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“No country has ever fully developed without urbanising,” World Bank Senior Economist Mark Roberts told Euronews at the World Urban Forum in Baku, in direct response to governments that treat urban growth as an issue to be managed rather than progress to be guided.
Roberts said the scale of investment required, particularly in Africa, was beyond any single actor.
“When it comes to urban infrastructure, the financing needs are tremendous for Africa in particular, as well as all the very fast-urbanising regions,” he said.
“No one agency, donor organisation or the public sector by itself is sufficient. It’s really about catalysing finance from a range of different sources, including from the private sector.”
Flooding and extreme heat were among the threats he cited as already disrupting how cities function.
On the growth pressures that urbanisation brings — traffic jams, rising land prices, housing strain — Roberts was direct.
“We get traffic congestion within cities, land prices tend to increase, but that’s because cities are attracting people,” he said.
“And that attraction of people to cities provides these tremendous opportunities in terms of economic growth and job creation.”
“Urbanisation is not something to be feared,” he said.
Not everyone shares Roberts’s optimism. Experts and local leaders alike argue that rapid, poorly managed urbanisation in Africa and South Asia has produced vast informal settlements, worsening inequality and environmental degradation.
Dr Moges Tadesse, chief resilience officer for the city of Addis Ababa, warned that for many African cities the pressures of rapid urban growth are already outpacing governments’ ability to respond.
“Climate change is a global challenge, but it doesn’t affect only housing. It affects the economy, it affects also the human life, and it is very disastrous,” he told Euronews, calling for greater international investment to help vulnerable countries absorb costs generated largely by wealthier nations.
The World Urban Forum was established by the UN General Assembly in 2001 alongside the creation of UN-Habitat and has been held in a different city every two years since its first edition in Nairobi in 2002, which drew around 1,200 participants.
Previous host cities include Barcelona, Vancouver, Rio de Janeiro, Abu Dhabi, Katowice and Cairo.
The 13th session, WUF13, is taking place in Baku from 17 to 22 May under the theme “Housing the world: Safe and resilient cities and communities.”
More than 40,000 delegates from 182 countries have registered, making it one of the largest editions in the forum’s history. For the first time, Azerbaijan convened a dedicated session at heads of state level.
The forum is expected to produce the Baku Call to Action, the outcome document intended to support the UN’s New Urban Agenda.