Abstract — This brief analyzes the need for modern 21st-centurycities in the context of urbanization, population & economic challenges, and sustainability. It offers a framework for policymakers to consider historical perspectives, dynamic planning, and future outlooks.

Executive Summary

In 2008, more than half of all human beings lived in cities for the first time in history. Cities are growing in population as well as in their geographic footprint at an accelerating pace.

Although megacities with populations over 10 million, such as Tokyo, Mexico City, and São Paulo, are widely recognized, most urban growth is taking place in so-called medium-sized cities of between 1 million and 5 million. This reality changes how policymakers in every sphere can pursue their goals.

Overview

Cities were and remain the center of innovation, exchange, interests, culture, and art. Increasing urbanization is taking place all over the world. At the beginning of the 21st century, more than 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities, and according to United Nations, in 2050, this number will rise to nearly 70 percent.

In Western countries, urbanization is already slowing down, and the challenge is to optimize and update existing structures. With the change from an industrial society to a service and knowledge society, cities offer numerous development opportunities for today’s highly individualized and fully connected society.

The main challenge of cities that want to play a role in the competition for businesses and residents will be to offer a high quality of living.

Even if we are aware of the positive effects that nature can provide in cities, we pay almost no attention to the complex and subtle ways in which architecture and nature can relate to each other. History showed us extraordinary examples of visionary projects which explore new models of coexistence between buildings and nature. Lots of those concepts seem to be forgotten.

Pointed Summary

• The challenges of 21st-century urbanization seem unprecedented.
• Global population growth will continue to concentrate in urban centers of the developing world, which will become home to more than 2 billion new residents over the next two decades.
• Profound demographic and economic transformations are accompanied by geographic changes that are especially important in a time of global climate change.
• The new challenges of 21st-century urbanism require a recalibration of measures of policy success.

Relevance

According to the United Nations, in 2008, the global urban population surpassed half of the world’s population of 6.7 billion, compared with 13 percent a century ago and 3 percent a century before that.

This trend requires profound changes in how the U.S. government addresses everything from development policy to international security. The population of cities continues to grow at an accelerating pace for at least the first half of the 21st century, with the number of large cities increasing as well.

Not only are such urban giants as Delhi, Dhaka, Jakarta, and Mexico City exploding to absorb up to 30 million residents and more—threatening to overtake the entire population of Canada— but more than 500 cities will have more than a million residents within a decade.

Over 700 urban centers are already home to half a million or more residents. Thus, in a little over a century, human beings have gone from being rural animals to urban ones.

Policy Problem

Population Growth

Global population growth continues to concentrate in urban centers of the developing world, which will become home to more than 2 billion new residents over the next two decades. In other words, 100 million people a year—a number that is on the scale of the population of Mexico—will be moving from rural areas to cities each year for the next 20 years.

On average, the world’s urban population is growing by 3 million people — more or less the size of Cape Town — each week. China has been expanding its cities at a rate of one new Chicago every month for the past dozen years. Increasingly, such growth is proportionately less a consequence of migration and more a result of natural population growth within cities.

Thus, the relative weight of cities on the planet will continue to grow even in the unlikely event that policies can be devised to
keep people “down on the farm.”

Economic and Geographic Inequality

Not only are cities growing, but they are producing more and more of the world’s wealth. Urban economic activity accounts for up to 55 percent of the gross national product in low-income countries, 73 percent in middle-income countries, and 85 percent in high-income countries. At the same time, global poverty is also becoming an increasingly urban phenomenon.

In 2002, 746 million city dwellers lived on $2.00 a day or less. Consequently, urban inequality is becoming more widespread, with measures of inequality growing most rapidly in cities with lower income levels.

Urban sprawl consumes more and more land, both arable and not. According to estimates based on satellite photos from the Cities Alliance, urban population density is two-thirds of what it was just a half-century ago. This global trend undoubtedly would happen in any event, given the sheer numbers of people who have come to live in cities, which necessarily means that urban “agglomerations” are spreading farther and farther out.

Indeed, what constitutes a city needs to be redefined—that is, carpets of urban development that obliterate the landscape as they extend hundreds of square miles literally in every direction.

These global trends mean that the “urban age” is not ending — it is just beginning. Cities worldwide are becoming larger, more diverse, more fluid, and less manageable than has been the case in the past.

In addition to sheer size, the sprawl created by declining density — which is happening worldwide — means that the city as it has been understood no longer exists. The traditional city has taken steroids and has grown into a sprawling, urbanized region.

Policy Options

Meeting the challenges of urban life will require policymakers to think differently about cities by moving beyond entrenched notions of rural versus urban and by posing new questions for thinking.

In short, the new challenges of 21st-century urbanism require a recalibration of measures of policy success. As Susan Parnell of the University of Cape Town has argued, the only evaluation that matters in judging an urban community—or an urban development program—is whether anyone would want their own children to live, study, or work in a given community.

In the short term, policymakers who deal with international affairs need to build an urban dimension into all of their policies, whether those policies are directed toward poverty alleviation, public health, or national security. The scale and complexity of urban communities require that policies to advance broad development and security agendas recognize the urban context.

Policymakers face some important tasks: to create policies that encourage businesses to address the new challenges of the urban age and to predicate those policies on the new opportunities to be realized, given the tens of millions of people who are in new communities around the world.

Policymakers similarly should support forums that bring together community and business leaders from similar urban areas, as in the so-called South-South dialogue. Finally, U.S. policymakers concerned with the domestic agenda should begin to examine the many experiments with urban and metropolitan governance that are taking place outside the United States.

Conclusions and Recommendation

Urban areas in historic cities resemble a living organism that evolves in parallel to social transformation processes, shaping the material substrate that expresses identity and collective memory. In the twenty-first century, exponential population growth, globalization, and the information society have resulted in many of these socioeconomic processes accelerating, with consequences that we are not yet able to discern in their entirety.

In this context, cities need to adapt to the general dynamics of urban development by incorporating the environmental,
economic, and social aspects of the “sustainability paradigm.”

With good planning, urban heritage is a key sustainable resource that needs promoting as part of the existing territorial competitiveness in a scenario marked by an increase in the rivalry between cities.

This requires the development of a conceptual framework that, based on a global, holistic, and integrative approach, covers equity and social justice, respect for human rights, the gender perspective, public health, and environmental quality, among other aspects.

Acknowledgement

The Institute for Youth in Policy wishes to acknowledge Marielle DeVos, Paul Kramer, Sydni Faragalli, Carlos Bindert, and other contributors for developing and maintaining the 2022 Summer Fellowship program within the Institute.

Citation

APA: Cultivating the City of the 21st Century. The Institute For Youth in Policy. (2022, September 14). Retrieved [Today's Date], from https://cite.yipinstitute.org/bwXXTz4

MLA: “Cultivating the City of the 21st Century.” The Institute For Youth in Policy, 14 Sept. 2022, https://cite.yipinstitute.org/bwXXTz4.

The author for this project has requested to remain anonymous. Questions or comments can be passed along to the program management, [email protected]

Works Cited

Parnell, S. (2016). Defining a Global Urban Development Agenda. World Development, 78, pp. 529 – 540. DOI:

Edward R. Kantowicz, “Carter H. Harrison II: The Politics of Balance, in The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition, ed. Paul M. Green and Melvin G. Holli (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University, 2005)

2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Dynamics

70 years of urban growth in 1 infographic, World Economic Forum

The Evolution of National Urban Policies: A Global Overview, Cities Alliance, Cities without slums, UN-Habitat for Humanity

New World Bank country classification by income levels 2020-21, Umar Serajuddin & Nada Hamadeh, World Bank