Has the great urbanisation of our species over the last 5,000 years been good for humanity or bad?

The UN human settlements programme predicts that homo sapiens will soon be a majority urban species: 60% of humans will live in cities by 2030. More than 10 millennia of adaptations have gone into changing our lives from free-range to metropolitan. Yet in evolutionary terms this is a blindingly swift change of habitat, and to understand what it means for our future we must turn to the long view of archaeology.

The accumulation of humans in dense habitations – cities – has had enormous and frequently fatal consequences. Problems of access to resources, disease transmission and pollution follow rapidly on the heels of our great urban experiment. And it is precisely these problems, originating many thousand of years ago, that we must come to terms with if we are going to survive as a species.

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The preserved skull of urban reformer Jeremy Bentham, held at UCL.
The preserved skull of urban reformer Jeremy Bentham, held at UCL. © UCL Special Collections

Skull 4. A bright future?

The story of humans in cities is one of adaptation. In inventing urban life, we have essentially given ourselves the tools we need to meet our own challenges. Hidden in each of these skulls is a note of optimism.

While violence still haunts us, the fatal pattern of raids and massacres that seem to have been prevalent in the past now occurs mostly where urban states have failed. The diseases that decimated us in the past are now treated with the skills and knowledge born of the specialists and institutions that cities support. And it is among the citizens of our urban centres that we find the movements at the forefront of making the city a safer, cleaner, more equal place.

A final skull illustrates exactly this best hope for our urban future. In 1832, the pioneering social theorist Jeremy Bentham passed away, and, according to the terms of his will, his body was given over for dissection and eventual preservation in a cabinet located in the cloisters of University College London, while his head was mummified as an “auto-icon”.

Bentham had been part of a wave of philosophers and reformers who imagined a better world geared towards “the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”. London, the busiest metropolis in the western world, had produced people with a zeal for reform; the legacy of these reforms can be seen in the institutions that harness the city for innovation, for radical thinking and for addressing the very problems our cities throw up. Bentham’s skull is evidence of the track our urban lives left deliberately behind – a reminder that the city, the very engine of so many modern problems, might be the very same adaptive tool that we use to save ourselves.