Are cities about to die?
This is what many people were thinking just a few years ago. Back in the 1990s, scholars speculated about the impact of the ongoing digital revolution on the viability of cities. The mainstream view was that, as digital media and the Internet had killed distance, they would also kill cities. Technology writer George Gilder proclaimed that "cities are leftover baggage from the industrial era" and concluded that, due to the continued growth of personal computing, telecommunications and distributed production, "we are headed for the death of cities".
In actual fact, this is exactly opposite to the view that has shaped our conversations as part of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council 2011. Starting in Abu Dhabi - and during our discussions leading up to Davos - we have observed that cities have never prospered as much as they have over the past couple of decades. China is currently building more urban fabric than has ever been built by humanity. Since 2008, for the first time in history, over half the world's population lives in urban areas and, according to some estimates, there is a US$40 trillion opportunity in global infrastructure investment, mostly urban. Read more
Source : nationmultimedia.com
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