The Seven Billionth World Citizen: Crisis, Cities and the Global Agenda

Notes internacionals CIDOB, núm. 40

Forget about the BRICS. Brazil, Russia, India and China are not the only true emergent powers that will shape the 21st century’s order. As a matter of fact, cities will do just as much. Their political will and action at both the local and international level will inevitably outline the global agenda of the coming decades. And they will do so in a deeper and more transformational manner than any nation-state can probably anticipate.

As one of the world’s most respected economists, Jeffrey Sachs, puts it, we live in a “crowded planet”, a planet that will become more and more crowded every minute of our lives. World population at the time of writing is 6.971.051.486 (27 October, 2011), and more than half of it is below 25 years of age. The United Nations believes that by 2043 the world will charter 9 bn people, at a growth path per year of almost 79 million. According to some estimates, two thirds of those people will live in urban areas. These areas will house about 6 bn people by 2050, which will represent two thirds of the world’s total population at that time. Humanity will be facing a series of global crises if action is not taken at the local, national and international level. As the argument goes, we are standing at a crossroads: either we continue on our path of environmental degradation, population booming and huge numbers of people trapped in extreme poverty (often stranded in vast urban slums), or we choose international cooperation and foster an alliance between the global and the local levels of action.

Sustaining the world’s ability to house an amount of people that will symbolically reach 7bn by 31 October this year, is the core political issue of our times. Even though population growth, which boomed during the 20th century (from 1.6 billion in 1.900 to 6.1 billion in 2000) has already started to slow down as nearly half of the world’s population already lives in countries with fertility rates below the 2.1 births per woman rate which is considered to be the replacement level, decreasing numbers of young manpower, aging populations and other demographic pressures will certainly shape both the economic and the social landscapes of our near future. Deterioration of soil, rivers, oceans and climate, combined with indiscriminate and rapid urbanization, go largely unrestrained. At the same time, our growth model based on consumerism and perpetual mobility is now obsolete, as it heavily consumes nonrenewable resources such as energy, water, commodities and clean air. In a more short-term analysis, the model may even not be suitable to provide jobs, security and basic services for everyone.

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