Urbanisation | 21st Century Challenges What’s the challenge? Humans are rapidly becoming an urban species, with millions of people migrating to cities each year. Over half of the world’s population live in urban areas and this is likely to reach 70% of the population by 2050. FactsIn 2008 for the first time in history more people lived in cities than in rural areas.Slums are the world’s fastest growing habitat. Rural to urban migration Much of global urbanisation is due to rural-urban migration. The global proportion of urban population rose dramatically during the twentieth century: 1900 13% (220 million) 1950 29% (732 million) 2005 49% (3.2 billion) By 2030 this figure is estimated by the United Nations to be 60% (4.9 billion) Source: The UN World Urbanization Prospects (2009) Cities In 1900, the world’s largest city was London, which then had 6.5 million, and out of the 10 largest cities that year, only one was outside of Europe or America. Slums Case study: Kibera slum, Nairobi, KenyaKibera is East Africa’s largest slum.
Endless cities: will China's new urbanisation just mean more sprawl? | Cities Wu Shuhua sells flowers from the back of her bicycle in the pleasant, tree-lined streets of Shanghai’s Xuhui district. Originally from a village in neighbouring Jiangsu province, Wu came to the wealthy eastern city for its abundant economic opportunities. But it isn’t easy to make it big in Shanghai without education or connections. There are many flower sellers in the city – two other regulars work the same street – and most days Wu positions her bike on a strategic corner and waits patiently for customers. She is one of almost 10 million rural migrants in Shanghai, part of the world’s most rapid urbanisation, moving almost 500 million rural Chinese people into cities over the last 35 years. China now has more than 600 cities, many of which were small towns just a few decades ago. In April, the government announced plans to create Xiongan, an enormous new city 60 miles south of Beijing which sits within the Jing-Jin-Ji urban megaregion. Starting from scratch can also be easier.
Revealed: London is the most unequal place in the UK - Sky News London is by far the most unequal region in Britain, with a greater slice of the nation's poorest and richest residents than anywhere else. New research for Sky News, carried out by the Office for National Statistics, has revealed that the value of property owned by households in the capital has gone above £1tn for the first time, with more than a fifth of London households having total wealth of more than £1m. But almost exactly the same proportion of Londoners live in the poorest households, with total wealth of under £20,000. The term wealth includes the value of equity you have in a property, as well as savings, pension pot and possessions. Sky News analysis shows pronounced regional variations, with households in South East England having more than double the wealth of those in the North East. Scottish and Welsh households have, on average, more money than regions in the North of England or in either the West or East Midlands.
'Forest cities': the radical plan to save China from air pollution | Cities When Stefano Boeri imagines the future of urban China he sees green, and lots of it. Office blocks, homes and hotels decked from top to toe in a verdant blaze of shrubbery and plant life; a breath of fresh air for metropolises that are choking on a toxic diet of fumes and dust. Last week, the Italian architect, famed for his tree-clad Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) skyscraper complex in Milan, unveiled plans for a similar project in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing. The Chinese equivalent – Boeri’s first in Asia – will be composed of two neighbouring towers coated with 23 species of tree and more than 2,500 cascading shrubs. The structures will reportedly house offices, a 247-room luxury hotel, a museum and even a green architecture school, and are currently under construction, set for completion next year. But Boeri now has even bolder plans for China: to create entire “forest cities” in a country that has become synonymous with environmental degradation and smog.
More than 100 cities now mostly powered by renewable energy, data shows | Cities The number of cities reporting they are predominantly powered by clean energy has more than doubled since 2015, as momentum builds for cities around the world to switch from fossil fuels to renewable sources. Data published on Tuesday by the not-for-profit environmental impact researcher CDP found that 101 of the more than 570 cities on its books sourced at least 70% of their electricity from renewable sources in 2017, compared to 42 in 2015. Nicolette Bartlett, CDP’s director of climate change, attributed the increase to both more cities reporting to CDP as well as a global shift towards renewable energy. The data was a “comprehensive picture of what cities are doing with regards to renewable energy,” she told Guardian Cities. That large urban centres as disparate as Auckland, Nairobi, Oslo and Brasília were successfully moving away from fossil fuels was held up as evidence of a changing tide by Kyra Appleby, CDP’s director of cities. Burlington is now exploring how to become zero-carbon.
Life expectancy in Britain has fallen so much that a million years of life co... Buried deep in a note towards the end of a recent bulletin published by the British government’s statistical agency was a startling revelation. On average, people in the UK are now projected to live shorter lives than previously thought. In their projections, published in October 2017, statisticians at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimated that by 2041, life expectancy for women would be 86.2 years and 83.4 years for men. In both cases, that’s almost a whole year less than had been projected just two years earlier. As a result, and looking further ahead, a further one million earlier deaths are now projected to happen across the UK in the next 40 years by 2058. It means that the 110 years of steadily improving life expectancy in the UK are now officially over. A rising tide of life Life expectancy is most commonly calculated from birth. In 1891, life expectancy for women in England and Wales was 48 years. Life expectancy continued to soar ahead. Flatlining
Growing mega-cities will displace vast tracts of farmland by 2030, study says | Environment Our future crops will face threats not only from climate change, but also from the massive expansion of cities, a new study warns. By 2030, it’s estimated that urban areas will triple in size, expanding into cropland and undermining the productivity of agricultural systems that are already stressed by rising populations and climate change. Roughly 60% of the world’s cropland lies on the outskirts of cities—and that’s particularly worrying, the report authors say, because this peripheral habitat is, on average, also twice as productive as land elsewhere on the globe. “We would expect peri-urban land to be more fertile than average land, as mankind tends to settle where crops can be produced,” says Felix Creutzig from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Berlin, and principal author on the paper. “However, we were ignorant about the magnitude of this effect.”
Delhi will overtake Tokyo as the world flocks to cities We live in a rapidly expanding world, and one that is increasingly urban and focused on the economic, social and creative opportunities offered by cities. As a result of demographic shifts and overall population growth, the lure of city living will account for an increase of around 2.5 billion people in urban areas by 2050. This is according to a report by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which predicts two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in cities by the middle of the century. Overall, the global population is expected to swell beyond 11 billion in the next 80 years, UN data shows. Image: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Delhi will overtake Tokyo The increase in urban dwellers is likely to be concentrated in just a handful of countries. India is also destined to have the world’s largest population by country by 2024, overtaking China, which is currently home to around 1.4 billion people. Image: World Economic Forum Share
Pollution hotspots revealed: Check your area Image copyright Getty Images Marylebone Road and Hyde Park Corner, both in central London, have the most polluted postcodes in Britain, says a new study on air quality. The data comes from a project to map concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) across the country. However, the results also show that large parts of Britain have relatively clean air. Diesel vehicles are a key source of NO2 gas, which has been linked to respiratory disease. While this study only concentrates on NO2 pollution, scientists advise that high concentrations of NO2 are generally a good indication that other pollutant types may also be present. You can see what air quality is like in your area by entering your postcode in the search below. Sorry, your browser does not support this tool How polluted is your street? Source: MappAir100 by EarthSense If you cannot view the postcode search, please click here to reload the page. Five ways to avoid pollution Three-quarters of the postcodes with the worst ratings are in London.
The Observer view on London’s wealth gap | Opinion The cliche of London as a tale of two cities is well-worn. But new research published by the Trust for London shows it is deservedly so. Striking new figures show that the proportion of households classified as either poor or wealthy has grown across the country in recent decades, leaving a shrinking middle. But it is in London that the trend is by far the most pronounced. London is now a city of contradictions. It is also by far the most culturally diverse part of the country, a melting pot of ethnicities, languages, faiths and traditions, more liberal and tolerant than the rest of Britain. In this city of contradictions Londoners of different means live utterly separate lives. The contrast with the lives of poor Londoners could not be starker. The supposed trickle-down from the City doesn’t even reach the capital’s middle-income households. These contrasts betray the danger in drawing simplistic conclusions about wealth distribution winners based just on region or age.
The rise and fall of great world cities: 5,700 years of urbanisation – mapped | Cities Urbanisation is one of the defining processes of modern times, with more than half of the world’s population now living in cities, and new mega-metropolises mushrooming in Asia, Latin America and Africa. But a comprehensive, digitised database of city populations through world history has been lacking, with the United Nations’ dataset only extending as far back as 1950. That was until recent research, published in the journal Scientific Data, transcribed and geocoded nearly 6,000 years of data (from 3700BC to AD2000). “In general, it helps us see human interaction with the environment,” says lead author Meredith Reba of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences. Mining tabular data from two tomes only available in print (the works of historian Tertius Chandler and political scientist George Modelski), Reba and her team mapped how city populations developed around the world over the millennia.
China's Shanghai sets population at 25 million to avoid ‘big city disease’ China’s financial hub of Shanghai will limit its population to 25 million people by 2035 as part of a quest to manage “big city disease”, authorities have said. The State Council said on its website late on Monday the goal to control the size of the city was part of Shanghai’s masterplan for 2017-2035, which the government body had approved. “By 2035, the resident population in Shanghai will be controlled at around 25 million and the total amount of land made available for construction will not exceed 3,200 square kilometres,” it said. State media has defined “big city disease” as arising when a megacity becomes plagued with environmental pollution, traffic congestion and a shortage of public services, including education and medical care. But some experts doubt the feasibility of the plans, with one researcher at a Chinese government thinktank describing the scheme as “unpractical and against the social development trend”. Reuters contributed to this report … we have a small favour to ask.