7 Lessons From The Century of Cities
Calling all urbanists. If you haven't seen this wonderful body of work by Prof Greg Clark CBE FAcSS and Borane Gille, highlighting 7 lessons from The Century of Cities podcast, co-host by Jennifer Dolynchuk, you simply must. The article is too long to post in a blog, but I am including the first segment and here is the link for your reference. Its a lot to chew on, but so very worth it. I have been savoring it one lesson at a time over the last few days. Enjoy!
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Over the past two years, The Century of Cities podcast’s co-hosts, Greg Clark and Jennifer Dolynchuk, have invited more than 100 of the world’s most thoughtful urban voices on a podcast of the same name. We’ve met city leaders, planners, mayors, investors, architects, scholars, activists, chief sustainability officers, and lawyers, from Lagos to Stockholm, Mumbai to Melbourne, Cape Town to Glasgow, Hong Kong to Bilbao. We asked each of them to tell us about their cities in 1980, today, and 2080. Those conversations helped build a picture that almost no short-horizon view can provide. This essay is an attempt to set out what we have learned. It is structured around seven lessons that the 100-year view reveals, illustrated throughout by the voices of the leaders, practitioners, and scholars who joined us during series 1 of the podcast.
1. A Century revealed
1.1 2080: the completion of two great human journeys?
Our world has recently entered a period of profound uncertainty and unpredictability. But, for as long as anyone reading this essay has been alive, two constants have been true and still are:
the human population has been growing, and,
the world has been urbanising.
These two processes have unfolded so steadily in recent decades that they have come to seem normal and feel inevitable. None of us alive today can recall a time before either. Yet what feels normal to us all is, historically, extraordinary.
Humanity is now approaching two simultaneous endpoints.
For the first time since 1400 (after ‘the Black Death’) and building upon almost 300,000 years of long-run aggregate growth, the global human population is expected to stop growing, peaking near a maximum of 10.2 billion around 2080, or potentially a lower number and much sooner.1
For the first time in more than 6,500 years, the long migration from dispersed settlements to concentrated city life will be largely complete, with 85 to 90% of humanity living in towns, cities, and urbanised regions.2
These two arcs will now converge within the next 54 years, a single human lifetime. That’s why we call the 100-years from 1980 to 2080, The Century of Cities.
Why does this long view matter?
Prof Uwe Brandes of the Georgetown University Global Cities Initiative, in Series 1 Episode 49, reminded us why the long view matters. “We have so many important and pointed conversations about issues and problems in cities today, but it is very rare that we look at contemporary issues in the context of a long trajectory, and indeed a century-long trajectory, of cities growing and transforming. Thinking about cities today in the context of this deep, unprecedented evolution of how we live is critically important.”
Dr Parag Khanna of AlphaGeo, in Series 1 Episode 9, added “The most stable political form in history is the city. We can talk about 1980, but we can also talk about 2080, or 2480. We will have cities. I’m not as confident in many of the states on our map today as I am in many cities.”
Why does it matter now? Prof Richard Florida of the University of Toronto, in Series 1 Episode 2, highlights the tensions and opportunities ahead. “Every epoch of capitalism has opened up new hinterlands. In the past, those were physically adjacent. These digital ones create new digital hinterlands. That’s what’s so interesting about this new era: you have digital connections and physical places existing in some kind of tension, and it enables lots of people in lots of other places to participate.”
Dr Tim Moonen, managing director of The Business of Cities, in Series 1 Episode 51, framed our predicament as follows: “We are in the middle of a 100-year process of figuring out what kind of reforms, what kind of leadership, what kind of finance, what kind of revenue, what kind of coalition building cities need to thrive. And the thing that I would say that has changed, particularly in the last 20 years, is that we are now seeing cities surrounded by many more doubts.”
Why 1980, why 2080?
The year 1980 is not symbolic. It is catalytic.
By 1980, around 40% of humanity, roughly 2.3 billion people, lived in cities. The world had eight megacities (over 10 million people): Tokyo, Osaka, Jakarta, New York, Seoul, Mexico City, São Paulo and Kolkata.3 From that decade onwards, two distinct urbanisation pathways fused into one global thrust.
The first was rapid new manufacturing-led urbanisation in the global south, inspired by the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Korea) driven by intentional industrialisation, infrastructure investment, demographic momentum, and rapid rural to urban migration.
The second was a more unpredicted re-urbanisation in the global north, driven by the rise of the knowledge economy, advanced services, and creative industries, facilitated by population mobility, urban renewal and regeneration, new forms of mixed-use and density, and technology platforms.
Together they combined to generate the largest, fastest, and most concentrated population movement in human history. The global north and global south synchronised together in favour of cities.
Prof Richard Florida of the University of Toronto, in Series 1 Episode 2, located the hinge around the same time. “1980 was the hinge point at which our economy went from industrial to innovative, creative, knowledge, and I think we are at another hinge point currently. When we looked at the creative class or creative economy at about 10 or 15% of occupations, 1980 is where it takes off, and by the year 2000 it is a third.”
1980 also marks a shift in the planning of large cities, following post-war population growth. This was illuminated by Prof Felipe Correa, founder of Somatic Collaborative, in Series 1 Episode 92: “From the 1970s onward, we begin to see cities less driven by urban projects as architectural form and much more driven by diverse set of design and planning approaches. We begin to see the expansion of an incredible toolkit, on how we actually study and design urban fragments, work that begins to diversify the types and scales of projects, that reconfigure inner city urban districts.”
Dr Ming Zhang, Senior Director for Cities at the World Bank, set out the headline numbers for us in Series 1 Episode 96. “At the end of 2024 the global urbanisation rate has risen from 39% in 1980 to 67%. 3 billion people were added to the urban areas. About one quarter of that increase came from China, as China’s urbanisation rate increased from 20% to 67%.”
The year 2080 is not symbolic either.
According to the United Nations 2024 World Population Prospects, global population is now expected to peak around 10.2 billion in or near 2080, earlier than previous estimates suggested as 2100.4 By then, the world’s urban population will have risen from 2.3 billion to roughly 9.2 billion, a four-fold increase. The number of cities with more than 1 million people will have grown from 275 to nearly 1,600, a six-fold increase. Moreover, among them, there will be close to 100 megacities, up from 8 in 1980.5
With rapidly falling birth rates in many countries, coupled with delays in household formation, it is now possible, and even likely, that the eventual population peak will be much lower and even sooner, but there is as yet no clear consensus on when or how many.
Humanity is living through the final and decisive chapter of an urbanisation story that began in a ‘fertile crescent’ in Mesopotamia 6,500 years ago. The decisions and paths taken in the next 25 years will shape that final chapter to its end. This century matters because it is a distinct phase of both crystallisation and completion, in the context of multiple challenges.
1.2 The back story: 1880 to 1980, the Century before.
In 1880, roughly 10 per cent of the world’s population lived in cities, perhaps 150 million people in total. By 1980, that figure had reached 40 per cent and 2.3 billion.6 The 100-years between 1880 and 1980 was the first true mass-urbanisation century, the dress rehearsal for the one we are now living through.
The cities of 1880 were already extraordinary by historical standards. London had grown past 4,000,000 people, then the largest city in the world. Paris, New York, Berlin, Vienna, and Tokyo were close behind. But the planet was overwhelmingly rural. The major cities were islands of density in a sea of agrarian settlement.
What happened in the 100-years that followed 1880 was a sequence of profound urban innovations that, taken together, made both the modern city possible, and urban life tolerable.
The sanitary revolution came first. London’s sewer system, designed by Joseph Bazalgette and largely completed by 1875, became the template for cities everywhere. Paris under Haussmann had begun the same process a decade earlier. Public water supply, drainage, refuse collection, vaccination, and disease control transformed urban life from a health hazard into a place where most people could expect to live longer than their rural counterparts. By the 1920s, the differential urban-rural mortality of the 19th century had reversed. Cities had become safer than the countryside, for the first time in human history.
Urban mass-transit followed. The horse-drawn omnibus, the cable car, the electric tram, the underground railway (London in 1863, Budapest in 1896, Paris in 1900, New York in 1904, Moscow in 1935), and the elevated railway radically expanded what counted as walkable. The streetcar suburb appeared in North America, the tram suburb in Europe, the railway suburb almost everywhere. The unit of the city stretched from a few square kilometres to tens or hundreds.
The skyscraper proceeded next. Steel-frame construction and the safe elevator, both perfected in Chicago in the 1880s, allowed cities to grow upward as well as outward. By 1930, the silhouette of the modern city, vertical, dense, electric, was established.
Comprehensive zoning followed in 1916, when New York City adopted the United States’ first comprehensive zoning ordinance, regulating use, height, and bulk for every property in the city. The 1924 Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, developed under Herbert Hoover, embedded the model nationally. By the late 1920s, hundreds of US cities had adopted some form of zoning, and the practice spread internationally. Zoning gave city governments a structured legal instrument for shaping urban form. It also, over time, became one of the principal engines of segregation and housing unaffordability.
Then came two competing urban philosophies. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement, launched with Letchworth in 1903 and Welwyn in 1920, argued for low-density, mixed, self-sufficient settlements. Le Corbusier and the modernists, codified through the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) and the Athens Charter of 1933, argued for high-density tower-in-park urbanism and the strict separation of functions. Most cities of the post-war world tried to do both. Few did either well.
The Green Belt then arrived as the world's first urban growth boundary. First formally proposed for London by the Greater London Regional Planning Committee in 1935, given statutory force by the Green Belt (London and Home Counties) Act 1938, embedded in Patrick Abercrombie's 1944 Greater London Plan, and strengthened by the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, it was the first deliberate attempt to put a legal ring around a major city. From 1955, the model was extended to other British cities, and exported widely thereafter, to Seoul, Tokyo, Vancouver, Adelaide, Frankfurt, São Paulo, Tehran, and many others. The Green Belt was an act of urban discipline: it accepted that the city had limits, and that protecting the countryside was the same task as shaping the city.
Municipal social housing at scale emerged in Vienna between 1919 and 1934. The Social Democratic city government built around 64,000 apartments in 400 Gemeindebauten complexes, rehousing one-tenth of the city's population, with kindergartens, libraries, clinics, and laundries integrated into the buildings themselves. The Red Vienna programme set the template for the public housing systems built across Western Europe after 1945 and is still the foundation of Vienna's housing market a century later. It established the principle that affordable housing was a municipal responsibility, not a market accident.
The motor car then arrived, and it reshaped everything. Mass car ownership in the United States from the 1920s, in Europe from the 1950s, in the rest of the world later still, fundamentally rewrote the geometry of the city. The 1956 Interstate Highway Act in the United States, the autoroute system in France, the autobahn network in Germany, the motorway system in the United Kingdom, and similar programmes elsewhere built motorised cities that could spread further, faster, and looser than ever before.
Decolonisation produced a parallel innovation. Entirely new capitals were planned from scratch: Chandigarh in 1953, Brasília in 1960, Islamabad from 1960, and many more. Some succeeded, most struggled. They were experiments in nation-building through urban design.
Deindustrialisation emerged as a new challenge. By 1980, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, the Ruhr cities, and many other industrial centres were already losing population and economic base. At the same time, the first signals of climate stress and resource constraint had begun to register, particularly after the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979.
Cllr Susan Aitken, leader of Glasgow City Council, gave us in Series 1 Episode 93 the texture of how 1980 felt from inside one of the cities that suffered most from deindustrialisation in the previous century. “In 1980, cities were regarded as a problem. They were seen as dying, seen as the past. There were narratives about flight from urban to suburban places, about crime, about bankruptcy, about urban decline. Cities were seen as something that was a burden on countries and on governments. Now cities are understood much more as being where the solutions to many of society’s endemic problems can be found.”
The 100 years from 1880 to 1980 created the modern city. They also created its contradictions. The Century of Cities, 1980 to 2080, is the period in which those contradictions either get addressed and resolved, or tip past the point of possible correction.
What the 100-year perspective reveals
Most analysis of cities works in a shorter than 100 years window. Many developers look 5 to 10 years ahead. Planners look ten or twenty. Politicians look at the next election. Investor may look further ahead. Academic literature is usually organised around recent episodes: the financial crisis, the pandemic, the rise of working from home, the affordability emergency in successful cities. These windows are not wrong, but they are too short to see the shape of the whole curve.
What does the shape of the curve actually look like? Prof Philip McCann, the Sir Terry Leahy Chair in Urban and Regional Economics at the University of Manchester, offered a striking analogy in Series 1 Episode 18.
“Imagine you have a table with a tablecloth on it. You pinch the tablecloth and pull it up, and it makes a pyramid, a bit like Mount Fuji. You pull that up, that drives the productivity. You do get greater inequality, but you get greater localised inequality, it pulls everybody up. Problem is, imagine that you only pull up one part of the tablecloth and everything else stays stuck. The whole economy has grown, the average has grown, but those average growths have only accrued to part of the tablecloth because the other part is not growing, it’s not lifting up.”
And then the diagnosis: “The first country in the OECD where the data told us this fundamental shift from a convergence regime to a divergence regime, was the UK. It first appeared in the data in 1988, but at the time it was not really noticed. We did not understand what that meant, and part of the reason we didn’t understand it was because we didn’t have the models to explain this for us. We didn’t have comparative data between countries to benchmark.”
That is the single most important point. We have moved, country by country, from a 1950s and 1960s convergence world to a divergence world, and we are still using the institutional toolkits of the earlier era. City governments are not designed or empowered for these modern challenges that cities face.
The 100-year lens also forces a different question. Not just what happens next, but what happens at the end of the curve, on completion? Once you start asking that question, the priorities of urban policy, urban investment, and urban governance look very different. You see industries inflating in scale beyond historical precedent. You see urban hierarchies quietly being reshuffled. You see regions diverging when they used to converge. You see leadership and institutions structurally outmatched by the scale of what cities are now asked to do.
The DNA of Cities
A second long-view insight runs through this essay. It is the proposition that cities are not neutral containers responding uniformly to global forces but are active ecologies that translate and metabolise those forces in distinctive ways. Greg Clark and Caitlin Morrissey host a podcast on this theme and have written about this elsewhere as The DNA of Cities. The framework rests on a simple proposition: every city has DNA, and that DNA is composed of three kinds of traits.
Endowed traits are the things a city starts with and cannot easily change. Its physical geography, geology, and climate. Its location and relational position in the wider landscape of trade, borders, and exchange. The original purpose for which it was founded. The natural constraints and opportunities of water, land, energy, and ecology. Nairobi, Mumbai, Reykjavik, and Riyadh begin from radically different endowed traits, and no policy intervention can change them.
Inherited traits are what history has left behind. The infrastructure, land use, and urban form that earlier generations built. The architecture, design, and vernacular that defines a place. The peoples, cultures, and social biographies that have settled and re-settled the city over time. The civic institutions, public spaces, and amenities that pass from one generation to the next. Glasgow and Liverpool carry their industrial inheritances. Barcelona and Madrid carry their distinct civic traditions. Istanbul and Cairo carry millennia of civilisation.
Acquired traits are what cities have learned and have become through deliberate choice, experimentation, and response to shock. The institutions and governance models a city has built. Its capacity for innovation and invention. The behavioural system and the economic outcomes it produces. The disruptions, crises, and forks in the road that have shaped its instincts. Singapore’s acquired traits are very different from Detroit’s. Bilbao’s are very different from Buenos Aires.
These three families of traits combine to produce what that work describes as the Genetic Code of each city, the deep configuration of who that city is and what it can plausibly become. The Genetic Code conditions but does not determine outcomes. Cities also display epigenetic features, the way that urban populations sharing space, time, and events react and respond under different conditions of change, shock, stress, or trauma. A city carries scars from previous crises, and its population carries instincts shaped by how it absorbed them, or responded to them.
The point of the framework is not classification. It is to enable what we can call bespoke regenerative medicine for cities. Just as DNA testing in human medicine moves treatment from generic to personalised, DNA-informed urbanism moves urban strategy from ‘copy and paste’ templates to bespoke pathways. Strategy that ignores a city’s DNA produces high effort and low yield. Strategy that aligns with a city’s DNA deepens and accelerates over time.
This matters because we are on track to shape the planet with around 15,000 cities by 2080, each with its own DNA.7 The future of urbanisation cannot depend on convergence toward a narrow set of models. A planet of 15,000 cities cannot function as a monoculture. Diversity is a systemic asset, not an inefficiency to be engineered away. It supports resilience, specialisation, creativity, and choice. The strongest framing for The Century of Cities is therefore not city competition based on comparative metrics, but ‘city contribution’: each city understanding what it is best equipped and endowed to do, and doing it well as part of the wider systems of cities upon which humanity and planet now depends.
With this 100 year lens and understanding of the century prior to 1980-2080 we can observe 7 key lessons from our 100 guests.
Read on by clicking here.