With the world’s urban population expected to increase by about
60 percent by 2050, we have an opportunity to build cities where
everyone can live, move, and thrive.1 There is an emerging global
consensus that we must work towards cities that provide a high
quality of life for all. Achieving this outcome is not guaranteed. It
requires a new vision of how to build and manage cities. The decisions
cities make today are crucial because they could lock us into a cycle
of low productivity, poverty, and environmental degradation for the
rest of the century and beyond.
The next generation of cities will be very different from those of the
past. As Figure ES-1 shows, the patterns of urbanization we are seeing
today create four significant challenges for cities. This demands a
reexamination of our conventional responses to urbanization.
First, imagine the entire population of China and India moving into
the world’s cities by 2050. The urban population is rising at an
unprecedented rate: about 2.5 billion more people are expected to be
living in cities within just over three decades, and more than 90 percent
of that increase will occur in Asia and Africa.2 By mid-century, estimates
show that 52 percent of the world’s total urban population will be living in
Asia and 21 percent in Africa.3
About 40 percent of this urban growth will
happen in cities that currently have populations between 1 and 5 million.