One can contemplate the progressive visions of dense, vertical, towns and cities, where a certain population is concentrated, and the displacements and destruction wrought by heavy infrastructure is limited to a smaller area, and then the surrounding earth is left alone, with suspended transportation networks and green buildings with the appropriate low and sustainable energy usages, and one could imagine such a project working a little better.
Of course it could be the case that whole other sets of unforeseen problems would arise, that could only be experienced through the course of development in that direction. But conceptually these visions do indeed sound pretty good.
If only we could reorganize our powers of manipulation and the patterns of development in which that manipulation unfolds. But today we are left overwhelmingly with sprawl, automobile proliferation, monoculture crop concentrations, industrial parks, and the like. The scale and mass of our society, and its momentum from past trajectories forecloses upon these utopian visions.
The weight is spread out everywhere, and the destruction spreads. There is no off switch, or even direction, for the growth, other than further and outward. Those disfavored superfluous folk are left to starve, waste away medically, or are rounded up in prisons and holding centers. Those great concrete labyrinths of glass and steel can only absorb so much human activity; the rest must be expelled and/or contained.
