Macroscope | Vision critical in city planning as metropolises from Philippines, Hong Kong boom

Cities: love them or hate them, they are likely to be the future for most of our children. Developed well, they can provide high quality of life and convenience – and huge environmental efficiencies. But developed poorly, they create a blight that will take decades to eradicate.

Today, 55 per cent of the world’s population lives in cities – and that population is growing by 1.4 million people a week. Already cities account for 80 per cent of global GDP.

The developing world is home to most of these cities – China alone is in the process of building more than 40 new cities of more than one million people between now and 2030, and developing-world cities are expected to account for 93 per cent of all future urban growth. But more than 30 per cent of our urban residents are currently living in slums. So planning cities right is a need that presses urgently on us.

The “Building Better Cities” forum organized by the Philippines for the APEC meetings in Cebu last week homed in keenly of the challenges we face. Mayors from across the Philippines were brought together to ruminate over the challenges they face, and the mistakes they had made. And let’s just say that the Philippines, from Manila down, is not well-renowned for intelligent city planning.

But let’s not point the finger at the Philippines. Governments across the world face massive challenges both practical and political in building better cities. Very often, the democratic political process does not help: when a Philippine mayor faces re-election every three years, he or she is ill-placed to focus on costly infrastructure-building that may take decades to bear fruit.

Difficult as the challenge may be, the problem is not going to go away: with 1.4 million people a week arriving in cities, the price of policy failure is slums, squalor, and a colossal waste of human potential.

The first message in research coordinated for the forum by PwC was that cities need to be viewed as economic drivers, and must from the very beginning be people-centred. It is estimated that US$50 trillion will be needed between now and 2050 to build the infrastructure we need to provide satisfactory living environments for our future urban generations, and this can either be regarded as a cost, or an investment.