At present we share our planet with some 7.5 billion other human beings, and as swollen as that number may already sound, it is projected to hit 10 billion before levelling off sometime around the middle of the century.

Global population may never scale the vertiginous peaks foreseen in the panicky neo-Malthusian literature of the mid-20th century, chiefly Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s famous jeremiad of 1968, The Population Bomb. Nor will overpopulation’s effects, as they fold back against the cities of the global north, much resemble the apocalyptic depictions in the era’s pop culture; 1973’s Soylent Green, for example, opens with a title card informing the viewer that 40 million souls reside in the smog-choked New York City of 2022, and that seems more than a little hard to imagine now. But neither is it a state of affairs one can dismiss casually. Every last one of those 10 billion human beings is going to need a place to live.

And wherever that place should happen to be, it won’t be in the cities we’re presently familiar with. However trendy “urban infill” and densification may be in our faculties of architecture, polities in the developed world are no longer willing to countenance the kind of conditions that inevitably result when hundreds of thousands of human bodies are packed into every square mile. The residential housing densities of New York’s Lower East Side circa 1905, for example, among the highest ever recorded, were achieved by housing two or three families in each (smallish) room. This is precisely the kind of overcrowding the entire Modernist movement in architecture was set up to design out of urban settlement.

Further, barring the deployment of truly draconian powers of expropriation, central-zone land values in existing cities are in any event orders of magnitude too expensive to permit wholesale redevelopment at anything like the scale required. Entirely new cities will be necessary – very likely, thousands of them.

The notorious Chinese predilection for ghost cities is being replicated on African terrain

It shouldn’t surprise us that the planet’s newest cities are to be found in the places where its population is most rapidly urbanising: India, China and sub-Saharan Africa. Whether acquired by eminent domain, compulsory purchase order or outright expropriation, assembling meaningfully sized parcels of land in existing urban cores can be a messy, expensive and time-consuming process. The favoured strategy in all of these places is therefore to develop entirely new satellite cities on peripheral sites where land is cheap – or barring that, to build upon land reclaimed from the ocean.

Vanessa Watson, an urban planning expert at the University of Cape Town, has written extensively about this dynamic as it plays out in Africa. In Watson’s telling, a long litany of private-sector new city initiatives now spangles the African continent, from the planned Nairobi developments of Konza Techno City and Tatu City, to Ghana’s Appolonia and Hope City, to the Eko Atlantic project in Lagos (“the best prime real estate in West Africa”). Each represents an effort to gussy up the raw economics of land development with the comforting, familiar tropes of the knowledge economy. Each is dashed with the most superficial gloss of technological contemporaneity, right down to the inevitable “Silicon” prefix. And each is more placeless than the last, predicated on a generic model of development that could not possibly have less to do with the actual political, economic or material conditions obtaining in any African society.

The planned business district of Konza Techno City in Kenya

This strikingly inapposite quality among the new African cities can be traced to a few factors. On the one hand, the bland look of nonplace is perceived by local elites to be the sign and sigil of successful modernity. But it is also true that none of the parties doing the actual design work are local to the continent, or, evidently, particularly conversant with any of its cultures. Though certain western names – Deloitte, McKinsey, HR&A Advisors – crop up repeatedly, it’s clear that at present infrastructure development in sub-Saharan Africa has a markedly Chinese character. Even the notorious Chinese predilection for ghost cities is being replicated on African terrain, most evidently at Nova Cidade de Kilamba in Angola, where a city for 500,000 constructed by the Chinese state-owned developer CITIC stands mostly empty on the Luandan plain. Chloé Buire reports that as of last September, after the passage of legislation mandating steep price cuts to the smallest available units, Kilamba could now claim some 80,000 residents.

Even where they are fully inhabited, though, the new wave of African cities seem designed not so much to house existing local populations as to purge them in favour of a more remuneratively elite clientele. In Watson’s words, the schemes she studied “assume that the largely informal urban population will be wished away”. (There is some support for this assertion in the published renderings for Eko Atlantic, striking primarily for their depiction of a markedly light-skinned population cohort that in no way resembles a representative sample of present-day Lagos.) The palpable fear of informality is a troubling sign: if history is any lesson, any success at all on the part of these development sites will be despite and not because of their static plans; like Brasília before them, they may eventually come to life when the voids in the formal city have been occupied by all of the people left undepicted in the expensive renderings, and whatever informal housing and services they develop to serve their own needs.

The emerging African pattern of private-sector new-city development is mirrored by the “entrepreneurial urbanism” that University of Leeds researcher Ayona Datta identifies in contemporary India, under Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Here, too, we see the strategy of distributing population to a scatter of brand-new satellite cities, erected on low-value land; here too the design undertaken by an all but exclusively foreign expert class (though not, in this case, Chinese).

A poster advertising one of India’s new smart cities, the Gujarat International Finance Tec City. Photograph: Sam Panthaky/AFP

The BJP scheme to develop no fewer than 100 new “smart cities” – and here that label feels even more than usually empty – would be unworkable without recourse to the mostly invisible global infrastructure of planning and engineering firms. As a result, where published plans exist, they are as generic and as poorly suited to the realities of Indian life as their equivalents to the southwest are to African realities. Datta’s grim account of the Dholera smart-city project echoes Watson: it’s a tale of farmers and fishers displaced from their land, supplanted by gated communities and air-conditioned golf clubs for the globalised elite.

Some new Chinese cities, at least, have a different flavour. Here the preferred model of development isn’t some smoothly generic global nonplace, but the idealised European past. Shanghai’s “One City, Nine Towns” policy dropped detailed copies of Scandinavian, German, Dutch, Italian and Tudor villages on to a ring of sites orbiting central Shanghai; as has been widely reported, most remain empty, used perhaps as backdrops for wedding pictures. Not even the evident lack of demand for such housing can slow the pace of construction.

Given newly available construction technology, China’s world-historical rush of citymaking appears if anything to be accelerating. Just as the high Soviet technology of tilt-up concrete slabs permitted thousands of new towns to be thrown up in short order, across the Eastern Bloc, the emergence of building-scale 3D printing allows high-rises to sprout overnight. A Shanghai-based company called Winsun Decoration Design Engineering has for the last few years demonstrated feats of near-instant fabrication with its massive printer, and if the results won’t be winning the Pritzker Prize any year soon, they at least appear to respond to local tastes and preferences.

Construction taking place in the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city, China. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Sometimes, when Chinese cities appear overnight, it’s not via cutting-edge technology, but rather because they’ve been created by fiat. This is the case of the new Chinese supercapital Jing-Jin-Ji. Completely subsuming the cities formerly known as Beijing and Tianjin, as well as their Hebei Province hinterlands, Jing-Jin-Ji imagines an urbanised condition being smeared between these previously discrete settlements until they fuse into one mind-boggling hypercity. At least, this is how it all plays out in the mind of state planners, and the real-estate brokers already salivating over the catchment area’s skyrocketing land values.

Though it has little to do with cities as most of us understand them, or even with anything foreseen by the original theorists of megalopolis, Jing-Jin-Ji is clearly something new upon the earth. Perhaps it can help us broaden our conception of what a city is and can be, what forms urban habitation can take.

By any rational accounting, we’d be numbering refugee camps like the sprawling complex at Dadaab, Kenya, among the planet’s newest cities. Home to well over 300,000 human beings as of last October – and half a million, as recently as the end of 2011 – Dadaab is a grid of tents in the desert, housing a population roughly the size of Helsinki, Memphis, Bristol or Wellington.

Dadaab refugee camp has a population roughly the size of Helsinki, Bristol or Wellington. Photograph: Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images

If it qualifies as a city by that of population or any other reasonable metric, why then do we tend to neglect Dadaab and the all too many places like it when we discuss emergent practices of urbanism? Both the American architect Charlie Hailey and the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, after all, identify the camp as the signature form that urbanism takes in our century. For Agamben, camp space is what results when a wartime state of emergency becomes the permanent condition of everyday life, and that feels like an acute diagnosis of the real lives far too many people lead, much more relevant to the actual circumstances of our collective existence than any number of glossy renderings.

Under UNHCR policy, however, sites like Dadaab cannot be defined as permanent settlements, lest their residents lose eligibility for aid. The planet’s refugee and resettlement camps are destined to remain cities in everything but name.

But for these camps, most of the planet’s newest cities bear a markedly strong resemblance to one another. Whether they happen to be planted on African terrain or Indian or Chinese, they have the self-contained, inward-turning flavour of a high-end condo, and indeed are branded and marketed in just the same way. Though in virtually every case, the developers in question have taken great pains to describe their sensitivity to local traditions, both social and architectural, their developments have a numbing similarity, right down to the central business districts, marinas and grand axial boulevards. Indeed, at a first glance, the Tianjin Eco-city plan is impossible to distinguish from those for Dholera, Eko Atlantic or the cloyingly named GREAT City Chengdu.

These new cities – or more precisely, new conurbations – demonstrate how complexes of land can become comprehensively urbanised without ever really acquiring the character of a city. They may, with a few decades’ in-dwelling, habit and custom, someday feel like real urban places, but for many years to come they will almost certainly remain as harrowingly sterile as any new master-planned development, western exemplars like Canary Wharf or Mission Bay not excluded. And for the moment, anyway, far too many of them stand all but empty, despite the millions close at hand clamouring for a decent home.

There we have the new cities of the twenty-first century: buildings without people, people without buildings. Even if the injustice of the situation doesn’t abrade your soul, perhaps the sheer irrational waste of it will.

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