Photo by Grant252 | CC BY 2.0
Around 4 billion people, or more than 50 % of the world’s population, now live in cities. By 2050 that percentage is expected to rise to 75%, as the world population soars to 9.7 billion. Fifty of those cities will be mega cities, i.e. concentrations of people in excess of 10 million.[1]There are already 10 hypercities, each housing more than 20 million people, which was the size of the population of the entire world at the time of the French Revolution. How many of these mass conurbations there will be by that time is anyone’s guess, because the rate at which cities have grown over the last thirty years is simply unprecedented. This accelerated urbanisation of the world is a direct result of globalisation, both its intended and unintended consequences. And what the newly arrived urbanite can expect from that development will largely depend upon whether or not he has been invited to the party.
To get some idea of the remarkable speed of this urbanisation it is instructive to compare the growth rates of some of these new cities with that of the city of London in Victorian England. As Mike Davis points out in ‘Planet of Slums’, (reprinted in 2007, and so already woefully behind on current figures) from 1800 to 1910 the population of an increasingly industrialised London multiplied 7 fold. But compare that with Dhaka, Kinshasa and Lagos, which over a far shorter period, (1950 to 2000) have experienced population increases by a factor of 40. What is even more remarkable is that this influx of people occurred not against the backdrop of developing industries and expanding labour markets, but just the opposite. It happened at a time of “falling real wages, soaring prices and skyrocketing urban unemployment.”[2]
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