The six photos above are all taken at, according to Google’s handy altimeter, roughly 27,000 feet (8230 meters) above mean sea level. Thus, each shows approximately the same number of acres or hectares of the planet surface, the differences in land surface elevation being a trivial component of the view. Five of the six photographs show the homes, working places, and treasured historical sites of well over one million people, each. (Keen viewers of the five photos will be able to pick out the walls of the ancient cities at the core of each of these modern metropolises–the Beijing wall-and-moat system is especially prominent.) The other photo shows the same components figuring in the lives of 40, 437 people, plus a few thousand of their neighbors caught unawares.
Do the citizens of Charlottesville want their city to be as densely populated as is Islamic Cairo? Probably not, although the citizens of old Misr-al-Kahira seem to be surviving well enough. Isn’t urban density and community size limited by resources other than land? Yes. Each of these cities, with the possible exception of Cairo, has had to (as did New York City) reach out and seize distant sources of potable water. As Charlottesville and Albemarle County are planning to do, presently. Haven’t these cities shipped many of their social problems to the city perimeter? Well, Cairo and Paris certainly have. Rising literacy rates in developing world have encouraged women in those rural lands to leave the limitations of farming or herding life behind and aim for a richer future in squatter settlements around the Egyptian capital and grim ghettos of (illegal or officially marginalized) immigrants around the French one. In each of the five cities, there are internal “squats” as well, once-vacant buildings now illegally sheltering the formerly homeless.
But, what the photos do is put the lie to the possibility that an increase in population density is entirely undesirable in Charlottesville, and thus that despoiling rural Albemarle to accommodate Central Virginia’s population growth is a necessity. One of the cities pictured is Paris, after all, the most visited municipality in the world and the greatest artistic achievement of the 19th century, during which the town was dramatically reconfigured at enormous expense, and entirely by choice. (It remains the only European, perhaps capital, city rebuilt without having suffered a catastrophe beforehand.) There were those in the French legislature who continually complained, at the time, about the cost. Yet, how many times in the past 130 years has Paris recovered those costs? To make investment in urban infrastructure that permits, and to legislate building regulation that demands, stronger buildings of consistent design (the kind of buildings that are more readily reused) and greater population density in Charlottesville could be the wisest decision that Central Virginians could make.
