Urban blogs

No easy, quick solutions to improving life in the "slums"

BBC journalist Paul Mason’s “Our World,” shown on the 26th August 2011, relies once more on professionalized solutions to offer hope to those living in Manila, the capital of the Philippines – and the most densely populated city on earth. But they’re not a viable solution for the 900 million people living in informal settlements and other forms of inadequate accommodation such as crowded inner city dwellings.

Braking Beijing’s car addiction

Driven by subsidies for small cars and an ever increasing middle class, the Chinese year of the tiger saw a ferocious increase in the car industry — a whopping 18.1 million vehicles (including 13.8 million cars) were sold in China in 2010, up by a third from the previous year. But will new efforts by Beijing combat both the booming economy and the grid-locked streets? And is this another example of China setting a new course for a greener future?

Low2No helps show how to build sustainable cities

‘Low-carbon growth’ seems to be mentioned all the time with regards to environment and development policy. As a theory this is great, but how can the theory be made more concrete? What might the practice of low-carbon growth look like when applied to urban environments?

Let's get compact

The future sprawls before us — urban sprawl, that is. John Vidal of the UK Guardian says that in 50 years, we could see ‘vast “mega-regions” which may stretch hundreds of miles across countries and be home to more than 100 million people’.

In fact, they’re here already: the gargantuan Hong Kong-Shenhzen-Ghaungzhou conurbation, to take just one example, houses more than 120 million people.

Whether in-migration to these regions is a trickle or a flood (and the downturn has apparently had a mixed effect on migration to cities), the urban pull remains powerful, as the poor chase jobs and escape degraded rural environments or conflict.