Home » Opinion » Foreign Views
Who will pay for world cities’ fight for better life?
Print Edition
Fast-growing cities will determine how the world manages to fight poverty, disease and climate change in coming decades but increased resilience is likely to come with a hefty price tag.
While cities are poised to benefit from technological innovation, tackling crippling inequality is crucial to help cope with shocks and stresses which are set to rise alongside urban populations, said experts at a New York summit organized by the Rockefeller Foundation-backed 100 Resilient Cities (100RC).
“The way we design food systems, community health systems, economies that create opportunities across the socio-economic spectrum and public infrastructure... will very much define how the world performs in the fight against poverty, hunger, disease, inequality and against climate change,” said Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation.
Better protecting urban populations from flooding, heatwaves, hurricanes and earthquakes, improving housing and basic amenities, reducing crime and inequality, and developing better transport options top the list for many cities. However, financing resilience remains a crucial issue for cities with many struggling to raise revenues.
In the United States, cities can create jobs and cut social inequality as they reduce global warming but must act quickly since the nation took a “wrong turn” on climate change, said New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Some 300 US cities have stepped up and said they would work to meet the Paris climate goals, sidestepping President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the country out of the 2015 pact to limit global warming, the mayor said.
“Cities are taking matters into our own hands, because we have no illusion that things will change otherwise,” he said.
With cities needing to spend an estimated US$78 trillion on infrastructure over the next decade, they should consider collective action to influence markets and shape policies, as they try to design cities to protect the vulnerable, said Michael Berkowitz, president of 100RC. “If we’re going to be building US$78 trillion of infrastructure, let’s build it better and smarter and in a more resilient way.”
Better tackling inequality would make “our cities better able to handle whatever the shocks and stresses they face, that will make them resilient,” he said.
New technologies such as 3-D printed buildings are set to revolutionize infrastructure, while the internet of things and big data projects would help develop smarter cities, said Judith Rodin, former president of the Rockefeller Foundation that partners with the Thomson Reuters Foundation on a project focused on building resilience. Vertical farms — producing food in stacked layers — could help feed urban populations while self-driving cars and technology entrepreneur Elon Musk’s proposed “Hyperloop” highspeed underground transport system would revolutionize transport.
But financing these new innovations will not be easy. The World Bank’s Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez said a recent review of 500 cities showed only 20 percent had a credit rating high enough to borrow on domestic markets and only four percent could raise capital on international markets.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
