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Issue: The number of urban dwellers is projected to double in the next 40 years, presenting a host of new problems for city planners Shift: Build, retrofit and rethink expanding cities deliberately to promote efficiency, sustainability and livability

According to the latest UN population projections, the next 40 years will see an almost doubling of urban populations. This growth will offer both unprecedented challenges and great opportunities to cities around the world.

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On the challenges side, we can point to a set of 10 problem areas, which to different degrees, affect all urban areas: clean air, clean water, energy, land use, transportation, waste, health care, housing, employment, and personal security.

Most cities around the planet are doing an inadequate job with regard to most of these issues. The doubling of urban populations means that we need to become twice as effective at addressing these problems in most cities on the planet, just to stay even. If we want to achieve levels of performance that we might consider satisfactory, we probably need to get four to five times as effective in these 10 areas as we are today, on average, in virtually every city on the planet between now and 2050.