[thedoc (OP)]

rookie pitcher  asked the Naked Scientists:
   Hi, thanks for a great show!
One question that you never approached in the episode: our houses in 2050 - with your interview of (I think her name was) Rachael, whom spoke about a car-free Birmingham, was as follows: what happens to the rural areas around these car free cities? And the people who need to go to said cities to do shopping, how do these 'thinkers' imagine that their days go?
Imagine now the farmer who must go and buy implement parts after already working for 30 hours that week (on a Tuesday), and the afore mentioned parts amount to a few hundred kilos of mass... Whilst this farmer is buying his implements, he - or his partner wants to go to the supermarket in the city, hence killing two birds with one stone. How does this car free city solve that? How do you make the city accessible particularly for real life rural people and not just the hillbillies that city dwellers think they are?
I think you get my point.
Background to the question: I live on a farm in Sweden, all of our political leaders have abandoned rural dwellers in favour of big city politics that wins a lot of votes. I see how everything is decaying outside of cities and how as a result, Sweden has the highest urbanisation rate in the world. Housing crises reign where there is no housing in cities and under priced housing or even decayed houses in less built up areas. Sweden is not even (as a direct result) self sufficient for food due to a lack of political knowledge or even goodwill. It would be interesting to get a perspective on this from this 'thinker' as to how  your future will be different from our now.
Keep up the good work! (You've done it so far already)
Patrick

   
What do you think?

[alancalverd]

There are several important points in that posting.

Most people have the impression that Britain is an urban society but the fact is that only 20% of the population live in inner cities (London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Bristol and suchlike), around 20% in quite small "cathedral cities" like Lincoln or Durham, maybe 25% in suburbs, and the rest in villages or "deep countryside". In fact only three cities (London, Birmingham & Manchester)  have populations exceeding 1,000,000 and the densest population outside of London is in the Brighton area - more of a seaside resort than a metropolis. So planning for cities may have lots of political impact but doesn't affect the lives of most people.

The key question is why do cities exist? Pre-telephone, it was very handy for businesses to be located near each other but modern manufacturing needs  a lot more space and a lot fewer people than the Victorian factories, and very little trade is done face-to-face nowadays: even retail shopping is moving towards on-line purchase and doorstep delivery, and supermarket distribution centers are not built on expensive land with narrow road access.

I'm not sure that Patrick's farmer would visit a city to buy agricultural equipment in the UK. Most ag-eng stores and workshops are based on the edge of small towns where you can store trucks and tractors cheaply and reach your customers without having to negotiate urban traffic.

Some activities are necessarly located geographically. You can't build a sea port just anywhere, but thousands of dock workers have been replaced by a few dozen container cranes, so there's no need for a great wen of conurbation around Felixstowe or even Glasgow.

Ther is an interesting dichotomy between the USA, where the rich live in cities and the poor in the countryside, and the UK where the opposite applies.

My feeling is that future cities will simply be places of entertainment, like Las Vegas, and increasingly irrelevant to most of us.