Bruce Sterling on Cities

"Boing Boing: Do you think governance can scale with the increasing size of megacities like Jakarta, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, & New York? Or are such cities doomed to increasing ferality?

Bruce Sterling: I don't think urban scale is a truly serious problem. Tokyo and Jakarta share the same scale, but not the same problems. There are plenty of cities that are getting *smaller* and have some awful problems, viz Detroit.

There are many cities that have outgrown their old infrastructure and become huge squatter camps, but that's not inherently a scaling problem, it's a management problem."

This discussion also touches on the pros and cons of urbanization and which are some of the most exciting cities today.