Last week, McKinsey and UN Habitat published an essay by Joan Clos, on how we can build better cities. In the essay he points out that in the economic history of humanity, urbanization has always been an accelerator of growth and development, and we are now in the process of massive urbanization.
Already 55 per cent of the world’s population lives in cities and this figure is likely to reach 70 to 75 percent in the next 30 or 35 years. Clos asks, rhetorically, what kind of urbanization will nurture sustainable growth? In his view, there are three areas that we need to address to ensure prosperous urbanization, which he describes in the essay text.