By the middle of this century, roughly seventy per cent of humanity will live in cities. Already, more than forty urban areas around the world have populations bigger than the whole of Norway. These are the megacities — Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, São Paulo, Cairo, Mexico City, Mumbai — and they are the most complicated machines humans have ever built.
The paradox is simple. Megacities are, on paper, catastrophic. The traffic is unmanageable. The air pollution shortens lives. The infrastructure is under permanent, expensive strain. Accommodation is unaffordable for most of the people who actually keep the city running. Rubbish collection alone is a small national economy.
And yet, people keep coming. Every day, on average, another 200,000 people move from the countryside into a city somewhere in the world. They come because the megacity, despite all its problems, is still the fastest engine of opportunity ever invented. Wages are higher. Healthcare, education and freedom of movement are wider. A child born in a rural village in India has, statistically, a very different life ahead of them than a child born in urban Mumbai — even in one of its poorest districts.
Urban planners now talk less about STOPPING this movement and more about MANAGING it. Well-designed cities are walkable, mixed-use, endlessly reusable. Badly-designed ones are car-choked, unaffordable and unbreathable. The difference is not the size of the city — Tokyo works at 37 million; some cities of two million barely function. The difference is the decisions the city made about buses, parks, housing and rubbish thirty years ago. Every megacity we build today is a bet on a future we can't quite see.
