Section A: Urban Issues And Challenges

Somewhere around 2007 the human species crossed a line it had been walking towards for ten thousand years: for the first time, more of us lived in towns and cities than in the countryside. By 2018 the figure was about 55 per cent, and the United Nations expects roughly 68 per cent by 2050. Almost all of that growth is happening in lower income countries and newly emerging economies, and almost all of it is happening faster than anyone can build sewers.

This lesson takes you into two very different urban worlds. First a major city in a newly emerging economy, Mumbai, where growth has delivered extraordinary opportunity and extraordinary hardship on the same street, and where a slum of roughly a square mile contains a recycling industry the city could not function without. Then the world cities, London and New York, which the specification names for you, where the challenge is not building fast enough but managing wealth, inequality, waste and traffic in places that have been global for centuries. You will finish able to argue about whether urban planning really improves life for the urban poor, and whether a flagship regeneration project benefits the people who were already there.