Cities: The New Frontier

In that time, an extra two billion people will move to the world's urban centers - 500 of which already contain more than one million people. By 2020 more than half the population of developing countries will also live in cities - making them a key frontier in the fight against poverty in the 21st century.

"This is good news," says Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Sachs was one of a panel of experts writing on how cities can fuel economic growth to boost the living standards of their burgeoning populations in a special edition of the World Bank Institute's Development Outreach magazine entitled Unknown Cities.

Sachs bases his "good news" view on the fact that urban areas have outperformed rural areas during the past century on almost every dimension of economic development. They have produced more innovation, the people who live there are better educated, healthier and live longer than their rural cousins. Their children are less likely to die in infancy and they have better access to clean water and sanitation.

Tim Campbell*, a World Bank Institute lead specialist who assembled the panel of experts as guest editor of Unknown Cities says waves of powerful changes such as political reforms, decentralization, democratization, and globalization have thrust cities into new unknown terrain in economic and political terms.

Campbell says in his 30 years of working in the field, he has never seen cities so alive with hope, despite the "unknowns" about the future. He says increased global trade and the information revolution sparked by the internet have opened a myriad of opportunities for cities to become growth centers.

"The question then becomes how do you take a large urban conglomeration and achieve a sense of coherence, a sense of a self, which can produce a competitive advantage over other areas."

Campbell says that far from shrinking back from the pressures of globalization, cities are eagerly stepping into the voids created by the decline of national boundaries. Cities are forging relationships with other cities, becoming involved in diplomacy, seeking to embrace technology and attract new industries.

Uri Savir, architect of the Oslo Peace Accords, and a former head of the Israeli Foreign Service, says the city is the one socio-political unit growing in power in the era of globalization.

Arguing that globalization has failed to deliver its promised peace and prosperity, he says cities can be at the core of a reformed globalization called "glocalization" which is more sensitive to social and cultural needs.

"Cities can harness local civil society for capacity-building, more effectively direct peace-building activities and take into account local labor, cultural expressions, languages, businesses and communities at all levels of decision-making," he says.

Campbell says the increasing importance of cities has implications for international aid donors who should be "ready to respond to cities that feel a need for new and higher professional standards in governance, management, and planning".

Campbell's panel of experts identify several basic problems for cities in the face of the onslaught of population growth.

They have to debate how to grow their economies while maintaining their cultural and social identities, confront the structure of their internal governance to maximize growth and develop external relationships with other cities.

And with cities on the front lines of some of the most difficult issues for nations to resolve, such as poverty, HIV/AIDS and sustained peace, the stakes have never been higher.

Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs says while the flood of new arrivals to cities creates "countless opportunities", he warns "the process also creates challenges that can prevent the urban promise from being fulfilled".

Many urban areas are growing not because they are economically dynamic, but because their rural hinterlands are in such distress that impoverished rural people are flooding to the cities to find work or in search of emergency income support.

Often these people, rather than finding the opportunities they are searching for, become part of an extreme urban poor. And these highly-dense populations are at risk from environmental factors such as disease contagion, urban blight and chemical pollution.

Sachs says this poses a major challenge "to make the urbanization process work more effectively so that urban areas become true engines of growth and livable environments for the rising proportion of humanity that will be in cities in this century".

Frannie Leautier, the World Bank's Institute's Vice President, cites urban air pollution, which causes up to one million premature deaths a year, as another major challenge for cities.

So how can cities face the challenges posed by massive population growth?

Sachs says the world's cities will have to succeed on three policy dimensions: urban planning, such as carefully laying out water, sanitation, transport and public health systems; urban development strategy, through tailoring their goals to their circumstances of their own regions, and urban governance.

In terms of development strategy, Chinese cities had been successful in creating special economic zones and special port facilities to take advantage of their coastal locations to develop bases for export-led development.

Sachs said the Chinese experienced followed on from successful urban-based development strategies that had been pioneered earlier in cities like Singapore, Puasan(Korea) and Penang (Malaysia).

Shahid Yusuf and Kaoru Nabeshima from the World Bank's Development Research Group argue that in seeking economic growth, cities should not lose site of the benefits of providing green space and recreational facilities. They argue creative industries such as software, publishing, design, music, video, movie-making and electronic games, will become more important to the economies of cities as their incomes rise.

"More than 50 percent of consumer spending is now on outputs from creative industries in G-7 countries. This trend will be equally true for the middle and higher income economies of East Asia."

Yusuf and Nabeshima argue that tolerance, protection of individual rights and a climate that encourages individual expression have been factors that have made cities like Boston, London, New York and Toyko innovative centers.

They argue that the highly skilled workers required for creative industries, will continue to gravitate towards those urban areas seen as the most desirable and this would require world class recreational facilities such as restaurants, green spaces, shopping as well as good schools and health care.

Other writers such as UNESCO World Heritage Centre director, Francesco Bandarin, argue that cities must be careful to preserve their cultural and architectural heritage as they grow.

"Identity, place, pride, values, future - these are the products of urban historic conservation. A city with no past and no beauty is a non-place, a place that exists today but can disappear tomorrow.

"A city rooted in its past is a place where people want to remain, to invest, to grow their families and to see their future. It is a cradle for social, human and economic development."

* Tim Campbell is the author of the book Quiet Revolution: Decentralization and the Rise of Political Participation in Latin American Countries and (with Harald Fuhr) is the editor of the forthcoming Leadership and Innovation in Subnational Government: Case Studies From Latin America.

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