City development and environmental stability

I came across some concept art earlier from a digital artist, Nivanh Chanthara (Chanthara's Space) and found them quite interesting and inspiring, and so they go like this: 

This reminds me of Howl’s Moving Castle, which Howl has built to block himself out from the war outside, and to seek his piece of childhood “Everland”. Are we all not doing the same, consistently encroaching to the undeveloped rural, avoiding the urban and environmentally decaying inner city? 

Inner cities urban problems - overcrowding, pollution, etc. (Pictures from: http://duster132.deviantart.com/)

Chanthara gets his inspiration from the overcrowding inner city of Hong Kong, and that the most astonishing part is that he has never set foot on this piece of land, despite his ability to draw out most of the core urban problems that many Hong Kongers would have agreed. Not surprisingly, these problems (i.e. overcrowding, land-use conflicts, pollution, etc.) apply to all inner cities around the world.

It is quite controversial when we are actively promoting environmental protection and ecological importance while still allowing encroachment into the undeveloped rural for all sorts of anthropogenic activities, in this case, urban encroachment to create more land for development and city expansion, better residence environment, etc. This sounds like yes, we have been doing terrible in urban development in the past, and so we would like to do it right this time, exploiting the environment in a more responsible and sustainable way. However, the inner city will not simply fade away with city expansion, and the city system is likely to repeat itself. 

Johan Rockström from the Stockholm Resilience centre and colleagues suggested in their article ‘A safe operating space for humanity” (Nature, International weekly journal of science) that our civilisation is deeply reliant on environmental stability - ‘as long as society knew what was coming up it could plan for the future’. Advancement in agricultural activities led to rapid increase in global population, which provided the excuse to exploit the environment further for economic and social development. As such, both economic growth or societal stability is based on environmental stability.

Will the city future be what Chanthara has predicted in his artwork? We don’t know. But surely, if we continue to overexploit the environment systems for economic benefits, we will soon subject ourselves to a catastrophic climatic and environmental shift on a global scale, which the environment may become more volatile than ever before or humans may not be resilient enough to inhabit.