The business of death has become highly lucrative as the cost of dying rises in cities across the world. So what place is there for tomorrow’s dead – and does new technology offer a better solution?
Some 55 million people are reckoned to pass away each year (about 0.8% of the planet’s total population – equivalent to 100% of England’s). Yet urban planners and developers focus overwhelmingly on accommodating and making money from the living. Cemeteries and columbaria (burial vaults) dating back hundreds of years retain an iconic place in our towns and cities – but, partly as a result of their limited profitability, most have not been allowed to grow. Which means metropolises the world over are running out of room to house their dead
With space running out, the business of death has become highly lucrative as the cost of dying rises all over the world. “Burial is becoming more and more of a niche product or market,” says Dr John Troyer of the University of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society. “The burial issue is not just about economics – but there is a lot about capital, capitalism and commodification involved.”
Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York – a city with almost no burial plots left – pre-purchased his grave in Manhattan five years before his death in 2013 for $20,000. He described it as “a good investment” due to the rising prices.
In Hong Kong, where a series of hastily created hillside cemeteries consumed the city’s last available burial space back in the 1980s, those still able to find and purchase a private grave can pay $30,000 for the privilege. Alternatively, there is an average five-year wait for a small spot in a public columbarium, where thousands of urns of cremated ashes are stored.
In some London boroughs, meanwhile, those unable to pay for a burial (currently costing around £4,500, and rising) are buried in multiple layers beneath the ground, in the style of the Victorians. But without long-term public solutions to the burial land crisis, local authorities may end up outsourcing the problem.
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With the boundary between our virtual and physical lives becoming ever-more blurred, technology is sure to play a greater role in death, too. In Canada, Calgary’s new “green” cemeteries have proposed using GPS locations, and hand-held satellite units instead of headstones, to help visitors find graves. In Japan, the company I-Can Corp offers descendants online visits to virtual graveyards, where they can pour virtual water or light a virtual incense stick, instead of travelling the long distance to visit a grave in person.
Hong Kong’s government went a step further, creating a social-media network of virtual graves aimed at families who had been forced to cremate their relatives’ ashes – because of lack of space in the city – and so no longer had a physical space at which to pay their respects.
Troyer, however, offers a word of caution about this shift towards virtual graves. “A lot of the companies talking about digital solutions talk about ‘forever’ – and that’s very complicated with the internet, because the virtual material we create can easily disappear. The lowly gravestone has been a very successful human technology, and I suspect it will last … I would go with granite.”
