Two centuries ago just five percent of the world’s population lived in cites. This compares to 55 percent of global population living in cities nowadays. We’ve seen a dramatic transformation, but the best is yet to come, as most analysts promise.
One of the latest reports from the UN projects that by midcentury nearly 69 percent of the earth’s population will live in cities.
It is not just that more of us live in cities – more and more of us live in extremely large urban conurbations. At the start of the 19th century, just one city had a population over one million people – Beijing, while today there are more than 450 such cities.
The trend is set to continue, posing huge challenges in some areas but creating vast opportunities for those willing and able to seize them. According to World Bank figures, more than 80 percent of global GDP is generated in cities. Some experts say if managed well, urbanization can promote sustainable growth by increasing productivity, allowing innovation and new ideas to emerge, saving energy, land and natural resources. Others argue that the trend comes at a high cost, as cities are simultaneously becoming nests for violence, crime, poverty, and high levels of income inequality. Like almost anything in the world, the urbanization medal has two sides, and it’s such an enormous undertaking to say for certain whether it’s a blessing or a curse.
“I think it’s a right question, and I think it’s something that we should be thinking about much more because globalization has its limitation, I mean there’re great things about it – it’s very useful to people who are educated and have resources, but we have to be thinking about, as we rapidly globalize do we protect others, I mean at what point the social stability matters,” says Joel Kotkin, an internationally-recognized authority on global, economic, political and social trends, and distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California.
What we can surely state is that the current global urbanization is triggering inevitable and irreversible shifts – be that a shift in customer base and market needs, or a psychological perception of urban life – which means a big city has changed the world past recognition.
