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C h a p t e r 1 World Urbanization: The Critical Issue of the Twenty-First Century Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter In 2010, a majority of the world’s population lived in cities, an important milestone actually reached in 2008; by 2050, this proportion will approach 70 percent. These simple facts point in two directions: looking back, they confirm the intensity with which the world has urbanized over the past fifty years and, moving forward, they mark the world’s cities as the central terrain on which the critical issues of human development will play out over the course of the twenty-first century. This chapter explores the implications of these facts and frames them within broad societal goals of achieving socially inclusive economic growth, environmental sustainability and disaster-resistant resilience in the world’s cities and metropolitan regions. Further, it lays a foundation for probing urbanization more deeply through emerging research methods that uncover better understandings of urban growth and development, the subject of this book. According to UN demographers, past and future world urban growth rates are higher than those for the overall population. They estimate that between 2009 and 2050, the global urban population rate (100 percent ) will dwarf the total population rate (44 percent). This prediction generally holds for individual regions, regardless of the level of development . However, the Global South (121 percent urban, 54 percent overall ) will surpass the Global North (22 percent urban, 8 percent overall) with Africa showing the greatest change (167 percent urban, 122 percent overall) followed by Asia (119 percent urban, 33 percent overall). Rates of urbanization vary not only between more and less developed countries but among regions of the Global South due to wide differences in the current size and distribution of population. Latin America and the Caribbean, for instance, have much smaller populations than 4 Twenty-First-Century Population Prospect Asia or Africa and are already far more urbanized; in fact, at 79 percent urban, Latin American and the Caribbean are more urbanized even than Europe (73 percent). Accordingly, the UN predicts that in the next decades Latin America and the Caribbean will urbanize at rates (about .34 percent annually between 2009 and 2025 and .23 between 2025 and 2050) much closer to those of North America (whose projected rates are .28 and .20 percent annually for the same periods) and Europe (.36 and .37 percent annually). By contrast, Africa and Asia—at 1.10 percent for 2009–2025 and 1.07 thereafter and 1.13 and 1.03 percent annually— should see urbanization rates three to four times those of North America, Europe, or the Caribbean. By midcentury, Asia and Africa will be home to most of the world’s urban population, with Asia having 54 percent and Africa having 20 percent of the total (UN 2010). In share and sheer number, the Asian urban population overshadows all others today and will do so in the future. In 2009, it held 50 percent of the total urban population (and 60 percent of the world’s population ); by 2050 its 3.4 billion urban inhabitants will constitute 54 percent of all urbanites—notably, as this rise occurs, its relative share of the world’s total population will decline slightly (table 1.1). This rise of urban populations, with their associated development issues, calls into question the tendency of many social scientists to measure and analyze national-level data and to ignore internal spatial variation (Krugman 1991, 1998). Their reliance on such broad statistical measures as GDP and GDP-per-capita, inflation, and unemployment does not measure the right things; it misses the progress of society (Brugmann 2010). In 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy realized the extent of this problem when he appointed the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (or Stiglitz Commission), calling on it to review global statistical measurements and recommend improvements. In its fall 2009 report, the commission concluded that ‘‘what we measure affects what we do; and if our measurements are flawed, decisions can be distorted’’; it acknowledged that global metrics are flawed and suggested better measures, including those to assess ‘‘well-being’’ (economic and noneconomic aspects of people’s lives) and ‘‘sustainability’’ (stocks of capital—natural, physical, human, and social—that can be passed on to future generations) as well as improved economic indicators (Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi 2009, 4, 11). Yet the commission, in its list of recommended metrics, lacked an important dimension: the...

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