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-The Honorable Jaime Lerner, Former Governor of Paraná, Brazil, and former Mayor of Curitiba

State of the World 2007 Home Page

The twentieth century was, par excellence, the century of urbanization. Around the world the supremacy of rural populations over urban ones was reversed and cities experienced an accelerated growth, often beyond the desirable. They have been through unthinkable transformations, which left a fantastic array of challenges and possibilities as a legacy.

If the last century was the century of urbanization, the twenty-first will be the century of cities. It is in the cities that decisive battles for the quality of life will be fought, and their outcomes will have a defining effect on the planet’s environment and on human relations.

Therefore, what can we expect from an urban planet? What will the cities of the future be like? There are those who portray an urban world in apocalyptic colors, who depict cities as hopeless places where a person cannot breathe, move, or live properly due to excess population and automobiles. I, however, do not share these views. My professional experience has taught me that cities are not problems, they are solutions. So I can face an urban world only with optimism.

My strongest hope resides in the speed of transformation. For instance, the demographic projections based on the high birth rates of 20–30 years ago have not been confirmed, allowing us a more encouraging view on the growth of cities for the next years and decades. Renewable energy sources, less-polluting automobiles, new forms of public transportation, and communication technologies that reduce the need for travel are all pushing away the chaos that was predicted for large urban centers. The evolution of technology and its democratization are presenting new perspectives for cities of all sizes and shapes.

In terms of physical configuration, the cities of the future will not differ significantly from the ones of yesterday and today. What will differentiate the good city will be its capacity for reconciling its residents with nature. Socially just and environmentally sound cities—that is the quest!

By having to deal directly with economic and environmental issues, this quest will foster an increasingly positive synergy between cities, regions, and countries. As a consequence, it will motivate new planetary pacts focused on human development.

Still, a certain sense of urgency is vital to positively transform our cities. The idea that action should only be taken after having all the answers and all the resources is a sure recipe for paralysis. The lack of resources cannot be an excuse not to act. The planning of a city is a process that allows for corrections, always. It is supremely arrogant to believe that planning can be done only after figuring out every possible variable.

To innovate is to start! Hence, it is necessary to begin the process. Imagine the ideal, but do what is possible today. Solutions for 20, 30 years ahead are pointless, because by then the problems will probably be different. Therefore we need urban policies that can generate change beginning now, that will not need decades to show results. The present belongs to us and it is our responsibility to open paths.

In the roots of a big transformation there is a small transformation. Start creating from simple elements, easy to be implemented, and those will be the embryos of a more complex system in the future. Although we are living a phase of our history when events happen at a galloping pace, and information travels in the blink of an eye, the decisions regarding urban problems are postponed due to a systematic lack of synchrony with the speed of the events.

The world demands increasingly fast solutions, and it is the local level that can provide the quickest replies. But it is necessary to plan to make it happen. Plan for the people and not for centralized and centralizing bureaucratic structures.

Those responsible for managing this urban world must have their eyes on the future, but their feet firmly on the ground in the present. Those who only focus on the daily needs of people will jeopardize the future of their city. On the other hand, those who think only about the future, disregarding the daily demands, will lose the essential support of their constituents and will not accomplish anything.

It is necessary then not to lose track of the essence of things; to discern within the amazing variety of today’s available information what is fundamental and what is important, the strategic from the daily demands. A clear perspective on future objectives is the best guide for present action—that is, to bind the present with a future idea.

There are three crucial issues that need to be addressed: mobility, sustainability, and identity.

For mobility, the future is on the surface. Entire generations cannot be sacrificed waiting for a subway line while in less than two years complete networks of surface transportation can be set up. In Curitiba, starting in 1974 we gave priority to public buses carrying 25,000 passengers a day in exclusive lanes on a north-south axis. Today, the network carries 2 million passengers throughout the metro area with a single fare.

The key to mobility is the combination and integration of all systems: subway, bus, taxi, cars, and bikes. But these systems cannot compete in the same space. People will select the most convenient combination according to their own needs and travel with a “mobility card.” Operators of each transportation mode will be partners in the system.

Regarding sustainability, the main idea is to focus on what we know instead of what we don’t know. And, above all, to transfer this knowledge to the children, who will then teach their parents. Curitiba’s Garbage That Is Not Garbage Program encouraged separation of recyclable waste in households; children learned about the program at school and helped mobilize their parents.

Simple things from the day-by-day routine of cities can be decoded for children: for instance, how each person can help by reducing the use of the automobile, living closer to work or bringing the work closer to home, giving multiple functions during the 24 hours of the day to urban infrastructure, saving the maximum and wasting the minimum.

Sustainability is an equation between what is saved and what is wasted. Therefore, if sustainability= saving/wasting, when wasting is “zero,” sustainability tends to infinity. Waste is the most abundant source of energy.

A sustainable city cannot afford the luxury of leaving districts and streets with good infrastructure and services vacant. Its downtown area cannot remain idle during great portions of the day. It is necessary to fill it up with the functions that are missing. The “24 hours city” and multiple-use equipment are essential for sustainability.

Finally, identity. Identity is a major factor in the quality of life; it represents the synthesis of the relationship between the individual and his or her city. Identity, self-esteem, a feeling of belonging—all of them are closely connected to the points of reference that people have about their own city.

Rivers, for instance, are important references. Instead of hiding them from view or burying them in concrete, cities should establish riverbanks as valuable territories. By respecting the natural drainage characteristics, cities can make sure the preserved areas provide necessary episodic flooding relief channels and are still used most of the time for recreation in an economic and environmentally friendly way. Parks can work within a similar logic, providing areas that people can relate to and interact with.

Historic districts are also major reference points, closely related to each city since its inception. But these areas often suffer a process of devaluation and degradation. Finding ways to keep these districts alive by connecting identity elements, recycling outdated uses, and hosting a mix of functions is vital.

In Curitiba, a deactivated gunpowder storage facility was transformed into one of the city’s most cherished theaters—Teatro do Paiol. A city is a collective dream. To build this dream is vital. Without it, there will not be the essential involvement of its inhabitants. Therefore, those responsible for the destinies of the city need to draw scenarios clearly—scenarios that are desired by the majority, capable of motivating the efforts of an entire generation.

A city is a structure of change even more than it is a model of planning, an instrument of economic policies, a nucleus of social polarization. The soul of a city—the strength that makes it breathe, exist, and progress—resides in each one of its residents.

Cities are the refuge of solidarity. They can be the safeguards of the inhumane consequences of the globalization process. They can defend us from extraterritoriality and the lack of identity.

On the other hand, the fiercest wars are happening in cities, in their marginalized peripheries, in the clash between wealthy enclaves and deprived ghettos. The heaviest environmental burdens are being generated there too, due to our lack of empathy for present and future generations. And this is exactly why it is in our cities that we can make the most progress toward a more peaceful and balanced planet, so we can look at an urban world with optimism instead of fear.

-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.

State of the World 2007 Home Page

Purchase the PDF for this State of the World 2007 chapter (below), or purchase the entire book.

-Mark Roseland with Lena Soots

The wealth of a nation depends in large measure on the economic health of its cities. Strong local economies are the foundation of strong communities that can grow and withstand the pressures created by an increasingly urbanized world. And strong communities require a holistic approach that not only provides the traditional deliverables of economic development—jobs, income, wealth, security—but also protects the environment, improves community infrastructure, increases and develops local skills and capacity, strengthens the social fabric, and respects heritage and cultural identity.

While individual actions and lifestyle choices, such as buying organic produce, are important personal contributions, strengthening local economies requires a collective shift in individual actions and political choices. The cooperative economy of Emilia Romagna in northern Italy, the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, Vancity Credit Union in Vancouver, the Women’s International Sewing Cooperatives of Nueva Vida, and the campaigns for local trade across North America are all examples of the potential of community mobilization to help strengthen local economies.

Strong local economies give communities the capacity and resources to address specific and immediate problems such as the provision of health care, adequate housing, clean water and sanitation, and disaster prevention and response. Human settlements—large and small, rich and poor—need strong local economies to withstand the pressures created by an increasingly urbanized world.

Mark Roseland is Director of the Centre for Sustainable Community Development (CSCD) and a professor in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Lena Soots is a researcher at the CSCD.

State of the World 2007 Home Page

Purchase the PDF for this State of the World 2007 chapter (below), or purchase the entire book.

-Zoë Chafe

Large natural disasters, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunamis, garner media attention, inspire action, and remain emblazoned in our memories. But the suffering caused by chronic small-scale urban disasters— such as local flooding, water contamination, and landslides— often escapes the limelight. While cities are increasingly home to both types of disaster, they also serve as great places for tackling the underlying issues that leave people vulnerable to these threats .

Although natural disasters are often presented as rare and unexpected tragedies, the reality is that they now occur more frequently, affect more people, and cause higher economic damages than ever before. Urban disaster risk reduction goes hand-in-hand with the aims of poverty reduction, and it can easily be linked to international efforts to achieve a better standard of living for the growing number of urban dwellers struggling to make ends meet.

Already w e are seeing hints of the ways that climate change will affect cities by amplifying natural hazards, including sea- level rise. Of the 33 cities projected to have at least 8 million residents each by 2015, some 21 are coastal cities that will have to contend with the impacts of rising seas , however severe they may be.

Effective urban disaster risk management hinges on advocacy for risk awareness, good governance, proper technical and communication infrastructure, and the empowerment of all those who are at risk.

Zoë Chafe is a Staff Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute.