White paper on creativity - ebla center

Chapter 3physical setting of our homes, and themicro-system of dwelling, i.e. theinternal organisation of homes andtheir relations with the outside world.The two levels are obviouslyinterrelated but refer to different setsof variables. I will try to sum up themain issues in a series of points partlytaken from previous works(Martinotti,1999, 2002, 2005) butintegrated and further developed inthis work.The urbanisation of society and themetamorphosis of the urban objectPopulation trend estimates at the turnof the 21st century suggest that ourage is witnessing a phenomenon on aworldwide scale: for the first timesince it emerged as a physical productof human organisation 120 to 50centuries ago, the urban populationaccounts for the majority of theworld’s inhabitants. And in theabsence of unpredictable events on ahuge scale, wars, epidemics or naturalcatastrophes, always possible even ifnot very likely, this proportion willprobably rise and especially in theless developed regions of the world.The final stages in this transformationwere a feature of the 20th century,during which the world populationdoubled twice. To provide acomparative quantitative idea: theprevious doubling of the worldpopulation up to 1.6 billion (thepopulation at the beginning of the20th century) took place 150 years agoin the 19th century. By the 1970s thepopulation was 3 billion and after only30 years, it rose to 6 billion, and overhalf of this figure were people living incities. The common perception of thisprocess is that country and city are likecommunicating vases, i.e. one emptieswhile the other fills. But this is amisleading and ingeniously mechanicalmodel. As happens in all livingsystems, change is an interactivephenomenon: as the “countryside”depopulates, its nature changesradically.Only in the last 200 years, followingthe worldwide spread ofindustrialisation in increasingly largecircles out from Britain, the ratio ofurban to rural dwellers changed fromthe pre-industrial figure of 1:9 to theexact opposite of 9:1. As onegeographer has pointed out “thepeople who live in today’s Europeancities would like to conserve thecountryside as the rural population leftit. While some experts stress the needto keep enough farmers to conservenature and the open spaces as they are,others accuse the farming industry ofbeing one of the main causes of thedemise of the landscape, the pollutionof water-bearing strata, the destructionof river banks and the proliferation ofbuildings in the country.” But whenthese accusations are levelled atfarmers, urban dwellers forget thatsuch situations are the result of theirown growing numbers and thecontinually rising demand for low-costfood. “Urban dwellers would like thelandscape to be the outcome of a ruralsociety living harmoniously with itselfand nature, immutable and foreverfrozen in a legendary Golden Age. InWHITE PAPER ON CREATIVITY 59