Posts in the 'Urban Development' category
Imagine Lagos, Nigeria, a city of 22 million. What was once a small coastal town just a few decades ago has exploded into a sprawling megacity spanning 452 square miles. Its rapid growth has stretched the city’s services impossibly thin: ...
Affordable housing is a crisis that only seems to deepen. Some 1.2 billion people in cities lack access to affordable, secure housing – a number that’s projected to grow to 1.6 billion people by 2025. Cities in the global south, ...
While most cities around the world struggle with inequality, in Johannesburg, South Africa, the challenge is compounded by the legacy of apartheid. In the apartheid era, black populations were relocated to the poorly serviced areas far away from job opportunities. ...
“Integrating planning” can sound nebulous, maybe even unfocused. But when carried out well, the benefits of intentionally seeking to coordinate across different levels of government, sectors and stakeholders, speak for themselves – especially when it comes to sustainable development. A ...
This century will be remembered as the urban century. Our generation will witness the most significant urban growth in human history. By 2050, there will be 2.4 billion more people in cities, a rate of urban growth that is the ...
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report on the prospects for staying under 1.5 degrees of warming is a call to action and a warning. The world is not on track to limit dangerous temperature rise and its follow-on ...
For decades, Kampala has raced to keep up with its own rapid growth. Set alongside Lake Victoria, the Ugandan capital more than quadrupled in physical footprint between 1991 and 2012 as population doubled to 1.5 million people. One of Kampala’s ...
From space, cities can look like microscopic living organisms, with bright nodes of industrial and civic activity connected by circulating routes of traffic and transport. Some cities are taking this analogy to a new level with an “urban metabolic” approach ...
As the recent Global Climate Action Summit underscored, we’re seeing a steady rise in the number of commitments by cities, states and provinces to address climate change, with over 17,500 actions registered on the NAZCA Climate Action Portal. Not only are ...
Cities are changing at an unprecedented rate: 75 percent of the infrastructure expected to be in place by 2050 has yet to be built. Meanwhile, major adjustments are needed to reach global climate and development goals. Now is the chance ...
Bold action on climate change could deliver $26 trillion in cumulative economic benefits by 2030, according to a new report by the New Climate Economy (NCE). Without immediate action to cut emissions, the costs of “runaway” climate change will be severe: ...
As India prepared to commemorate its 72nd Independence Day last month, the southern state of Kerala saw little reason to celebrate. The monsoon rainfall this year was heavier than normal and had reached alarming levels. On an average, districts received ...
A huge challenge for growing cities is provision of core services and infrastructure. Every time a new neighborhood crops up, services like roads, water and sanitation, education, and health centers must be extended to cover new residents. In practice, cities ...
8 Years Watching and Influencing Urban Transformation: Reflections From a Foundation Program Officer
Can innovative work be achieved by a program officer in a philanthropic organization? I remember asking this question when I started at the Hewlett Foundation in 2010. In my time there, I learned that program staff at philanthropies get to ...
Most people now live in cities and cities are growing rapidly. We are living in the midst of the urbanization age, an age that started in earnest at the beginning of the 19th century, when people first decided en masse ...
