Preface

-Christopher Flavin, President, Worldwatch Institute

State of the World 2007 Home Page

Sometime in 2008, the world will cross an invisible but momentous milestone: the point at which more than half the people on the planet—roughly 3.2 billion human beings— live in cities. The combined impact of a growing population and an unprecedented wave of migration from the countryside means that over 50 million people—equivalent to the population of France—are now added to the world’s cities and suburbs each year. More than at any time in history, the future of humanity, our economy, and the planet that supports us will be determined in the world’s cities.

Urban centers are hubs simultaneously of breathtaking artistic innovation and some of the world’s 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 world’s resource destruction and pollution.

This modern “tale of two cities,” to borrow the title of Charles Dickens’ famously grim book about nineteenth-century London, 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 won—or lost—in the world’s cities.

Although our species existed for over 100,000 years before the first small cities were built between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers around 4000 BC, the growing dominance of cities is one of the most dramatic changes we have experienced and one for which we are poorly equipped. As recently as the early twentieth century, the vast majority of the world’s people lived in the countryside and practiced subsistence farming. Even today, the electoral systems of many predominantly urban countries—Japan is a good example— give disproportionate political influence to rural citizens. And the international development community often neglects cities when allocating its aid.

In 1950, only New York and Tokyo had populations of more than 10 million. Today there are 20 of these so-called megacities, the bulk of them in Asia and Latin America. But most of the growth in the decades ahead will come in smaller cities. By 2015, demographers project there will be 59 cities with populations between 1 million and 5 million in Africa, 65 such cities in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 253 in Asia. As early as 2030, four out of five of the world’s urban residents will be in what we now call the “developing” world.

The demographic and political impacts of this transformation will test us. In China, for example, millions of people are moving to cities each year, and while that nation has done better than most in meeting the needs of new urban residents, the social strains are showing. And Africa, the least urban continent today, is the area that is urbanizing the fastest—a trend that will undoubtedly put additional social, economic, and political pressure on this already stressed part of the world.

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 world—more than half a billion people— lack 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. While air quality has improved markedly in many European and American cities in recent years, it has become far worse in most cities in the developing world; China alone has 16 of the world’s most polluted cities. 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 developments—from the security of those who live in nearby luxury apartments to the stability of Arctic ice sheets near the planet’s poles. It is particularly ironic that the battle to save the world’s 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 Guatemala—cities 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 world’s modern cities might seem equally hopeless—except that it is already happening. This book documents the problems facing the world’s cities, but also a remarkable array of promising advances that have begun to mushroom over the past few years. 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 and energy are increasingly being produced by urban pioneers inside city limits.

In Accra, at least 1,000 urban farmers grow food in backyard plots, in empty lots, along roadsides, and in abandoned dumps, fertilizing their crops with “greywater” from kitchens and bathrooms. In Barcelona, over half the new and refurbished buildings now have solar hot water. In Karachi, the urban poor have organized themselves to provide sewer services by having the inhabitants take responsibility for planning, building, and managing the local piping system. In Bogotá, many residents move easily around on the spiffy new bus rapid transit system. On an island in the Yangtze River near Shanghai, a new ecological city is being built from scratch. And in Johannesburg, cooperative businesses have been formed to sell eco-friendly construction materials while creating hundreds of new jobs for city residents.

As these examples suggest, State of the World 2007 covers a topically and geographically diverse urban landscape as we explore the many ways in which cities are key to both human progress and ecological sustainability. My colleague Molly O’Meara Sheehan, who directed this year’s State of the World project, has assembled an inspired team of Institute researchers and outside experts to write this volume. It includes indepth discussions of many of the challenges facing today’s cities as well as exciting stories about the innovators who are finding new ways to address these problems, often in the poorest corners of the developing world. The short “Cityscape” stories that appear between the chapters were prepared by people who know firsthand what is happening in these cities.

We are particularly pleased that two of the world’s great leaders on urban issues—both from the global South—have written eloquent Forewords to State of the World 2007. Anna Tibaijuka, Executive Director of UN-HABITAT, the U.N. body devoted to the well-being of human settlements, has brought the plight of urban slum dwellers to the attention of world leaders. As a woman who grew up in rural Tanzania and studied agricultural economics at university, Anna Tibaijuka provides the perspective of a person who has professionally and personally straddled the rural-urban divide.

Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba in Brazil and former governor of Paraná, who developed the bus rapid transit system that inspired Bogotá’s system and is now being replicated in cities such as Los Angeles and Beijing, wrote our second Foreword. In contrast to those who portray today’s cities as hopeless and apocalyptic places, Jaime Lerner views cities as exciting laboratories of change. That sense of optimism is central to the future of cities—and the world itself.