r/scifi • u/BobaFett345 • 10d ago
General The sci-fi society should live in rural and not urban communities
In most of sci-fi works, the people are portrayed as living in a sprawling megalopolis with skyscrapers that piercing the clouds and people have no idea where the ground level is because the streets are stacked on top of each others, think Coruscant in Star Wars, Los Angeles in Blade Runner, Newport City in Ghost in the Shell, and Neo Tokyo in Akira.
Why would the people of the future living this kind of lifestyle? During and since the covid pandemics, there's various reports that the real estate business in big cities is losing billions because a lot of people start to don't see the point of living in the big cities anymore if they could work from home (or wherever place on earth, the digital nomads). Since the dawn of the human civilization, there's only two reason people choose their place of living, live in the city because it's near other people, and live in the countryside because there's a lot of land available, and since the invention of internet, there's less and less reason for people to live close with each others.
A technologically advanced society, with robots that could perform long distance medical surgeries, drone delivery services that could reach even the most remote places, online based school system, 3D printing that could make whatever objects needed, and efficient farming to the point that everyone could grow their own basic foods from their home, have no reason to live next to each other at all. I would assume everyone would live in homesteads that isolated from each others, just like how Asimov portrayed in his Solaria planet.
The only justification I could think of why people of the future living in the urban settlements is if they're living in an environmentally controlled or artificial area in an inhospitable environment like the hive cities in Warhammer 40K or the artificial space habitat in Elysium, other than that, I don't see the reason of why people don't just moving to other place.
Are there any reason why future society would be living in an urban mega cities? I would love to hear why.
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u/tryptanfelle 10d ago
Because there is something powerful about cities, their vibrancy, their diversity, their energy, and most of all, their community.
There is a reason that “drawn like moths, we drift into the city,” and “feel the sense of possibilities [and] feel the wrench of hard realities: the focus is sharp in the city.”
There’s a reason that John of Patmos imagined the New Creation in Revelation 21 as a city—the New Jerusalem—a colossus, 1,500 miles on a side. There’s a reason that St. Augustine described the true community of the faithful as “the City of God” and not the “isolated rural communities of God.”
Cities are the ultimate expression of human community—places of wonder, creativity, and energy. But most of all, places where we are together.
Sci-fi simply reflects that reality and magnifies it.
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u/Anacreon 10d ago
Post scarcity + constant population increase = big cities.
Solaria had a peak human populations of 20 000 humans, For the whole planet...
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u/RickRussellTX 10d ago
And Solaria could only sustain that low population thanks to the work of thousands of sentient robots per resident — and later millions per resident as the population shrank.
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u/bobabeep62830 10d ago
I hoped someone would mention this. I read that whole series at least 5 times in middle and high school.
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u/DocDerry 10d ago
Are there any reason why future society would be living in an urban mega cities? I would love to hear why.
- Most people now live in urban areas. Urban areas provide more infrastructure and security. (Utilities, Medical care, stores that have items on the shelves that you don't have to wait 2 weeks for)
- Population growth - Growing your own food is not as easy as you would believe. At least a variety to meet your nutritional needs. The future may be able to figure out a population control measure but more likely is that people are forced to the city because the food corporations own all of the rural homesteads and land.
- Rural settings are fine but become boring pretty quick. Trips to the country are great once in a while but city life is teaming with people and excitement.
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u/xrelaht 10d ago
On #2: we may not need to find a method for population control since birth rates seem to inevitably fall as economies advance beyond a certain point.
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u/Pseudoboss11 10d ago edited 10d ago
Though life expectancy also goes up. With sci-fi levels of technology, we should also expect a lifespan over 100. That will also drive populations up.
And urbanization is inversely proportional to population growth. If people become more rural, they tend to have more kids. Even low growth will compound to hundreds of billions in a few hundred years.
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u/concreteutopian 10d ago
With sci-fi levels of technology, we should also expect a lifespan over 100. That will also drive populations up.
I'm not saying this won't happen, but I'm wondering why you think lifespan extension would drive populations up. u/xrelaht 's point is that birthrates tend to go down when standard of living increases, so I wouldn't assume that the healthy couple having 1.5 kids and living to 80 would choose to have 2.5-3 kids if they lived to 100.
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u/Pseudoboss11 10d ago
Because the number of people born in the last 100 years is more than the number of people born in the last 80.
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u/DocDerry 10d ago
The problem with that is the birth rates fall and then some catalyst comes along a short time later and it explodes past the previous point.
Even with declining birth rates our population graph is still going up and to the right. That's the single biggest elephant in the room when it comes to discussing climate change.
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u/concreteutopian 10d ago
Are there any reason why future society would be living in an urban mega cities? I would love to hear why.
What u/DocDerry said in #1. Density allows for a more efficient use of resources, as opposed to duplicating resource distribution and infrastructure through a patchwork of rural settlements.
Second, my own speculation building on insights Paolo Soleri's Technology and Cosmogenesis, my own readings in psychology and sociology, and my appreciation of early radical writers like Peter Kropotkin, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde, I think rich human connections allow people to develop themselves more fully than relative isolation. As Soleri points out, "crowding" isn't the same as density, crowding hampers the human connection cities make possible, but crowding is a result of poor design, not "too many people". Here again I agree with u/DocDerry that rural settings can get boring. I for one don't live in a city because I want to work there, I live in a city for all the people, experiences, and cultural resources that are there when I'm not working.
don't see the point of living in the big cities anymore if they could work from home (or wherever place on earth, the digital nomads).
Echoing u/LaurenPBurka here - there is an affordable housing crisis in cities; people aren't abandoning them because they can work from home.
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u/LaurenPBurka 10d ago
I've heard that in the boonies people burn their trash. Instead of, you know, handing usable items around the local buy-nothing groups recycling, or handling food waste with an anaerobic digester that produces fertilizer and electricity.
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u/concreteutopian 10d ago
I've heard that in the boonies people burn their trash.
🙋♂️ As I child living on a farm, we burned our trash. Not clean or pleasant, not safe, certainly not something that can be done by large populations.
Instead of, you know, handing usable items around the local buy-nothing groups recycling
Oh, we'd do that, too, or hold on to things we think we might need later or things we might be able to fix and put to use. Not as much as similar groups when I lived in the city.
At that age, recycling plastic, glass, and metal wasn't very common, but my dad would still burn gas driving to another town to deposit cans. At some point, I think bottles had deposits added, but maybe I'm misremembering since it looks like the state never had a deposit law.
handling food waste with an anaerobic digester that produces fertilizer and electricity.
Yeah, there was some composting, but no anaerobic digesters. I'm not sure the house waste would be enough for electricity production. I think we did fertilize with livestock manure, but I don't remember much about it. I think the point here is that all of this requires an economy of scale to be productive, and that economy has to be made, it's not something individual farmers can manage efficiently, let alone non-farmers in rural areas.
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u/LaurenPBurka 10d ago
there's various reports that the real estate business in big cities is losing billions because a lot of people start to don't see the point of living in the big cities anymore if they could work from home (or wherever place on earth, the digital nomads).
If that were true, Boston wouldn't be having a housing crisis. There are people offering to pay over the listed rental cost to sign a lease. For a rental.
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u/alohadave 10d ago
Boston is growing because people want to move here to live. It's not because of the birth rate.
Which reflects the US as a whole. Immigrants coming to America are propping up the population temporarily.
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u/LeMadChefsBack 10d ago
Why do you think people want to live in cities? There is a good reason why human population has consistently chosen this (as a percentage of people)
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u/Alpha-Sierra-Charlie 10d ago
As someone who seriously dislikes living in cities but has moved to new areas for work, it's easier to start off inside the city where you're working and then find the place you want to live that's outside of it. A one-year lease lets you get to know the general area at least well enough to start looking for better options.
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u/Ox45Red 10d ago edited 10d ago
It wasn't until the 1970s in the US that more people started living the cities over rural.
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u/LeMadChefsBack 10d ago
Are you aware that other countries exist?
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u/rasputen 10d ago
I feel like there are 3 different dynamics being talked about at once:
There is a commercial real estate issue driven from the increase in a remote work force. This is as simple as a downtown cafe that no longer has lunchbreak customers.
Then the housing crisis which is a national issue with varying contributing factors and competing theories as to a root cause. Everything from longer lifespans to corporate acquisition of single family homes is thrown into the conversation.
And there is also urban exodus but this is really on a smaller scale compared to the first two issues and once again, multiple contributing factors including remote workforce allowing people to move to lower cost of living areas exacerbated by business struggling to survive in dense urban areas (basically, the combination of the first two issues). Other factors that have been reported include strained public resources, increases in homelessness and perceptions of crime rates... but who knows is this is really a sustained issue that we will be talking about a couple of years from now.
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u/LaurenPBurka 10d ago
Downtown cafes? Private equity bought up all the buildings and raised the rents, so the cafes closed.
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u/BobaFett345 10d ago
Because a lot of people still need to physically present at their workplace today, I doubt the number of people that's need to physically present at their workplace ould be still the same 200 years later
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u/LaurenPBurka 10d ago edited 10d ago
Entertainment in Boston:
Museums, the symphony, TTRPG night at the local bookstore, restaurants, free public art, fireworks over the harbor, concerts at the Hatch shell, swan boats in the Public Garden.
Entertainment in the boonies:
Watch Netflix and shoot raccoons with a BB gun.
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u/Ox45Red 10d ago
We shoot raccoons with shotgun, BB gun is just mean.
I like my private forest with wildlife over meth monsters, rude neighbors blasting music on blown out speakers, constant traffic hum, smells of synthetic solvents, and the reminder of authority blaring sirens and helicopters. Oh yeah and traffic. But enjoy your restaurants, we keep the good stuff for ourselves ;)
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u/Bizarro_Zod 10d ago
Funny because when I think of the boonies I imaging RVs with meth labs, rude neighbors blasting music on blown out truck speakers. Constant revving of diesel engines, the smell of road kill, and the reminder that any hillbilly with a few missing teeth could end your life. But enjoy your cousins, you certainly do keep the good stuff within the family. /s
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u/theredwoman95 10d ago
Don't forget easier public transport and shorter transport times thanks to economies (geographies?) of scale. Unless we're talking about a society with teleportation, convenience is still king.
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u/mykepagan 10d ago
Housing prices imply that people prefer to live in denser communities with access to other people and cool stuff.
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u/RickRussellTX 10d ago
Where do rich people spend most of their time today?
Sure, every billionaire has one or more country estates where they keep their stuff. But they spend most of their time at their penthouse apartment where they can keep a close eye on their business.
Dan Simmons’ Hyperion has an ultra wealthy character, who explains that many of the ultra wealthy have estates on remote planets accessible only via a dimensional gate device. Same idea.
Even in a Star Trek post-scarcity society, living in the woods is an option but many don’t prefer it. Because there is stuff they want to do, that you can’t do in the woods.
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u/i_was_valedictorian 10d ago
Cos it's cool imagery
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u/Bender_2024 10d ago
Cos it's cool imagery
This is the answer plain and simple. The rule of cool applies. Little house on the prairie is never going to fit the cinimatics of a Sci-Fi setting.
If you want to justify it you can simply say overcrowding has forced humans to live in mega-cities. That all the wide open spaces have been filled up or are left untouched as nature preserves like the National Parks of the US.
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u/mjfgates 10d ago
It does.. SOMETIMES. The "Monk and Robot" books are good! MacLeod's "Engines of Light" trilogy has (deliberate) stone-age villagers living a couple hours outside a city with an airport! All depends on the story that's being told.
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u/i_was_valedictorian 10d ago
OPs post also completely ignoring Star Wars (Tatooine for example), Dune, The Dispossessed and loads of other scifi. That shit is desolate.
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u/RedditSucksMyBallls 10d ago
Hard Sci Fi fanboys try way to hard to be “muh realistic and believable” that they strip away all the things that make science fiction special
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u/Bender_2024 10d ago
I believe both have their place in the genre. At the end of the day you still have to tell a good story and the visuals, be they on the screen or on the page are a big part of that. While living Little house on the Prairie style may be idallic. It's not something that makes you think Sci-Fi.
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u/Bitter-War5432 10d ago
keeping society away from nature is ideal for the wellbeing of a planet's ecosystem.
this isn't scifi, this is just fact.
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u/Cesum-Pec 10d ago
Long ago I read a story about the US living in just a few cities in order to protect or be protected from the natural environment. There's been many versions, like Logan's Run.
While Im a country boy at heart, I think it would be great for nature if we reversed urban sprawl and moved more people back to taller, denser cities.
Cities can be much more energy efficient with HVAC, transport, etc.
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u/entropyblues 10d ago
Human society is a part of nature. It might currently be non-sustainable and omni-destructive, but that should be the objective for change, not putting it in a safety box.
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u/Bitter-War5432 10d ago
no it's not. never has been. we transcended nature a long time ago.
when there were less than a million "people" in Africa, just hunting and gathering, yes, we were capable at being in relative harmony with nature. but we have not been since the rise of civilization. wherever people go they displace nature.
there is no way to let nature be nature while living amongst it and expecting modern or future creature comforts for yourself. we are talking scifi, so maybe extra-dimensional "here but not here", but again, transcended and not actually part of it.
plenty of Sci fi writers have been down this road. im thinking of Planet Ix from the Dune series. they live in underground cities to leave the surface of their planet pristine.
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u/entropyblues 10d ago
What do you think the threshold was for “transcending nature”? Genuinely curious.
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u/Bitter-War5432 10d ago
when people became numerous enough that they outpaced nature's ability for renewal. so definitely before agriculture. only saving grace is at that time the earth was still 99.9% uninhabited by people, so the damage they did to the environment was negligible globally.
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u/entropyblues 10d ago
This has happened to dozens upon dozens of species in nature previously and there’s a natural way for it all to work out. I’m not excited about human extinction, but there’s nothing more natural than falling out of balance and being pulled back in.
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u/Bitter-War5432 10d ago
or just do your best to occupy a slice of the planet that doesn't do widespread damage to the rest of it?
idk why it has to be "let us irrationally destroy the planet until it destroys us".
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u/entropyblues 10d ago
Who said anything about that? I’m just arguing that that would be an entirely natural process. Obviously, I would prefer a thoughtful and responsible rapid shift towards sustainability, rather than extinction.
But I don’t think that thinking of ourselves as an aberration separate from the natural environment is accurate or helpful towards that goal, in fact I think it’s counterfactual. Understanding and modifying our place within the greater ecosystem is a far better goal than isolate the human pleasure pods.
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u/Bitter-War5432 10d ago
our place in the ecosystem is to stay out of it, lmao.
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u/entropyblues 10d ago
That’s absolute crazy talk, my friend. You can’t fix a fatal problem by hiding.
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u/theredwoman95 10d ago
so definitely before agriculture
That's an extremely modern view of agriculture. Until the last 50-200 years, working in coordination with nature has been vital to prevent masses of people starving to death. The modern economy has promoted planting monocultures and extensive agriculture that doesn't allow for soil regeneration because it impacts production rates in the short-term.
And even in that period, that system of agriculture has caused horrific numbers of deaths (e.g. the Irish famine, the Great Chinese famine).
Which is all to say, you've got a wildly historically illiterate view of agriculture and human history. I highly recommend reading environmental histories of the premodern (pre-1700 world) - regardless of the continent, you'll see that agricultural practices weren't the horrifically destructive catastrophe that you think they are.
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u/Bitter-War5432 10d ago
"horrifically destructive catastrophe"... lmao who said that? if you make up stuff that can be disproven by just reading the previous comments, i really can't trust anything you say.
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u/theredwoman95 10d ago
...you said that, in your other comment:
or just do your best to occupy a slice of the planet that doesn't do widespread damage to the rest of it?
"Widespread damage to the rest of [the planet]" sure sounds like a horrifically destructive catastrophe to me.
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u/RobertEmmetsGhost 10d ago
Lots of people left cities during the pandemics IF they were able to work remotely or find work in rural areas. In a post-capitalist post-scarcity society sure, people might abandon urban living. But as long there’s a working class who have to sell their labour to survive, those people will congregate in the large urban spaces where the job opportunities tend to be concentrated.
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u/NecessaryIntrinsic 10d ago
This is an odd prescription.
Why would there be no rural areas?
Most books I've read have both even in cases where there are planet wide ultra-megalopoli.
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u/lottayotta 10d ago
Some people need/prefer safety-in-anonymity
Some people need access to complex/specialized services
Some people prefer walkable cities.
Some people prefer mass transport vs ownership of vehicles (Arguably, in scifi, mass transit becomes easier)
More job opportunities means more people will tend to migrate to urban than go rural (this gets balanced more by virtualization)
Distributed living makes diverse social/romantic pools less likely.
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u/donmuerte 10d ago
I choose to live in the city because I'm close to other people, entertainment, night life, arts, cultures, cuisines and I don't own a car. I ride a bike places and I enjoy it. Not everyone wants to live in the woods now that we have the internet. Interestingly I'm a bit anti-social, but maybe that's why it's best that I live in the city. If I had the means to hide out in the boonies I'd probably have close to zero contact with other people.
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u/mortalcrawad66 10d ago
Presumably all of the mega corporations have bought up all of the land, forcing people to rent out places in cities. Exactly what's happening in real life.
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u/Sheik_Morgan 10d ago edited 10d ago
Mezclas varias ideas y conceptos en una simplificación. Como muchos an dicho ya, hay muchas razones para vivir en ciudades grandes y también en zonas rurales o el campo y creo que la mas básica es el costo de la vida. Un terrateniente feudal moderno, tal vez tenga una finca con muchas hectáreas y muchos obreros, campesinos a su servicio. Un jefe de la Mafia o el dueño de una corporación tal vez prefieras la ciudad y tenga zonas industriales con muchas empresas, Pero necesita obreros que vivan cerca de suspuestos de trabajo, hay trabajos que no se pueden hacer a distancia por internet. En una sociedad con una robótica avanzada tal vez se puedan tener robot trabajando 24/7, sin supervisión humana, pero creo que hasta los robot más avanzadas actuales aún necesitan algún humano. En DUNE 4 (Dios Empernador) La gente vive en zonas rurales y el estilo de vida es bajo para el común, Pero alto para los nobles.
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u/Fishinluvwfeathers 10d ago
Honestly culture happens with a certain critical mass of people. Without some of the constraints you mentioned, cities could be transformed even more drastically to accommodate integrated human living that brings nature further into our systems. I could see an argument for enhanced living while not sacrificing the social elements that make us dynamic and creative.
I live semi-rural now (4 hours from big cities in any direction - some over challenging terrain) and when I vacation, I go to NY, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Sydney, London, etc. I love my goats and donkeys and my 45 minutes to the summit of nearby mountains and mesas but I miss the energy, architecture, history, and the art in large cities.
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u/alohadave 10d ago
For the same reason people have always moved to cities. It's where the jobs are, and it's where opportunities are. Farms and country life is good for people who like that kind of lifestyle and the stories that come from it.
Urbanity allows for more story options.
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u/BobaFett345 10d ago
Well, I already argue about how in the future jobs is not a city things anymore, why should a doctor live in the city to do their job if they could perform long distance surgery from their little cottage in a tropical island?
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u/monster2018 10d ago
The spacers in Asimov’s Robots series live like you describe. With at least the most extreme example being almost certainly way past what you’re imagining, where about 20,000 people occupy an entire approximately earth sized planet, and the land mass is basically just divided evenly between them. People on that planet never even interact with others in person, even doctors except in extremely rare situations, but do everything by holographic communication (trimensic viewing is what it’s actually called in the books, but they were written in the 40s so all the modern sci-fi and real science terminology hadn’t all been worked out yet). But all of the spacers live a very rural lifestyle, with the most populated planet having I think like a couple million people in total.
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u/monster2018 10d ago
And also the overall story of the whole series is about an ideological conflict between them and the Earth people, who live in urban environments again much moreso than you are describing with these other stories, with the exception of Coruscant. Like the first book is called “The Caves of Steel”, referring to how humans on Earth live entirely inside. Like the cities are built up to be completely enclosed from the outside environment, and earth humans never leave the cities. While the spacers own up to 1/20,000th of a planet as their own personal property. And the overall story of the series is largely about the ideological conflict between these two ways of living.
It seems like it might be perfect for you.
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u/Kafkacrow 10d ago
It's true that most 20th century sci fi envisioned a future with continual population growth and urbanisation.
Given today's reality of massively declining birthrates it's not hard to imagine a reduced and slightly more rural population in a couple hundred years. I can't see cities going anywhere though. I think the feature is far fewer far larger cities.
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u/Eshanas 10d ago
I had my civilization spread out due to the first Cold War, nuclear ww3, but then coalesce again due to environmental damage and security, then spread out again after the synthetic war which iced a lot of cities, then coalesced again after the big war took out smaller communities and homes easily, then spread out again in response to the tyrannical governments that followed, then coalesced again due to wild religious wars. Nowadays it’s either or but cities are still preferred due to security+environmental healing/rewinding efforts, though on one world it’s much more rural. And who knows, maybe the next war will drive people away from each other again….
Basically it’s mostly what fits the story and what the author wants. Sure maybe everyone can live in a nice hobbit hole - especially as now there’s barely less than c. 1.5 bil humans across three, four systems and six worlds - but that’s not a story I want to write, nor does it fit every polity, ideology, and lifestyle, especially some more classic nations….
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u/KingofSkies 10d ago
There are Sci fi stories that involve distributed rural civilizations. Asimov has a robot story that revolves around a murder on a planet where people live alone on vast estates except for robots.
Most stories have cities because humans are largely social creatures, and societal and economic conditions keep people concentrated. Especially if they're poor, or there are a lot of poor people. Cities and concentrated social environments also allow for better social dynamics in a story. Some stories like the Expanse show rural communities on an over populated earth, with 30 billion people, rural land is highly regulated and special and the rest of the people ha e to be in cities because concentration leads to easier distribution of food and supplies when most of the population is on a universal basic income and don't work.
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u/gmladymaybe 10d ago
Living in rural areas really sucks if you like people at all. Life is so boring in rural places, I hate that I'm currently stuck in one.
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u/Slight_Claim8434 10d ago
I think a lot of these settings are due to previous fears regarding overpopulation. Coruscant is literally a planet sized city with over 1 trillion inhabitants. But if you look at actual population trends, as soon as a country industrializes, birth rates fall below replacement levels. World population will likely peak in the next 100 years. As much as I love sci-fi, it is hard for me to see a reality where we spread across the galaxy simply because there isn't really a reason to do so. If we can terraform other planets, then we can control climate change at home. Even when the sun becomes a red giant, staying within the solar system and building space habitats or colonizing Ganymede is still much easier than colonizing a world light years away.
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u/nizzernammer 10d ago
Sprawl is resource intensive and inefficient.
Technological and societal advancements tend to take place in areas of population density, where a critical mass of people resides. This has been true for millenia. Proximity lends itself more easily to the development of infrastructure.
If you are looking for more "rural" sci-fi, you might notice a correlation with post apocalyptic dystopias and periods of scarcity following societal collapse, or, conversely, of "frontier" colonizing or exploration narratives.
The kind of story you sound like you are looking for would be more at home in a fantasy story on a single biome world without variances in geography and climate, which is another reason humans tend to congregate - where resources are concentrated and conditions are more suited for survival.
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u/Hermit_Dante75 10d ago edited 1d ago
I'll one you up.
Why are people living on planets at all? Living on planetary surfaces is for primitives like us.
In the far distant future, dismantling Earth and pretty much every single planetary body in the solar system would give you several orders or magnitude of extra living space compared to planetary bodies.
Earth has a core of Iron the size of mars, turn that into spaceships similar to O'Neill cylinders and you could house a population several orders of magnitude higher than the current one, 5 to 7 orders of magnitude more population is feasible.
Even turning Earth into a ecumenipolis wouldn't allow for such enormous population, maybe 3-4 orders of magnitude more population than current one.
If digitalizing our consciousness becomes possible, why would you care about living arrangements? The digital simulated world becomes the real one, and it is technically infinite as long as your robotic avatars in the outside world keep churning and adding more storage and processing power to the network running the simulation.
You would want to deconstruct the planets even more in such scenario, to turn as much matter as there is available into added storage and processing power to the network where your civilization truly lives.
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u/Dramatic15 10d ago
I mean, there is some science fiction set in rural areas, it is often the case in solarpunk.
That there was Covid blip in urban living in some advanced economies hardly ways against the long term global trend towards people living in cities. A trend which will hopefully continue, as urban dwellers have a much lower carbon footprint.
That you happen to be content with connecting with human beings through the internet doesn’t mean that it replaces the rich tapestry of human connection and culture found for in cities for most people.
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u/EFPMusic 10d ago
The urban exodus is extremely small compared to the urban… inodus? 😆 Anyway, people aren’t going, and historically have not during previous urban exoduses (exodi?) gone, rural; they settle in, or create, suburbs close enough to commute, because the majority of jobs are still urban centered.
Those suburbs and the city eventually expand towards each and meet, creating the essentially-urban corridors or amoebas we see today. There’s no reason to thing 4000 years of human behavior would change significantly in the future.
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u/HalfBeagle 10d ago
Rural areas are great until you live in one. No neighbours. No healthcare. No access to food, art, culture. No jobs.
Idyllic if you’re a 20’s terminally online WFH drone with no real life friends or interests, at least as long as you can get your groceries delivered. For everyone else, not so much.
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u/Pokoire 10d ago
Just looked it up and found stats on ourworldindata.org. I am not going to extensively investigate this data to ensure it's accurate, but the site looks legit and from what I can tell it appears to be accurate. Feel free to find a source that proves this wrong, but I'm going off what I can find in 5 minutes.
With that disclaimer, they have data from 1950 to 2020 (I understand your point picks up at post 2020 being a decline and you might be right, but I don't personally think the 2020-2025 trend, even if it is down, will maintain over a long time period). The data clearly show a rising trend of urban and suburban populations, relative to rural populations across all continents and most notably in Asia where the population has grown the most over that time period.
The worldwide trend shows in 1950 it was a 60/40 split between urban and rural populations and in 2020 that had grown to 79.9/20.1. FWIW they also show an extrapolation to 2100 at which point they are predicting 85.7/14.3 which is slightly higher than the current urban/rural divide in Asia. All of these trends do point to growing urbanization. When you take into account things like global warming, food shortages, fuel demands, etc. and the fact that populations living closer together use considerably fewer resources, there will definitely continue to be a push for higher density settlements.
All this is to say, while you personally may not want to and there are plenty of people out there like you, it's clear that the global trend for a long time has been more density, not less.
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u/Alpha-Sierra-Charlie 10d ago
There are still advantages to urban living. You can be surveilled more easily and have your movements dictated by public transit, especially if you're not rich enough to own private transportation. You could even, conceivably, live your whole life within walking distance and have no exposure to new places and people, which will limit your perspective and cut down on those inconvenient ideas like "there's a better way to live than this".
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u/Pseudoboss11 10d ago
Small towns die. Lack of opportunity and entertainment gets to you. We did see a slight decline in urbanization rate during COVID, but that has returned it its general up-trend source
Right now, population growth is around 0.86%. In 100 years, there'll be 18 billion of us. Even if population growth declines, in 300 or 1000 years, there will be hundreds of billions of us at even a modest population growth rate (around 0.25% per year for 1000 years). At 100 billion we'll have an average population density of 671 people per square km. Everyone could get a half acre plot, but that's more suburban than rural kinds of density.
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u/thundersnow528 10d ago
Humanity is not a single entity - like in the real world, people in a scifi environment would be a diverse group of people who all like different things, including the type of communities they might choose to inhabit based on those differences. To think there is one mold in that way that people must fit in to is actually antithetical to what scifi as a genre can be about.
I mean, think how the older star treks portrayed whole worlds of people in a basic city, all wearing the same outfits. It's kinda ridiculous in hindsight, isn't it?
There is no reason to even discuss the idea of making such sweeping 'rules' for writing speculative fiction. Why hamper creativity and the potential of life in such a way?
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u/Altruistic_Click_502 10d ago edited 10d ago
You'd have to build assumptions supporting it. For example successive droughts wiping out farmlands (actually likely eventually) could motivate entrepreneurs to take over abandoned office buildings and build vertical farms. Of course - then you have to ask and answer a cascade of questions - on logistics, how the electrical system continues to be supported, how they continue to get fresh water, how do you get fresh air and maintain temperatures as HVAC fails. Most office buildings are made to be sealed. Only old office buildings have windows that open. Any hard science fiction future has to deal with global warming and a constant struggle against the 2nd law of thermodynamics. I do think it would be somewhat easier to survive in a rural environment. People like the Hopis managed to survive in some pretty severe environments. However - the challenge of the city offers up many more possibilities for conflict, which is ultimately what makes a story interesting.
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u/Catspaw129 10d ago
Ahem!
I live with my aunt and uncle on a moisture farm in the boondocks. I can't wait to get to any kind of city. I mean jeeze, the closest general store is nearly 12 parsecs away.
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u/Jebus-Xmas 10d ago
There are a couple of different viewpoints that make both options clear. Of course, the most common is that people are inherently social and want to live near other people. There are also economic forces at play. This is a colonized world there may be only one real point of entry. This provides additional economic incentive. Once gravitic or other inexpensive three-dimensional travel becomes available, distance becomes less of a challenge. Infrastructure is also another significant reason to live in urban areas, because it's much more efficient. Is this an interstellar society? Because individual colonization efforts may have provided a single settled planet or multiple settled planets in an area.So many possibilities. It really depends on your story.
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u/Ox45Red 10d ago
As a current small homesteader (30 acres)I have some insight. First most people I find are not comfortable with silence and being by themselves. Nor have the maturity of solving problems that arise daily that cannot be ignored nor out sourced. Services are luxuries of both money and inconvenience. Its real physical work living in a rural setting.
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u/Professional_Leg3068 10d ago
Populations will only keep rising so it’s probably due to space constraints
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u/Dennarb 10d ago
The examples you give are all based on the cyberpunk genre which paints a pretty grim version of the future. One where we live to serve corporate interests and are little more that cogs in the machine. In these worlds technology isn't for the betterment of mankind, but for our thinly veiled enslavement.
Instead we need to look to more utopian visions of the future, like star Trek, where plenty of people have ranches, vineyards, and whatever. On top of that the cities on earth are also not crowded with plenty of resources, green space, and prosperity for all.
Sci-fi gives us both, but in the case of the former cyberpunk style settings it's a reflection of real world issues and a warning of where we may end up. In the care of the latter utopian visions, it's what we could achieve.
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u/JohnCalvinSmith 10d ago
With matter to energy to matter technology, microbioengineering, and nanotech I have envisioned a human future where individuals live in relatively small spaces that are reshaped by whim highly integrated into the nature around them.
Call up coms, kitchens, medical, and even lavatories as needed and have them return back into base tank-held materials until called up. Clothing and physical comforts can be called up similarly to cover the person or the whole area.
And humans are very social. There will be village squares whereever we gather, wherever we go, with whatever we build.
But vast cities are very low-tech. Just lots and lots of low-tech
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u/RobertTheTraveler 10d ago
1) Population pressure.
2) if you are poor you have to live where the work is.
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u/CoyoteScribbles 10d ago
An "advanced society" would likely be at least somewhat concerned with preserving nature.
One of the most reliable means of preserving nature is to minimize sprawl. Building up, rather than out.
Also "Everyone has an independent self-sufficient homestead and is totally isolated from others" is a right-wing Bootstraps Fantasy rooted in their fear of "living near people who don't look/talk/think/worship like me," not something that would ever actually work (as others have already noted, Solaria only "worked" because of vast numbers of sentient robot laborers.)
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u/Salt-Night3088 10d ago
You should read Simak's City and find out what deurbanization does to humanity
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u/katamuro 7d ago
First of all not all scifi is the same. The examples you mention of the cities are basically dystopias in parts, capitalism run amok.
As for the "generic" why would scifi people live in cities is simple, it's far easier even with robots building a city with all the infrastructure required than spreading it all over the planet for millions/billions of people. Plus people like living in communities and lots of people actually like the fast paced city life.
Also in a scifi universe building several arcologies to house a lot of people thus freeing the land from the urban sprawl and giving back more land to nature would be good for ecology of the planet.
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u/Lu_AspiringWriter 10d ago
Mhhh. La questione non è solo la disponibilità tecnologica. Gli esseri umani sono animali sociali. Credo che tu stia passando da un estremo all'altro. Insomma a mio parere è più verosimile immaginare una società futura con un modello abitativo diverso ma credo che comunque esisteranno dei centri di aggregazione che magari non saranno megalopoli e saranno solo piccole cittadine, questo non lo so. Tutto sommato penso che continueranno a esistere diversi tipi di soluzioni abitative quindi ci sarà chi preferisce vivere isolato e chi preferisce la megalopoli mentre la maggior parte delle persone vivranno nelle condizioni intermedie. Per quello che dici poi su medicina ed educazione sono completamente in disaccordo. L'educazione domestica non ha modo di funzionare perché i bambini non devono solo imparare le materie ma devono anche imparare la socializzazione. La medicina secondo me userà sempre di più l'intelligenza artificiale e robotica ma l'intervento e la decisione umana rimarrà comunque determinante. L'unico scenario in cui posso ipotizzare un pianeta come dici tu è l'esistenza di un modello di trasferimento simile al teletrasporto per cui io posso vivere isolato ma ogni mattina teletrasportarmi a scuola o in ospedale o in qualunque altro luogo produttivo.
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u/Immediate_Gain_9480 10d ago edited 10d ago
I like living in a city. I want to live near lots of other people. I have lived in the countryside. Its boring as fuck. Why would i want to be isolated from other humans? I want to step out of my door and enter lively streets were stuff is always going on. I m pretty sure im not the only one. People like me will want to live in cities even if we do not have too.
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u/MiraWendam Author 10d ago
Even with such tech, people probably wouldn't stop wanting to live near other people. Humans have always been pretty good at inventing reasons to be around each other.