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II TRENDS AND OUTCOMES: THE URBAN WORLD OF 2025
1.
Introduction: The Basic Driving Forces
Basic driving forces will shape the urban world of 2025: demographic, economic, social,
environmental. In Chapter II we look at these forces and at the resulting pattern of cities and city life.
In the short and medium term, at least, urban policy-makers must accept these forces of change and
these constraints as given; but they can bend and shape them, to serve their objectives. The political
process, itself one of the drivers, can help shape the way the economy and society and technology and
culture develop. It should do this, as suggested in Chapter I, based on the principles of sustainable
human development, delivered through good urban governance.
Thus, urban governance will interact with the local economy and with the exogenous forces. And the
driving forces themselves interrelate with each other in a complex way. This makes the task of urban
governance exceedingly complex and demanding.
At least some of these interrelationships are predictable. High population growth reduces the
possibility of rapid growth of income per head; conversely, rising per capita income is in general
associated with falling birth rates and so with lower rates of population growth, increasing the
chances to improve quality of life. Yet, at later stages of development, the relationships become less
clear: increasing income disparities may be associated with divergences in fertility patterns, including
high rates of pregnancy among lone teenage females. And advanced societies, in spite of low
population growth, may display relatively high rates of household formation, with consequent effects
on demand for housing and consumer durables. Other things being equal, increased rates of household
formation in all cities with rising incomes are likely to create big demands for additional housing,
decoupling population growth and spatial needs, which will lead to increasing dispersal from cities
into surrounding suburban rings.
As already observed in Chapter I, rising incomes, most importantly, bring rising car ownership. And
in these cities, more people tend to own cars at a given income level than in developed cities: first
because driving is often cheaper here, especially in oil-producing countries, and second because other
costs, such as those for housing, are lower in tropical and subtropical cities. And higher car
ownership, in turn, will tend to lead to increasing dispersal from cities into surrounding suburban
rings. This is a prime illustration of the complexities of sustainable development: unless growth in
income and wealth is accompanied by positive measures (such as enhancement of public transport) it
can all too easily produce negative effects such as an increase in pollution.
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For urbanists, these interrelationships between driving forces represent a challenge: it proves difficult
to predict future paths of development. And this is especially true in the medium and long term, over
twenty and more years. In 1950 it would have proved nearly impossible to forecast the economic
miracle that transformed Munich from a provincial capital and central place for an agrarian
hinterland, into one of the leading high-tech cities of Europe; or to guess at the economic development
that would take some Asian cities to the ranks of the world’s richest (but then threaten them again, as
their economies went into crisis); or to credit the unravelling of the urban economies that followed the
fall of communism in Russia.
Still more difficult, if anything, would have been to predict the fortunes of cities in the developing
world. In 1952, Seoul had been virtually wiped out by the Korean War; its transformation into one of
the great industrial power-houses of Eastern Asia would have been well-nigh unimaginable; the
people of Nairobi, a charming colonial capital soon to experience the stresses and strains of the
independence movement, could likewise never have envisaged its future as a city of 2.7 million, with
a large majority living in abject poverty in ever-spreading shanty towns, as industrial development
failed to keep pace with in-migration and population growth.
These examples show that driving forces are not inexorable or irreversible: they have to be translated
and transformed into local growth preconditions. The secret is how to use the driving forces
positively, to promote local development; and this must be done locally.
In the paragraphs that follow, we trace these driving forces and their impacts. There is one key
question that will need to be raised each time: to what extent will the urban world of 2025 display
common problems – and, conversely, to what extent are the developed and the developing world
different, even contradictory?
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2.
Demographic Change
2.1 Demography and the Urban Explosion
In the world of demography we see two different and opposite imbalances, partly created by policies:
rapid and burdensome population growth in many developing cities, equally problematic ageing in
many developed cities.
In the developing cities, the problem is that the explosive growth of the recent past has left a very
young population and thus a still rapidly growing number of young families. In these countries, seven
major factors appear to be principally responsible for urban growth. The first five affect rural areas,
producing powerful and even draconian incentives to move to the city:
1. Big productivity gains in agriculture due to mechanization, allowing fewer and fewer farmers to
feed more and more city dwellers, and leading to rural over-population;
2. Coupled in some cases with lack of arable land and over-exploitation leading to soil exhaustion;
3. Lack of resources (technological inputs, access to credit) and social services in rural areas;
4. Natural disasters and environmental degradation in rural areas;
5. Growing civil unrest and internal conflicts in parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia.
But these are parallelled by trends in the cities to which the migrants go:
6. Better health care and consequent decreases in death rates, especially in the cities.
7. High birth rates in cities and increased life expectancy, mainly due to reduced infant mortality.
The cities offer the prospect of jobs, albeit precarious and poorly rewarded; they also offer as escape
from traditional thoughtways and traditional practices, often irresistible to the young. Push factors and
pull factors both reflect large and widening disparities between regions, between cities and
countryside (UNCHS, 1996a). They produce the major global trends summarized by the Habitat II
agenda:
: the concentration of the urban population in large cities;
the sprawl of cities into wider geographical areas; and
the rapid growth of mega-cities.
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In most developing countries, these forces focus on just one or two major cities; current estimates
indicate that in some countries, migration to capital cities may be responsible for up to 80 per cent of
all internal population movements. But increasingly the growth of cities depends on their own natural
increase rather than migration.
Rapid population growth has at least two highly negative consequences, especially because of the
very large numbers of children. First, it severely hinders the capacity of poorer cities to increase
infrastructure per head, to provide an adequate number of jobs or homes or school places. Each
individual needs a growing endowment for survival and much more than that for a decent standard of
life in the urban environment. Without a certain definite minimum of education and training, such an
individual is very unlikely to succeed in the modern urban economy.
Second, the survival problems of the rapidly-growing young generation tend to override all other
considerations. The time horizons of the present generation shrink; their pressing needs compel a life
of day-to-day survival. Only when their survival problems are solved will citizens and decision-
makers be free to turn their attention to the survival and quality of life of future generations.
Sub-Saharan Africa offers a special and extremely nightmarish variant on the general pattern: here,
more than 8 million children under 15 have lost one or both parents to AIDS, and by 2010 the number
is expected to reach 40 million, 16 per cent of all children under 15. An enormous burden will fall on
grandparents and other relatives, and there are growing numbers of street children.
But in many cities in the developed world, the problem is the ageing of the population. Here, birth
rates are plunging below replacement rate, creating a skewed age structure where in the long run more
and more elderly have to be fed and helped by shrinking numbers of active younger people: the
proportion of people over 65 has increased from 7.9 per cent in 1950 to 13.5 per cent today and is
expected to reach 24.7 per cent by 2050; the most rapidly ageing countries (which include Japan,
Germany and Italy) will approach or exceed 40 per cent of their populations at older ages. The effects
on urban society are hard to forecast; at present, we can only ask questions, such as:
Will the slower renewal of human capital through ageing reduce innovative potential?
How can urban systems stay flexible and innovative?
Will people be capable of lifelong learning to overcome the ageing of knowledge?
Will the family as producer of care and personal services for old people be replaced by new
associations (of old people), who take over the role of families as provider of services?
How do societies deal with a rising burden of dependency, whereby a diminishing number of
younger working people have to generate more and more income to support increasing numbers
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46
of pensioners? If past trends continue, in 2030, public spending on old age security in OECD
countries will be 16.5 per cent of GDP. How will these younger working people react politically
to the growing social security taxes? How will they cope with the resulting reduced incentives to
work, or to the possible flight of capital to other nations and other cities?
We cannot answer these questions now. But we need to find answers to them, and we return to these
challenges in Chapter IV. Before we do this, however, we need to examine the trends in greater detail.
For this, we need a slightly more sophisticated basis than the familiar binary contrast, developing
versus developed; we need to add an intermediate category, countries and cities in demographic
transition.
2.2 The City of Hypergrowth
In the earliest stage of demographic development, as is well known, high birth rates are accompanied
by reductions in death rates. They result in a high rate of natural population increase and a high
proportion of young people. This demands large investment in human capital (high education costs).
Because of high birth rates, the age structure of the population of these countries is generally young.
In Kenya, for example, 52 per cent of the population are less than 15 and only 2.8 per cent are over
65. This is clearly an extreme case, but in most of the developing cities in the next ten to twenty years,
the large numbers of the under-15s and those in their 20s entering the labour force and the housing
market will still create enormous stresses on poorly developed education, health and housing systems,
on infrastructure, on mass transit systems, and on hospitals.
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Source: WRI, UNEP, UNDP, World Bank (1996).
0,00
0,20
0,40
0,60
0,80
1,00
1,20
1,40
1,60
1950-55
1955-60
1960-65
1965-70
1970-75
1975-80
1980-85
1985-90
1990-95
1995-2000
Male life expectancy
Female life expectancy
Total Fertility Rate
Infant Mortality Rate
LIFE
EXPECTANCY
FERTILITY
AND
MORTALITY
2.3 Cities in Demographic Transition
But there is one ray of hope in the cities of the developing world: although their high percentages of
young people will automatically result in large numbers of children during the next twenty years, the
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THE URBAN FUTURE 21 – Chapter II: Trends and Outcomes: The Urban World of 2025
48
number of births per woman is already shrinking and will shrink further, with improved education of
women and urban living conditions. Urbanization and urban culture produce a sharp fall in birth rates;
countries and cities enter into a phase of demographic transition. Contraceptive knowledge spreads
and the economic value of children declines, particularly because of the costs of their longer and more
intensive education. Thus, the next generation be smaller, and will enjoy more care – especially time
for their education.
Such demographic cycles are now often much more rapid than they were in developed cities at the
equivalent point in demographic evolution, about 100-200 years ago. But they will become easier to
manage, because – as we show later – many of these countries and cities are experiencing rapid
economic growth. Thus the quality of population change will alter more than the overall figures
signal.
And, in the more advanced among these countries, falling births are already producing a ‘workforce
bulge’ which is a ‘demographic bonus’ to these countries; recent East Asian experience, where the
ratio of working-age to non-working people will rise to a peak around 2010, shows clearly that it is
likely to contribute quite strongly to economic growth. Over the next few decades there will be a
demographic shift towards an older population in all countries; and by 2045-2050, no less than 97 per
cent of the growth of the old age population will be in today’s developing countries. However, the
proportions of old people will still be relatively low compared with the developed world.
In a few cases (Singapore in the 1980s) governments may become concerned about this process,
trying to raise the birth rate again among the more highly educated groups. However, all such attempts
have been rare.
2.4 Mature Developed Cities – Ageing and Implosion
Birth rates in developed cities generally remain low and in some cases (Western European countries
in the 1980s and 1990s) fertility rates have fallen below replacement levels. Because of this,
immigration – especially of workers to fill lower-skill, lower-paid jobs – has become a critical
element, subject to State control.
The other major factor is household ‘fission’ – the fall in average household size and the rapid
increase in numbers of one-person households, resulting from both demographic and social change –
more young people leaving parental homes for higher education; higher divorce and separation rates;
more old people outliving their partners for longer periods; and, most startlingly, more young people
choosing to live alone. There has been fierce debate, in some countries, as to the degree to which
policy can control this process. In the United Kingdom the government has announced an end to
‘predict and provide’ housing policies, implicitly accepting the argument that household formation
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49
(e.g. by young people) depends at least in part on housing availability. However the best available
evidence suggests that failure to provide housing will lead to real hardship (e.g. young people living
involuntarily with their parents; separating couples forced to continue to cohabit).
Because of continuing medical advances in high-income countries, predictions show a huge increase
of older (post-retirement) groups between 2000 and 2025. The pyramidical age structure thus changes
into something resembling a tree.
Population in thousands
1
6
11
16
21
26
31
36
41
46
51
56
61
66
71
76
81
86
91
96
Ag e
150
100
100
50
50
150
fem ale
male
Public social security services, especially provision of health care, will become extremely costly as
labour costs will be high, particularly where those services have to be paid out of net income in
economies with high tax burdens. To date no city with a rapidly-increasing elderly population has
found a means to cope with and provide for growing service needs.
A significant proportion of the population will be in the ‘old old’ group (85+). They will impose a
new, and so far unknown, economic burden through their needs for health and medical care in an
economy with a declining proportion of working people. In particular, the ‘old old’ are likely to have
special housing needs. One question here is the extension of retirement ages or the abolition of
mandatory retirement, as has already occurred in the United States, to reduce the burden of
dependency.
Falling birth rates in developed cities, as many surveys show, are in part a consequence of urban
lifestyles, especially women’s higher participation in the labour force and the high investments and
time costs of rearing children and providing for their security. Today in cities, providing care,
attention, supervision and services for children has become extremely expensive compared with the
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typical informal support systems earlier developed in villages or suburban environments, or as
compared to past urban lifestyles. Housing which is adequate for families (quiet streets with low
density of transportation, small houses with only one family per building) is expensive. Mothers with
highly qualified jobs pay a high price when they have children, as their careers can suffer. Work and
the role of a mother are not easily compatible.
The overall shift is accompanied by a shrinking household size; in many cities 75 per cent of the
people live in households with one or two persons. More than 30 per cent of the urban dwellers will
have no children. This means that the traditional role of the family in providing services for the
elderly will break down, especially as the proportion of women who are in employment is still rising.
The consequences of this imbalance in age structure are hard to forecast, as we have no experience of
it; we can only speculate. One risk is that because of ageing, human capital can depreciate in terms of
a decline in technical knowledge, flexibility and mobility. Cities with high percentages of pensioners
may run the risk of a flight of capital to ‘younger regions’ with higher growth rates and possibly
higher increases in productivity. Saving rates, especially among people between 55 and 70 years, tend
to be very low at the same time as competition for scarce capital is increasing and the urban systems
become economically less attractive.
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