Emerging economies is one of four scans that forms part of The Economics of the Built Environment theme for RIBA Horizons 2034.
The urban population in emerging economies will grow significantly in the coming decade, with the African continent predicted to see the fastest increase. This growth has the potential to stimulate prosperity and lift people out of poverty, as it did in China a decade ago.
However, strategies used in the past might not work today. New and forward-looking ideas are needed to reduce social inequality and create sustainable pathways to urban development, all without aggravating the global environmental and climate crisis. This is a call for built environment professionals to transform their practice so that the cities of the future are reconciled with nature and generate opportunities for all.
Therefore, this horizon scan aims to explore not just the potential costs of and bottlenecks to this great urban transformation, but also its opportunities, and how architects and urban planners can positively shape it.
Two caveats need to be added.
First, the current global context is complex and uncertain. Multiple socio-economic, environmental, institutional, and especially urban crises – which are particularly acute in fast-changing countries – are becoming “causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects”. [1] Architects must wake up to the impact of these forces, upgrade their competence to respond to them, and adjust their design solutions accordingly.
Second, this uncertainty coincides with what has been called ‘the end of illusions’. The illusions were that, after decades of relatively stable global economic growth leading up to the 21st century, improving the world’s economic health was possible. As it turned out, though, globalisation was not beneficial for all. Economic interdependency between countries did not always reinforce multilateralism and common understandings. By integrating into this global system, emerging economies did not necessarily embark on economic growth through modernisation, opening up to market opportunities, and democratising their processes. [2]
This shattering of old certainties has given rise to new questions. Which solutions should be implemented to enhance the quality of cities and their economic functioning? What forms of international collaboration should be envisioned? And what should be the profession’s ethical response to the changing transnational context?
Trade-offs for a built environment in emerging countries facing multiple crises
Since the world has surpassed eight billion inhabitants in 2022, it is worth noting that more than a quarter of this total has been added almost entirely in emerging economies over the last 25 years. Additionally, the global population is predicted to rise by an additional 1.6 billion by 2050, more than 90% of which will be in emerging countries. While Asia has led demographic growth over the past 25 years, Africa is expected to take over for the next 25 years. [3]
The proportion of the world’s population living in cities is due to increase everywhere, concentrating in larger cities. By 2030, a projected 28% of people will live in cities with over 1 million people, and nine of the 10 projected mega-cities, i.e., with populations of over 10 million people, will be located in the emerging world. [4]
In the second half of the 20th century, the astonishing development of East Asia was primarily attributed to the state's role in steering growth. In the case of China, development was the result of stimulating market-oriented mechanisms for industrial development while at the same time strictly controlling domestic mass migrations and large-scale land development processes. [5] The fact that today China is showing signs of demographic and economic slowdown, while African cities are predicted to grow hugely, is generating a new discourse about the African miracle. [6]
Whether Africa will be able to replicate the Asian trajectory and manage its massive urbanisation effectively is, however, open for discussion – not least by Anthony Venables in his horizon scan about interconnectedness. [7] Africa still has problems associated with urban sprawl, lack of infrastructure and large-scale informal settlements. This means that so-called agglomeration economies, i.e., the benefits that accrue when firms and people come together, may not lead to shared prosperity. [8]
In 2014, the World Bank praised China for its socially considerate urban development model, which had prevented the formation of slums, and for its unprecedented investment in infrastructure. However, they warned against the rising environmental and health costs of such a model and the potential future shortcomings of its entrepreneurial governance for municipal finance and real estate development. [9]
Understanding such critical trade-offs sheds light on the narrow margin for realising the economic potential of the built environment sustainably. For example, forecasts for the economic performance of the global construction sector are promising. The sector is predicted to reach 13.5% of global GDP by 2030, with almost 60% growth in emerging markets alone. [10]
However, the sector is currently responsible for around 21% of global greenhouse gas emissions. If this continues at the same pace, the economic good will be at the expense of the environment. [11]
To sustainably reap the global construction’s economic benefits, the sector must decarbonise and, critically, retrofit the existing housing stock. This is especially true in hot climatic regions where there is an increasing demand for cooling and, because so much housing is in informal settlements, low resilience to climate change. It is unclear how much of this housing stock will be in fast-growing cities and whether it will be accompanied by appropriate urban planning policies.
This gives a picture of the massive challenges ahead. The emergence of multiple overlapping issues, such as mitigation versus adaptation and economic development versus public health, requires strong political visions and tough choices.
Competence of architects and planners in and for emerging countries: the need to do ‘something more’
Architects’ and urban planners’ competence to tackle these challenges needs to be enhanced. There is also a critical shortage of these professionals in emerging countries, especially in areas where the challenges pose the greatest risks. [12]
Of course, problems will not be resolved simply by adding suitably competent architects and planners. There is the feeling that, as in the early 20th-century debate about the evolution of the architecture profession, ‘something more’ is needed. [13]
Complex urban problems need holistic design thinking, integration of knowledge, and anticipatory approaches. City designers will have to navigate the challenges of operating in different and, in some cases, weak institutional environments, and under unpredictable conditions. They will be expected not just to design buildings and cities, but also to manage multi-stakeholder and multi-scalar processes, collaborating to enable long-lasting transformations. [14]
Architects’ and urban planners’ educational curricula should be updated, too. They will need to be equipped with suitably context-based understandings of places and the skills to deal with culturally sensitive issues. At the same time, they need to rise to the professional challenges of digitisation and AI. The legacies of cities, including their inhabitants’ traditions and indigenous knowledge, will need to be reassessed, possibly reused, but not erased, in ambitious, innovative urban futures.
What a sustainable city should look like: signs of change
The latest UN-HABITAT report on the future of cities describes an optimistic scenario of “collaborative, well-coordinated and effective multi-lateral interventions”, and calls for major efforts to localise global agendas to improve people’s lives. It recognises, however, that the goal of eradicating poverty by 2030 is unlikely, and the objective of reducing the number of people living in inadequate housing is still far from reach.
The key to moving from business-as-usual practices, which are dangerously unsustainable, towards more ambitious urban futures lies in the capacity to envision long-term action in the face of multiple crises – which have become the norm in many countries. These include the difficult and unequal global recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate emergency, and the tensions caused by wars and conflicts. [15]
In times of crisis, it is worth turning to the lessons of history – its pathways and trends, ruptures and experiments – and interpreting them for meaningful foresight. Identifying even small signs of past innovative change is essential in that it stimulates creative imagination and alternatives.
By comparing Asian urban development, and China’s in particular, with that of current emerging economies, one might conclude that dirigisme, state interventionism, alongside resource control are the keys to success. However, this may be no longer viable, or desirable, given the side effects of such a model.
There’s a danger, however, of eliminating the valuable as well as the inappropriate. Chinese municipal governments’ experiments included some interesting approaches. For example, they devised strategies for collaborative urban micro-regeneration, flood-resilient built environments (sponge cities), and, more recently, a massive revitalisation of the countryside. [16]
A few emerging countries have attempted, not always successfully, to shift their development away from a model based on manufacturing and cheap labour to one based on a more advanced knowledge-based economy. The idea is to avoid the so-called ‘middle income trap’. [17] This has resulted in increasing investment in high quality urban space and rural restructuring, new infrastructure, including for higher education, and new service industries such as finance, retail and tourism.
At the same time, people have experimented with more radical and equity-oriented ways to transform their cities. For example, they have linked urban development to the constitution of new urban commons, circular economies, the re-naturing of cities, and the democratisation of urban processes. [18] Taking these aspects together, a more fine-tuned understanding of emerging countries as potentially extraordinary laboratories of innovation may emerge.
Future built environment professionals in a complex world
Built environment professionals’ involvement could be game-changing in shaping cities’ long-term sustainability. As well as having more of them where they are needed and ensuring that their skillsets are properly upgraded, these built environment professionals will need to position themselves effectively in a changing geo-political context.
We have seen the end of illusions. Countries may act against the internationalist spirit that broadly characterises the architecture and planning professions, [19] thus creating barriers to collaboration. While potentially problematic, this is also a spur to reflect critically on how to overcome these barriers by avoiding the mistakes of the past. The complex interdependency of global economies and their common urban challenges requires that built environment professionals operate beyond national boundaries.
Examples like China and the Gulf countries show that virtuous processes of urban development can generate international professional opportunities and new educational ventures. In turn, this can stimulate the formation of a more mature professional class locally.
The solution is not that simple, however. Emerging countries that lack urban infrastructure and skilled professionals may not be able to develop in the absence of processes of economic opening up. Even where the same modernisation process has been tried, it has, in some cases, been contested, generating abstract urban formations, scarcely related to the everyday life of people.
Behind a supposedly progressive Westernisation, development assistance, which is generally unilateral, may have resulted in extractive architectural and urban outcomes – in other words, purely for profit, with little regard for social or environmental benefits.
To be credible, new multilateral collaborations need to be built on a different basis. They must be more responsive to the diversity of local contexts and designed to enable regenerative processes. They must forge more mature and equal partnerships between countries in the Global North and the Global South.
Models of development reimagined
The range of models for managing the built environment and stimulating the economic potential of emerging countries have generally only partially responded to the complexity of problems on the ground. Given the imperative to limit global warming, the world can hardly afford another wave of massive urbanisation without decoupling its environmental harm and without fostering more transformative and inclusive processes.
To create sustainable, resilient cities, fresh models of development are needed. What they will look like is hard to foresee but built environment professionals will contribute constructively to it. To do so, they need a new set of skills. They must be able to respond effectively to the complex challenge of how agglomeration economies are achieved in emerging countries. They must consider the challenge’s multiple scales, dimensions, unaccounted costs and trade-offs, anticipating possible solutions. And they must develop the awareness needed to open up a frank, honest and mutually beneficial dialogue between people and places all over the world.
Author biography
Giulio Verdini has a PhD in Urban and Regional Development. He is a Reader at the School of Architecture and Cities of the University of Westminster, leading the MA course in International Planning and Sustainable Development. He is also a Visiting Professor at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco.
He has held academic positions at the Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University in Suzhou China and consulted for UNESCO, UN Tourism (formerly UNWTO), Union for the Mediterranean, Cities Alliance, and The King’s Foundation.
RIBA Horizons 2034 sponsored by Autodesk
References
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[2] B. Tartrais (2023). La Guerre des Mondes. Le retour de la géopolitique et le choc des empires. L’Observatoire
[3] United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (n.d.). Total and urban population
[4] United Nations (2018). The World’s Cities in 2018: Data Booklet (Statistical paper)
[5] B. Naughton and K. S. Tsai (Eds.) (2015). State capitalism, institutional adaptation, and the Chinese miracle. Cambridge University Press
[6] The Washington Post - M. Bearak, D. Moriarty and J. Ledur (19 November 2021). Africa’s Rising Cities. How Africa will become the center of the world’s urban future
[7] RIBA - A. J. Venables (2024). Interconnectedness and specialisation: the economic geography of the built environment
[8] International Institute for Environment and Development - A. Turok (5 February 2024), Rethinking urbanisation and economic development
[9] World Bank and The People’s Republic of China Development Research Center of the State Council (2014). China’s Urbanization and Land: A Framework for Reform. Chapter 4 in Urban China: Toward Efficient, Inclusive, and Sustainable Urbanization
[10] Oxford Economics - Marsh and Guy Carpenter & Company (2021). Future of Construction: A Global Forecast for Construction to 2030
[11] United Nations Environment Programme (2024). Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction - Beyond foundations: Mainstreaming sustainable solutions to cut emissions from the buildings sector
[12] Commonwealth Association of Architects, Commonwealth Association of Planners, Commonwealth Association of Surveyors and Land Economics, and Commonwealth Engineers Council (2020). Planning for climate change and rapid urbanisation: survey of the built environment professions in the Commonwealth
[13] S. Davoudi and J. Pendlebury (2010). Centenary Paper: The Evolution of Planning as an Academic Discipline. In Town Planning Review, 81(6), 613-645
[14] J. Fokdal, O. Bina, P. Chiles, L. Ojamäe and K. Paadam (2021). Enabling the City: Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplnary Encounters in Research and Practice. Routledge
[15] UN-Habitat - United Nations Human Settlements Programme (2022). World Cities Report 2022. Envisaging the Future of Cities
[16] G. Verdini and l. Zhang (2020). Urban China: The Tortuous Path Towards Sustainability. In Planning Theory & Practice, 21(2), 330–336
[17] Asian Development Bank (2011). Asia 2050: Realizing the Asian Century Executive Summary
[18] Barcelona - United Cities and Local Governments (2022). Pathways to urban and territorial equality: Addressing inequalities through local transformation strategies
[19] Palgrave Macmillan - O. Sykes, D. Shaw and B. Webb (2023). International Planning Studies: An Introduction
