Word: urbanity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...days, nearly $1 billion worth of property, from clothes to computers, was pillaged. After the rampage, foreign businessmen -- and foreign money -- fled the city. The economy collapsed. Since the government now has almost no money to buy supplies and spare parts from abroad, all the services that make urban life bearable are breaking down. Buses and trains stall, fuel supplies are uncertain, electricity is unreliable and water quality is in jeopardy...
...coming years, the fate of humanity will be decided in places like Kinshasa and Curitiba. Faster than ever before, the human world is becoming an urban world. Near the end of this decade, mankind will pass a demographic milestone: for the first time in history, more people will live in and around cities than in rural areas...
...cities remain the cradle of civilization's creativity and ambition. To focus on the degradation is to miss the deep well of pride and determination that inspire the urban poor to better their lives. In Bombay, high school girls learn about sanitation, nutrition and immunization so that they can pass on this information to illiterate neighbors. In Bangkok a program called Magic Eyes has reduced street trash by 85% through the gentle method of encouraging children to hum a jingle about sloppiness when they see their parents litter. In Mexico City cash-starved peasants band together to form cooperatives that...
During earlier periods of urban collapse, the fact that human society was largely rural tempered the effects of catastrophes. When the black death wiped out 80% of Europe's urban population, more than 95% of the people lived in the country. But if the world enters a new age of epidemics, few will escape unaffected...
These layers of sediment become pages in urban history, which, in large measure, is the history of civilization. The need to preserve foods and seeds at trading centers in ancient Mesopotamia and Anatolia focused human ingenuity on the problem of storage and led eventually to the development of armories, banks and libraries. Along a treacherous path paved with bloodshed and pestilence, cities evolved as the repositories of humanity's collective intelligence: the record of culture and science that enables a civilization to benefit from the lessons of the past...