Urban humans

Driverless transport, underground shops, heated bike paths, armed street patrols – this is not the setting for a dystopian novel but it could soon be the city where you live.

As the world sees the biggest wave of urban growth in history – with almost 70% of its population expected to be living in urban areas by 2050, up from 56% today – the task of making cities greener and safer is becoming more urgent.

That cities are attracting more people is nothing new, noted urban specialist Philipp Rode, who runs London-based research centre LSE Cities.

"People move to cities to live and work because they're a solution: they significantly reduce the amount of movement and space required to do anything," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"But the absolute increase in population, the millions coming into cities - that's unprecedented," he added.

The shift is creating significant challenges for many cities already at risk from worsening climate change and rising inequality, with the race on to house swelling populations.

To cope with these modern-day pressures cities around the world are trying to become "smarter" - from moving storage and retail facilities underground to using data and technology to improve security, healthcare and mobility.

Many cities, particularly in poorer nations, are also facing large and expanding slum populations who lack basic services, fuelling inequality, and, in some cases, violence.

Mandy Pienaar, a 43-year-old media executive from Johannesburg, knows this only too well.

One winter evening, as she and her boyfriend drove home from the movies in the South African city, two armed assailants hijacked their car, stripped them of their clothing and stole their bank cards before the couple managed to escape.

"It was quite shocking because there were a lot of people walking past who kind of looked at me as if this was an everyday occurrence, to see a stripped woman sitting in a slum area in the cold," Pienaar recalled.

Their ordeal illustrates the "false sense of security" that comes with living as they do in a gated community, she said.

"We have bars on every window, huge dogs, electric fencing ... to us that's normal. We've become desensitised."

Community-led projects aim to tackle such violence such as "vuvuzela patrols" when groups of men armed with plastic trumpets escort women on their daily commutes in Johannesburg.

But security is not the only worry on urban planners' minds.

From the small U.S. city of Duluth to the metropolis of Hong Kong, cities are thrashing out ways to reinvent themselves and revamp how their residents live, move and consume.

"Mobility, water, waste: the world's greatest challenges are solved in cities," said Tiina Kaho, head of the Helsinki Metropolitan Smart & Clean Foundation, a coalition of businesses, researchers and state officials.

Yet as the world transforms rapidly, "cities will have to innovate like never before", she said.

As cities seek space to grow, they must also consider how their development affects social equality, said Rode of LSE Cities.

"In fast-expanding cities the differences between rich and poor increase," he said.

Neighbourhoods tend to display income disparities, leaving some with better access to services, and leading to what Rode called "anti-urban gestures" such as gated communities.

In South Africa, the legacy of apartheid-era city planning and rapid urban population growth, have contributed to making it the most unequal country by income, according to the World Bank.

South Africa's cities remain for the most part racially divided more than 20 years after the end of apartheid, under which millions of black people were forcibly removed from white-only urban areas to live in crowded townships and homelands, with buffer zones separating the races.

Those patterns of inequality can stoke grievances, according to urban analysts, with South Africa – which has one of the world's highest murder rates – in July deploying the army to quell a surge in violence in gang-infested parts of Cape Town.

That has led to a proliferation of private security firms, such as safety start-up Aura, which created a mobile platform allowing customers to access a network of armed emergency services.

"The police are stretched thin," said Warren Myers, founder of Aura, which has received about 25 panic alerts a day from its 70,000 users since its launch in 2017.

"We need to marry as many different technologies as possible - CCTV, facial recognition, data collection, WhatsApp groups - to better protect South Africans," he added.   

But private security is hardly sufficient to tackle crime, analysts warned, as realised by cities in Latin America where drug-fueled murder rates are among the world's highest.

After decades of heavy-handed police tactics in cities in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela and parts of Central America, new methods of tackling crime are gaining currency, with a stronger focus on social development projects. 

In Colombia's second city of Medellin, this approach has focused on urban renewal in slums: once-neglected shanty districts now boast landscaped parks, open-air gyms, schools, playgrounds and community halls where youth orchestras play.

"Sustained investment in deprived areas ... combined with increased community policing and recreational alternatives, like after-school programmes, have seemed to turn the dial in reducing homicide rates," said Robert Muggah, co-founder of the Igarape Institute, a Brazil-based think-tank.

After the death of city native and cocaine drug-lord Pablo Escobar in 1993, Medellin's murder rate plunged more than 90% from 266 per 100,000 people in 1991 to 19 per 100,000 in 2018.

Medellin resident Johan Rodriguez, 25, decided to retire from gang life after taking part in a six-month programme to keep vulnerable people away from crime.

The "Parceros" ("Mates") project, launched last year by city hall, helps teenagers go back to school, get job interviews and set up small businesses, from textiles to DJing.

"While the violence is always there, the project showed me there's something else around the corner, another way," said Rodriguez, who now works in a motorbike factory after social workers sent out his CV to employers across the city.

To try to thrive amid rapid urbanisation and worsening climate change threats, many cities around the world are trying to become "smarter". 

From heated bike paths to melt snow in Toronto to high-tech sensors that detect when Barcelona's bins need emptying, governments are pooling resources from citizens and businesses to make cities more efficient, sustainable and livable.

Many of those efforts focus on improving mobility in cities, with urban planners looking at innovative ways to cut both traffic and climate-warming emissions.

Dubai - which, according to the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), has more than one vehicle for every two people - is experimenting with driverless mobility pods that aim to combine the comfort of ride-hailing services like Uber with the efficiency and capacity of buses.

The cube-shaped vehicles, built by U.S.-based NEXT Future Transportation Inc., can carry up to 10 people each and dock together when in motion, allowing passengers to move from one unit to the other using the front and rear doors.

The vehicles – which should enter mass production at the end of 2020 – are designed to pick up single users at home, then pool people going in the same direction inside one module, as other pods are released to collect more passengers.

"It's like a relay race," said founder Tommaso Gecchelin.

Rode of LSE Cities said it was important one inefficient car system should not be replaced with another, adding autonomous vehicles should carry as many passengers as possible.

Allowing private self-driving cars could result in empty vehicles "just driving around waiting for their owners", taking up public space needlessly, he warned.

Other major smart city initiatives have run into delays or unexpected problems, sparking criticism.

Kenya's planned Konza Technopolis – a new $14.5 billion city to be built about 60km southeast of crowded Nairobi – has fallen behind schedule on its goal of accommodating 20,000 people by 2020, according to Nairobi-based entrepreneurs and analysts.

Dubbed the Silicon Savannah, Konza aims to become a modern tech hub but the first building has yet to be completed due to red tape and a lack of funding, critics noted.

Lavasa - the first city in India's $7.5 billion plan to turn 100 urban centres into Smart Cities by 2020 - has suffered from design issues, and ignored the needs of poor and marginalised groups, planners and rights groups have said.

"Urban planners, not cities, are the ones who need to get smarter," said Mills of Future Cities Catapult, calling for more investment in data collection and training of city planners. 

"Google knows more about our cities than planning departments do."