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When the face of the digital clock displayed four zeros on the evening of October 31 2011, the world’s population symbolically reached 7bn people – an incredible number, considering that only 2,5bn people lived on Earth in 1950.

This growth parallels directly with an increase in the number of people living in cities. In 1950, only 30% of the global population were living in cities, and this figure is predicted to be around 70% by the middle of this century. In a sense, the population alive on Earth today will be the entire urban population of the world in 2050 — 7bn people.

The UN’s predictions for SA are similar. In 2050 SA’s population is expected to be around 60m people, a 440% increase from 1950. Seventyfive percent of the population will live in cities — 45m South Africans, 15m more people in urban environments than today.

From the Greek polis or city state, to Alexandria, London, Prague, Istanbul, Tokyo, Lagos, São Paulo and New York, all cities have evolved differently, responding to particular social, political, economic and environmental forces. Today they stand as idiosyncratic monuments to their histories, struggles and achievements.

A future in which most of the world’s population will be living in cities raises the question: what will these cities look like and what quality of life will residents have?

What we do know today is that many rapidly growing cities cannot adequately cope with their new populations, most of which settle informally on the edges of these cities.

People are often left to live in the most basic of conditions without services. They are in a sense peripheral visitors, disconnected from taking part in the city, left in constant impermanence — and today number 33% of global urban citizens.

If cities cannot accommodate the pressures placed on them by current flows of migrants, and given the predicted increase in urban growth and current levels of unemployment, it seems our urban futures will be more like a mega-Mumbai than a sterile Singapore.

In order to achieve a more sustainable and future-proof city, our current urban structures and ways of living have to be rethought.

Johannesburg, Durban, Pretoria and Cape Town are sprawling, suburban cities where residents commute for long hours every day because their places of residence, be they gated communities or informal settlements, are located on the fringes of the city.

This suburban lifestyle, so common to SA cities, is possibly the most environmentally and socially unsustainable available to us.

Johannesburg produces more waste per person than New York, London and Shanghai, and more CO² per person than Mumbai, São Paulo and Istanbul combined.

While social attitudes to recycling, the environment and low-impact living may be to blame for these statistics, it’s the way in which our cities have developed — and thus shape our lifestyles — that should be questioned.

For example, Johannesburg grew around the motorcar. As its population increased, more vehicles appeared on its roads, roads were widened, and the city grew outwards at low densities.

When it was a divided, apartheid city, the interests of the more mobile white classes were placed above those of the disenfranchised black majority, so little investment was made into transportation. The apartheid government didn’t want to connect the city better at cheap rates — it wanted it as divided as possible, with basic transport available to get the black labour force to factories and mines.

Today, as a result of this, we experience a city reliant on motor vehicles and widely dispersed communities that are significantly unequal. Where some residents hide behind walls, don’t walk through their streets, don’t know their neighbours and have only experienced a sense of public in shopping malls, others live an entirely public life, in incredibly dense communities where privacy and dignity are often luxuries.

Many cities throughout the world are as socially divided, and face similar problems.

In Colombia, however, two such cities, which were also among the most violent on Earth, have been turned around and today serve as beacons for the development of similar cities, including those in SA.

Firstly, Bogotá — of drug cartel and soaring murder rate fame — was faced with a large fringe slum population from migration into the city.

In 1998, Enrique Peñalosa became mayor and radically changed the way the city worked. During his term five mega projects were implemented, including a bus system known as the Transmilenio, new parks, libraries, road upgrades and cycle lanes.

With a serious focus on the architectural and social qualities of the building or space, an engaged public dialogue, and parallel city programmes, this new system of urban improvements reconnected Bogotá.

Following Bogotá’s success, Medellin — Colombia’s second city — went through a similar set of changes under mayor Sergio Farjado.

His approach was far more finely tuned to the immediate needs of Medellin’s disenfranchised, and through the careful insertion of well considered, top quality schools, libraries and public spaces into troubled parts of Medellin, with the buyin of the public and with new city programmes, the rates of violent crime in Medellin fell dramatically — a sign of better social cohesion.

Be it through Bogotá’s introduction of new systems to tie the city together, or Medellin’s careful, almost acupunctural insertion of the right facilities and public spaces into parts of the city, Colombia was able to turn its two largest cities around, while accommodating a far greater population and preparing for growth.

Allowing them to densify around the right kind of public infrastructure, be it schools, parks or cycle lanes, gave residents access to better facilities and prevented outward sprawl.

In SA a similar approach can be advocated, given that, as in Colombia, most informal settlement residents have already built their own houses.

Should they be provided with services, social infrastructure, schools, public space and reliable, safe and cost-effective transport, together with a form of tenure over the land they occupy, it would be expected that investment in individual homes will increase, and a newly mobilised, socially and economically sustainable community will emerge.

This process requires a move away from the archaic roll-out of individual housing subsidies related to one house centred on a plot on the edge of the city.

In looking towards 2012 and the decades that follow, it is vitally important that SA cities are able to critically rethink themselves. The quest to be “world class” is a delusion, as it glosses over real challenges and real strengths to appeal to global images of what a city should look like.

Medellin and Bogotá were motivated by the improvement of the quality of the lives of their residents, and with successful, better informed and mobile residents, both cities are set to grow successfully.

In facing the global growth of urban populations, cities need to become more flexible and more accommodating of changes in population.

In a sense, cities need to learn from the informal world they often feel so threatened by, and through a resourceful, citizen-orientated approach of strategic intervention and service provision, grounded on sustainable public transport, the city of the next few decades should be a better place to live in for more of its residents.

Trangoš is an architect

Source: Financial Mail