Sustainable Urbanization:Place Matters Program
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Sustainable Urbanization: PLACE MATTERS March 27-28, 2014 The University of Pennsylvania 3600 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA With support from page 1 We compiled Summit participants’ views on urban research... page 2 ...9 Cross Cutting Urban Topics Emerged page 3 CONTENTS Introductory Notes....................................................... 07 Agenda.......................................................................... 15 Participant List............................................................. 21 Participant Bios & Views on Urban Research............. 25 About the Urban Research eJournal (SSRN).............. 47 About Penn IUR........................................................... 49 page 5 Introductory Note Welcome to the Penn IUR Tenth Anniversary Research Summit. Below are some thoughts that we hope will provide a platform for our discussions over the next two days. We mean this piece to be suggestive, not definitive. We put it together as we collaborated with The Rockefeller Foundation on its Transforming Cities initiative, begun in Spring 2013. This Summit is a continuation of that project. For more information about the previous work, see www.visionariesunbound.com. Eugénie Birch and Susan Wachter Sustainable Urbanization: Place Matters Introduction That the world is soon to be overwhelmingly urban is well known. That cities are the fulcrum of human economic, social, and political opportunities is also well known. What is in question is the future of the many citizens who live in urban areas. Worldwide, a billion city dwellers live in slums, the majority in the developing world. Many have marginal jobs in the informal economy. All are deprived of some type of public good: quality education, adequate health care, accessible transportation. At the root of these conditions is income inequality that is growing in both the developing and developed countries. Furthermore, global warming is threatening the well-being of many urban places. With 60 percent of all large cities in hazard-prone locations, rising water levels and increasing climatological disturbances are placing cities at risk. Associated issues of food security and water scarcity are likely to mount as well. United Nations demographers are predicting that the global urban population will double to 7 billion by 2050. If they are accurate, today’s issues may well be exacerbated by this growth. Figure 1 offers a picture the urban world today and tomorrow with the first map showing highly urbanized places in 2011 and the second illustrating the urban growth by country and number of cities a mere decade and a half later. Note the changes in Asia and Africa. page 7 Figure 1. Percentage of Urban Population and Agglomerations by Size Class, 2011 and 2025 Between 2011 and 2030 alone, the urban areas of the world are expected to gain 1.4 billion people, with the increases concentrated in just a few countries. Together, cities in China and India are expected to account for more than a third of the increase; 276 million more people will live in China’s cities and 218 million more people in India’s cities in 2030. Nine other countries are predicted to contribute another 26 percent of the additional 1.4 billion: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bangladesh, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and the United States. Countries in Africa and Asia will experience the highest rates of urban population growth, surpassing 2 percent or even 3 percent per year. Figure 2, the actual and predicted distribution of cities by size and by their respective shares of the total global urban population shows two notable phenomena. First, megacities, places that capture much media attention, are in reality few in number and have a relatively low share of the global urban population today, a condition likely to hold true in the future. Second, the true weight of urbanization is and will continue to fall on cities of 5 million population or less. Figure 3, offering population distributions from 1970- 2025, simply underlines the fact that most urbanites have lived and will continue to live in these cities of this size. These data suggest that future urban research query the extent to which city size variations matter. page 8 Figure 2. City Size, Number, and Share of Population, 2011 and 2025 Number (% Number (% of world urban of world urban City Size population) population) 2011 2025 Megacities (10 million+) 23 ( 10%) 37 ( 14%) 5-9.9 million 40 ( 9%) 59 ( 9%) 1-4.9 million 394 ( 21%) 573 ( 24%) .5-.9 million 525 ( 10%) 750 ( 11% ) Under .5 million NA ( 50%) NA ( 42%) Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division: World Urbanization Prospects, the 2011 Revision, New York 2013 Figure 3. Distribution of Urban Population by City Size, 1970-2025 Nonetheless, these data make clear the importance of including spatial considerations in urban research. Where urban development is occurring is critical. Consider, for example, the location of cities in the Pacific Region’s so-called “ring of fire,” the area along the periphery of the Pacific Ocean basin where many earthquakes and volcanoes occur, which calls to mind the scale and location of such natural and human-made disasters as drought, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, and cyclones. See Figure 4, which illustrates cities prone to multiple disasters. When newly urbanized places haphazardly absorb arable land, are placed on landslide-prone hillsides, or disrupt storm-sensitive floodplains they will be in jeopardy. Natural disasters, food crises, and other emergencies related to geography and climate change disproportionately affect urban populations in general, and most dramatically impact the poor and vulnerable in particular. With this in mind, the importance of understanding sub-city social and economic patterns, particularly patterns of concentrated poverty (in which both children and adults are alienated from mainstream opportunities) and informality in all its forms, is obvious. Finally, while Figure 5 outlines poverty levels in nations not in cities or sub-city districts, the range and location of different levels of deprivation highlights its severity in Africa, parts of Asia, and Latin America. page 9 Figure 4. Urban Agglomerations by Size Class and Potential Risk of Multiple Natural Disasters, 2025 Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division: World Urbanization Prospects, the 2011 Revision, New York 2013 Figure 5. Percentage of Population Living Below National Poverty Lines Source: CIA Factbook 2008 Although cities vary enormously throughout the world, some general principles of urban dynamics hold true; understanding these principles may assist researchers and policymakers in managing them to harness cities’ strengths. If managed well, cities can be sustainable—determining how to accomplish this mission is the challenge. In general, cities are shaped by and can control three forces of urbanization that public and private decision-makers can bring to bear. First, they are physical entities where the arrangement of buildings, transport, and the public realm affects the full range of human needs—housing, transportation, air and water quality, access to jobs and social integration. Second, by delivering public goods and by regulating public and private behaviors, decision-makers can support the smooth functioning of city economies and of human development. Third, by virtue of their density, that is the “magic of human page 10 interactions,” cities can support the social and economic connections that undergird productive synergies that enhance their residents’ life chances. Understanding the interplay of these forces of urbanization and how to manage them to maximize opportunity for all is paramount. Urbanization is not new—nor is the failure to provide public goods in cities. Since the late nineteenth century, generations of practitioners have worked to address such failure. And they have made notable advances. The provision of clean water, development of mass transportation, creation of the civil service, and the invention of public health, education, and social welfare systems in the developed world are a few examples of progress. Although tailored to twentieth-century urbanization, and to the cities of Europe and the Americas in particular, these advancements may still provide some lessons for today’s growing cities and metropolitan regions in Asia and Africa. Contemporary researchers are now making the connections. However, twenty-first-century urbanization differs in pace, location, and character from urbanization of the past. The speed of today’s metropolitan growth is at a historic high: demographers report that it took 10,000 years for the world to reach its first billion urbanites, but will likely take only fifteen years for the current urban population to increase by a billion. Accommodating this growth alone would require building the equivalent of a city of a million every week for the next forty years. Brief Situation Analysis for Rapidly Urbanizing Places Africa and Asia are the focal points of rapid twenty-first-century urbanization. Today, Africa is 40 percent urbanized and Asia is 45 percent urbanized. In two decades, these rates will likely rise to 48 percent and 56 percent, respectively, as African and Asian cities experience annual urban growth rates of 2 to 3 percent. By 2050, demographers expect Africa to be 58 percent urbanized and Asia to be 64 percent urbanized. African and Asian cities already strain