Occupy All Streets:

A Tale of Too Many Cities

In the recent history of our cities worldwide, something strange is happening to development . . . What began as the project of creating a community together, undertaken in the common interest, morphed over time into an insidious corporate takeover of our public spaces and shared amenities. Cities sprawled into larger entities, endless metropolises spreading their tentacles further inland, snatching up surrounding towns and turning them into glorified commuter traps, rendering entire communities irrelevant one more bypass at a time.

Jerome Irwin watched as his hometowns of Sydney, Vancouver, and San Francisco all fell victim to the pernicious spread of concrete monotony, helpless to intervene as big business extinguished the starlit night with street-lit uniformity worldwide. He wants to know how it happened — and whether the endless greed and out-of-control growth can be curbed before it’s too late.

What will every major urban center in the world look like in the next ten, fifty or hundred years?

Demographic experts say the cities of the world will continue to morph, with future estimated population projections such as Mexico City’s 20 million in 2015, becoming 25 million by 2050, Kigali, Rwanda’s 1 million becoming 5 million within the same timespan, and Sydney, Australia’s 2.4 million turning into 7.4 million plus. The experts are still grasping to understand what future implications such explosions will have on the human and natural worlds.

The first, most immediate clue one could point to would be the growing multitudes of over-weight, drug and alcohol-ridden, stressed-out bodies of so many who live increasingly self-indulgent lifestyles, oblivious to what their lifestyles in search of ‘the Good Life’ are doing to themselves, society and the natural world around them. Another clue, and possibly the chief source of so much human angst could be attributed to the same disease, at a societal level, of: so much out-of-control urban development and the sum total effects that high-density living environments already are having, compared to the way human beings, and especially those like the aboriginal Australian people, have normally lived for centuries.

A mass meltdown of modern human life and city-life is unquestionably underway. Its complex lifestyles exacerbated and accelerated by the extreme pressures of dysfunctional and corrupt authoritarian, dictatorial processes, that some would even call fascist in nature.

Will the single-most critical, deciding factor of this cataclysmic collision end up being a: lack of fresh, clean air, pure water or healthy, nutritious foods; the elimination of the last detached single family homes, neighborhoods and disappearance of their surrounding open green spaces, replaced by ever more impacted, barren, high-rise, high-density environments?

Will the deciding factor be: the lack of sunlight and views of nature’s beauty, blocked by ugly, bland concrete structures that everywhere dominate the skyline; the oppressive effects of mounting traffic congestion, gridlock and lack of parking, that daily wears upon the populace’s nerves and sense of well-being; the unaffordable reality of never being able to buy one’s own home, or the accumulative effects of instead being forced to rent from money-hungry landlords who are allowed by ‘The Big Boys’ to keep raising the rent, forcing those who can’t pay their ‘pound of flesh’ to move on to wherever society cares not? Perhaps the deciding factor will end up being the ever-dwindling source of simple building materials – such as common, ordinary sand – that’s required to make the massive amounts of concrete needed to construct what some would like to eventually see become one giant, sprawling ‘Hong Kong’ in Sydney and throughout the world?

‍Maybe the answer is:
All of the Above!

Yet because of a wide-held belief in Sydney, as it is everywhere else in the world, in the absurd concept of perpetual growth and expansion, that could be characterized, planetary-wide, as ‘a quasi-religious belief’, it seemingly constitutes the sole answer that every government has to give for every human and societal problem. Consequently, every urban centre in the world thereby is virtually kept under perpetual siege, forced to forever totally transform itself into something entirely different again than what it was, and perhaps never wanted to actually become. Like a mad man feverishly pedalling his bike faster and faster for fear of falling over if he ever stopped and all would be doomed; these endless ‘growth solutions’ destroy what human beings perpetually long for, are fighting for, and yet are losing every day as time goes by.

The barometer is now plummetting at such an alarming rate as to suggest the coming of some kind of horrific, monstrously-violent storm of epic proportions, that one day will not only engulf cities like Sydney but all of human civilization to whatever nefarious, pitiful end.

The real culprits always are in this scenario and what is constantly being manipulated behind the scenes between the minions of:
investors, speculators, politicians, developers, city planners, architects, schools of business and real estate industry;
who seldom consider in their massive urban projects the people’s own desire for, perhaps, yet a different, slower, softer way of life, say, with more affordable housing that’s smaller, more economical, and environmentally-sensitive; built solely with recycled materials that conserve the earth’s ever-receding finite natural resources. The same goes with those who manufacture ever bigger, more powerful SUVs and the complex, archaic, ’60s-style highway systems needed to convey them to and from these massive developments.

But then this is what is part and parcel of the conspiratorial world view that forever continues to be the engine that drives everything ever-forward; while convincing the masses to believe in their flawed vision of the future to the point where it becomes impossible to know what came first: the Chicken or the Egg!

If Beauty is to be the chief deciding factor – rather than money, power and control – than the feminine characteristics that make Sydney the unique place that it is, with all its charm, character and heritage, then the Nimbys and Bimbys will be the ones who decide. But if the Yimbys are the ones to decide, then all the money, power and control will again win the day and the same ones who will point everything towards the same direction as things always have been heading,

And so goes what appears to be at the moment an ever-deteriorating state of the human mind-body-spirit, civilization and Planet Earth in 2018 and beyond.

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Jerome Irwin is a committed environmental activist, organizer, and the publisher of The Wild Gentle Press.