How will cities shape future global challenges?

To tackle the biggest challenges facing our future, it is important to recognise the threats today that will emerge under possible conditions. The Global Governance Futures – Robert Bosch Foundation Multilateral Dialogues (GGF) program brought together exceptional young professionals to look ahead to the year 2035 and think of ways to better address these global challenges. By considering a time-span of 10 years, they created a process to engage different future scenarios in order to anticipate plausible developments.

There are aspects of the future role of cities in tackling global challenges that can be comfortably extrapolated until 2030.

Rapid urbanisation and population growth will dramatically change the size and shape of cities resulting in a growth of global megacities. In 1970, New York and Tokyo were the only megacities in the world - urban areas inhabiting over 10 million people. This year, there are 44 megacities.

Other major cities such as Dubai and Singapore, although not yet megacities, have risen as globally significant economic connections that have helped shape the way the world moves and grows. Cities of the global south have also been pivotal in the process of urbanisation because of their booming pace of urban growth which brings to the forefront urban infrastructure challenges at their most extreme - for example New Delhi, Lagos and São Paulo.

Globalisation is changing the landscape of cities by creating shifts of power, competition and cooperation dynamics within and between other cities. Advances in technology have introduced opportunities for more free, competitive and borderless trade. Industrialisation and the revolution in transport generated opportunities for more free trade. New information technologies allowed “trade in factories” where it became profitable to move entire factories to where labour was cheap. Today, the internet is enabling “trade in offices” where economic activities are increasingly evolving from the movement of physical goods to the movement of virtual information which carries a range of new opportunities for how we live and work.

However, there are unpredictable aspects of the future role of cities and these should be considered as uncertain factors that can be realised in many different scenarios resulting in multiple potential outcomes. Which include some of the following big questions: