UPM-Biofore-Magazine-2-2019

TEXT Marko Erola   PHOTOGRAPHY UPM

THE FUTURE OF OUR PLANET IS IN THE CITIES – WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT

Exponential urbanisation is a huge challenge, but in cities are also the seeds of solution.

T he world is began leaving rural areas and heading for the big smoke. By 2010 half of the global population was urbanised. Now urbanisation is entering its most intense phase ever, with more than one million people migrating to cities every week. China is building hundreds of cities from scratch. By 2050 three out of four of the world’s citizens will be living in cities. Rural-to-urban migration is not the only cause of urban growth. Most new urbanites are born in the urbanising at a staggering pace. In 1950, less than a third of the global population lived in cities, until villagers all over the globe

city or become urbanites because their village is swallowed by a growing metropolis. Urbanisation is the megatrend that will affect not only the two billion predicted to be living in slums by 2030, but everybody and everything. Cities produce up to 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and mountains of waste. Most of the land projected to become urban is yet to be built. Virtually every sustainability issue from global warming and inequality to pandemics originates and culminates in cities. Urbanisation and population growth are drivers of all business and all spheres of policy. And yet, the physicist Geoffrey West began to wonder, we carry on as if nothing is happening.

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