For the first time in history, more than half the world’s population resides in cities. The world’s urban population now stands at 3.7 billion people, and this number is expected to double by 2050. The trend towards urbanization is only accelerating and 96 percent of all urbanization by 2030 will occur in the developing world. This global shift toward a more urban global population has profound implications for a wide range of issues including food, water, and energy consumption.
As cities become a reality for an ever-greater share of the world’s population, governments, companies, and civil society must recognize that they are largely unequipped to deal with city-level problems. All of this leads to the fact that we cannot organize cities as we have in the past and must take into account new approaches to urbanization.
This session will establish the context for the conversation around the global trend of urbanization and panelists will share their perspectives on different types of social infrastructure including governance, commons, community building, placemaking, resilient economies - that could drastically change how city development is approached and how cities could look in the future.