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I noticed this on the Guardian News Blog - The world: just how dangerous is it?

So, it's not just the Daily Mail that believes we are all doomed. According to a new survey almost three-quarters of Britons think the world is a more dangerous, war-like place than it was 50 years ago, writes Peter Walker.

And it got me thinking about the sorts of changes I've seen. Despite appearances, I'm actually a full decade away from fifty - oh yes I am! - but when I was a child we lived a lot in Africa. And whilst I haven't travelled a great deal since leaving school, it's interesting to recall how different the world actually is.

When, in 1972, we lived in southern Tanzania, it was a minimum of two stops on a flight to get from the UK to Dar es-Salaam, with a flight in a Dakota DC-3 from there onwards. The DC-3s of East African Airways were flown still by WWII Belgian pilots, I seem to remember.

Most of the people in the UK probably didn't even have passports at the time. What we did was really quite "exotic". Even in 1980 it was so relatively unusual to have children traveling alone that British Caledonian provided special hostesses for, essentially, the British public school crowd going out to parents in school holidays. Even if we did go abroad, we could take so little money with us under exchange controls one wonders if it was really worth it. Not even everyone was "banked" by the end of the seventies - the Conservative government really saw to that when they removed the ability of folk to demand their wages in cash, in the early eighties.

We had of course, no internet, as one of the commenters to the Guardian blog noted. But we should also realise that most of the world wasn't really covered by television. It was commented on in one of those 20th anniversary of Live Aid programs last year that in 1985 it was the first live broadcast transmitted to a stadium in South Africa and the people that were present say they remember being gobsmacked that someone on a stage in London was yelling "Hello South Africa!" live at them.

Jon Snow, in a Christmas Chancellor's Lecture here at Brookes in his first year I think, reflected on how much the media has changed - he recalls when he first started being sent somewhere like Iraq or Afghanistan (not much changes there then!) with a film camera and a notebook and filing stories every few days or weeks, not presenting his news program from the top of a hotel in Bagdhad live with bombing going on in the background. I remember working at Central TV (remember them?) Facilities for a short while in 1989 and it was relatively new to be hiring out "ENG" (Electronic News Gathering) kit even then.

The power of "world leaders" was vastly different too. Whilst we have given away most of Empire within the last half century, which you might think would have reduced the power of the heads of the European governments, actually I'm not sure that's the case. The patronage of appointing governors was great, to be sure, but if it took so long to get instructions to them they were probably less "controlled" by Whitehall than are their "successor" diplomats in those same countries. While today the G8 leaders stride the globe exerting influence and projecting power much more directly perhaps than even under Empire.

The irony for me in all this, and the reason I think we are more fearful, is that we haven't really used all those technological and transport advances to get to know and understand our fellow planet-dwellers while many others have had a window opened into our lives. The vast majority of Islamic peoples have been poor for a long time, for example, and most remain so, beyond our understanding of poor, but now they too know we are rich by comparison. Wouldn't it be natural to want some of that? Or to feel that we are rich because they are poor?

Some, the former, make their way here in the hope of having some of that wealth and we feel threatened by them. Others, mercifully few, but nowadays with the ability to communicate their cause to millions of their own, come here in the hope of shaking us up, and we feel threatened by them. And so, in many ways, we should, because potentially they are legion. Unless we learn to use all this technology to bring the peoples of the world closer together, not start a new age of empire in an environment in which them hitting back will not mean the odd Mao Mao uprising but an event like 9/11 right in our backyards.

Yesterday in my piece about the Policy Exchange think tank's suggestion that Oxford and Cambridge ought to be allowed to expand to as many as a million homes I mentioned the work "Car Free Cities" by J H Crawford which I came across a decade ago when looking into Oxford's last Local Plan. In it he postulates a city of a million people with a topology and transport system that means that any two addresses anywhere in the city would be no more than 35 minutes apart by foot and rapid transit system.

The city is made up of many districts of about 12,000 population like strings of beads along one of three overlapping rapid transport loops. Every home is less than five minutes walk from open countryside. And whilst the densities within the districts are amongst the highest on earth (similar to Seoul, for example, although nothing is more than three stories in the reference designs) only 20% of the total 100 sq mile (10 by 10) area is developed at all, leaving all the areas between the beads and strings as open countryside or managed parkland or whatever. Overall then the density is not a lot greater than Oxford's current density and less than the average of Greater London as a whole.

So, for a bit of fun, I superimposed Crawford's one million population city topology onto the ten by ten mile square centered on the current centre of Oxford. Now sure, a million population is only probably about a third of the million households the Policy Exchange report was ultimately suggesting, but if anyone says to you that it would simply be impossible to imagine a million people in the area between Wheatley and Eynsham, Littlemore and Kidlington, you can say you have seen how, and with no traffic and only 20% of the land developed to boot! It would currently take me over an hour to get from the end of one of these loops to about a third of the way out the adjacent one, incidentally.

Now nobody is suggesting that we do this, least of all me. I'm just demonstrating that it would be possible, indeed whilst making more of the green belt actually because all the space would be accessible in minutes rather than in half an hour in the car, it would reach right into everyone's neighbourhood - with open country no more than 400m from every front door. Fitting such principles into existing cities is of course much more difficult than an academic sitting at a drawing board with a blank sheet of paper. They need not be loops for example but twelve strings with termini at the end of each. It would increase average journey times but not the overall maximum of 35 minutes door to door and could be fitted in along existing radial roads as a series of villages.

Incidentally, the picture on the right here shows some of the housing in the ward with the highest density in England, at least that I can find - a "middle level super output area" either side of the Cromwell Rd in Kensington & Chelsea.  I notice from Net House Prices that there have been 267 £1m plus residential property transactions in the last eight years in this post code area.  This is getting pretty close to the densities that would be required in a city such as that in Crawford's book.  It's hardly slum clearance stuff is it!