How the city of tomorrow will determine our future

Cities are all about people. They are home to 50% of the world’s population, yet cover only 2% of our planet’s surface. They consume up to 80% of our power and are responsible for 75% of CO2 emissions. It is where wealth is created and where social progress is often first imagined and fought for.

Cities of the future need to be conceived around people rather than around cars and roads. They need to be made sustainable with regards to energy consumption and CO2 emissions. If we fail to transform our cities, we will fail to meet the targets set out in the sustainable development goals. And if we fail to support the cities of the developing world, especially of Africa, the young and able will continue to migrate to Europe for a brighter future. It is on the city of the future that we must focus if we are to solve many of the world’s most pressing problems.

The model of our current cities is as simple as it is unsustainable: Build large roads and large Co2 spewing vehicles to travel on them with all the known consequences for our environment. For Africa, which will need to expand its cities to cater for half a billion people expected to move to urban centres by 2050, the looming urban explosion presents both an opportunity and a risk: With the new technologies and know-how available today, they have the incredible opportunity to leapfrog and bypass the city of the fossil fuel era. The World Bank-led “Global Platform for Sustainable Cities”, for instance, supports cities to integrate climate into urban planning. They also, however, run the risk of creating unsustainable poverty traps we see in the shanty towns of Nairobi or Lagos. The way urbanisation will be managed over the next decades will determine the fate of the continent.

Building cities able to accommodate half a billion people over the next 30 years is one of the biggest transformations of our planet and we have to get it right. To get it right, the African city of the future needs to completely change its urban planning. Up until today, rural populations moved to cities without any planning, infrastructure or public policy to speak of. The result are slums and shanty towns.

 Rather than producing wealth and business opportunities, these poverty traps produce disease, crime and violence. Since these cities fail to function as centres of productivity, no wealth can trickle to countryside. That way entire countries remain trapped in poverty. The consequences reach far beyond African borders as the youth look for a better future elsewhere. Over the coming decades, the impact on Europe, already struggling with migration, will be hard to overstate.

So what needs to happen?

Successful cities are built on 3 vital ingredients right:

• People invest in houses
• Companies invest in factories and commercial property
• Government invests in infrastructure

The sequencing in which this happens is the clue. Rather than repeating the mistake of waiting for people to move first and build slums, governments need to move first providing infrastructure. Building infrastructure ready to absorb half a billion people, however, is no small feat. It requires far-sighted planning. It requires investment in transport systems, housing, clear cut land rights and financial instruments to finance it all. The know-how and the resources need to be made available now. It is much more expensive and cumbersome to provide infrastructure retro-actively, to clarify land disputes retroactively and to contain disease and crime retroactively.

Millions are doomed to remain poor unless the African city of the 21st century becomes a success story. Let’s help Africans to leapfrog the fossil fuel city of the 20th century and build clean, sustainable, and wealth producing urban centres.