The planet-wide city

Jorge Álvarez has an interesting LBV piece on those who have imagined the merger of all the world’s major cities into one planet-wide city.


Ecumenopolis, the Future Merger of All the World’s Great Cities into One

Coruscant, the capital of the Republic in the Star Wars films, is an overwhelming planet-wide city, completely urbanized and crisscrossed by millions of flying vehicles. It’s a concept previously used by Isaac Asimov with Trantor, the imperial capital in his famous Foundation literary saga, as well as by other writers and artists in numerous novels, comics, and video games. The idea of global-scale conurbation was named ecumenopolis in 1967 by a Greek architect named Constantinos Doxiadis, who predicted an initial phase involving the merger of London, Paris, Amsterdam, and the Rhine and Ruhr river basins.

In truth, Doxiadis was not the first to imagine planet-sized cities. Strictly speaking—although from a poetic rather than a scientific standpoint—that honor should go to the inimitable Thomas Lake Harris, who included a similar proposal in his verses. Lake, born in England in 1823 but emigrated to New York as a child, was a devout Baptist Calvinist who leaned toward universalism (a philosophical doctrine asserting the existence of a universal, objective, and eternal truth that governs everything), which led him to found the peculiar Spiritualist Community of Mountain Cove.


The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of the kind of ideas which may float through any gathering of globally influential people, or those who aspire to be globally influential. 

It's one of many airy concepts which may be unworkable and probably bonkers but interesting enough to attract the attention of globalist sentiment with too little practical experience.


It is also appropriate to clarify another concept, that of the global city, which differs from that of ecumenopolis in that it acts as a key player in the world economy—not only because of wealth generation but also because of large pockets of poverty—culturally and politically, without needing to spread over the entire planetary surface. The term was coined in her eponymous work by the Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen (recipient of the 2013 Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences), who explicitly distinguishes it from the megalopolis or megacity (one or more united metropolitan areas—another definition speaks of urban agglomerations, i.e., zones of continuous growth—with more than ten million inhabitants and/or a population density exceeding two thousand people per square kilometer).