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The world is changing faster now than ever before. The dispossessed, and the ambitious are flooding into cities swollen out of all recognition. Poor cities are struggling to cope. Rich cities are reconfiguring themselves at breakneck speed. China has created an industrial power house from what were fishing villages in the 1970s. Lagos and Dhaka attract a thousand new arrivals every day. In Britain, central London's population has started to grow again after 50 years of decline.

We have more big cities now than at any time in our history. In 1900, only 16 had a population of one million; now it's more than 400. Not only are there more of them, they are larger than ever. In 1851, London had two million people. It was the largest city in the world by a long way, twice the size of Paris, its nearest rival.

That version of London would seem like a village now. By the official definition, London has getting on for eight million people, but in practical terms, it's a city of 18 million, straggling most of the way from Ipswich to Bournemouth in an unforgiving tide of business parks and designer outlets, gated housing and logistics depots. There might be fields between them, but they are linked in a single transport system and a single economy. Those villages in Suffolk that are close enough to a railway station to deliver you to Liverpool Street in under 90 minutes are effectively as much a part of London as Croydon or Ealing and they have the house prices to prove it. The other big conurbations - from Birmingham to Manchester and Glasgow, names for cities that spread far beyond the bounds of political city limits - can be understood in the same way.

Having invented the modern city, Britain promptly reeled back in horror at what it had done. To William Morris and John Ruskin, or the Salvation Army exploring the cholera-ridden back alleys of London's East End, the city was a hideous tumour sucking the life out of the countryside and creating in its place a vast, polluted landscape of squalor, disease and crime. In their eyes, the city was a place to be feared, controlled and, if possible, eliminated.

In William Blake's bitterly ironic words, Jerusalem had been overwhelmed by dark, satanic mills. Morris dreamt of a London abandoned by its population in favour of communal country life, leaving behind a dung heap in Parliament Square and empty streets enlivened by fluttering, worthless banknotes.

Such attitudes continue to shape thinking about the city and not only in Britain. In America, the Republicans have concluded that there are no votes to be had in cities. And wealthy suburbanites refuse to pay the property taxes that will support the downtown areas they fear and despise. Yet whether we like it or not, at some point in 2008, the city will have finally swallowed the world. The number of people living in cities is about to overtake those left behind in the fields. It's a statistic that seems to suggest some sort of fundamental species change, like the moment when mankind stopped being hunter gatherers and took up agriculture. It has been the trigger for a wave of task forces, academic disaster tourism and feverish speculation, from Forbes magazine and National Geographic to the United Nations' habitat programme.

When Forbes went to Lagos last year, drawn by what it called the 'Malthusian nightmare' of a city that had grown from 300,000 people in 1950 to 10 million today, in an unconscious echo of those Victorians horrified by the spectacle of the new industrial cities of the 19th century, it invited us to think of the future of Lagos in terms of the lawless chaos of Baghdad's Sadr City, multiplied by 100.

The future of the city has suddenly become the only subject in town. It ranges from tough topics such as managing water resources, economic policy, transport planning and law enforcement to what is usually presented as the fluffier end of the scale, such as making public spaces people want to spend time in. It's about racial tolerance and civilised airports, the colour of the buses and the cost of the fares on them. Unless you have some kind of framework to make sense of all that, the city can seem to be about so many diverse things that it is about everything and nothing.

And that is how I found myself swept up in Urban Age, a mobile think-tank set up by the London School of Economics Cities programme, with the Alfred Herrhausen Society, a well-funded charitable arm of Deutsche Bank.

The starting point of the Urban Age project, originated by Richard Sennett and Ricky Burdett of the LSE, was that a successful city has to be based on an understanding that it is shaped both by politics and by ideas about space and architecture. Their idea was to bring together a diverse selection of people, not only those who spend their time thinking about cities, but also those who have to try to do something about them.

There were a couple of mayors - of Washington and Bogotá - and a formidable American sociologist in the shape of Saskia Sassen. They were joined from time to time by Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel and Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. On one occasion, Ian Blair, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, turned up. There were Gerry Frug, a Harvard lawyer who writes constitutions for cities, a criminologist from the Sorbonne and an Austrian transport planner desperately worried about the impact of cars on the sustainability of cities. These are not the kind of people you usually find in the same room.

Over two years, the group toured six of the world's key cities - New York, London, Shanghai, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin - in a series of conferences. At each stop, they met their local peers.

In New York I listened to Rem Koolhaas behaving badly and blaming our inability to face up to the realities of the contemporary city on our sentimental attachment to Jane Jacobs and the rose-tinted views on street life she expounds in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Ever since the 60s, Jacobs ideas about protecting traditional neighbourhoods from planners trying to carve urban motorway through them have made her a heroine to generations of urban activists.

Later, I was in Johannesburg and saw Richard Sennett offend a roomful of South Africans as he attempted to put the ANC deputy mayor on the spot by asking her exactly what she intended to do about making life better in a city in which taking a journey on a suburban train is too dangerous for all but the desperate to contemplate. And in Berlin I asked Ian Blair how he defined the boundaries of London. His answer included Jamaica and Baghdad.

The results of all this have been boiled down to The Endless City, a 500-page doorstep of a book I edited with Ricky Burdett and which is published this week. It has a lot of messages about reducing the reliance of cities on the car, on high-density cities being more sociable places in which to live, as well as more sustainable environmentally, about the importance of a coherent form of city government. Though it doesn't shrink from the darker aspects of city life, it is also a powerful affirmation of the city as mankind's greatest single invention.

The nature of cities has already changed irrevocably and in The Endless City, there is plenty of evidence to show that they are changing us. In 1950, they were predominantly a Western phenomenon, with the developed world accounting for 60 per cent of the urban population. Now, 70 per cent of city dwellers are from the developing world. In China in 1970, one in five people lived in cities. In 30 years, that number has risen to two in five. The fastest-growing cities are all well outside the comfort zone of the Western world. Lagos, the fastest growing of them all, is adding 58 people every hour; Mumbai is growing by 42 every hour.

A score of cities including Los Angeles, Shanghai and Mexico City, which were still tiny in the 19th century, have all passed the once unimaginable 18 million mark. That puts them well ahead of all but eight of the 27 nations of the European Union. This is a dizzying rate of transformation and it's still accelerating. In 1900, 10 per cent of the world's population lived in cities; by 2050, it is going to be 75 per cent. And the biggest question is if such places can survive as coherent cities at all.

Cities bring out a lurking paranoia in some people. They see this explosive growth as a tide of slums engulfing the world. Certainly there is plenty to be worried about.

Half of the 12 million people in Mumbai live in illegal shacks, 200,000 of them on the pavement. Every day, at least two people are killed falling off overcrowded suburban trains. In Mexico City, fewer than four workers in 10 have formal jobs, public transport is largely in the form of mafia-controlled minibuses, and taxis. The last mayor's response was to build a second tier on the elevated motorway, to allow the rich to speed up their commuting time.

Johannesburg, with its horrifying levels of violent crime, has seen the affluent quit the city centre for fortified enclaves on its boundaries. As a result, South Africa is leading the world in developing new security techniques for gated housing, built appropriately enough in the style of Tuscan hill towns. Private security is also a divisive a topic in north London where I live where the clatter of police helicopters has become routine. My neighbourhood divides between those who want to install barriers and gates to cut us off from the world outside and those who see such measures as the ultimate negation of what life in a city should be. Despite our anxieties, London is a safe city by world standards. The murder rate is 2.1 for every 100,000 inhabitants. In Johannesburg, it is nine times that figure and you are eight times as likely to be killed in a car crash there.

Even in the traditionally more successful cities, there is plenty to fuel the anxieties of those who worry about such an uncontrollable surge of urban change. In the last 20 years, the percentage of people with manufacturing jobs in New York has fallen from 20 per cent to just 4 per cent. In London's central seven boroughs, more than 70 per cent of births last year were to mothers not born in Britain. In 1992, 38 per cent of newcomers to London were foreign-born. Five years later, it was 40 per cent and in 2001 it was 56 per cent.

Cities look different, too. Shanghai had just 121 buildings over eight storeys high in 1980. Twenty years later, it was 3,500, and just five years after that it was a staggering 10,000.

But for all their agonies, cities must also be counted as a positive force. They are an engine of growth, a machine for putting the rural poor onto the first rung of urban prosperity and freedom. Look at London, a city that existed for several centuries before anything approximating England had been thought of. It has a far stronger sense of itself and its identity than Britain as a whole or England. It has grown, layer on layer, for 2,000 years, sustaining generation after generation of newcomers.

You see their traces in Spitalfields, where a Huguenot chapel became, successively, a synagogue and a mosque, tracking the movement of waves of migrants from poverty to suburban comfort. It is a history of migration marked by place names like Lombard Street, Hindu shrines and mosques. It's a place without an apparent structure that has proved extraordinarily successful at growing and changing. Its old residential core, sheltering in the approaches to its fortress, has made the transition into the world's busiest banking centre.

Its market halls and power stations have become art galleries and piazzas. The simple terraced streets built for the clerks of the Great Western Railway in Southall have become home to the largest Sikh community outside India. The failed speculation of 19th-century housebuilders in Holland Park has provided the base for the international financiers. Hoxton's nonconformist chapels and Camden's wharves provide fertile territory for hipsters interested in tattoos, unnecessary facial hair and the internet.

And all of these worlds overlap in space and time. London is different for all its people. They make the most of the elements in it that have meaning for them and ignore the rest. A city is an a la carte menu. That is what makes it different from a village, which has little room for tolerance and difference. And a great city is one in which as many people as possible can make the widest of choices from its menu.

Ever since I began writing about cities, London's structure has fascinated me. It manages to be both monumental and intimate. I have lived in many cities: Edinburgh was spectacularly beautiful; Glasgow has the grim magnificence of its stone built core and its American style grid of streets. Milan has its glittering centre and its endless sprawl of factories and workshopts that make it a world capital of design. But it is London which has left me with a mental map to interpret every other city in which I have found myself. Which is the east end, which is south of the river? It is partly that phenomenon that made the experience of the Urban Age conferences so compelling. It was a chance to sample in quick succession a sequence of very different urban menus.

The South African leg of the programme took me to the top of the country's tallest skyscraper. Once it housed Johannesburg's only four-star hotel. It is shuttered now, trapped in the midst of a dystopia that could have been the product of JG Ballard's imagination. Nigerian squatters occupy brutalist concrete towers. Stalls selling bush meat and magic have taken over the streets. A particularly fearless band of yuppies is attempting to turn the Art Deco office blocks left behind by the gold rush years of the 1930s into city-centre lofts.

When the Urban Age got to Mexico, I found myself touring illegal squatter camps in Mexico City, in the company of armed guards courtesy of the Herrhausen Society, not so surprising, perhaps, since it was established by Deutsche Bank in memory of a chairman assassinated by terrorists. These settlements are called informal, yet they are planned with remarkable precision. A whole community from the rural south of the country arrives in a single co-ordinated movement to establish an instant suburb.

Mexico is a place in which globalisation works in unexpected ways. While America might be worrying about losing car plant jobs to Mexico, the street traders who crowd the heart of Mexico City are the tip of another global supply chain. The T-shirts and the plastic flip-flops they sell are from China.

In Berlin, Angela Merkel talked about the challenge that migration poses to the big cities, while Lord Foster discussed designing a symbol for the capital of a reunited Germany in the form of the Reichstag, and Berlin's mayor offered a model for the future of his city as 'poor but sexy'.

In Shanghai, the city had been hit by a rash of graffiti. There had been nothing like it on my first visit in the early 1990s, when the main road into the city was a two-lane blacktop. Now it's an eight-lane highway, amid a forest of skyscrapers. It turns out that the ubiquitous sequences of spray-painted numbers, with the occasional Chinese character thrown in, have nothing to do with tagging or politics - they are mobile phone numbers of migrants looking for work. In the turmoil that is modern China, it's the only way to show they are available for hire.

It is chastening, but valuable for a critic to be confronted with how little you really know. Before the Urban Age conference in Shanghai, I hadn't understood that the city has three million illegal immigrants from inland China with fewer rights than Mexicans in Los Angeles, or that the city had levels of inequality of an order close to Manhattan's. In the context of a state based on an ideology-free version of Marxism, it's hard to know if that is to be understood as a success or a failure. I knew that huge areas of the city centre had been bulldozed, but I had not understood that this relentless tide of construction had doubled the living space, which is still far from generous, of its most crowded inhabitants.

I knew that Johannesburg was a city shaped by apartheid, but I hadn't understood what it would mean to try to deal not just with social inequalities, but structural ones too. Johannesburg was built as a white city surrounded not by suburbs but by invisible black labour camps. It's not enough to open the city to the majority; the edges are still hugely dispossessed. I could not have imagined what it is like for the city's transport officials to work on its suburban rail system until I heard at first hand of the effects of a security-guard strike that involved scores of murders. Six dead bodies were found on one particularly bloody day.

The Urban Age did make me understand exactly how the Victorians felt about the city, and how threatening a place it seemed to them. It also forced me to think not just as a critic, but to look at things from the point of view of a politician. What is to be done about the city?

It's clear that every city is in desperate need of answers, and that events like the Urban Age act like hot spots for the transmission of avian flu. Ideas spread from them like epidemics. Culture-led renewal, congestion charging, elected mayors have all been strategies for the future of cities that have ricocheted around the world.

What may be surprising is that, for once, many of these ideas are coming from London. Ken Livingstone's electorate may be focusing on allegations of misdemeanours at City Hall, but in New York and Barcelona, they are taking his policies on planning, transport and housing with the utmost seriousness. Nobody knows what effect his insistence on making the builders of luxury flats include a percentage of affordable housing will have on land prices in the long term, but it looks like an experiment worth trying.

We do not belong to a generation that has the shared faith that the pioneer architectural modernists had when they chartered a liner to cruise the Mediterranean and drew up their vision of what the modern city ought to be, the Charter of Athens (1933). They divided their ideal city into functional zones, shaped by slabs arranged to maximise the sunlight falling on the ground between them.

Theirs was a generation that was freed from the luxury of self-doubt. Ours is not and that is why we struggle now when we try to think what cities should be. We have seen too many soured urban utopias that were invented by the architects on that liner, and propagated by a political system that measured success in the number of new buildings that it could deliver each month.

Politicians love cranes; they need solutions within the time frames of elections and cranes deliver them. But there are only a limited number of problems that are susceptible to this kind of time scale. The result is a constant cycle of demolition and reconstruction that is seen as the substitute for thinking about how to address the deeper issues of the city. Visions for cities tend to be the creation of the boosters rather than the theorists or the policy-makers. City builders have always had to be pathological optimists, if not out-and-out fantasists. They belong to a tradition that connects the map-makers who parcel up packages of swamp land to sell to gullible purchasers, and the show-apartment builders who sell off-plan to investors in Shanghai, who are banking on a rising market, making them a paper profit before they have even had to make good on their deposits.

Cities are made by an extraordinary mixture of do-gooders and bloody-minded obsessives, of cynical political operators and speculators. They are shaped by the unintended consequences of the greedy and the self-interested, the dedicated and the occasional visionary. The cities that work best are those that keep their options open, that allow the possibility of change.

The ones that are stuck, overwhelmed by rigid, state-owned social housing, or by economic systems that offer the poor no way out of the slums are in trouble. A successful city is one that makes room for surprises. A city that has been trapped by too much gentrification, or too many shopping malls, will have trouble generating the spark that is essential to making a city that works.

The pattern of the Victorian terraces of London has proved to be remarkably adaptable. A four-storey house 18ft wide can be used for almost anything and it supports a population dense enough for pedestrian life on the pavement that makes cafes and small shops flourish; a system-built tower block marooned in Tarmac is not so adaptable.

Similarly, giant out-of-town sheds, the predominant form of so many new cities now, are not designed for flexible use or even for the long term. They are built with a maximum of 20 years of life in mind and then trashed. Successful cities are the ones that allow people to be what they want; unsuccessful ones try to force them to be what others want them to be. A city of freeways like Houston or Los Angeles forces people to be car drivers or else traps them in poverty. A successful city has a public transport system that is easy to use; an unsuccessful city tries to ban cars.

Later this year the Urban Age programme moves to Sao Paolo, shifting its focus from the bigger picture to the fine grain of life in a city in which the rich commute by helicopter, the prisons are a state within a state, and in which the mayor is able to ban outdoor street advertising overnight in a bid to beautify his city.

A successful city has room for more than the obvious ideas about city life, because, in the end, a city is about the unexpected, it's about a life shared with strangers and open to new ideas. An unsuccessful city has closed its mind to the future.

Endless City, edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, is published by Phaidon next week at £35.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

What lies beneath - Sinai’s hidden texts

By Clive Cookson September 21, 2012 8:19 pm Financial Times

A scientific effort is under way to reveal and record palimpsests at the world’s oldest continuously operating library

©St Catherine’s monastery, Sinai

Spectral imaging reveals the hidden text on the medieval palimpsests. Copyright St Catherine’s monastery of the Sinai. Used with permission

The Greek Orthodox monks of St Catherine’s monastery in Sinai have been accumulating manuscripts and books since the sixth century, making their library the world’s greatest repository of early medieval writing after the Vatican. The collection is even richer than it first appears, because many of the 3,300 ancient manuscripts contain hidden text and illustrations older than their visible contents – and a large scientific effort is under way to reveal and record them.

The concealed texts are in palimpsests, manuscripts on which the original writing was erased so that scribes could reuse the precious parchment. Faint signs of the original text remain, as traces of pigment or indentation, which can be enhanced visually through modern techniques of spectral imaging at different wavelengths.

“We may think now of St Catherine’s as a remote place isolated in the middle of the Sinai desert, but in medieval times it was a major destination for pilgrims from around the Christian world, who would have used the library and brought manuscripts to it,” says Michael Phelps, president of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library in Los Angeles. “We already know of nine languages in the palimpsests.”

As a place of pilgrimage since its foundation by the Emperor Justinian in around 550 – it includes both the relics of St Catherine and the site where Moses saw God in the burning bush – the monastery has always had an outgoing attitude. A 21st-century manifestation of this openness is the desire of Archbishop Damianos of Sinai and his monks, especially the librarian Father Justin, to digitise their collection of manuscripts, including palimpsests, and make them available for study by scholars worldwide.

Arcadia, a British charity set up by Lisbet Rausing, the Tetra Pak heiress, is funding the five-year programme to image the St Catherine’s palimpsests with a $2.1m grant. “This hugely exciting project fits perfectly into Arcadia’s mission to save endangered cultural materials through modern technology,” says Anthea Case, the fund’s principal adviser.

Phelps leads a team of 10 US-based scientists and technical staff working on the project. The team has made two preparatory visits to Sinai this year, and will set off for the monastery again next week – unless security concerns force a postponement. Data will start flowing in earnest in 2013.

“Operating our advanced digitisation technology in such an austere desert location challenges our planning and logistics,” says Michael Toth, the programme manager. “Digital post-processing of the manuscript images to reveal hidden text isn’t like CSI – you don’t just push a button and suddenly see it appear in a couple of minutes,” he adds.

St Catherine’s monastery, Sinai

Preliminary data will be released this autumn for analysis by 18 scholars who have particular expertise in the range of ancient languages found in the palimpsests.

Many of the erased texts are in Christian Palestinian Aramaic, a language used between the third and eighth centuries, which then died out. “These texts were erased because they were in a dead language for which the medieval scribes had no use,” Phelps says. “We can help to recover its voice.”

Preparing new parchment was an elaborate process of flaying, soaking, curing, dehairing and splitting animal hides, so recycling redundant manuscripts by scraping off the old text made good sense.

“Many of the manuscripts dating from the seventh to the ninth century are palimpsests,” says Father Justin, who is originally from Texas. “During those centuries, especially, it was often difficult to obtain new parchment.”

There are known to be 130 palimpsests at St Catherine’s – though research is likely to find more. Most are religious texts such as scriptures, homilies and services. An important exception awaiting further study is a medical treatise that may date back to the late classical period and seems to be the oldest known Hippocratic text.

“Scholars have been able to decipher occasional words visible in the margins, but these texts, often of the greatest importance, have thus far eluded attempts to read them. The prospect of recovering these texts is a very exciting development,” adds Father Justin, who had been running a sophisticated digital-imaging operation at St Catherine’s for several years before the project started. “Any western university would be proud of the digitisation facility that Father Justin has put together,” comments Phelps.

Father Justin prepares a manuscript for digitisation

The technical heart of the project involves spectral imaging across a wide range of wavelengths from the ultraviolet through visible light to the near infrared, says Keith Knox, a key member of the scientific team who has been involved in manuscript research for 20 years in his spare time (his main job involves detecting objects in space from multispectral images of the sky).

The equipment is designed both to transmit light through the parchment and to shine light on to the surface and image its reflection. But the biggest single source of data is ultraviolet irradiation, which makes traces of ancient ink fluoresce blue.

Computer programs combine all the spectral data, using special algorithms to make the overt top text disappear as far as possible while enhancing the appearance of the undertext. False colour is used to make it stand out.

The palimpsest work has a lot in common with image analysis in other fields such as astronomy. “The task is to extract information out of noisy data,” Knox says. “It is a detective story, trying to find out what’s there.”

What makes the detectives’ job more difficult is that medieval scribes did not necessarily reuse pages from which text had been erased in the same order or even orientation as the original manuscript. And a further complication is that some texts were erased and reused twice, leading to “double palimpsests”.

Although no one has tried before to access so many palimpsests in such a remote location as Sinai, multispectral imaging has already shown what it can do on individual manuscripts. The best example is the Archimedes Palimpsest, a 13th century Byzantine prayer book containing erased texts from the 10th century. These include seven treatises by Archimedes, two of which (The Method and Stomachion) cannot be found anywhere else.

A US collector bought the manuscript for $2m in 1998 and deposited it with The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for conservation, imaging and scholarship. The project, which featured several of the scientists now working on the Sinai manuscripts, has shed light on Archimedes and revealed texts from the ancient world, including speeches by Hyperides, an Athenian orator of the fourth century BC, and a third century AD commentary on Aristotle’s “Categories”.

It remains to be seen whether new treasures to match the Archimedes Palimpsest are revealed at the Holy Monastery of the God-trodden Mount Sinai (to give St Catherine’s its official name). But with such expertise focused on the world’s oldest continuously operating library, some remarkable discoveries are likely.

When people think about space science, they usually imagine researchers looking out into the cosmos. But an important role of space agencies is to look down on Earth – and Earth observation is the primary mission of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research.

Inpe (as the institute is known from its Portuguese initials) has developed one of the world’s most advanced environmental monitoring systems. It tracks what is happening on the ground – and, above all, in the Amazon rainforest – as this huge country expands its population, economy and agricultural production.

Using its own satellites – and remote sensing data bought in from bodies such as Nasa and the European Space Agency – Inpe monitors Amazon deforestation on a daily basis. A supercomputer processes the raw satellite data, looking for evidence of illegal logging, burning or forest clearance. And when Inpe detects something suspicious it alerts local law enforcement agencies.

The latest climate prediction modelling shows that the Amazon basin may not suffer a catastrophic drought later this century due to global warming, despite recent fears

Although Brazil’s environmental policing has many imperfections, Gilberto Câmara, Inpe’s director-general, insists that the alerts have led to a substantial reduction in Amazonian deforestation in recent years. In 2011, 6,238 sq km of forest were lost – the smallest area since satellite monitoring started in 1988. As recently as 2005, the annual deforestation rate was more than 25,000 sq km.

Inpe does not send the satellite observations only to its own government and law enforcement agencies – all the data are made freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world.

“We used to sell remote sensing data, like other space agencies,” says Câmara, “but in 2004 we opened it all up for free. We used to sell 1,000 images a year; now we distribute 500,000 images freely around the world. Full and open access to space-based information is indispensable for global sustainable development.” Câmara is critical of agencies elsewhere that restrict public access to environmental monitoring data.

Satellite monitoring shows not only how much forest is lost, but also what the cleared land is used for – most becomes pasture for low-intensity cattle ranching.

“Of the 720,000 sq km of Amazon forest lost so far, about 65 per cent is used for cattle,” Câmara says. “This means that Brazil has lost an enormous amount of biodiversity just to graze cattle at about one head per hectare.” Just 5 per cent of former forest land is devoted to growing commercial crops – mainly soya beans.

Such information can be commercially, as well as environmentally, valuable. For instance, Inpe provides the data to enforce a soya moratorium. In place since 2006, and endorsed by Greenpeace, this agreement commits all of Brazil’s big soya traders to buy only from farmers who can prove that their land did not come from illegal deforestation. So, soya grown on uncertified land is worth less on the market.

Câmara says that most space agencies around the world exist at least partly “for geopolitical and military reasons”, such as supporting a domestic aerospace industry. Inpe is different, he claims: “Our aim is to support the development of a peaceful, green economy in Brazil.”

October 7, 2011 10:09 pm The Better Angels of Our Nature

Review by Clive Cookson Financial Times

Despite appearances, the human race is losing its appetite for violence

Fratricide 'Cain murdering Abel' by Bartolomo Manfredi (c1610)

Readers, rejoice: we are living at a time that is not only the healthiest, wealthiest and best-educated in history but also by far the least violent.

That is the message from Steven Pinker, Harvard psychology professor and one of the world’s most celebrated science writers. He expects it to be controversial, given our constant exposure to stories in the media about contemporary violence and horrific images of mass carnage in the recent past.

To demonstrate that people have become progressively more peaceful since Neolithic times – and that the trend is continuing into the 21st century – Pinker devotes much of The Better Angels of Our Nature to a historical and statistical analysis of violence at all scales and of many types, from warfare between tribes and nations to individual murders, from torture and rape to slavery and cruelty to animals. This takes up about two-thirds of the book, before Pinker the historian hands over to the more familiar figure of Pinker the psychologist, who analyses why the “inner demons” behind violent behaviour are giving way to the “better angels” of co-operation and altruism.

Unlike the sceptical reader set up by Pinker in his introduction, who laments the growing violence of the modern world and refuses to believe that things are getting better, I felt that I knew enough about the past to accept his basic thesis before I started the book. Even so, I was astonished by the extent to which violence has declined in every shape, form and scale.

In his statistical argument Pinker rightly focuses on the rate of violence relative to the size of population, rather than the number of violent acts. What matters to an individual living at a particular time and place is their risk of becoming a victim of violence. In moral terms too, Pinker believes the experience of those who enjoy full lives should be included in any reckoning.

The second world war was the worst episode in human history in terms of absolute numbers killed on the battlefield and indirect deaths of non-combatants. But when adjusted for population size, the death toll of 55m makes it only the ninth most deadly event over the past 1,200 years.

The worst of all, according to Pinker’s interpretation of figures from the “atrocitologist” Matthew White, was the eighth-century An Lushan revolt and civil war that killed 36m in and around China (equivalent to 429m deaths in the mid-20th century). Second worst was the 13th-century Mongol conquests (40m deaths, equivalent to 278m in the mid-20th century). Although statistics for ancient atrocities are far from reliable, they are good enough – combined with contemporary accounts – to demonstrate the astonishing bloodlust of past warlords.

Pinker begins his pacification story thousands of years ago with the transition from the hunting, gathering and gardening societies of prehistory to more settled agricultural civilisations with cities and governments. Anyone who has read recent forensic archaeology reports about bodies and skeletons excavated from stone and bronze-age European burial sites will be struck by the frequent evidence of violence. Pinker estimates that the end of raiding and feuding between prehistoric tribes led to a fivefold decrease in violent death rates.

But, by today’s standards, life remained nasty, brutish and short. The next stage, according to Pinker, was the “civilisation process” after the Middle Ages, in which a patchwork of feudal territories was consolidated into large nations with an infrastructure of commerce and the authority to enforce law and order. While nations still went to war, the advent of centralised government greatly reduced the violence between individuals and small groups.

Analysis of court records and official documents shows an astonishing decline in murder across western Europe between the 13th and 20th centuries. Murder rates fell between tenfold and a hundredfold. For example, the murder rate per 100,000 people was 110 in 14th-century Oxford and less than one in 20th-century London.

“The discovery confounds every stereotype about the idyllic past and the degenerate present,” Pinker says. When he surveyed public perceptions in an internet questionnaire, the average guess was that 20th-century England was about 14 per cent more violent than 14th-century England; in fact it was 95 per cent less violent.

Pinker proposes several historical forces that have promoted peaceful behaviour by suppressing the “inner demons” of human psychology and stimulating our “better angels”. Besides government and commerce, they include feminisation and cosmopolitanism.

Since violence is largely a male pastime, the increasing respect for the interests and values of women has led society away from the glorification of violence. A more cosmopolitan culture – resulting from growing literacy, mobility and the mass media – can prompt people to understand the perspective of those unlike themselves and expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them.

Finally, Pinker says, an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs, “the escalator of reason”, can force people to recognise the futility of violence and reframe it as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won. Less than a century ago, many Europeans were positively looking forward to what became the first world war – it is unthinkable that anyone besides a deranged eccentric would look forward to war today.

At 830 pages, the book might be too long. Although Pinker says he needed the length to make his argument and convince the sceptics, I found some passages repetitive. Readers of a squeamish disposition might feel that he has included too many detailed accounts of murder and excruciating torture through the ages, in his effort to illustrate how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence.

Overall, however, this is a marvellous synthesis of science, history and storytelling, demonstrating how fortunate the vast majority of us are today to experience serious violence only through the mass media.

Clive Cookson is the FT’s science editor

Photography with the FT, featuring Stephen Pinker, see FT magazine

The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes, by Steven Pinker, Allen Lane, RRP£30, 830 pages

China scientists lead world in research growth By Clive Cookson Published: January 25 2010 18:06 | Last updated: January 25 2010 18:06 FINANCIAL TIMES

China has experienced the strongest growth in scientific research over the past three decades of any country, according to figures compiled for the Financial Times, and the pace shows no sign of slowing. Jonathan Adams, research evaluation director at Thomson Reuters, said China’s “awe-inspiring” growth had put it in second place to the US – and if it continues on its trajectory it will be the largest producer of scientific knowledge by 2020. Thomson Reuters, which indexes scientific papers from 10,500 journals worldwide, analysed the performance of four emerging markets countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China, over the past 30 years. China far outperformed every other nation, with a 64-fold increase in peer-reviewed scientific papers since 1981, with particular strength in chemistry and materials science.

“China is out on its own, far ahead of the pack,” said James Wilsdon, science policy director at the Royal Society in London. “If anything, China’s recent research performance has exceeded even the high expectations of four or five years ago, while India has not moved as fast as expected and may have missed an opportunity.”