A binary South to North world: the geography of sustainability for a high-energy, urbanizing, digitalized human species

Abstract

During the course of the twentieth century, half of the world’s population migrated from rural agricultural environments into urban areas, mostly in the Northern hemisphere. Current demographic tendencies indicate that, as the twenty-first century unfolds, most of the rest of humanity will join the urban migration, mostly in the Southern hemisphere. This creation of a planetary city will take us towards the “Ecumenopolis,” as time and space are further united in the great megalopolises on each continent. The advantages of the urban environment are numerous. People desire a vibrant central district with cultural, banking and industrial infrastructure. Cities also provide economies of scale, ease of provisioning for basic necessities, a concentration of human diversity and the fomentation of innovation through ease of access to new technologies. At the same time, migration to the city involves changes in virtually every aspect of human life, including the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the land we live on, the physical activity we get, how we transport and educate ourselves and what our governments and families look like. We analyze this greatest of all geographic evolutionary transitions within the context of binaries, where concepts that can seem like extreme opposites revolve around each other: including human and natural, Global South and Global North, rural and urban, wealth and poverty, material and spiritual, carbon and silicon. Using an extended example from potatoes that includes analysis from their cultivation to their consumption, we strive to use these binaries to illuminate how geographies of sustainability can guide our new urban and digital species.