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More than half the world’s population lives in urban areas and by 2050, the world’s population is expected to grow by three billion people.

Almost all of this growth will take place in developing countries, and within those countries, in cities and towns—more than doubling the urban population today.

Dealing with this challenge is critical. But according to renowned economist Jeffery Sachs, the rapid growth of urban centers need not be perceived negatively or interpreted as an automatic rise in urban poverty.

"The challenge," says Sachs, "is how to make urbanisation really work. We should view urban planning as one of the most promising aspects of global civilization."
Sachs, who is Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Senior Adviser to the United Nations Secretary General on the Millennium Development Goals, delivered the keynote address on Monday at the Urban Research Symposium at the World Bank. Running from December 9-11, it brings together some of the world's leading poverty specialists and researchers to help the urban and other sectors reconnect with current directions in urban poverty research.

Sachs, who spoke via live video link from New York, noted that, "urbanisation has worked well for some cities and towns, but not very well for others. We need to ask why." He drew comparisons between South Asian urban centers like Shanghai and Hainan Island, where urbanization had galvanized cities into the "poles or dynamic engines of economic growth," and coastal cities in sub-Saharan Africa like Accra, Dakar, Dar es Salaam, Maputo and Beira where urbanization had not had the same effect.

Sachs stressed three dimensions which he felt were prerequisites for making urbanization work.

First, he said, effective urbanization requires good urban planning, especially the planning of infrastructure systems like water, energy, transport, public health and others. "For urbanization to be effective, urban planners are needed far more than macroeconomists like myself," he said. He noted that the problems of rapidly urbanizing centers would not be solved by markets but by establishing links between the urban planners and the macroeconomists.

"What we must do is put macro and development economists to help with the urban planners with the huge challenges of making these infrastructure systems work."
The second recommended prerequisite for effective urbanisation was a development strategy capable of attracting foreign direct investment. The establishment of export processing zones, for instance, that could take advantage of coastal, open port areas were a good incentive, Sachs advised. Tax holidays and special industrial parks were other incentives. Other elements of the strategy, he added, should embrace such issues as tenure rights for local land construction, and microfinance for small scale entrepreneurs.

As a third prerequisite, Sachs welcomed the move from central level planning to a more decentralized approach with more autonomy at the local level. Sachs pointed out that such an approach made it easier to ensure that local authorities could be involved in design based on the specificity of their needs, as well as active participation by local non-governmental organizations in the process.

In conclusion, Sachs suggested that the urban development community work toward improved strategies to help establish solid economic bases for manufacturing services in large coastal urban areas that have so far not succeeded, while not forgetting the formidable obstacles facing land-locked cities such as Kabul or La Paz.

There are currently no regular international meetings of high caliber and broad perspective on this subject, which is what inspired the staff of the World Bank’s Transport and Urban Development Department to initiate this conference. It comes on the heels of a related conference on disaster management in cities held last week.

In his introductory remarks, Transport and Urban Development Director, John Flora emphasized that urban development encompassed all aspects of development. "Urban development cuts right across the broad spectrum of development. It is inextricably linked to transport, roads, health, education and every other aspect of development that automatically goes along with urbanisation.

Underscoring the urban development challenge in his opening remarks, World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn stressed that it was important to come up with methodologies that could be replicated at local levels. "With 80 million people coming on to the planet each year," he said, "it is important that our interventions make the most impact—on real people at the community level. We need to bring together rural and urban activities into the same symbiotic development."
Other key participants on this opening day included Anna Tibaijuka, Executive Director of UN-Habitat, who called on participants to do their utmost in defining an effective research agenda, as well as Gobind Nankani, Vice President of the Bank’s Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (PREM) network.

Over the next two days, participants will discuss issues at the macro level, such as urban development's contribution to national poverty reduction, as well as those at the more localized, city level that center on reducing poverty within urban areas. Participants will be invited to share their experience and present their views on future research priorities relevant to policy and practice. Organizers hope that this first symposium will identify the broad lines of an agreed research agenda with relevance to poverty reduction. They also expect it to provide direction, impetus and some agreed collaborative framework for subsequent research conferences - World Bank.

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