Is de-urbanization of a society possible in 2017...

Is de-urbanization of a society possible in 2017? Let's say that there's a third world country out there that's is struggling to modernize, has no hope of modernizing, and begin a program to go back and de-modernize the country: to drive that nation's society back to an 18th century level where the majority of the people have their own little plots of land and live off of subsistence farming. ]

It's ludicrous, I know all I'm asking is it something feasible? Or are all the nations of the world locked into the path of constant progress?

t. Pol Pot

objectively better than endlessly pouring money into a shithole so shitheads can pocket it while nothing gets done. The worst third world cities are not really worth improving

Simply cannot happen. Compared to a spread out rural population, cities are phenomenally efficient and only getting more so. You can house more people in a smaller space, serve them more effectively, feed them more easily, and generally every system works better and need is more easily met in cities. Now you may see some drawbacks like pollution, but per-capita, city dwellers pollute less than rural households. Cities can organize garbage services and recycle or bury their trash in a well managed landfill. Rural people most often burn their garbage or dump it into an unlined, unregulated pit. With how much populations in undeveloped countries have exploded, ruralizing the entire population would be hugely impractical and undesirable.

Ironically, my captcha was to click on all of the buses; transportation is a huge logistical advantage that cities hold over countryside.

Well, Buthan obviously. Some micro nations in the Caribbean maybe.

I'd like to believe so. History has a way of showing us time and time again that society has a way of falling apart in large urban centers, time and time again. As far as I am aware it has happened at least 5 times in the past when the general opinion is that centralized society was pretty much there to stay and I see no problem of it happening again.

Vast, vast majority of people on Earth prefer having clean running water.

Do you think the people that fled Detroit just became mountain men in the Canadian wilderness or something?

Civilization is a cycle that always leads back to urbanization.

>having clean running water.
>implying you need to be a industry nation to achieve this

OP look into Bhutan and the amount of legally-mandatory forest covering on Bhutanese territory.

De-urbanization would require killing at least 2/3 of the world's current population.

You are talking about two different concepts here. I find the second point (the one about a third world country returning to an even worse-off state) quite unlikely, unless we're literally talking about some kind of dictatorship (see ). And as for the first one (ruralisation), I could see the potential, but not necessarily in the third world.

Among European countries, Slovenia is one of the ones with the lowest urbanisation rate. In addition, the urbanisation rate has fallen in the last few years from just a bit over 50% to a few fractions under 50%. While the population of full-time farmers is small, a great deal of population, both in rural as well as urbanised villages grow some of their own food. I can see some kind of trend emerging and the growth of the rural population continuing if more social support was introduced to promote it.
I think a country like Slovenia would be a perfect candidate due to the small size of the country itself, as well as the population, as well as the pre-existing conditions regarding urbanisation. But in the end, this would still be of limited extent as anything more radical is just not realistic. Unless there's some kind of cataclysmic event, cities just won't hemmorhage population - and even if humanity returned to nomadic life or small rural communities, cities would appear once again as they started to organise once again.

>what is VX

>Is de-urbanization of a society possible in 2017?
A better question to ask towards what end? What would be the purpose of de-urbanizing? To make society less efficient? To make people wealthier by making them poorer? To slow down the rate of technological advance?

It makes even less sense in an age of highly efficient transportation, where rural dwellers can commute to the cities and be back in their log cabin in the woods in a fairly rapid amount of time, where the overwhelming majority of rural dwelling people do NOT work on some kind of farm but have jobs like everyone else.

>where the majority of the people have their own little plots of land and live off of subsistence farming. ]
That would depend a lot on whether they were freemen or serfs. De-urbanization usually causes the latter: so many people swarming into the countryside looking for work that they'll take anything which keeps a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs, no matter how shitty and demeaning it is.

> Or are all the nations of the world locked into the path of constant progress?
Yes. Nations and countries which become sclerotic and resistant to change will eventually fall far enough behind to merit a hostile take-over by a less timid nation. The reason we need powerful governments is to protect ourselves from the other guy's powerful government, and in order to keep those powerful governments from out-competing us we need industry, and therefore we need cities.

> Vast, vast majority of people on Earth prefer having clean running water.
So? You don't need a globalist mega industrial dystopian complex to have running water

Isn't more possible that there is going to be more urbanization and more "de-suburbization"?

what's the fucking point

urban centres are necessary in a modern economy

what are you asking for is literally limiting people's opportunities, hindering growth, cutting income, and yes, more damage to the natural environment

Depends on your goal, if you just want more natural space you can just built higher and cram people tighter.

Because the way that humans currently live is killing the planet.

You fucking Greenpeace faggot cuck. Kys.

>unironically wanting the whole planet to turn into a Detroit-tier planet-sized megalopolis

De-urbanizing is happening in places such as Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, because all their cities are getting rekt by adherents to a pre-medieval way of thinking. Does that count as de-modernizing?

Debatable. Many official calculations show that the global population will plateau within a few decades. Soon, the big concern will be humanity slowly dying out instead.

akshully, the Salafi-Wahhabi ideology that inspires those people is quite modern (if not revivalist in terms of an early medieval rose-tinted caliphate)

Once global warming kicks in and 90% of humans die out, it will get deurbanized pdq