World’s big cities set to become even more crowded

The world’s big cities are already bursting at the seams but are set to grow even larger, with experts predicting that some 70 per cent of the world’s population will be urban by 2050.

This will put great strains on infrastructure and the environment, and presents a major challenge to city planners, developers and mayors who gathered at MIPIM, the world’s leading annual real estate event, to look for the best way forward.

“The future of the world lies in cities,” London’s mayor Boris Johnson told a packed auditorium at the opening day of MIPIM last Monday.

He was among leaders taking part in a “mayors’ think-tank” here who are starting to work together in looking for urban development initiatives to improve quality of life for their citizens.

“We have to keep putting the village back into the city because that is fundamentally what human beings want,” Johnson told the crowd, adapting a famous statement made by India’s Mahatma Gandhi that the future of India lay in its 70,000 villages.

“Cities are where people live longer, have better education outcomes, are more productive,” Johnson noted, adding that cities are also where people emit less polluting carbon dioxide per capita.

In 1900, around 14 per cent of the world’s population lived in cities; by 1950 this had risen to 30 per cent and today is 50 per cent. There are currently more than 400 cities with a population of over a million, 19 of which have over 10 million inhabitants, said Robert Peto, president of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).

Much of this surge in the next 40 years will occur in cities in emerging countries such as China, India, Asia, Latin America and Africa, all of which are growing very fast, Tony Lloyd-Jones, Reader in International Planning and Sustainable Development at the University of Westminster in London, told AFP.

A recent study by Citigroup published in Britain’s Daily Telegraph forecast that mega-cities expected to have the fastest growing economies by the middle of the next decade include London, Chicago, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles and Hong Kong, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Mumbai and Moscow.

“There is a massive explosion of urbanism and this will have a major impact on communities, businesses, economies, and, specifically, our environment,” underlined RICS’s Peto.

Increased urbanisation, however, also concentrates risks as many big cities are in earthquake and flood zones. And climate change is likely to intensify these risks, Fouad Bendimerad, president of the seismic and megacities initiative in the Philippines, told a MIPIM conference.

Key issues for dense cities over the coming years will include sustainable development, transport and energy use, Lloyd-Jones told AFP.

“Obviously, with the price of oil going up, the pressure is on to conserve fuel and energy,” Lloyd-Jones emphasised. This means cities need to become more efficient in terms of transport infrastructure; investment in public transport is one of the keys to achieving that, he added.

This urban explosion is already having a big impact in China, experts here noted.

Between 18 and 20 million people each year leave the Chinese countryside for its cities, putting great strains on existing accommodation and infrastructure, experts said.

But some of China’s fastest-growing cities are now looking abroad for foreign investment to help fund their redevelopment.

Officials from Chongqing, the biggest city in the western China with 32 million inhabitants, are exhibiting at MIPIM for the first time to meet potential foreign partners to help fund a massive redevelopment program that aims to double the surface area of the city by 2020.