Sustainable Urbanization
Talal Abu-Ghazaleh
Migration to cities over the past thirty years has massively increased as citizens want to secure better lives. The world’s cities have become the centers of national prosperity that has in turn put them under greater strain to deliver equitable services to a growing population. Our cities provide greater and better living opportunities and they naturally encourage migration from country to city.
This poses significant challenges in planning, governing and running cities as global demographics shift with such burgeoning urbanization. It is essential that cities worldwide find sustainable solutions to dealing with the population increases, particularly in the light of depleting resources and the need to provide services in a more efficient and fairer manner.
This problem has been further aggravated with the COVID 19 crisis that has affected global supply chains and economies in ways could not have been imagined. Poorer countries have suffered the most during this pandemic with inadequate sanitization, limited access to personal protective equipment, lack of social distancing space in cramped housing conditions and even limited access to soap and clean water to wash their hands.
Even with respect to the assumed more robust western economies, they actually proved to be quite frail. Our survival has turned out to be one that can only be achieved by taking collective action and developing sustainable structures that will serve us into the future. We cannot take the mindset of the past and treat the world as a blank canvas on which we can paint what we like. It has become a canvas that is starting to tear at the seams and that requires collective action from us all as the future of our planet is at stake.
COVID 19 has taught us that we all share this small planet and need to build bridges for our mutual survival and prosperity. It is refreshing to see that this spirit has been adopted in an effort to develop vaccines within record time, and shows what we are capable of when we put our resources together for the common and the greater good. We need to pass the fruits of this collaboration to third world countries in order to speed up the international response to the virus and restore some level of international normalcy; albeit under a new normal.
Urban populations are set to explode by 2050 with the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) predicting that 2.5 billion more people will be living in our cities by 2050. This is particularly worrying as this growth is set to take place in a few regions of the world, concentrated primarily in Africa and Asia. This requires serious action and proper city planning as otherwise I fear we will be seeing tragedies of epic proportions related to hunger, poverty and long term climate change, which may become irreversible; having serious consequences on our future prosperity as a human race.
Access to services such as education, healthcare, housing, employment and safety are human rights for which everyone should be entitled. Such requirements support the work done by the UN Development Agency and committees such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and others. Their work is essential to plan the urbanization that will take place over the next thirty years as this will have a huge impact on the quality of life for future generations. Our cities are already overcrowded and the influx of more people poses a problem in developing countries especially where city populations live in informal settlements.
Cities must be designed to grow in a sustainable manner that in my mind can only be done through investing in proper city infrastructure, effective policing, sustainable energy production, healthcare and education for all, as well implementing strong governance to ensure transparency, to reduce cronyism and to increase employment opportunities by providing an attractive climate for business investment. I see this as essential to prevent the possibility of developing cities becoming breeding grounds for crime, poverty and disorder if proper action is not taken.
If our global cities are developed and upgraded with the support of urban planners, architects and engineers, they will flourish long into the future. There are numerous cost effective technologies now available that can be implemented to produce better, greener, more sustainable cities.
This is a crucial endeavor that requires the utmost attention as there is a pressing need to make real change before time runs out. We do not need to re-invent the wheel as there are blueprints and expertise available through agencies like the United Nations and the Consortium for Sustainable Urbanization in New York that I have proudly chaired since 2015 to help develop a sustainable future for our planet.