“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” ― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities We have travelled in time and all over the world while reading about urbanization for this class. I think of this course in three sections. In our first section, we look at how urbanization has changed throughout history. This Urbanization is relatively recent in history when you think about it. Two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid. Then we talk about agriculture, and the beginning of urbanization we are talking about 20,000 years. 200 years for industrial and as we move into the digital era the telescopic nature of evolution becomes clear. This process only accelerates. Barring catastrophic regression, it will not be slowing down anytime soon and the issues we have covered in this course will not likely disappear. I want you to reflect on some of the challenges to urbanization or urban living we have learned about this semester. Select one (one your peers have not already written about) and write about why you think it is a pressing issue for urban life going forward. As a group rank the problems your group identified in an ordinal fashion and provide substantiation for each as to why you think it is in the list and in that order.
