Urbanisation is one of four scans that forms part of the Population Change theme for RIBA Horizons 2034.
The United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goal 11 recognises the importance of cities as contributors to sustainable development, which seeks to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”. [1]
Indeed, UN-Habitat estimates that 65% of the 169 targets underpinning the 17 Sustainable Development Goals are attributable to urban and territorial development. [2] Little wonder then that urbanisation is now recognised as one of the five global megatrends [3] or that, in a speech delivered before the Rio Earth Summit in 2012, the then UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon, said that “our struggle for global sustainability will be won or lost in cities”. [4]
Today, just over half the world’s population are urban dwellers. By 2050, UN-Habitat predicts that two out of every three people will be living in cities. [5] That’s an increase of 2.5 billion more urban dwellers, 95% of whom will be in Asia and Africa, where 95% of the cities most at risk from the impact of climate change are to be found. [6]
Nearly half of the growth in the number of people living in cities is predicted to be in Commonwealth countries. This doubles the Commonwealth's urban population, from 1 billion to 2 billion urban dwellers in less than 30 years.
The foundations for tomorrow’s cities are being laid today and, as we look forward to 2034, architects and their professional bodies, such as the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), clearly have a critical role to play. So, how well-equipped are we to deal with the challenges ahead and what are the main issues to be faced?
A tale of two city types
In its World Cities Report 2022, published by UN-Habitat in the shadow of the global pandemic, the authors recognised that responding to climate change vulnerability and rising levels of inequality are global concerns. Even so, the key priorities confronting developed countries in the Global North are different to those facing developing countries in the Global South. [7]
Historically, cities in Europe and North America developed over time as a result of agglomeration. This is where the clustering of firms in a variety of sectors brought advantages that led to the development of large, diverse cities.
The advantages included abundant employment prospects that attracted a skilled labour force. In turn, this facilitated economies of scale which resulted in greater productivity, higher wages and a better quality of life due to increased levels of social and cultural engagement.
Such has been the success of urbanisation, particularly in industrialised countries, that today more than 80% of global gross domestic production is generated in cities. [8] Indeed, many of the world’s wealthiest cities, such as New York and Tokyo, now qualify as megacities, with populations of over 10 million residents.
But urbanisation is not without its challenges, not least the fact that today’s cities consume over 70% of the world's energy and produce more than 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions. [9] So, while no country has prospered economically without first urbanising, equally, no city has grown without also significantly increasing its carbon footprint.
The imperatives for cities in the Global North are therefore to rapidly decarbonise by plotting a course towards a net zero future. This means upgrading and modernising ageing infrastructure and revitalising urban centres while meeting the needs of an ageing population.
The pattern of urbanisation over the past few decades in many parts of Africa and Asia has been distinctly different. They have experienced significant levels of rural-to-urban migration aggravated by increasing numbers of people affected by forced displacement due to conflicts and natural disasters.
This has led to rapid urbanisation that has overwhelmed many city authorities’ capacity to respond, resulting in large numbers of informal settlements, which in turn has led to inequality and vulnerability. [10]
Such unplanned growth is characterised by low density development, which has frequently resulted in uncontrolled urban sprawl. The area of the city has expanded out of all proportion to population growth, with damaging consequences. Not only has it led to the loss of productive agricultural land and damage to precious ecosystems, but it has also meant that basic utilities and social infrastructure have not been able to keep up.
There is typically a lack of basic services (for the provision of energy, waste treatment, and water) together with a lack of access to facilities such as education, healthcare and public transport. Needless to say, these all have correspondingly negative impacts on social, economic and environmental wellbeing.
Therefore, the imperatives for cities in rapidly urbanising countries are to address rising levels of poverty and the challenge of slums, and to provide basic services together with adequate affordable housing.
In many countries, such challenges are compounded by high levels of youth unemployment and the difficulty of accessing finance. Consider that the median age in the UK, which has a population of 67 million, is around 40 while the median age in Uganda, with a population of 45 million, is just 16.
Revealing the capacity gap
As we entered the Decade of Action [11] to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals in 2020, the Commonwealth Association of Architects (CAA), along with its planning, engineering, and surveying counterparts, published a survey of the built environment professions in the Commonwealth. Their objective was to establish how well-prepared the professions were to deal with the challenges ahead. There were three key findings. [12]
1. Lack of professional capacity
First, they found a critical lack of capacity among built environment professionals in several Commonwealth countries, many of which are urbanising rapidly and are among the most vulnerable to climate change impacts.
The capacity gap was most acute in the public sector and in secondary and intermediate cities, which are urbanising just as fast as their larger counterparts. For example, while the UK has approximately 40,000 registered architects in a country urbanising at less than 0.5% per annum, Uganda has barely 300 architects in a country urbanising at over 5% per annum. The situation is even more acute in the case of town planning.
2. Lack of educational capacity
Second, they found a corresponding lack of educational and institutional capacity to grow the profession fast enough to make up the shortfall in these same countries. This situation was often aggravated by a shortage of experienced teaching faculty, an outdated curriculum and a lack of the mandatory continuing professional development necessary to maintain competency among both faculty and practitioners. The UK, for example, has 61 schools of architecture whereas Uganda has just four.
3. Poor governance
Third, they found that these countries’ built environment policies, including their planning policies and building codes, were weak in terms of standards, implementation and enforcement.
The size of the risk associated with this finding is thrown into sharp relief by research from the International Energy Agency. It anticipates that around 90 billion square metres of additional floorspace will be built in Africa in the next 40 years, [13] yet there are barely a handful of countries on the entire continent that currently operate mandatory building energy codes. [14]
Rising to the challenge
Such is the nature, scale and complexity of the challenges ahead that the coming decade will be make or break for cities and the planet. Together with their professional institutes, architects have a pivotal role to play – especially in the areas of advocacy, capacity building and climate action.
Advocacy
Central to this effort is the need for built environment professionals to work much more collaboratively and at scale, not only across built environment disciplines but also with economists, researchers and others to advocate for the value of sustainable development.
A critical objective is to help policymakers in both central and local government to make better evidence-informed decisions on built environment issues. The Declaration on Sustainable Urbanisation, which was adopted by 56 heads of government at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 2022, is a good example of what is needed. [15]
It recognised the Call to Action published by the Commonwealth Sustainable Cities Initiative, of which the CAA was a founding member. [16] The message is increasingly getting through. For example, the 2023 G7 Urban Development Ministers Meeting in Japan illustrates that governments understand the issues. [17]
Unfortunately, these examples are the exception rather than the rule. The voice of built environment professionals is missing from many critically important policymaking forums. The sector needs to work harder and smarter to make themselves heard, helping to bridge the gap between policy and practice by bringing their experience, creativity and design thinking to bear.
Building capacity
Capacity-building and knowledge-sharing are vital if the critical issues identified in the Survey of the Built Environment Professions in the Commonwealth are to be addressed. The UK Built Environment Advisory Group (UKBEAG), a collaboration between RIBA, the Royal Town Planning Institute, the Institution of Structural Engineers and the Landscape Institute, demonstrates how uniquely well-placed professional institutes are to work with national governments and development partners around the world.
For example, UKBEAG worked with UN-Habitat on the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s (FCDO) Global Future Cities Programme to support 19 cities in 10 low- and middle-income countries on 30 projects in the areas of resilience, transportation and urban planning. [18]
RIBA is also a member of the CAA Knowledge Sharing Partnership, bringing together 16 member organisations from around the five regions of the Commonwealth to work together on shared challenges.
Climate action
Effective climate action is by far the most important and pressing aspect of the work ahead, in terms of mitigation, adaptation and climate justice. Analysis by the CAA has revealed that half of carbon emissions from Commonwealth countries is attributable to just 10% of their combined population and that these people live mainly in the industrialised countries in the Global North.
The other half of total Commonwealth carbon emissions is attributable to the remaining 90% of the population, who mostly reside in the countries that are urbanising most rapidly.
This highlights the imperative to address the issues in both urbanised and urbanising countries simultaneously. Built environment professionals need to bring their collective knowledge and expertise to bear across a broad front – including policymakers, practitioners, and the public – to ensure a just transition while leaving no one and no place behind.
The architectural community is responding to these challenges in a myriad of different ways.
At the University of East London, for example, researchers are making good progress with the development of a bio-based building material called ‘Sugarcrete’. [19] It uses the waste from sugar cane (the world’s largest crop by volume) together with non-cementitious binders to manufacture a range of products including insulating panels and load-bearing blocks.
Countries in the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific have already shown considerable interest in the material, and the project has recently been shortlisted for the Earthshot Prize.
The Architects Climate Action Network is a network of individuals within architecture and related built environment professions taking action to address the twin crises of climate and ecological breakdown. It is working together with RIBA and the Standing Conference on Schools of Architecture to develop teaching materials for both practitioners and teaching faculty to accelerate climate literacy and sustainable practice throughout the profession.
Other organisations are contributing. For example, the Feilden Foundation, the charitable arm of Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, not only helps to deliver community facilities across East Africa but recently secured funding from ENABEL, the Belgian government’s development agency, to develop a training programme for passive design strategies called the Manifesto for Climate Responsive Design. [20]
Other roles
There are plenty of other roles for built environment professionals, not least in connection with their technical know-how. For example, the CAA is leveraging its network to support the rollout of the IFC Edge Designing for Greater Efficiency training programme among teaching faculty throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. [21]
CAA has also been working with the Ordnance Survey to use artificial intelligence to produce digital base maps, the object being to provide local governments with a starting point for better planning.
The pilot programme, which focused on Lusaka in Zambia – a city of 3.5 million people, 65% of whom live in informal settlements – enabled its base map to be completed in less than a tenth of the time it would have taken by traditional means. [22] Importantly, the technology is scalable and replicable.
Leadership for a better future
The key findings from FCDO’s Global Future Cities Programme identified five common areas of weakness in many of its subject cities. These were:
- a lack of integrated and inclusive planning
- a weakness in governance and collaboration
- the ineffective use of data and lack of evidence-based policymaking
- poor business case preparation and weak procurement practices, combined with poor monitoring and evaluation, implementation and enforcement
The overarching lesson from the programme was the critical importance of effective leadership. As we face the nature and scale of the challenges ahead, we must all be leaders now.
Author biography
Peter Oborn, RIBA RIAS HonMRAIC HonMRTPI HonFIStructE HonRAIA, currently serves as President of the Commonwealth Association of Architects and is a member of the UN-Habitat Stakeholder Advisory Group Enterprise (SAGE).
Following a successful career in private practice, Peter has spent the past decade addressing the challenges of sustainable development at city scale, working with national governments, local governments, and fellow built environment professionals around the world.
RIBA Horizons 2034 sponsored by Autodesk
References
[1] United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (n.d.). Goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
[2] Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (n.d.). OECD Programme on a Territorial Approach to the SDGs
[3] United Nations (2020). Report of the UN Economist Network for the UN 75th Anniversary: Shaping the Trends of Our Time
[4] United Nations - Ban Ki-moon (23 April 2012). ‘Our Struggle for Global Sustainability Will Be Won or Lost in Cities,’ Says Secretary-General, at New York Event (speech).
[5] United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2019). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision (ST/ESA/SER.A/420)
[6] Verisk Maplecroft (2018). 84% of world’s fastest growing cities face ‘extreme’ climate change risks
[7] United Nations Human Settlement Programme, UN-Habitat (2022). World Cities Report 2022: Envisaging the Future of Cities
[8] The World Bank (n.d.). Urban Development
[9] United Nations (n.d.). Climate Action: Generating Power
[10] African Cities Research Consortium, The University of Manchester - S. Ouma, D.C. Beltrame, D. Mitlin and B. Chitekwe-Biti (2024). Informal settlements: Domain report (ACRC Working Paper 2024-9)
[11] United Nations (n.d.). Decade of Action
[12] Commonwealth Association of Architects, Commonwealth Association of Planners, Commonwealth Association of Surveying and Land Economy, Commonwealth Engineers Council - P. Oborn and J. Walters (2020). Planning for climate change and rapid urbanisation: survey of the built environment professionals in the Commonwealth
[13] Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction - International Energy Agency (2017). Global status report 2017: Towards a zero-emission, efficient and resilient buildings and construction sector, p. 8
[14] International Energy Agency (2022). All countries targeted for zero-carbon-ready codes for new buildings by 2030
[15] Commonwealth Sustainable Cities Initiative (27 June 2022). Commonwealth Heads of Government Adopt Declaration on Sustainable Urbanisation
[16] Commonwealth Sustainable Cities Initiative (2021). Call to Action on Sustainable Urbanisation Across the Commonwealth
[17] G7 Sustainable Urban Development Ministers (8 July 2023). G7 Sustainable Urban Development Ministers’ Communique: Achieving Sustainable Urban Development Together
[18] Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (n.d.). The Global Future Cities Programme
[19] University of East London and the Sustainability Research Institute (n.d.) Sugarcrete
[20] Feilden Foundation - P. Clegg and I. Sandeman (2019). A Manifesto for Climate Responsive Design: proceedings of a conference on raising awareness of Climate Responsive Design in East Africa, 27 to 28 February 2019
[21] International Finance Corporation - M. Farrell and P. Oborn (17 July 2023). IFC Edge and the Commonwealth Association of Architects collaborate to accelerate climate literacy among built environment professionals across the Commonwealth
[22] Ordnance Survey (14 October 2022). Informing nationwide development through new AI land mapping: automating base maps in Zambia – one year later
