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Impact of Urbanization on the Environment

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Impact of Urbanization on the Environment

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In cities two of the most pressing problems facing the world today also come together: poverty and environmental degradation.

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The promise of jobs and prosperity, among other factors, pulls people to cities. Half of the global population already lives in cities, and by 2050 two-thirds of the world's people are expected to live in urban areas. But in cities two of the most pressing problems facing the world today also come together: poverty and environmental degradation.

Poor air and water quality, insufficient water availability, waste-disposal problems, and high energy consumption are exacerbated by the increasing population density and demands of urban environments. Strong city planning will be essential in managing these and other difficulties as the world's urban areas swell.

Threats

Intensive urban growth can lead to greater poverty, with local governments unable to provide services for all people.

Concentrated energy use leads to greater air pollution with significant impact on human health.

Automobile exhaust produces elevated lead levels in urban air.

Large volumes of uncollected waste create multiple health hazards.

Urban development can magnify the risk of environmental hazards such as flash flooding.

Pollution and physical barriers to root growth promote loss of urban tree cover.

Animal populations are inhibited by toxic substances, vehicles, and the loss of habitat and food sources.

Solutions

Combat poverty by promoting economic development and job creation.

Involve local community in local government.

Reduce air pollution by upgrading energy use and alternative transport systems.

Create private-public partnerships to provide services such as waste disposal and housing.

Plant trees and incorporate the care of city green spaces as a key element in urban planning.

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The promise of jobs and prosperity, among other factors, pulls people to cities. Half of the global population already lives in cities, and by 2050 two-thirds of the world's people are expected to live in urban areas. But in cities two of the most pressing problems facing the world today also come together: poverty and environmental degradation.

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Perhaps floating cities can ease the housing challenge in major cities & help mitigate climate change effects?

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This article was created in partnership with the National Geographic Society.

The corridors and meeting rooms here bustled this week with a familiar-sounding mix of sessions, on "policy options for low fertility," the launch of "The State of Pacific Youth Report," the "International Day of Sport for Development and Peace."

But something completely different was going on in conference room 8 on Wednesday, where a glowing blue-and-beige model on a central podium illustrated the theme on the door: "Sustainable Floating Cities." ( See more photos of floating city concepts.)

There, dozens of experts, investors, scientists, and officials-along with a group of students on a video link from Nairobi-explored a new approach to building offshore hubs of habitation, commerce, education, and recreation designed to ease pressures facing coastal cities squeezed between rising populations, rising seas and storm risk, resource limits, and threatened ecosystems.

Bright and dark visions of humanity spreading from land to life offshore have been around for decades, with variants ranging from hopeful-a vaulting pyramid-shaped floating city conceived for Tokyo Bay in the 1960s by R. Buckminster Fuller-to involuntary, as with straggling survivors of a flooded planet building ragtag "atolls" in the dystopian 1995 film Waterworld.

The developers, a company called Oceanix and partners including the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, insist this time is different.

They envision an eventual galaxy of satellite "cities" built where coastal urbanization is hitting limits. They would consist of mass-produced, storm-worthy hexagonal floating modules, towed into position, moored and connected in larger arrays topped by sustainably built housing, workplaces, recreational and religious facilities, and the rest. Ferries and drones would be a tie line to shore. The communities would be sustained as much as possible with local solar and other renewable energy, recirculating water and rainwater, and local food production.

At first hearing, the concept of floating cities has the feel of magical thinking.

But coastal cities around the world face the ultimate space crunch, and it's worsening fast.

The erosion of polar ice sheets and expansion of heated seawater under global warming are relentlessly raising sea levels, almost assuredly for centuries to come, with only the pace of coastal immersion, and rising storm-surge losses, in question. And coastal risk is building even faster through the surge in populations in a fast-urbanizing world.

So it would be magical thinking to exclude such solutions, proponents say.

A new vision for seasteading

The project is the brainchild of Marc Collins, a Hawaiian-born entrepreneur with Tahitian and Chinese family roots who has spent more than a decade pursuing a range of options for such developments, including ones favored by " seasteading" individualists seeking to escape the strictures of governments and taxes.

In interviews, he said he came to realize that floating communities can only really succeed with government support and would work best within a country's coastal waters. "It will take governments," he said in an interview.

This proposal is aiming for a middle ground, attracting investors by centering on Asia-where cities are extraordinarily dense and real estate exorbitantly pricey, and where there's substantial government power to orchestrate offshore or onshore development. But Collins said it's vital that such projects benefit everyone in a city, not just the prosperous. "This can't turn into something where a bunch of rich people watch poor people drown on the beach," he said in an interview.

The meeting was hosted by the UN-Habitat program, which was launched in 1978 to pursue progress toward socially and environmentally sound human communities and is now focused on achieving Sustainable Development Goal 11, making cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable by 2030.

It's not an agency associated with cutting-edge technology or design. But given the intensifying pressures, particularly the slow progress addressing human-driven global warming, unconventional solutions can no longer be discounted, said Victor Kisob, deputy executive director of UN-Habitat and the convener for the day.

How did such an unconventional idea take center stage?

"This got into the mix simply as we looked at possible solutions out there that we could consider when you have a superstorm Sandy or the humanitarian crises we're dealing with, as in Mozambique," he said. "Listening to Marc and seeing his designs, this seems futuristic but it really is practical. And you have to consider what would happen to these places otherwise."

During the course of the day, the merits of such a project, in theory, became evident. The threat from rising seas and storm surge is erased a mile or two offshore. Even tsunamis would not pose the kind of threat they pose to coasts because such quake-triggered waves only rise to devastating heights in shallowing waters.

Offshore waters can be leased in most countries for dollars an acre while real estate values in cities like Hong Kong or Lagos are astronomical.

But the discussion identified a wide array of issues.

Some were technical. Can a cluster of tethered, moored platforms ride out a typhoon?

Nicholas Makris, the director of MIT's Center for Ocean Engineering, was on hand with several colleagues. He asked how many attendees had been at sea in hurricane-strength winds. Only his hand went up.

Makris described a host of structures around the world designed for such conditions, but noted they are all enormous, and enormously expensive, components of global oil and gas infrastructure.

In an interview, he said the Oceanix concept has merit, but would need to be restricted to sheltered waters as designed.

Scale of course is perhaps the grandest challenge. There are plenty of floating structures around the world now. The low-lying Netherlands, long in the lead on such efforts, has a prototype floating dairy farm in Rotterdam, and is home to a new Global Center on Adaptation to climate change- housed in a floating building. But the farm is designed for 40 cows.

But Collins notes that the Oceanix concept centers on eventual mass manufacturing of the basic floating units, which can then be towed anywhere in the world, offering the same economies through manufacturing efficiency that so deeply cut the cost of everything from furniture to solar cells.

While the construction of such communities can be expensive, he said, an Oceanix "city" would be a bargain compared to the cost of housing onshore. And the societal value can be enormous in the world's fastest-growing cities, where housing shortages and costs place a particularly enormous burden on the poor.

Enthusiasm was expressed at the meeting by Joseph Stiglitz, the Columbia University Nobel laureate in economics who has built his career on studying policy paths to reducing inequality. "It's certainly worth trying," he said in an interview. "The only way you're going to find things out is to actually do these things."

He said the merit of moving offshore is the capacity to start from scratch, taking a holistic approach to shaping services and limiting costs and risks-both environmental and financial.

What would floating island life be like?

The meeting also identified political and social challenges.

How would residents of these communities be chosen? Students in the video link from Nairobi were less focused on the technology than on doubts about how such projects would lessen the world's rich-poor divide.

One observer in the seats fringing the central circular table wondered whether young people might feel isolated on such an artificial island, even connected by transportation to the coast. From Polynesia to North Africa, the allure of cities worldwide is magnified for the young, not only for jobs but also for arts, culture, creativity, connection.

Would island living be seen as a trap?

But another young person, Max Kessler, an engineering student from MIT, said he was eager to work on this kind of project.

"I grew up on an island in the Pacific Northwest," he said. "If we create something that can foster the kind of tight-knit culture and mentality of sustainability we had there, this is really doable."

Another participant noted that the community design would be ideal for the elderly, offering an important option for retirement housing as the percentage of elderly in populations swells in coming decades.

Urbanization and development are all about tradeoffs. If an option like floating annexes doesn't take hold, that could simply boost the prospects for more dredging and filling-the solutions of choice through the past century, which already say global sea levels rise about a foot.

The island nation state Singapore, through sand mining and imports and filling has expanded its size by almost a quarter since independence in 1965, according to the United Nations. But the environmental damage from the global sand industry and from the filling is limiting that option going forward.

It's no surprise, then, that later this month Singapore is holding a more expressly commercial event promoting offshore development-the World Conference on Floating Solutions.

Before the day was out, the idea gained a remarkable endorsement from Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed, who had dealt with excruciating coastal challenges as Nigeria's environment minister, particularly in another kind of floating city-Lagos's vast offshore Makoko slum, where several hundred thousand people live in a maze of tethered boats and rafts. ( Read Mohammed's full prepared remarks.)

She said it would take years, but perhaps this floating-community model could help there. "We really do have an opportunity to do something" in places like Makoko, she said. "We could take from our universities, young people, partners from outside, and turn this into a shining example of the possibilities for millions of people being able to live on a coast and not have to move inside if they didn't have to."

She said "frontier" ideas and innovations are essential as the world grapples with achieving sustainable development amid accelerating environmental and technological change. (In May, another United Nations branch will hold a Geneva session on the role of science and technology in accelerating progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals.)

"Our approaches to development and environmental sustainability in cities need a serious retooling to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow," Mohammed said, noting that cities are the main testing ground for new ideas and noting the urgency of climate vulnerability. "Floating cities can be part of our new arsenal of tools."

Andrew Revkin moderated the opening panels at the UN meeting but was not involved otherwise and his views, as always, are his own.
He's the Strategic Adviser for Environmental and Science Journalism at the National Geographic Society and haswritten on global warming for 30 years. He is the author of three books about climate, most recentlyWeather: An Illustrated History, from Cloud Atlases to Climate Change. He covered the environment for years at the New York Times.

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Floating cities could ease the world's housing crunch, the UN says

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This article was created in partnership with the National Geographic Society. The corridors and meeting rooms here bustled this week with a familiar-sounding mix of sessions, on "policy options for low fertility," the launch of "The State of Pacific Youth Report," the "International Day of Sport for Development and Peace."

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How to build a city from scratch (Media template)

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How to build a city from scratch (Media template)

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Some pointers to keep in mind for your summative (some humour included)

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Building a real city from scratch isn't like playing Minecraft, Civilization or SimCity. Well, it is a little. But problems arise in reality that don't come up in cyberspace, including vainglorious dictators, pompous architects, bureaucratic impedimenta and the fact that much of the best land is already inhabited by those intractable objects: pesky humans.

Nevertheless, after studying several urban planning projects around the world, we've mastered the step-by-step process of how to build your very own real city.

Step 1: Choose a location

Before you begin, you need a spot. Deserts, undeveloped jungles and uninhabited islands are popular: you don't want to sink your budget into detoxifying brownfield sites, bulldozing slums or fighting legal battles over ancestral land rights. Plus, very few camels attend planning meetings, still less are they capable of forming coherent objections to your masterplan for a desert metropolis.

Tajikistan's president, Emomali Rahmon, recently laid the foundation stone for Saihoon, a new city for 250,000 people on a 14,000-hectare (34,580-acre) desert site. When complete, it will have 19 residential districts, 50 schools, 40 sports centres, shopping centres and bazaars - and, my favourite design feature, 7,000 hectares (17,290 acres) of orchards blooming in the former desert. Egypt's new capital, too, is going to be built on sand - to the east of Cairo, its functionally inadequate predecessor. Meanwhile, President Teodoro Obiang is currently overseeing the creation of Oyala as his new capital deep in the jungle of Equatorial Guinea, remote from the seaborne assaults that have menaced the dictator and his government in the existing capital. Crystal Island was to be built on a river island near Moscow.

If you don't have a desert or uninhabited island to hand, build one. Songdo, the new city near Seoul in South Korea, is built on land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. In the early 1960s, Buckminster Fuller dreamed up a giant floating pyramid in Tokyo Bay which would have housed 1 million people - in part as a response to the problem of acquiring building land in Japan. Perhaps sadly, it never got built.

Step 2: Ensure a reliable water supply

This may sound elementary, but consider what happened to the city of Fatehpur Sikri. The Mughal emperor Akbar commenced the construction of this walled city in 1569, to serve as the Mughal capital. Over the next 15 years, he and his lackeys built royal palaces, harems, courts, mosques and private quarters, all from locally available red sandstone. Shortly after completion, however, Akbar abandoned Fatehpur ... in part because of inadequate water supplies.

Today, Rawabi - the first Israeli city built for Palestinians - has a similar problem. Work started in 2011 and, when complete, it will have homes for 40,000 residents, as well as cinemas, shopping malls, schools, landscaped walkways, office blocks, a conference centre, restaurants and cafes. But, until as recently as this spring, apartments stood empty because negotiations failed with Israeli authorities over connecting the city to the country's water grid.

Step 3: Ensure a reliable money supply

Again this may sound elementary, but you don't want to run out of liquidity halfway through building the high-speed train link to the financial quarter. There are various options available to you when it comes to securing the cash. Rawabi, denounced by some Palestinians for normalising Israeli occupation and by some Israelis for the possibility of providing a base for terrorists, has drawn a third of its $1bn (£640m) investment from the private Palestinian conglomerate Massar International, and the rest from Qatar.

Oyala has been described as " a multibillion-dollar plaything for Africa's longest-serving dictator" and is funded chiefly by oil, timber and gas revenues. Equatorial Guinea is the third largest sub-Saharan oil producer, and much of that money is being lavished on the new capital, which will have a championship golf course, the Library of Central Africa (which looks like a spaceship docked in a jungle clearing), a luxury hotel and a presidential villa. Meanwhile, according to the International Business Times, " the people are starving ".

In Egypt, the nameless 700 sq km city that is set to replace Cairo as the country's capital will be partly funded by Emirati businessman Mostafa Madbouly, who recently unveiled the £30bn project's plans. He told Guardian Cities that he already has the money to build at least 100 sq km of the new capital, including a new parliament. But he needs more: which is why he invited kings, presidents, 30 visiting emirs and hundreds of would-be investors to the March launch at Sharm el-Sheikh.

Step 4: Think about jobs

If your city is to be economically sustainable, it needs jobs. Herbert Girardet, author of Creating Sustainable Cities, argues that Egypt's planned new capital has a better chance of success than other purpose-built Egyptian cities, mainly because the vast government will be relocated there. Indeed, many of the most famous planned cities were new capitals - Brasilia, Canberra, Abuja, Canberra, Ottawa, New Delhi - that, whatever their other shortcomings, benefited from the employment opportunities and economic uplift of being a national administrative hub.

Step 5: Do not alienate locals

Don't do what they did in Lavasa. The first three of 100 smart cities that prime minister Narendra Modi is planning in India will be built as part of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, which the government aims will be a " global manufacturing and trading hub". They're planning animation and film studios, software-development companies, biotech labs, and law and architectural firms, focusing the knowledge industries at the heart of the "new India".

However, the 12,500-acre site has been controversial, upsetting some locals and environmental groups. In 2010, the Indian Environment and Forests ministry ordered that construction on Lavasa cease temporarily, saying the developers had failed to obtain the mandatory environmental clearances.

Step 6: Devise a masterplan

You don't even need to set foot in the country where your plans will be realised. For example, Garsdale Design, which specialises in masterplans for war-ravaged cities in Iraq, is a family practice operating out of a converted barn in the Yorkshire Dales. Such 3D modelling applications as Esri CityEngine make it possible to devise city masterplans for homes, sewerage, water and electrical systems and integrated public transport, and then to amend these plans according to the needs on the ground. Increasingly, too, masterplans involve setting out Wi-Fi hotspots, fibre-optic grids and sensors (more on this below).

Step 7: Integrate transport

Narendra Modi's 100 planned cities in India all involve integrated transport with bus rapid transport (or BRT, a sort of overground metro system), suburban trains and cycle networks. Smart transport might well mean digital parking meters that text you when a parking space opens up, or real-time transport displays that give data about traffic jams, availability of buses and train services. Helsinki - admittedly not a planned city, but a good model to follow - is going so far in the integrated transport direction as to say that private cars may soon be obsolete.

Step 8: Consider banning cars

Speaking of private cars being obsolete, Masdar City - designed by architects Fosters + Partners and being built by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company - has banned cars within its walls. Similarly, Dubai's Ziggurat Pyramid, a metropolis planned in 2008 to house 1 million people, would have made cars redundant - its public transportation system, which would run horizontally and vertically, would be more efficient than private vehicles. (Sadly, since 2008 we've heard little of this putatively carbon neutral pyramid.)

Step 9: Make rubbish clever

Forget bin lorries, fetid dumpsters and the excrescence that is the wheelie bin. At Lusail City in Qatar, they're planning a system of pneumatic tubes to transport rubbish to a central location for processing. At Songdo in South Korea, similarly, there are no rubbish trucks or bins in the street: all household waste is sucked into a vast underground network of tunnels and dispatched to waste-treatment centres where it is sorted and deodorised. Alternatively, information and communications technology can involve sensors that detect when waste disposal pickups are needed, or to measure energy consumption and emissions. Citizens may question whether they want ICT sensors checking their emissions. Ignore them. Whose city is this, anyway?

Step 10: Maximise connectivity

Broadband infrastructure that combines cable, optical fibre, and wireless networks is a basic requirement in such hi-tech cities as Songdo. What's more, if you're serious about creating a smart city, then you'll need so much fibreoptic cabling that it's not even funny - not enough just to ensure high-speed access to the internet, but also so that the sensors that are key to the development of intelligent solutions for the city can work properly. Otherwise you'll have created not so much a smart city as a stupid one.

Step 11: Aspire to carbon neutrality

Destiny, the Florida city that developer Anthony Pugilese wanted to be a Silicon Valley of green technology, was, for a while, held up as a model: it aimed to reduce waste to close to zero and to meet its energy needs entirely through renewable sources including solar, wind, geothermal and the world's largest hydrogen power plant. The city never got built: Florida authorities nixed the development, arguing that the ostensibly green and pleasant city amounted to urban sprawl.

Step 12: Start again, clown, you've forgotten parks

Look at your masterplan. Is it all sprawl and mall, dazzling plate glass, and more cloverleaf junctions than you can shake a stick at? Of course it is: most masterplans are. Humans can't flourish in that environment, as good planners increasingly realise. Lavasa, for instance, is the first Indian city to be planned according to the principles of New Urbanism, which advocates walkable cities that commingle business and residential development, offer mixed-income housing, and preserve green space. Songdo has been planned around a central park, and designed so that every resident can walk to work in the business district - a big draw for attracting new residents. Sixty per cent of Great City, a high-density metropolis outside Chengdu in China, will consist of buffer areas of gardens and greenery that are at most 10 minutes' walk from the city centre. And Egypt's planned new capital will have a park double the size of New York's Central Park.

Step 13: ... and culture

Abu Dhabi has splashed its oil cash on a cultural city called Saadiyat Island, a few miles off the coast. It features a branch of the Louvre, due to open this year, and before 2020 will also see a Guggenheim museum - designed, like the one in Bilbao, by Frank Gehry - and a Performing Arts Centre by Zaha Hadid. Just along the coast in Dubai, they're playing catchup with D3 (short for Dubai Design District), in tacit recognition of the fact that shopping malls and gyms aren't enough to make a city a decent place to live. Wags are already comparing the industrial Al Quoz area - which now has more than 30 galleries among its 1970s and 80s warehouses - to Shoreditch or Williamsburg. Just don't expect any illegal raves or warehouse parties. Meanwhile, in the Congolese jungle, the Dutch artist Renzo Martens is trying something similar - to create an arts scene in one of the most impoverished parts of the world and thereby gentrify the jungle.

Step 14: Please, not another funny-shaped island

Does the world really need another state-of-the-art golf course? (At Lavasa they obviously think so: along with the medical campus, luxury hotels, boarding schools and sports academies, there is a Nick Faldo-designed golf course.) The worry about new cities built from scratch is that, as anthropologist Nick Simcik Arese of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities puts it, they offer a "secessionary envelope" for the rich - a form of class apartheid. He argues that new cities often fail to provide enough jobs for poorer residents or affordable transport to areas where they could find more work.

It's an important point. Around the world, new cities often exclude all but the wealthiest. For instance, the least expensive apartments in Lavasa now sell for between $17,000 and $36,000 - well out of reach for most middle-class Indians. The developer says it has modified its plans to offer affordable rental apartments for young professionals. New cities are thus often confounded by the inverse relationship between maximising real-estate proceeds and making new cities livable. Or, to put it another way, if you want your new city to become something other than a ghost town or a large-scale gated community, it must be socially diverse.

What the world doesn't need is any more unimaginatively shaped developments for those with more money than sense, such as the Palm Islands in Dubai. The entire point of the islands is that you can see them from space. On the ground, however, it means long spits of land that don't connect to each other and leave you in a kind of endless residential street hellscape. Besides, what must our alien neighbours think?

Step 15: Make a statement

The Palm Islands might be ridiculous, but who wouldn't want to live in the world's first inhabited volcano? When, in 2008, Norman Foster unveiled plans for a new city on an island on the outskirts of Moscow, the centrepiece was to be (at that point) the tallest building in the world: 450m high, covering almost half a million square metres and with a total floor area of 2.5 million square metres, housing theatres, exhibition spaces, 3,000 hotel rooms, 900 serviced apartments and a school. " Crystal Island is one of the world's most ambitious building projects, and it represents a milestone in the 40-year history of the practice," he said. But the economic crisis put paid to the grandiose scheme, which is perhaps a shame. After all, what's the fun in building a new city if it doesn't look cool?

Step 16: Treat workers with respect

In 2013, Nepalese migrants working in Lusail City in Qatar told the Guardian that their employers were making them work long hours in the heat and were withholding pay to keep them from running away. The International Trade Union Confederation estimates that 4,000 workers will die in Qatar by 2022. The country's kafala system - where employers exercise broad power and influence over the lives of their workers - has been called modern-day slavery by human rights watchers. It doesn't have to be this way. Building a new city from scratch can be socially beneficial. For instance, perhaps one of at the most heartening features about the Palestinian new city of Rawabi is that one third of its engineers and architects are women, a gender balance without precedent in the Arab world.

Step 17: Build fast. No, faster ...

Egypt's new capital city, according to the developers' brochure, will have exactly 21 residential districts housing 5 million residents, span 700 sq km (a space almost as big as Singapore), with 663 hospitals and clinics, 1,250 mosques and churches, and 1.1m homes. Oh yes, and -according to the brochure - it will be built within the next five to seven years. No pressure.

Step 18: Re-educate your new urbanites

In Kangabashi, a new city for one million people in the Ordos region of Inner Mongolia, China, new residents are handed a welcome pack that includes fans and a list of instructions: "Don't spit, don't throw rubbish on the streets, don't play loud music, don't drive on the pavement," says the introductory brochure. The thinking is that most of the residents are country dwellers from nearby villages who don't know how to behave in cities. I know what you're thinking: when are the urbanites of London, New York and Paris going to get forcibly re-educated so they don't continue to befoul their built environment with their phlegm and unspeakable music?

When work started on Kangbashi five years ago, it was derided as a "ghost city". But rural workers are now indeed moving into the city's new high-rises, lured by generous compensation packages. The Chinese authorities' idea is that such cities help diversify the country's economy: subsistence farming was becoming less economically worthwhile, owing to poor soils and increasing water shortages. The enormous wealth of the region's coal industry helped pay for much of the city's infrastructure, and there was cheap land to build on. Kangbashi is just the beginning: a test run for Beijing's plans to urbanise the vast rural interior of China, and relocate 250 million farmers over the next two decades - a social experiment as much as an economic one.

Step 19: If you build it, they will come

As any planner knows, it doesn't matter how sophisticated your 3D-imaging software or how smart your urban vision. "The test will be when the hookers come there, when the gay pride parade is flagged off on the promenade, and an organisation of deviants has its annual convention in town," Ajit Gulabchand, the developer of Lavasa, has said. "I don't want to plan for that, but I'll be happy if it happens." Quite so: one of the pleasures of creating a city from scratch must surely be that it goes rogue and becomes something other than you imagined.

Step 20: Oh, yes - give it a name

The planned new capital of Egypt doesn't yet have a name, though the safe money says it won't be called Mubarakville, Cairo 2.0 or Sisi City - though I kind of like the last one. And what of the new city rising on the coast of the Red Sea? It has a lot of things going for it. It will house one of the largest sea ports in the world. It will provide more than a million jobs. And, if construction sticks to schedule, it will be complete by 2020. Only one problem: its called King Abdullah Economic City. Perhaps it sounds nicer in Arabic.

This article was amended on 7 July 2015 to remove allegations about the Lavasa project, which we accept were wrong.

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How to build a city from scratch: the handy step-by-step DIY guide

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From Songdo, South Korea to Lavasa, India via Egypt's unnamed new capital, everywhere you look it seems someone's building a brand-new city. How hard could it be?

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Barcelona: How the city grew, from pre-Christian Romans to Cerdà to the 1992 Olympics.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/8/18266760/barcelona-spain-urban-planning-history

preindustrial era --> Industrial era--> postindustrial era

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The emergence of cities is closely associated with a significant historical change, which we call the Neolithic Revolution. The Neolithic Revolution marked the transition from exploiting livelihood (hunting and gathering) to production livelihoods (breeding and cultivating = agriculture). It would not be possible to achieve permanent settlement of populations and the consequent emergence of the first cities without this conversion.

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https://worldpopulationhistory.org/urbanization-and-the-megacity/

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Formative

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Basic outline https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QhEByihrnQB_leIzKEu1VtkAFFt_q7p7RY3zmNuF_6g/edit?usp=sharing

Good examples of how cities have embraced smart growth principles
http://smartgrowth.org/smart-growth-principle-examples/

Malmö https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yZYXSsWnsg

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Of Sweden's population, 85 per cent live in urban areas. Slums do not exist in any conventional sense; virtually all homes in Sweden's cities have functioning water, sewage, heating and orderly street networks with lighting and functioning waste management. However, there is a certain level of overcrowding. According to the norm applied in Sweden, a household is considered overcrowded if more than one person per bedroom lives in the home. Cohabiting couples can, however, share a bedroom, while children are to have their own bedrooms. A person living alone in a one-room apartment is considered overcrowded. With these definitions, 16 per cent of all persons aged 16 and older, were living in overcrowded conditions in 2014 and 2015. Six years earlier, the proportion was just under 15 per cent.

A comparison between urban growth in terms of area and urban growth in terms of population 1960-2015 shows that the growth of cities in terms of area since 1980 was greater than their population growth, i.e. urban areas use relatively more land per resident.

The quantity of particles in the air is of great importance for the health of the population, not least in urban areas, and the Swedish environmental objectives system has an environmental quality objective for clean air. Achieving this requires, inter alia, reduced emissions of nitrogen oxides and particles. The most recent follow-up using data from 19 Swedish urban areas shows that the development for air quality is largely positive, but that the objective will not be achieved.

Legislation and other rules exist for urban planning, which requires consultation with civil society and residents in areas to be developed, altered or planned for the future. A new policy for the designed living environment, architecture, form and design is currently being prepared at the Government Offices and aims to strengthen qualities in both urban and rural living environments.

Access to nearby green areas is in general relatively good in cities in Sweden. The proportion of the population in the 37 biggest cities with access to green areas within 200 metres of their home was 92 per cent in 2010.

As of 2015, the Swedish Discrimination Act (2008:567) states that inadequate accessibility can be a form of discrimination. Accessibility and usability need to be seen in the light of the population's diversity and are a prerequisite for an inclusive urban and social life.

Household waste is disposed of in organised forms using various treatment methods. Of the proportion of household waste that was recycled in 2015, 49 per cent went to energy recovery; 35 per cent to recycling; 15 per cent to biological
recycling and 0.8 per cent to landfill.

The total proportion of the population subjected to violent crime, that is assault, threats or mugging, amounted to 6.8 per cent in 2015. The proportion subjected to assault was 2 per cent, the proportion subjected to threats 5 per
cent, and the proportion subjected to mugging 0.9 per cent. Sexual offences are not included in the combined figure for violent crime above. The proportion of the population subjected to sexual offences amounted to 1.7 per cent in 2015.

Men are subjected to assault, robbery and fraud to a greater extent, while women are more often subjected to sexual offences, threats and harassment. In an international perspective, Sweden is affected by few fatalities and injuries due to major natural disasters. There are no comprehensive national calculations of economic losses caused by natural disasters.

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Sustainable Cities & Communities - Smart City Sweden

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Of Sweden's population, 85 per cent live in urban areas. Slums do not exist in any conventional sense; virtually all homes in Sweden's cities have functioning water, sewage, heating and orderly street networks with lighting and functioning waste management. However, there is a certain level of overcrowding.

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In LA, poverty on Skid Row defies US’ humane reputation

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Analyze a city

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Urban land use
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_ge7Z_wXGI

Urban model - Map/diagram (template) of the way land is used in a city.

Shows you “what’s going on, where things are and why things might change”

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Although every LEDC city has its own characteristics, models can be used to illustrate a typical LEDC city.

Both MEDC and LEDC cities have a CBD - often the oldest part of the city.

In LEDCs the poorest housing is found on the edge of the city - in contrast to MEDC cities whose suburban fringe is very often a place of high quality housing. The areas of poor quality housing found on the edge of cities in LEDCs are called squatter settlements or shanty towns .

Land use in São Paulo, Brazil

The below pictures show two very different areas of São Paulo in Brazil - the CBD and an outer-lying shanty town.

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Urban models in LEDCs - Revision 1 - GCSE Geography - BBC Bitesize

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1 2 Page 1of 2 Although every LEDC city has its own characteristics, models can be used to illustrate a typical LEDC city. Both MEDC and LEDC cities have a CBD - often the oldest part of the city.