Pirates of the Empty Cities of the Future

How the Global Population Bust Could Open a New Frontier

Empty houses in China | Photo: Wall Street Journal

There’s a ticking time bomb in America’s suburbs. In the next few decades, many of them will turn into ghost towns. You can already see it happening today. Drive through almost any suburb of a mid-size city: where once you’d see kids everywhere riding bikes and running around, you now only see retired Boomers. As they continue to age and pass away, the suburbs and some cities will quickly fall into disrepair and will ultimately experience continuous decline.

A few years ago, I had a vision. Why not get some people together to buy up a cul-de-sac of abandoned houses in the Midwest and transform it into a radical artist commune? On the outside it would look like any old suburban neighborhood, while inside the houses, it would be like Andy Warhol’s factory but with lots of spare bedrooms.

It’s not a terrible idea. But it doesn’t go hard enough. Given the magnitude of the population decline we’re about to witness around the globe, a suburban cul-de-sac is small potatoes. It’s time to start thinking about buying up abandoned Italian villas and Chinese cities.

This ramped-up vision hit home with me while listening to a recent episode of Ross Douthat’s NYT podcast. While speaking with sociologist Dr. Alice Evans, Douthat observes:

China has spent 20 years building all of these huge cities, and if China’s population falls by half, those cities will be empty. Big rural regions of Latin America will be empty. And so on. So… there are ways in which a young person could look at that world and say: ‘OK, the mega cities of Western Europe and North America are actually bad places to be young, but there’s a reopened frontier in Uruguay or Eastern Europe or the hinterlands of China.’

Evans pushes back with a practical concern:

“Those empty cities are in no sense a win. No one is moving to those cities because there’s no jobs, no demand, nothing there.”

Douthat then makes the point that resonates with my art-commune-building fantasy:

Imagine that you wanted to be a pirate. Imagine that you were a 19th-century would-be desperado. I’m imagining a world of groups with high intentionality. This new world is going to reward people who are unusually intentional about things like getting married and having kids, but also maybe about building a community and trying to set yourself up in one of the spaces created by the retreat of the human race.

I love how Douthat phrases this. So often when thinking about future scenarios, we forget that people living in that time will be able to make choices and determine their day-to-date reality. A depopulated world is not a happy place. By all accounts it will likely be hell for young people who experience a world that’s crumbling rather than growing. But there will be those who take advantage of the situation and build experimental communes—if not mini empires.

Evans didn’t exactly share Douthat’s pirate dream, but she did voice enthusiasm for the idea of community groups joining together to “forge a space” for a cause—particularly a “pro-coupling, pro-fertility” cause. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how often futurist visions take on the characteristics of old-timey, religious-based communities?

I’m generally optimistic about the future. There are ways things could go horribly wrong, but there are always ways that technology could help us navigate our most pressing issues, and possibly even bring us into a quasi-utopian age of abundance.

It really is only when I think about the forecasted population bust that I start to lose hope. I mean, dear god, look at this chart:

Source: NYT

Perhaps this is why I’m so drawn to Douthat’s hesitant, somewhat fantastical optimism. Despite his own massive worries about the future age depopulation, this is the message Douthat likes to tell his kids, to bring them some hope:

Yes, the world is going to grow old, but you’ll be young and you’ll have agency and you’ll have opportunities to shape a world in which there are fewer young people to compete with, and maybe your horizons will widen.

Still bleak, but at least it’s something. Who doesn’t, at times, want to be a pirate in a deserted urban dystopia?