City Planning: An Introduction to This Year’s Global Topic

A crowded street. A packed bus. A full subway car during rush hour. This is daily life for billions around the world, all living in cities. A city is a large, permanent human settlement defined by high population density, physical infrastructure, and a local system of government. The United Nations reports that 45 percent of the global population currently lives in cities and this number is increasing as Earth’s population grows. So how do we ensure our cities preserve culture and the environment while providing food, water, shelter, transportation, and economic benefit for all their residents?

Cities come in all shapes and sizes: Shanghai, China is densely populated with around 24 million residents, while Houston, Texas, USA is home to around 2 million spread across a larger area. Here’s an eye-opening statistic: all the cities around the world only cover 2 percent of the world’s land surface, but they consume more than 75 percent of the planet’s material resources.

Cities are incredible places, giving residents space to live, work, and play. Still, we can’t ignore the challenges they pose to the environment, wildlife, and residents themselves. As urban sprawl continues, natural lands are plowed and paved to create homes, buildings, and roads. Residents produce everything from noise pollution to wastewater throughout their day-to-day lives. Even with the many resources they consume, some cities fail to provide all their residents with what’s needed to live healthy and safe lives. Environmental injustice is common in urban areas where some communities are left behind or bear a bigger burden than others. Housing is part of the problem as well, with 300 million people experiencing homelessness worldwide.

Making cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable is Goal 11 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But meeting this goal becomes increasingly important, and difficult, as global population continues to increase. Creating sustainable urban areas is no easy task, but city planners have many examples to learn from: take Chandigarh, a city of 1.4 million in India. Chandigarh is far from perfect, but it does show the potential of a well-planned city with passive cooling designed into buildings, green spaces for residents, and smart transit infrastructure.

Picture waking up one day as the manager of your own city. What would you do? How would your city provide for the needs and wants of your residents? How can your city grow smartly when new people move in? Urbanization is expected to continue into the foreseeable future.

So get creative, put your problem-solving skills to work, and explore the full City Planning Topic Backgrounder to learn more!