Cities go up, down and high-tech to combat rising threats

Driverless transport, underground shops, heated bike paths, armed street patrols – this is not the setting for a dystopian novel but it could soon be the city where you live.

As the world sees the biggest wave of urban growth in history – with almost 70 per cent of its population expected to be living in urban areas by 2050, up from 56 per cent today – the task of making cities greener and safer is becoming more urgent.

That cities are attracting more people is nothing new, noted urban specialist Philipp Rode, who runs London-based research centre LSE Cities.

“People move to cities to live and work because they’re a solution: they significantly reduce the amount of movement and space required to do anything,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“But the absolute increase in population, the millions coming into cities - that’s unprecedented,” he added.

The shift is creating significant challenges for many cities already at risk from worsening climate change and rising inequality, with the race on to house swelling populations.

To cope with these modern-day pressures cities around the world are trying to become “smarter” - from moving storage and retail facilities underground to using data and technology to improve security, healthcare and mobility.

Many cities, particularly in poorer nations, are also facing large and expanding slum populations who lack basic services, fuelling inequality, and, in some cases, violence.

Mandy Pienaar, a 43-year-old media executive from Johannesburg, knows this only too well.

One winter evening, as she and her boyfriend drove home from the movies in the South African city, two armed assailants hijacked their car, stripped them of their clothing and stole their bank cards before the couple managed to escape.

“It was quite shocking because there were a lot of people walking past who kind of looked at me as if this was an everyday occurrence, to see a stripped woman sitting in a slum area in the cold,” Pienaar recalled.

Their ordeal illustrates the “false sense of security” that comes with living as they do in a gated community, she said.

“We have bars on every window, huge dogs, electric fencing ... to us that’s normal. We’ve become desensitised.”

Community-led projects aim to tackle such violence such as “vuvuzela patrols” when groups of men armed with plastic trumpets escort women on their daily commutes in Johannesburg.

But security is not the only worry on urban planners’ minds.

From the small U.S. city of Duluth to the metropolis of Hong Kong, cities are thrashing out ways to reinvent themselves and revamp how their residents live, move and consume.

“Mobility, water, waste: the world’s greatest challenges are solved in cities,” said Tiina Kaho, head of the Helsinki Metropolitan Smart & Clean Foundation, a coalition of businesses, researchers and state officials.