FoC Urban Change History

LEARNING 1

It is easy to make judgements about fundamentals through the lens of a human lifetime. ‘People work in offices’. ‘The commute is a part of our lives’. ‘Shopping is on high streets’. ‘People live in suburbs. ‘Cities are eternal’. However, a more than cursory look back over history reveals the opposite. Cities are highly dynamic organisms, that show the potential not only to change, but to change very quickly given the right conditions. This is highly relevant to any discussion about the future of cities. We should not conclude that because limited change has occurred in the past 20 years, that the rate of city evolution is slow. Consider the example of Manchester where the population almost doubled in 20 years during the industrial revolution and imagine what the city you live in might look like in 2040 were this to be repeated.

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