Articles in "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.

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.

An initiative launched in 2011 by U.S. President Barack Obama and Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff stands at the vanguard of policy innovation to spur inclusive and equitable economic development through sustainable and resilient urban investment. Showcased at the Rio+20 Conference in June, the U.S.-Brazil Joint Initiative on Urban Sustainability (JIUS) aims to catalyze infrastructure investment in “smart cities,” beginning with Philadelphia and Rio de Janeiro. Building on Philadelphia’s aspiration to become a leading “green city,” and recognizing the reality that Rio de Janeiro must undertake extensive infrastructure investment before the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, the JIUS (pronounced “juice”) strives to create a new paradigm for integrated urban investment that is socially and environmentally sound.

World cities are shaped as much by their own histories and ambitions as by their relationships with each other and the rest of the world. This is the story of New York, London and the financial crisis that threatens to pull them apart. The narrative starts with the fierce competition between the two cities in the first years of the new century and ends with the spate of scandals that rocked the transatlantic banking community in the early 2010s.

Most insurgencies have been quintessentially rural struggles. Guerrilla bands have historically relied on dense, leafy jungles and rugged mountains to organize clandestine resistance movements. But urbanization and population growth have contributed to the rise of campaigns in teeming cities such as Baghdad and Damascus. This trend toward urban insurgencies likely will have a profound impact on the nature of insurgency and counterinsurgency.

South America’s famed megacities are among the most heavily populated in the world.Consider four of the largest metropolitan areas in the region: São Paulo (19.96 million), Rio de Janeiro (11.84 million), Lima (8.77 million) and Bogotá (8.26 million). Lima and Bogotá are the capital cities of their countries. Rio de Janeiro was the capital of Brazil until the 1960s, when the capital moved inland to the city of Brasília. São Paulo is the largest metropolis and industrial complex on the subcontinent.

Growing up in what by the 1980s was the biggest metropolis in the world, my friends and I thought we were very tough. Taking to heart the naïve view that “things that do not kill you make you stronger,” there was plenty to choose from in Mexico City. To name but a few, the city had the worst quality air anywhere, and we still managed to play soccer, basketball and water polo at 7,300 feet above sea level without collapsing. We learned fortitude and patience from the three-plus hours lost in traffic as we fulfilled our daily obligations. We developed good negotiating skills, given that by 18 or 19 years of age we each had been mugged at knife or gunpoint at least a couple times without suffering major consequences. Of course, our smugness was baseless because we were among the lucky minority to have been raised in middle-class or well-to-do households, and therefore our exposure to the dangers and hazards of the city were minuscule in relative terms.

Along the periphery of Cape Town, the shantytown of Khayelitsha extends across the Cape Flats from the main highway to the horizon, a broad field of glinting tin, cardboard and plastic sheeting. The best current estimates place the population above 400,000, a community larger than Atlanta or Miami. This informal settlement is rivaled in size by Nairobi's Kibera slum, where 300,000 live in even more dire circumstances, without access to sanitation, electricity or effective public transport. The predicament of these slum dwellers is offset by the dynamism of downtown Cape Town

In the story of human history, the city quickly emerges as the main protagonist, leaving the countryside in a supporting role. As historian Samuel Kramer tells it in his widely read account, it was with the rise of the ancient city of Sumer that “history begins.” There, the development of an urban way of life accompanied by specialization and commercial activity added impetus to the development of many new technologies. The need for sophisticated record keeping, for example, went hand-in-hand with the revolutionary development of cuneiform script.