Los problemas del agua en tiempos de cambio.Luis Veiga da Cunha
Globalisation
A planet of metropolises (in crisis). The boom of cities and motorised transport thanks to oil.
The growth of the world population has accelerated in recent history, especially the urban population. This rate of growth increased slightly in the second half of the 20th Century as black gold became the dominant energy source on a global scale. Automobiles first appeared in the late 19th Century, but until the start of the 20th Century they were luxury items, only available for the enjoyment of the wealthy western classes. However, their power of seduction soon held sway over society as a whole and the automobile became a crucial element of the megamachine that characterises the industrialised anthroposphere. No one could fail to see that the new metropolises worked because they were functional for the interests of capital expansion and reproduction, although this might have manifested itself in different ways around the world; otherwise it would not have been able to dominate the whole of the last century as the hegemonic urban form. But at the same time, the metropolis made it possible to reduce the cost of workforce reproduction, owing to the lower costs of housing, food and transport. In this respect, cheap energy was essential to reducing all those costs. All of which turned the metropolis into the ideal space for industrial production, making major economies of scale and agglomeration possible for the capital. The spreading of the metropolitan form would have different kinds of impacts.
Keywords: oil, industrial production, metropolis.
