dwarfed by comparison. It is generally believed that by 1100 AD China had no fewer than five cities with a population of one million. In 1800, the world's population increased to 890 million people; in 1900, the number reached 1.6 billion. Everything changed in the 20th century: in 1950, the world's population was 2.5 billion, in 2000 it reached 6.1 billion. As I write this book, the world’s population is 7.6 billion. As humans evolved from hunter-gatherers to urban commuters, the world's population increased 4,000-fold.

The population is determined by the city's development rate. In 1950, two-thirds of the world's population lived in rural areas. Today, 54% of the world's population lives in urban areas; by 2050, this number will increase to 70%. The growth in numbers has been accompanied by the emergence of spectacular “megacities” – metropolises with more than 10 million inhabitants.

In 1950, there were only two megacities in the world, New York and Tokyo. The United Nations predicts that by 2030, the world will have 41 megacities and an additional 662 cities with a population of over one million. China's cities are developing rapidly, and many cities have gathered to form urban agglomerations or metropolitan areas. In the Yangtze River Delta region, the combined GDP of Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Wuxi, Ningbo and Changzhou is equivalent to that of Italy. Currently, two other metropolitan areas have spread in the Pearl River Delta region and around the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.

Cities are the most visible geographical features on Earth when viewed from the night sky. The Atlantic coast metropolitan belt from Boston and New York to Philadelphia and Baltimore looks like a lava flow. Chicago and its surrounding cities eclipse the distant green Northern Lights. Under the magnification of the camera lens, Denver becomes a blazing grill, and Tokyo becomes a blue-green amoeba - a color caused by the mercury vapor lamps in the city. Europe became a burning garden.

Hundreds of millions of people travel in and out of these cities. Rather than saying that the city is material, it is better to say that the city is humanistic. Cities exist against the backdrop of human movement over short and long distances. Most of us are immigrants, participating in this chaotic urban migration. Human geographer Danny Dowling once wrote, "Energy is the unifying force of everything from plate tectonics to climate systems to the global economy and local cultures."

One such long-distance energy flow is the 258 million people (3.4% of the world’s population) living outside their own borders, a number that has grown by an incredible 49% since 2000. India, Mexico, Russia, China and Bangladesh are, in order, the world's largest sending countries of immigrants, while the United States is the most popular destination for international migrants, hosting 19% of the world's immigrants.

While most people leave their homeland in search of work or are affected by persecution, natural disasters or war, a third category, asylum seekers, take to the streets to apply for international protection. In the chaotic world of international migration, cities are the main attractions for migrants, the Unaccustomed Earth - the title chosen by Juppa Lahiri for her story about migration. Pranab Kaku enters a story written by Lahiri called "Hell-Heaven". He "had just arrived in the United States, and his unfamiliarity with the place made him suspicious of everything, and he did not dare to believe even very obvious things." It’s this questioning that keeps cities – and civilizations – moving forward.

There is also a large amount of population movement within the country. India has so many people on the move that the country is no longer able to provide reliable data. The number of short-term "seasonal" immigrants (people who leave their usual place of residence for 1 to 6 months) is estimated to be about 15 million to 100 million. Rough estimates put the number of people permanently relocating within countries at about 400 million. If you imagine the combined population of the United States and the United Kingdom moving for work, Babu Bangi's story plays out on every city sidewalk: population growth and poverty lead to mass migration.

In terms of absolute numbers, no country can match China’s population mobility. After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, China adopted a Soviet-style development model. Since then, agricultural output has increased, driving rapid industrialization. The household registration system divides each person into an “urban” or “rural” household under a designated management unit, resulting in the rural labor force being tethered to the land. Grain restrictions were further tightened in 1955 when China collectivized agriculture, restricting farmers from taking grain from their own land. By the mid-1980s, economic reforms were spreading from rural to urban areas, freeing up vast agricultural laborers who flooded into cities and towns—industry needed them. Professor Chen Jinyong wrote in 2012: "This great migration has provided China with a huge pool of cheap labor to promote its economic development." Over the past 30 years, 200 million to 250 million rural residents have left their rural homes and trudged to urban and rural areas along the eastern coast of China. In terms of population migration, this far exceeded the 50 million or so Europeans who migrated to North America between 1800 and World War I. China's rapid industrialization suddenly broke the balance between urban and rural areas. In 1980, China's rural population accounted for about 80%, but in 2012 this number had dropped to 50%. By 2030, 70% of China's population will live in urban areas, and Figure 3.1 shows the urban residential areas that have emerged as China urbanizes.

These residential areas are surrounded by interconnected energy flows around the earth - they are the center of the global network, and some of them have become "world cities". The reputation of a "world city" is based on strong economic strength, proximity to developed areas, inflow of foreign capital, and political stability. The new winner in this game is not Beijing, New York, or London, but Dubai. Dubai has become a new popular destination for tourism and has also been described as "the future city of the world" and "the center of the world". In recent years, the shopping mall at the foot of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, has become the most visited place in the world.

Dubai is the world's textile center, with more than 90% of the population being immigrants; Dubai has multiple Airbus A-380 direct flights to major cities around the world. In Connectography: Mapping the Global Network Revolution, Parag Khanna describes Dubai as “an experiment in leaping from feudalism to postmodernism.” Dubai's population has grown from a mere 20,000 in the 1930s to 3 million today, and is expected to reach 5 million by 2027. Connor writes that it is “a new kind of world city… one with a new identity, a true center point of the world, whose strength lies not in its rich cultural heritage but in its borderless world ism and seamless global connectivity”.

This connectivity also applies to the distance between cities. There is no inhabitable place on Earth that modern humans cannot reach, either by four-wheel drive, boots, skis, or via drones and satellites. Although we do not live on city streets, nearly all of us need cities to provide the services on which society depends, social institutions, economic stability, and security and governance. This world is different from the primordial small role played by the cities that emerged from the fertile silt of Iraq - cities that marked the boundaries between urban and rural areas with fortified walls. As early as 1987, Fernand Braudel, the chronicler of civilization, wrote that “the West’s first victory was, of course, the conquest of the countryside by the towns and their peasant ‘culture’”. Despite some disdain for rural culture, modern readers might assume that this conquest was followed by colonization.

Cities have always sourced produce from their rural hinterlands, but now they have global reach. Braudel's clear artificial urban-rural boundaries have been blurred by interdependence on a global scale. New attitudes toward green spaces are further blurring the urban-rural divide. "Country" begins to become dependent on the city, and at the same time, the city is re-recognizing its inherent countryside.

Havana leads the way with its micro gardens, or urban organic farming: various boxes, boxes and oil drums cut in the middle are fixed on roofs or in backyards, and planted inside Full of organic vegetables. Under Mayor Sadiq Khan, London is on the verge of becoming the world's first "national park city". London covers an area of ??1,572 square kilometres, 47% of which is “entirely under green cover”, and is home to 14,000 wildlife species. A Starbucks opened in Yosemite National Park in the US, while beavers destroyed a tree in Stockholm, Sweden. In many parts of the world, the boundaries between urban and rural areas are becoming increasingly blurred.

Such is the scale, dynamism, and complexity of the modern city—it creates a new unknown. People used to think that the way to lose yourself was to wander into the wilderness: in a jungle, desert, or mountain range, or in a boat on the ocean. Now, however, cities offer a new kind of wilderness, unknowable and fascinating, surprising to some races and often unmapped. If you want to get lost, hop on a city bus or slip on a pair of sneakers. Finding your way can take time. In large cities that lack historical landmarks or topographical landmarks, constructing mood maps will be slower. A new generation of explorers, cyclists and psychogeographers are re-mapping urban landscapes through ‘non-place’ approaches.

In this ever-evolving urban maze, signposts remain the key to social cohesion. The surging flow of people in the city continues along its own social riverbed and pool.

Babu Bangi goes from the small patch of sidewalk where he is, to the Sulabh public toilet, to the roadside restaurant where he eats, to the bookstore where he works, to the special place that inspires his poetry: Sites of recently collapsed buildings include alleys behind the Flora Fountain where African drug dealers sleep and trade, and Santa Cruz slums with open sewers. Physical landmarks—whether pristine or fresh, or stale and rancid—are necessary signposts for the 3D (three-dimensional) mood map of sound and flavor in our extremely versatile brains. Newcomers to a city must quickly build such maps because they are networks for survival. City authorities often destroy or obscure historical landmarks, often not realizing until it is too late that they have destroyed regional identity and undermined social cohesion.

Hyderabad, India may have spread over an area of ??650 square kilometres, however, the Charminar Minar remains the soul of the city. MANHATTAN - Even the capital letters look like skyscrapers. However, what remains at the source of New York’s quiet axis is Central Park. The park is littered with glacial boulders and ice-eroded schist, which should have been very familiar to the Native American Lenni Lenape people because of their precious mountains. The walnut jungle gave the island its name, Manhattan Island. In the Monsi language, manaha?h-taan means "where we got the bow."

Other cities that have grown too quickly to acquire unique landmarks have failed to achieve a sense of historical awe and may have resorted to odd expedients: the Eiffel Tower, the Boulevard Haussmann, urban brick-and-timber townhouses, and embedded Chinese cities These are just placeholders until confidence in vernacular architecture is restored.

People's enthusiasm for urbanization is so great that in many cases the historical form and function of cities have been destroyed. Cities were once introduced to students as apparently isolated, relatively static residential areas, further neatly divided into centres, zones, sectors or districts. The academic lecture hall projects the central business district, mid-range residential areas and suburban industrial parks, giving people the impression that the city's internal boundaries are divided by red lines on the road. Of course, cities have never been simpler; but the scale and speed of modern urbanization, and the expansion of distinctive "districts", have blurred and exacerbated polarization and created entirely new "human landscapes."

The title picture is a still from the documentary "The Story of a Small British Town", from: BBC