Our Urban Future
Chris Flavin
Christopher Flavin is president of the Worldwatch Institute and author of
the preface to the recently-released State of the World 2007: Our Urban
Future.
S.B.
Sometime in 2008, the world will cross an invisible but momentous milestone:
the point at which more than half the people on the planetroughly 3.2
billion human beingslive in cities.
Urban centers are hubs simultaneously of breathtaking artistic innovation
and some of the worlds most abject and disgraceful poverty. They are the
dynamos of the world economy but also the breeding grounds for alienation,
religious extremism and other sources of local and global insecurity. Cities
are now both pioneers of groundbreaking environmental policies and the
direct or indirect source of most of the worlds resource destruction and
pollution.
This modern tale of two cities is something that every policymaker and
citizen needs to understand. The battles against our greatest global
problems, from unemployment and HIV infections to water shortages, terrorism
and climate change, will be largely wonor lostin the worlds cities. Yet
from 1970 to 2000, urban aid worldwide was estimated at $60 billionjust 4
percent of the $1.5 trillion in development assistance.
In 1950, only New York and Tokyo had populations of more than 10 million.
Today there are 20 of these so-called megacities. But most of the growth in
the decades ahead will come in smaller cities. As early as 2030, four out of
five of the worlds urban residents will be in what we now call the
developing world.
The demographic and political impacts of this transformation will test us.
The great majority of the population growth in the new urban centers of
Africa and Asia is in the unplanned and underserved settlements commonly
known as slums. Over one quarter of urban residents in the developing
worldmore than half a billion peoplelack clean water and sanitation, and
1.6 million die each year as a result.
The face of twenty-first century cities is often that of a small,
malnourished child living in a vast slum in a city such as Abidjan, Kolkata
or Mexico City, not far from the newly built opera houses, gleaming office
buildings and automobile-choked highways that are now common even in poor
countries. This child frequently lacks electricity, clean water or even a
nearby toilet. For that child in the slum, pollution-related sickness and
violence are daily threats, while education and health care are a distant
hope.
Our ability to meet the needs of the urban poor is one of the greatest
humanitarian challenges of this century. It is also going to shape key
global developmentsfrom the security of those who live in nearby luxury
apartments to the stability of Arctic ice sheets near the planets poles. It
is particularly ironic that the battle to save the worlds remaining healthy
ecosystems will be won or lost not in the tropical forests or coral reefs
that are threatened but on the streets of the most unnatural landscapes on
the planet.
At stake is the ability of those ecosystems to provide the food, fiber,
fresh water and climate stability that all cities depend on. Nearly two
thirds of these ecosystem services have already been degraded, according
to the latest scientific estimates. Our challenge is to avoid the fate of
the great Mayan cities that lie in ruins in the jungles of southern Mexico
and Guatemalacities that were abandoned not just because of forces at work
within their borders but because of the collapse of the surrounding
agricultural lands and water resources after centuries of overexploitation.
The task of saving the worlds modern cities might seem equally
hopelessexcept that it is already happening. Particularly striking is the
self-reliance being demonstrated by both rich and poor communities that have
stepped in to fill gaps left by governments. Even necessities such as food,
energy, clean water and sanitation are increasingly being produced by urban
pioneers, using innovative technlogies and delivery systems, inside city
limits.
As U.S. policy makers seek lasting solutions to problems such as climate
change, immigration and terrorism, they will need to understand that unless
we create prosperous, clean and sustainable cities, none of these problems
has a chance of being surmounted.
URL- http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/01/18/our_urban_future.php