Journal: Global Cities

A museum situatted in the city of London presented recently a photographs' exhibition called "Global Cities". The aim of it was to analize the differences and similarities of the big cities around the world and to evaluate their effects over nature and life quality.
The ehibition was intended to show the relionship between architecture and society. In order to do this, the researchers and artists took into account information provided by sociologists, the results of sudies related to population density and the development of modern art expressions. Their starting point, was the fact, that nowadays 90% of the world population is believed to live in cities, while last century that was the reality of only a 10% of the peolpe around the world, and that it is estimated that this percentage will rise to 75 by the year 2050.
The exhibition made many peolpe reflected on the rapid growing of cities which undoubtedly is starting to affect the social and psychological structure of the people who inhabitate them.
As regarding the placement of most of the cities, people who participate on the exhibition explained that this is related to geographical factors such as mountains and rivers, but it couldn't be denied that it is also related to different social, economical and cultural systems, which have historically influenced in the construction of the cities.
On the other hand, population density, appears in the centre of the debates about the future of the cities. However, this factor does not have a direct impact on people's life quality because design, open spaces and tranasport can been used to compensate the posible bad effects of the high number of inhabitants.
As regarding population diversity, this was understood as a normal ethnic an racial componet of the cities life, although it was also associated with economical and educational disparities.
The exhibition dealt with many interest issues related to cities growing but more than just an art exhibition in had a quite valuable educational and informative aim. It was not also an interesting artistic expression but it also made peolpe conscious about an aspect of our reality that, in most times, is not taked into accout seriously. The growing of the world population and the unplanned way in which many cities are becoming bigger should not only be an artistic issue but a problem than citizens and goverment should start to consider, before the impacts of it end up damaging our quality of life in dramatic ways.