Technology can tackle urban challenges

Today, more people are living in cities than in villages. The United Nations estimates that about 52 per cent of the global population of 7 billion live in towns and cities. By 2030, this will swell to almost 5 billion, or about 60 per cent of the estimated global population of 8 billion, with urban growth concentrated in Africa and Asia. The fastest population growth will continue to take place in countries that are currently the least developed.

While news reports have focused on megacities, most of the actual growth will occur in mid-sized cities in Asia and Africa, which have few resources to respond to the magnitude of the change. The Asian Development Bank estimates that within five years, there will be more than 900 large cities in Asia, many with more than one million inhabitants, and nearly 20 with more than 10 million.

How will we manage our finite resources under these circumstances? Today, between 20 and 30 per cent of the world's food is wasted along the chain from farm to table. And water shortages - clean drinking water is one of the most precious resources - are expected to worsen in the next two decades.

The powerful technology used by global business - information technology - has worked near-miracles in Asia. It has been a major factor in raising hundreds of millions of Asians from poverty into the middle class and has helped create the conditions for the increasing number of Asia's super-cities.

Now it's time for the creators and users of IT to apply its world-changing capabilities to solving the manifold challenges of those super-cities and their people, from the richest to the poorest. It's not just because helping improve their quality of life is the right thing to do, but because responsible action by the IT community will create vast new markets, generate more opportunity and more business, and make the new middle class less eager to upset their increasingly comfortable lives by rising up against their governments.

It is no longer enough for a city to be able to handle large flows of people and goods. It also has to be efficient in its use of resources that are becoming increasingly scarce, including clean air, clean water, open space and fresh food.

In Mumbai, for example, the cost of one cubic metre of clean water in an affluent neighbourhood is 3 US cents, while in a nearby shanty town, the same water costs US$1.12. Why the disparity? Affluent neighbourhoods are blessed with solid infrastructure monitored by sophisticated technology and managed by well-trained experts. Shanty towns, by contrast, receive their water through terribly inefficient means. Technology - in combination with infrastructure - could change that.