Cities of the Year 2100

Yes, the world will indeed be able to sustain this many people. The major reason is urbanization. By 2100, 80 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. There will be many more new cities, and some of today’s megacities (greater than 10 million people) will become supercities (greater than 20 million). Among the obvious candidates: Beijing, Delhi, Jakarta, Mexico City, Mumbai, São Paulo, and Shanghai. At the same time, recent advances in agriculture, energy, and water technologies suggest that human ingenuity will keep up with population growth.

Of course, the process of change will be uneven. For some time, perhaps as much as 50 to 70 years, urban living will continue to be associated with an underclass of people struggling to make ends meet and to secure a future. Income inequality within cities is likely to get worse before it gets better; it takes time for infrastructure and urban services to get to the masses. But the opportunities will be great. Large cities, if organized and planned well, allow governments to scale up training, education, and pollution control. And the movement of people from the countryside would free up arable land and allow larger-scale agriculture. Another benefit of a less dense rural population is more land to provide biodiversity, recreation, and tourism. That would help allow rural areas to catch up economically.

Migration will not only be from rural to urban. Over the next 100 years, we are likely to see large movements of people between cities, or more appropriately, between cultural centers. Net result? Well, think of more American-type melting pots in Europe, and traditional bastions of ethnic homogeneity like Japan and China crumbling in the face of an unrelentingly more mobile global talent market. Cities that don’t compete for these talents will fall by the wayside. Contrary to the argument for the maintenance of cultural uniqueness, the ensuing blending of cultures such mobility will bring about will introduce even greater diversity: the cultural evolution and renaissance of the 21st century will be about experimentation and innovation.

What will future urbanization look like? The question is, of course, speculative. So let’s speculate. First, convergence between rich and poor will happen. In fact, it is already happening. China has seen more convergence with the rest of the world in the past 15 years than it has in the previous 50. Its urbanization level went from about 20 percent in the late 1970s to about 44 percent now. That figure will likely be 66 percent by 2025 and probably 80 percent (today’s US level) by 2040. India, which has about 29 percent of its population in cities now, will also continue to urbanize, running about a generation behind China until 2040, and then closing the gap. It’s not inconceivable that India could be 70 percent urban by 2100. China will be predominately middle-class, in global terms, by 2050 and advanced by 2100. India will not be far behind. That spells convergence of the two largest countries, by population, in a little more than the expected lifetime of an infant born today. In historic terms, that is incredibly fast. And countries such as Brazil (200 million people) and Indonesia (238 million) are on similar trajectories.

Rural to urban migration should be pretty much complete by 2100. But urban-to-urban cross-border migration will be even more prevalent than it is now. If the European Union of today is a precursor to the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Mercosur, and the Arab alliance, for instance, then an immense intermingling of ethnicities will become reality. Think of large numbers of Chinese and Indians choosing to live in Europe and Africa, and Americans and Australians choosing to live in China, India, or Latin America. A big if, but certainly a possibility.

There will be other changes. By 2100, the world will go from a 7,000-language planet to a couple of hundred languages at the most. Putting aside the concerns about losing so much linguistic history, English will be the major medium of communication in many countries and the second-most prevalent in China, Japan, Korea, and much of Africa and Latin America—as it already is in most of Europe.

Highways in the sky? Maybe. Teleporter technology? Well, maybe not. But one thing’s for sure: just as today’s cities look and feel and smell different than those of 100 or 200 years ago, the cities of 2100 will evolve in a dynamic of rapid cultural, technical, and economic change. One constant is that cities will continue to be social networks—and I hope, of course, that we will always have New York, Paris, and Tokyo.