What Matters: The cities of 2100

22 April 2010

Social enterprise: It takes a network

By Raj Kumar

In Social Entrepreneurs

22 April 2010

Teaching the world to change

By Dan Viederman

In Social Entrepreneurs

22 April 2010

Innovating at scale in the social sector

By Jonathan Bays and Marla Capozzi

In Social Entrepreneurs

13 April 2010

The economics of social progress

By Iqbal Z. Quadir

In Social Entrepreneurs

Previous: Will the world be more tightly bound together 20 years from now, or less?

Next: Don’t count globalization out yet

The cities of 2100

By Janamitra Devan

26 February 2009

It took about a million years for the global human population to reach 1 billion in 1800. In the next 200 years, it reached 6 billion, and it will take only about 13 more years to add another billion. By 2100, the United Nations estimates that the global population will level off at about 10 billion, thanks to rising living standards and more widespread population control. By the end of 2008, slightly less than 50 percent of the global population lived in cities. If economic development proceeds at today’s pace, over the next century or so it is highly likely that 8 billion people will live in urban centers, up from today’s roughly 3.3 billion.

Yes, the world will indeed be able to sustain this many people. The major reason is urbanization. By 2100, 80 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. There will be many more new cities, and some of today’s megacities (greater than 10 million people) will become supercities (greater than 20 million). Among the obvious candidates: Beijing, Delhi, Jakarta, Mexico City, Mumbai, São Paulo, and Shanghai. At the same time, recent advances in agriculture, energy, and water technologies suggest that human ingenuity will keep up with population growth.

Of course, the process of change will be uneven. For some time, perhaps as much as 50 to 70 years, urban living will continue to be associated with an underclass of people struggling to make ends meet and to secure a future. Income inequality within cities is likely to get worse before it gets better; it takes time for infrastructure and urban services to get to the masses. But the opportunities will be great. Large cities, if organized and planned well, allow governments to scale up training, education, and pollution control. And the movement of people from the countryside would free up arable land and allow larger-scale agriculture. Another benefit of a less dense rural population is more land to provide biodiversity, recreation, and tourism. That would help allow rural areas to catch up economically.

Migration will not only be from rural to urban. Over the next 100 years, we are likely to see large movements of people between cities, or more appropriately, between cultural centers. Net result? Well, think of more American-type melting pots in Europe, and traditional bastions of ethnic homogeneity like Japan and China crumbling in the face of an unrelentingly more mobile global talent market. Cities that don’t compete for these talents will fall by the wayside. Contrary to the argument for the maintenance of cultural uniqueness, the ensuing blending of cultures such mobility will bring about will introduce even greater diversity: the cultural evolution and renaissance of the 21st century will be about experimentation and innovation.

What will future urbanization look like? The question is, of course, speculative. So let’s speculate. First, convergence between rich and poor will happen. In fact, it is already happening. China has seen more convergence with the rest of the world in the past 15 years than it has in the previous 50. Its urbanization level went from about 20 percent in the late 1970s to about 44 percent now. That figure will likely be 66 percent by 2025 and probably 80 percent (today’s US level) by 2040. India, which has about 29 percent of its population in cities now, will also continue to urbanize, running about a generation behind China until 2040, and then closing the gap. It’s not inconceivable that India could be 70 percent urban by 2100. China will be predominately middle-class, in global terms, by 2050 and advanced by 2100. India will not be far behind. That spells convergence of the two largest countries, by population, in a little more than the expected lifetime of an infant born today. In historic terms, that is incredibly fast. And countries such as Brazil (200 million people) and Indonesia (238 million) are on similar trajectories.

Rural to urban migration should be pretty much complete by 2100. But urban-to-urban cross-border migration will be even more prevalent than it is now. If the European Union of today is a precursor to the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Mercosur, and the Arab alliance, for instance, then an immense intermingling of ethnicities will become reality. Think of large numbers of Chinese and Indians choosing to live in Europe and Africa, and Americans and Australians choosing to live in China, India, or Latin America. A big if, but certainly a possibility.

There will be other changes. By 2100, the world will go from a 7,000-language planet to a couple of hundred languages at the most. Putting aside the concerns about losing so much linguistic history, English will be the major medium of communication in many countries and the second-most prevalent in China, Japan, Korea, and much of Africa and Latin America—as it already is in most of Europe.

Highways in the sky? Maybe. Teleporter technology? Well, maybe not. But one thing’s for sure: just as today’s cities look and feel and smell different than those of 100 or 200 years ago, the cities of 2100 will evolve in a dynamic of rapid cultural, technical, and economic change. One constant is that cities will continue to be social networks—and I hope, of course, that we will always have New York, Paris, and Tokyo.

Comment [25]

Agree? Disagree? Let us know what you think. Please include your full name with your comment. Comments may be edited.

Why would people move to the cities when they have everything they need in the suburbs?

Posted 6 March 2010, 14:18 by oscar
We agree with the text and think that if this forecast comes true there will be many problems to cope with. In our opinion for public institutions like schools, hospitals but as well as the government it will be a logistic challenge to manage rising population. Leopold Kohr has already mentioned the problems you can read in the text in his novel about the critical size. Furthermore we think working and living places will run short and the divergence of rich and poor will rise. But on the other hand we want to mention that there will be new opportunities for growing prosperity through technical development and economic growth.
What matters – we will never find out what will be in 2100.

Posted 8 December 2009, 10:22 by Estl,Ghaemi,Resch
A good article, amazing to read the optimistic and undisturbed environment in which this estimation and projections are done. Nevertheless the role of terrorism,war,naxlites etc are doing the balancing act,meaning thereby, reducing the population,may be the panic situation drive the people towards villages and small towns to have peaceful life,of course the Indians will prefer such an option.Thanks to IT the need for urban and city life is meaningless because the world has become so small by a click of a mouse for information.The feeling of urbanisation or its contribution to society in terms of safe and peaceful living in any continent is questionable and debatable.Most of the IT indusries are located in villages,peripheries of the so called cities in India,do give all the socio-economic comforts.cities are white elephant to maintain and manage whereas the villages are self contained and sustainable in the long run,provided jobs,good infrastructure facilities are ensured in the rural areas.

Posted 14 July 2009, 07:36 by subash chandira
Hi there

Thanks for the article -an interesting read.

It seems to me that many of your projections assume that the major factor driving development for the past two hundred years – increased energy consumption – will continue ad infinitum. I think that is unlikely to be the case.

I’m not sure I agree that financial inequalities will even themselves out eventually (evidence of the last few decades suggests a move in the opposite direction)without a major upheaval of the current economic system.

In my opinion the ‘Limits to Growth’ pretty much hit the nail on the head with its system linkages. I’ve not seen anything that suggests otherwise in the thirty odd years since its publication.

Unfortunately appealing to ‘human innovation’ has major problems as, historically, each innovation has always meant an increase in energy consumption. Urbanised living is very energy intensive and increasingly so. I can’t see any way around that and there are definite (if unknown) limits to the amount of energy extractable from the environment.

Posted 4 June 2009, 03:41 by MikDale
A while back they where looking at LA having highways in the sky and air ships.I am still waitng for that to proceed.And being close to not seeing it that is disapointing. As far as how many people are to be on this earth.That is hard to anticipate

Posted 1 May 2009, 14:56 by Mark Hughart
To add my two cents, by 2100 I think a good portion of the population will live a more or less a nomadic lifestyle. As movement between cities and places become easier and sometime unnecessary, people will realize that having a permanent domicile will hinder their ability to attain opportunities where it exists.
Nomadic lifestyle isn’t anything new to humans, we’ve been nomads a lot longer than we’ve been permanent dwellers.

Nomads to Agrarian to Urbanites, then back to Nomads…

Of course this is representative of people from developed countries(cities) with mobile asset/talent, there will always be people without the same opportunity or the desire to travel beyond their comfort zone.

Posted 15 April 2009, 01:49 by sang
As long as money is concentrated with 10 % of the people in the world such things are bound to happen.When people are paid astronomical salaries,collapses can be expected to happen repeatedly, unless the divide between the rich nations and poor nations are bridged nothing will happen.Only reconcilliation between societies and people can prevent such disasters.As long as precious resources which are wasted in avoidable wars nothing will improve.The answer lies in empowering the havenots on a global scale all thse bail outs wiil never work. Th solution lies in apreading wealth as wide as possible and building an eglatarian society.Selfishness and dishonesty has caused this all

Posted 3 April 2009, 10:38 by j.a.simon
My only contention with the post is the claim that convergence between the rich and the poor will happen, or at least that it will happen any time soon. Certainly, the number of people moving out of poverty in the last 30 years has been staggering, but this has been accompanied by an equally staggering increase in income inequality. With several hundred million more poor remaining, and with an economy that can only create jobs so fast, I don’t expect that to change until everyone in China is gainfully employed and the supply-demand equation on the labor end is more balanced.

My general (and analytically unsubstantiated) observation about development is that countries often seem to sacrifice equitable growth in favor of higher average growth rates, as has happened in China. I guess I wonder where the achievable threshold is on the “equitable distribution versus speed of growth” 2×2 matrix of economic growth.

It seems to me that laissez faire economic systems generate faster growth, but also tend to distribute the benefits of growth less evenly across society, and I wonder how much of that is driven by distribution of wealth creation talent, which is probably concentrated in its most potent form in relatively few people, like any other type of talent (e.g. artistic, etc) which are equally enriching to human life but which do not always allow their possessors to capture as much material gain. In laissez faire systems, wealth accrues more to those who organize and lead the means of producing it, and they generally do so in response to the incentive of receiving the benefits in economic terms. In more socialistic systems, where the incentives to create wealth are not as pronounced for individuals, perhaps the overall ability of society to do so is compromised because those most gifted in that area are less inclined to exercise their gifts. In other words, we may all think we’re ok with altruistically giving to others, but if we believe that a “too-high” portion of the fruits of our labor are going to people who didn’t contribute, most of us will slack off eventually.

Care to opine?

Posted 2 April 2009, 09:38 by Micah Rowland
I find this piece to be typical of disciplined thinkers. The world you imagine will never happen. I’ll hit a few of the lowest points.

1. Under the growth economy, rising living standards are tied to one thing in three aspects. The Earth’s resources have to be converted into dollars, binary code, and ash. We live in a finite system, one that has already suffered major systemic damage, please witness the 7 or 8 dead zones growing in our oceans, biocollapse (the highest extinction rate ever known to this planet), and massive wetlands destruction the world over just to name a few. Should these events continue, as raising living standards will demand, then civilization is dust well before 2100.

2. Getting to this point, the destruction has not meant a rising living standard when considering the population in aggregate. How can we expect this to change?

3. Large-scale farming, which you consider not to be part of the culture but is in fact the central part of any culture, is destructive of natural resources and not sustainable. We are losing topsoil through fertilizers, damaging biotic systems upon which we depend (like it or not) with pesticides, and expending some 9 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food. To top this off, the vast majority of humans on this planet have ALWAYS sustained themselves through agriculture. The more we are moved off the land, to your super-cities, the more dramatically we experience poverty, crime, disease (just to name a few ills). The evidence of this already exists in the cities you mention (Mumbai, Delhi, Jakarta, Mexico City, to name those outside the US), look at it.

4. Large cities, especially of the scale you speak, are never planned well. They happen rapidly as in the case of Mumbai, and once the people are there living in squalor no city of scale has ever been successful at retroactively implementing the infrastructure to accommodate them.

I like optimism as much as the next guy, but I like to have reasons for my optimism. You offer none and ignore, either through ignorance or arrogance, the reality of our condition.

Posted 30 March 2009, 22:52 by Micah Myers
Kelen, you bring up interesting points. Indeed, the Chinese urbanization level of 44% took place almost “overnight” in a manner of speaking.

I think the early fallout of any urbanization (the West’s notwithstanding) has always resulted in even greater income disparities. It’s only in the second horizon where these disparities begin to disappear (if policies are progressive, that is). In this regard, watch the new rural land reform bill that China announced last year. Policies are yet to be fully articulated, but they are likely to create an even larger migrant surge into cities and, in the meantime, enable consolidation to take place in the rural areas that will likely kick up yields and productivity of agricultural workers. This could ameliorate the rural-urban disparities somewhat. Dev

Posted 27 March 2009, 22:20 by Janamitra Devan

Commenting is closed for this article.

Previous: Will the world be more tightly bound together 20 years from now, or less?

Next: Don’t count globalization out yet

Send an e-mail to let us know how we can make our site better.

Will globalization be derailed by the world financial crisis?

Follow the opposing views presented by our two debaters, then make up your mind and join the conversation

Comment on the debate

The new normal
The business landscape has changed fundamentally; tomorrow’s environment will be different, but no less rich in possibilities for those who are prepared, argues McKinsey's worldwide managing director Ian Davis.
China takes aim at dollar
The Wall Street Journal reports on China's call for a new currency to replace the dollar as the world's standard.
Zhou Xiaochuan's speech
The full text of the essay by Zhou Xiaochuan, China's central bank governor, in which he calls for a new world currency, is available here.
A New Deal for Globalization
Rising wage inequality in the U.S. is threatening a protectionist backlash that will hurt everyone. The best way to avert the problem, argue Kenneth Scheve and Matthew Slaughter in Foreign Affairs, is by instituting a New Deal for globalization -- one that links engagement with the world economy to a substantial redistribution of income. (Article requires registration)