Features

Baltimore was the sixth-largest city in the United States in 1950, home to nearly 1 million people. But over the next 50 years, nearly a third of that population seeped away. The city fell out of the nation’s top 10 and wrestled painfully with the challenges of urban decline.

If we are in the midst of the "century of cities," then the world's mayors will be in the spotlight more than ever before as they try to solve the most pressing urban problems. That has been the case for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has made headlines for bold approaches to issues such as public health and climate change. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy this past fall, Bloomberg, a 1964 Johns Hopkins University graduate, took time to answer SAISPHERE's questions about rebuilding a city in the wake of a natural disaster, as well as the roles cities and their mayors must play in leading policy change to benefit the public.

For the first time in history, more than half of the world's population lives in cities. An estimated 200,000 people move from rural to urban areas every day—about enough to create a new New York City every month. More than 90 percent of this migration is occurring in developing countries.