City Tales
Hello,
dear readers. Hope 2024 has kicked off on a good
note for you. I rang in the New Year at my
birthplace, Kolkata, India, surrounded by
family, old friends, and a thick layer of grimy
smog that increasingly smothers the sprawling
metropolis every winter.
I was visiting after a gap of
four years, during which Kolkata seems to have
gotten ever more chaotic. Its towering new
skyscrapers jostle for space with stately old
homes reconfigured into posh cafes and
boutiques, which in turn are inevitably hemmed
in by ramshackle roadside shops and eateries.
Its streets are jam-packed with vehicles of all
sizes and shapes as well as pedestrians who
skillfully dart through the traffic maze. Life,
it feels, is bursting at the seams here.
Some of that seeming is
probably in the eye of this beholder — after
more than a decade living in the quiet hills of
Berkeley, California, the city has become
unaccustomed grounds for me. But Kolkata is
indeed growing. When I left it in 2009, the
population of the city’s metro area was 13.9
million. Today, it is 15.5
million.
Moving around the city with my
mask on in a feeble attempt to guard against
soaring AQIs, I was reminded of what I’d written
in this
article in our special
issue on urban environments: “While humanity
is trending towards an urban future, the current
fossil-fueled model of the city itself is
trending towards collapse.” (The issue,
incidentally, won the first
place for environmental reporting at the San
Francisco Press Club Awards in December.
Yay!)
Kolkata is certainly one of
those urban centers hanging in precarious
balance between growth and collapse. In many
ways, it is a perfect example of the immense
challenge to sustainability that cities
represent, a challenge we have to tackle sooner
than later given some 68 percent of
humanity will be living in cities by 2050.
But there is more to Kolkata than that. As with
all cities around the world, it is also a place
where diversity, culture, art, and ideas have
long thrived. Personally, its people and places
have helped shape who I am today, and it
continues to offer me the comfort of family and
the warmth of friends whenever I return.
What is a place that sustains
you similarly? Do share.
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