“Some 290 million people were living in cities in India in 2001, a figure that rose to 340 million in 2008 and is set to reach 590 million, around 40% of the population, by 2030. By that year, business consultant McKinsey and Co predicts, there will be 68 Indian cities of more than a million people, 13 with more than 4 million and six megacities with populations of 10 million or more. More than 30 million people will live in Mumbai and 26 million in Delhi.”
How the rise of the megacity is changing the way we live
Click the image to enlarge. A useful graphic from the Guardian…
UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake (statement)
Children in an Urban World: UNICEF report (download)
![“In 1900, just 10% of the world’s population lived in cities. Today more than half of humanity are city dwellers, and with each day that passes this proportion rises inexorably. We are living in a truly urban age. Global cities have become the engines of the modern economy and decisions made in cities touch the lives of every person on the planet. The challenges faced by the world today, from climate change to poverty and inequality, are concentrated in cities and often played out on their streets, in demonstrations and riots. The city has become the theatre of our anxieties as well as our hopes. In a world that is becoming increasingly crowded, successful cities are vital to generate the wealth, jobs and indeed the ideas that will make life on our planet sustainable and fulfilling in the future.”
From “Fast-growing fossil fuel construct”, my piece for this week’s Times Literary Supplement on Living in the Endless City, ed by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, and The New Blackwell Companion to the City, ed by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson.
Extended version here.
[photo © PD Smith]](http://www.peterdsmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/P1000721-Nathan-Road-Mong-Kok-Kowloon.jpg)
“In 1900, just 10% of the world’s population lived in cities. Today more than half of humanity are city dwellers, and with each day that passes this proportion rises inexorably. We are living in a truly urban age. Global cities have become the engines of the modern economy and decisions made in cities touch the lives of every person on the planet. The challenges faced by the world today, from climate change to poverty and inequality, are concentrated in cities and often played out on their streets, in demonstrations and riots. The city has become the theatre of our anxieties as well as our hopes. In a world that is becoming increasingly crowded, successful cities are vital to generate the wealth, jobs and indeed the ideas that will make life on our planet sustainable and fulfilling in the future.”
From “Fast-growing fossil fuel construct”, my piece for this week’s Times Literary Supplement on Living in the Endless City, ed by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, and The New Blackwell Companion to the City, ed by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson.
Extended version here.
[photo © PD Smith]
Today, for the first time in history more than half the population of the planet live in cities. Two hundred years ago, just three per cent were city dwellers, but by 2050, 75 per cent will be urbanites. My new book City - due out next spring - is a guidebook to our urban age, taking the reader on a journey through the past, present and future of the world’s cities.
The experience of living in cities is universal. As one historian has written: ‘A town is always a town, wherever it is located, in time as well as space.’ The first cities were built in the fertile land between the rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates in the south of Mesopotamia, part of modern Iraq.
When the first city builders set out on their urban experiment thousands of years ago, they created far more than a new man-made environment built of mud bricks. From them emerged the building blocks of civilisation, including essential skills such as writing and mathematics.
City dwellers created a new way of being. Humanity was reinvented in these pioneering cities. Urban communities formed a revolutionary social and moral order that broke free from the rigid structures – tribes and clans – of the rural world. According to a medieval German saying, ‘Stadtluft macht frei’, city air sets you free. You can be whatever you want to be in a city.
Read the full post on my site.
‘If there is a new orthodoxy in urban design, it is citizen participation. And Urbanized revels in this so-called “bottom up” approach. It depicts several cases of community engagement, from an energy measurement scheme in Brighton to a new pedestrian area in the South African township of Khayelitsha. It devotes a good chunk of time to the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, whose system of half-houses that residents complete themselves is often cited as a paragon of “participatory design”. The idea is that citizens, not god-like architects and planners, are the solution to the urban question.’
Urbanized: a documentary about city design that comes in the nick of time
