We call for an Urban Agenda that matches the pace and intensity of the Urban Age
The following is excerpted from a presentation by the Brookings Institution's Bruce Katz, Andy Altman, and Julie Wagner at the Urban Age Conference in Berlin, Germany, on November 10, 2006. Go here for the full presentation.
The proposition that has animated this initiative from the start is audacious and visionary. “The late 20th Century was the age of economic globalization. The first part of the 21st century will be the age of the city, the ‘Urban Age.’”
The “Urban Age.” A simple, clear, unqualified phrase. An incontrovertible statement of fact. In 2007, the population living in the world’s cities—some 3.2 billion souls—will constitute a majority of the world’s population. Ipso facto, we live in an Urban Age.
Yet an “Urban Age” is more than just a description of what is; it is a vision of what can be, if we imagine it, will it, and deliver it.
We make the following proposition today:
First, the 21st Century will be the Urban Age, where an ever growing majority of the world’s population will live in cities. This Urban Age is happening at a dizzying pace and with a scale, diversity, complexity and level of connectivity that challenges traditional paradigms and renders many conventional tools and practices obsolete. This great urbanization explodes the very notion of “city,” given the vast physical expanses where a growing portion of people and businesses now congregate. The Urban Age positions these conurbations as the vehicles for addressing the major challenges facing the world today: extending economic prosperity, promoting environmental sustainability, and reducing poverty.
This leads to our second point: in the face of rapid, unrelenting, unsettling change, cities lack a coherent roadmap to realize the promise of the Urban Age.
Our visits to and inquiries about five global cities—New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City and Johannesburg—have unveiled the stresses and strains that many cities face as they grapple with accelerated growth, demographic change, and economic restructuring. Although each of these cities has shown a remarkable ability to innovate and experiment, our primary conclusion is that there are broad disconnects between urban change on one hand and urban policy and practice on the other. These disconnects are magnified at the national and multinational level, where specialized and one dimensional policies dominate. As a result, the promise of cities is being systematically undermined.
Thus, we call for an Urban Agenda that matches the pace and intensity of the Urban Age. This Urban Agenda will embrace the goals of competitive, sustainable, and inclusive cities and, equally important, commit to pursuing and delivering these objectives in tandem. That will require wholesale change in how people— practitioners, policymakers, and researchers—do their business. It will necessitate programs and policies that drive integrative, multi-dimensional thinking and action. It will extol the role of the physical, emphasizing the importance of building cities that are adaptive and resilient and advance broader objectives. It will reinvent urban politics to advance the new urban paradigm. And it will require multinational corporations to be grounded in “place” and become strong partners for change.
Make no mistake, the stakes are high: the path of development in many cities around the world is simply not sustainable socially or environmentally or politically – nor, ultimately, economically.
So let us start with our initial proposition: the 21st Century will be the Urban Age, where the majority of the world’s population will live in cities.
Our world is undergoing a period of change and transformation that is unprecedented in ancient or modern times.
The world population grew by leaps and bounds in the 20th century – from 1.7 billion in 1900 to 2.5 billion in 1950 to 6.5 billion in 2000 – and is projected to expand by another 2.6 billion people in the next 50 years.
Globalization has opened and integrated markets and restructured the economies of both developed and developing countries.
The volume and value of global trade have increased exponentially in recent decades, rising 118 percent and 161 percent respectively since 1990 alone.
The industrial revolution in the developing world has rewired the circuitry of global markets almost overnight; China’s manufacturing exports alone have jumped from one percent to seven percent of the global total since 1980.
Over the past two decades, some two and a half billion people in China, India, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have discarded economic isolationism and entered a global labor market.
Technological innovation has shrunk the world, reducing the cost of transmitting information to virtually nothing. Internet users in developing countries could constitute more than half the world total within five years if current trends persist.
The metaphor, popularized by Tom Friedman, is that the world is now flat. But population and economic activity are not uniformly distributed across the globe. Rather people have settled and the economy is organized in a discontinuous, nonlinear fashion. The world, to borrow a phrase from Richard Florida, is “spiky” and each spike represents a city where the world’s economy and population is disproportionately concentrated.
Globalization and technological innovation, rather than flattening the world spatially, is physically rooting itself in dense spatial arrangements of people and firms, transportation and housing, ports and facilities.
The new world order is an urban order. The Urban Age has five central characteristics.
First, is scale and size. The world’s urban population today is over 3 billion people, the same size as the world’s total population in 1960. There are now 400 cities with populations of over one million people when a century ago there were only 16. In recent decades, we have grown a network of megacities; 23 cities with more than 10 million people now comprise 5 percent of the world’s population. The population of Greater Mumbai is now larger than the total population of Norway and Sweden, combined; likewise, Greater Sao Paolo’s population is now roughly equal to the population of Australia. With even more growth projected in developing countries, the urban population of Africa will exceed the total population of Europe by 2030. As cities have grown in people, they have stretched outwards, consuming vast expanses of land and covering enormous distances. Over a seventy year period, the New York metropolis, for example, expanded over 1300 percent and now covers more than 4.6 million acres of land.
Secondly, speed and velocity define the Urban Age. In 1950, 29 percent of the world’s population lived in cities. By 1990, the share had risen to 43 percent. Now, as stated before, it is slated to pass 50 percent by next year. And, by 2030, it will surpass 60 percent of the world’s population. Since 1950, the world’s urban population has almost quadrupled in size. Between 2005 and 2030, the world’s urban population is expected to increase at an average annual rate of close to 2 percent, almost twice the growth rate of the world’s population. If current trends persist, the world’s urban population will surpass 5 billion people sometime around 2030.
Third, urban growth is being fuelled by new levels of mobility and migration of diverse populations, within and across nations. Hundreds of millions of rural residents in China, in Brazil, in India and elsewhere across the globe are moving in droves to cities. These rural-to-urban migrants are pulled by the tantalizing prospect of jobs and opportunity, driven by the harsh realities of rural life and, in Africa and elsewhere, displaced by horrific wars and civil conflicts. Tens of millions of people are also on the move across national borders. Today, international migrants comprise 3 percent of the world’s population and are settling in a growing number of countries. Between 1960 and 2005, the number of countries hosting more than 500,000 migrants more than doubled, from 30 to 64. Immigration has fuelled urbanization in developed countries. In the United States, for example, cities grew during the 1990s almost exclusively because of the influx of Hispanic and Asian populations. In Berlin, over 13 percent of your population are immigrants.
Fourth, urban expansion has created new conurbations of staggering complexity. In one respect, cities are playing their traditional roles as the great levellers of people from radically disparate walks of life—of foreign born and native born, of rural migrants and urban residents, of rich and poor, of traditional and modern cultures. In the 21st century, cities also represent an uneasy coexistence between the global and the local—of high rise office towers and dilapidated slums; of the formal and informal economy, of educated elites and impoverished residents; of global chains and indigenous firms. The divisions between these phenomena are not stark; there are often symbiotic and synergistic relationships between aspects of urban life, say the formal and informal economy, which are multilayered and evolving.
Finally, the Urban Age is characterized by an unprecedented level of connectivity, between and among people, firms and places. Trans-national migration binds together countries of origin and immigrant-rich cities, as people, money and ideas flow back and forth. In 2004, immigrants around the globe sent $226 billion in remittances back to their home countries, an astonishing 1 percent of global GDP. Across nations, tight linkages are being forged between cities with similar industry clusters: financial centres like London and Tokyo; technology centres like San Jose and Bangalore; or trading centres like Rotterdam and Singapore. Even within nations, countries like Germany are taking this reality of urban connectivity to its logical conclusion and creating a network of inter-linked cities, connected, and soon to be even more connected, by modern rail and technology.
These five qualities of urbanization—scale, speed, diversity, complexity and connectivity—place cities at the center of the global economy, global challenges ... and, ultimately, global solutions.
Can the world extend the promise of economic prosperity and integrated markets and productive labor? Today, the path to prosperity runs directly through cities. As UN-Habitat has bluntly stated: “Cities make countries rich. Countries that are highly urbanized have higher incomes, more stable economies, stronger institutions and are better able to withstand the volatility of the global economy than those with less urbanized populations.”
Can the world address the environmental crisis of global warming and climate change? Rapid urbanization has, no doubt, exacerbated environmental pressures. Yet cities offer the best promise of developing in ways that are environmentally sound and energy efficient; objectives that, as a major report to the British government just concluded are prerequisites to global prosperity.
Can the world win the global fight against poverty? Incredibly, 998 million people now live in diseasespreading slums characterized by inadequate housing, unsafe drinking water and open sewer and sanitation systems. Yet, cities offer the promise of ultimately connecting hundreds of millions of workers to the expanding job opportunities offered by the global economy.
Economic Prosperity. Environmental Sustainability. Social Inclusivity.
In an Urban Age, the battles to achieve the highest aspirations of the 21st century and beyond will be fought – and won or lost – in our cities.
