Cities: How Crowded Life Is Changing Us How Will Our Future Cities Look? A Imagine a city of the future. Do you see clean streets, flying cars and robots doing all the work? Or something less rosy? Cities cover just 3% of the planet's land surface, but are already home to more than half of its people. That means cities are bringing people into ever greater contact, where collectively they act as a giant physical, biological and cultural force. Transport links and communication between cities, from superhighways to express trains and planes, allow businesses to operate planet-wide, shrinking the human world and making the global local. B The great homogenization ( 一体化 ) of the Anthropocene* includes human culture and lifestyle as much as any effect on the natural ecosystem. And cities are the biggest expression of that. They truly are universal. I feel at home in cities around the world precisely because they essentially provide the same experience. Some are more violent, or more sleepy, or more wealthy, but the urban environment is at its heart the same. There is not the vast diversity of landscape and experience that exists across the natural world. C The sheer concentration of people attracted by the urban lifestyle means that cosmopolitan ( 世界性的 ) cities like New York are host to people speaking more than 800 different languages -- thought to be the highest language density in the world. In London, less than half of the population is made of white Britons -- down from 58% a decade ago. Meanwhile, languages around the world are declining at a faster rate than ever -- one of the 7,000 global tongues dies every two weeks. D It is having an effect not just culturally, but biologically: urban melting pots are genetically altering humans. The spread of genetic diversity can be traced back to the invention of the bicycle, according to geneticist Steve Jones, which encouraged the intermarriage of people between villages and towns. But the urbanization occurring now is generating unprecedented mixing. As a result, humans are now more genetically similar than at any time in the last 100,000 years, Jones says. E The genetic and cultural mixture does a lot to erode the barriers between races, as well as leading to novel works of art, science and music that draw on many perspectives. And the tight concentration of people in a city also leads to other tolerances ( 宽容 ) and practices, many of which are less common in other human habitats (like the village) or in other species. For example, people in a metropolis are generally freer to practice different religions or none, and women are freer to work and to voluntarily limit their family size despite -- or indeed because of -- access to greater resources. Virtual Revolution F Now that the technology exists for individuals to communicate instantly with companies, government departments, to broadcast to millions or to specific groups over the Internet, the city has gained an entirely new dimension. This "virtual city" of communities formed online, using social networks like Twitter or Facebook, is incredibly powerful and not necessarily limited to the geographical contours ( 轮廓 ) of the real city. Like-minded individuals can find each other easily, gathering in online forums or through hashtags and comment streams in the same way as special interest clubs and cafe movements are formed in the real city. Online clubs -- like the shopping network Groupon -- are attempting to personalize trade exchanges and perhaps develop a proxy ( 代理 ) for the relationship people might have with a neighborhood store. G Those petitioning ( 请愿 ) for social or political change can hold governments and companies accountable in a manner never possible before. Instead of going through books of corporate ledgers ( 收支总账 ) in libraries, vast amounts of data are now published online and can be searched and filtered in minutes with algorithms ( 计算程序 ), allowing journalists and other groups to discover corruption, tax evasion or other information of public interest. Such information can be self-published in seconds, where it is available for billions to see. In a few seconds, I can compare hospital cancer survival rates in my area or nationally, I can look up how much profit popular stores shift to offshore accounts ( 离岸账户 ) to avoid taxation, or read hundreds of reviews of a product I'm thinking of buying. H The virtual and real cities are closely enmeshed ( 啮合 ). Information gathering and community building can take place more easily online than in the vast cities of the Anthropocene, where members of a group may live far from each other or be unable to meet easily for momentum-building. But the discussions and real-world changes these online gatherings initiate move easily to government chambers, mainstream media outlets in television, radio and press, or onto the streets. Starbucks was compelled by a Twitter campaign to pay billions of pounds of tax to the U.K. government after its perfectly legal offshore tax evasion was revealed in 2012. I So the virtual city is as global as it is local. I can get hourly updates on air-pollution levels in my neighborhood or buy a new battery for my phone from Korea. People from across the world can gather online to share ideas, pressure for change, innovate, spread their artistic talents or make friends. The virtual city provides a way of shrinking and filtering the real megacity, saving time and energy on real journeys across complicated spaces, of accessing multiple conversations with relative anonymity ( 匿名 ), and of individually helping steer humanity through collaborative creativity and problem solving. It enhances but doesn't replace the real city with its face-to-face social cues ( 提示 ), physical exchanges and wealth of information humans use to make judgments about trustworthiness and other value-laden ( 富有价值的 ) decisions. J The virtual city does have a more problematic side, however. Never has there been so much information about so much of our lives in such an accessible form. In the course of a day, the average person in a Western city is said to be exposed to as much data as someone in the 15th century would encounter in their entire life. The digital birth of a baby now precedes the analogue ( 模拟的 ) version by an average of three months, as parents post sonogram images ( 超声波扫描图 ) on Facebook and register their infant's domain name ( 域名 ) before the child is even born. Governments, groups, individuals and corporations can access data about us and use it for their own purposes. K This erosion of individual privacy can be benign ( 良性的 ) or malevolent ( 有恶意的 ), but it is already a part of life in the Anthropocene. Customer data collected by the U.S. supermarket Target allows it to identify with a high degree of accuracy which shoppers have recently conceived ( 怀孕 ) and when their due date is. The store uses this information to target such women for the advertising of its pregnancy and baby products in a timely fashion, even if she has not yet told anyone else. Threatening? Maybe. What about police officers identifying householders as marijuana growers by analysing energy use data? Or neighbors targeting individuals for cyber or physical bullying because of information they discover online? We're all generating data, every time we make an ATM transaction or log onto a website. In the Anthropocene, we will have to decide who owns our data and whether it can be shared. 1,179 words Comprehension Exercise Each of the following statements contains information given in one of the sections of the passage above. Identify the section from which the information is derived. You may choose a section more than once. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter in the blank. _________ 1. The personal data that people generate can be used for purposes both good and evil. _________ 2. Cities function in a way like melting pots in that people of different ethnicities intermarry and bring about genetic changes. _________ 3. Because the virtual city is connected to the network, it can bring the outside world to our doorstep without our stepping out of the house physically. _________ 4. Now that the world is plugged into the network, we are being flooded with data. _________ 5. A reason for the large ethnic diversity in the populations of metropolitan cities is that people are strongly attracted by the life and culture in such cities. _________ 6. The online city and the real city are connected to each other in such a way that online activities and information have an impact on activities in various government agencies and commercial organizations. _________ 7. In a network-connected city, it is easy to find people with similar interests without being restricted by the physical divisions of the real city. _________ 8. Despite some differences, cities across the world are generally similar at their core. _________ 9. The development of transportation and the accompanying infrastructure have made the world much smaller. _________ 10. The ethnic diversity and the resulting variety of cultures in the city have led to the breaking down of racial barriers and the flourishing of creativity.