Urban population

Abstract

We're just passing one of the great milestones in human history – but hardly anyone is noticing. It isn't anything outwardly dramatic, like a revolution or a war. But it is fundamental, in the sense that the Industrial Revolution in Britain was fundamental. Future historians, doubtless, will call it the Urban Revolution. For the first time in history, a majority of the world's six billion people are living in cities. Between 2000 and 2025, on the best estimates we have from the United Nations, the world's urban population will double, to reach five billion; city-dwellers will rise from 47 percent to over 61 percent of the world's population. But that's not all. Most of this explosive growth will occur in the cities of the developing world. There will be a doubling of the urban population, in the coming quarter century, in Latin America and the Caribbean, in Asia and in Africa together – above all in Asia and Africa. Even by 2015, the UN predict that there will be 358 "million cities", with one million or more people; no less than 153 will be in Asia. And there will be 27 "mega-cities", with ten million or more – 18 of them in Asia. It is here, in the exploding cities of some of the poorest countries of the world, that the central challenge lies. A huge challenge, to be sure – but also a huge range of opportunities: opportunities for greater freedom, greater freedom above all for development, as people leave behind their traditional bondage to the land and the total dominance of the daily struggle for food. Urbanization is a fundamental form of liberation of the human spirit: in the famous German quotation from the Middle Ages, Stadtluft macht Frei: the city air makes you free. It does more than that: just because it frees up human creativity, the city is the place where the great advances occur – artistic, intellectual, technological and also organizational. You need urbanization if you're going to get development. Urban growth is potentially a great thing. But only potentially. Urbanization is a basic precondition for development. But it doesn't of itself guarantee development. There's good urban growth and there's bad urban growth. Managing urban growth so that it contributes positively to economic advance, reconciling it with ecologically sustainable forms of development and reducing social exclusion, represents the key challenge for urban planners and urban …