BURSTING AT THE SEAMS
Hordes of people keep pushing their way into urban centers, putting more stress on stressed-out public services. Are you
ready to live in a town of 20 million? |
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BY NISID HAJARI
Expanding public transportation is key to alleviating air pollution that may contribute to 6,400 deaths over a typical year Like planets, cities have gravity. The bigger they are, the more powerful the pull. Size creates opportunity, and that's why cities attract so many dreamers, leaders, luminaries and ordinary job seekers in the arts, sciences, education, finance and commerce. Amid the cloud-skimming rooftops, bustling streets and swarms of humanity are the places where things happen, where fame and fortune beckon. Nothing less than an intoxicating combination of ambition and achievement enables city dwellers to tolerate the crowded sidewalks, the cramped apartments and the rude taxi drivers. Cities remain, as always, the hubs of our civilization--magnified, intensified versions of both the good and the bad in the human way of life.
It's no surprise then that the world's cities are bursting at the seams. Soon more than half of earth's humans--at least 3 billion souls--will live in urban areas. Can the cities handle all those bodies and billions more expected to arrive in the next century?
In the developed world, where more than 70% of citizens already live in cities, urbanization is spread fairly evenly, and population growth has slowed. The largest European city, Paris, has about 10 million people in its metropolitan area, which makes it merely the 20th largest on the planet. But in the developing world, people tend to flock most eagerly to one or two urban areas in each nation. Known as the megacities, they will only get bigger. By the year 2015, 27 of the world's 33 largest cities will be Asian. Bombay and Shanghai will bulge with 20 million people each, while Jakarta and surrounding cities will overflow with nearly 37 million.
Many megacities are already past the limits of their ability to accommodate the influx of humanity. If the immigrants were all young professionals and entrepreneurs bringing in skills and wealth, absorbing them would be easy enough, but the large majority of newcomers are poor families who find it impossible to earn a living in the rural countryside. With no other choice they often head straight for the worst kind of urban slum--foul squatter settlements plagued by open sewers, noxious cooking fumes and piles of fermenting garbage. The growth rates of these thrown-together neighborhoods can be astonishing: while Jakarta as a whole expanded 4% annually in the first half of this decade, the population of several areas on its urban fringe swelled as much as 18% per year. More than half the population of Dhaka, Bangladesh--an urban area of 8 million people--lives in slums.
Providing even the necessities is a huge task. In the Indian capital, New Delhi, electricity is often cut off for as much as six hours a day. Mexico City's demand for water is so unquenchable that the aquifer under the city has been depleted, causing the ground to sink about 7.5 m over the past century. Infrastructure in many places is not only inadequate but deteriorating. The pipes bringing water to Karachi, Pakistan, from sources 100 km away are full of "enormous" leaks, says city planner Arif Hasan. "They create lakes. They disrupt traffic."
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