Gaborone Urban Development Plan 2

This book was jointly launched by the National Academy of Economic Strategy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and UN-HABITAT. It uses the indicator system and objective data to evaluate the competitiveness of 1006 cities in the world and measures the overall development pattern of global punishment and competitiveness. The important theoretical and practical issues in the development of global cities are discussed. The book looks at the world from the perspective of cities and believes that the world will be fully urbanized in the 300 years from 1750 to 2050. The book points out the challenges faced by global municipal financing and systematically summarizes the experience and methods of municipal financing and concludes that the average competitiveness of global cities declined slightly due to the decline of the average competitiveness of cities in China, the USA and Europe. In addition, this book also launched the new global urban classification standard of the Institute of Finance and Strategy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme for the first time and rated 1006 cities in the world.

Hans van Ginkel Rector, United Nations University The challenges of the world's future are linked to the growing share of the global population that will reside in urban areas. UN projections indicate that by 2030 the world's urban population share will rise to 60 percent. Of the two billion added to the global population, 99 percent will be added to the urban areas of the world. Of this number, 95 percent will be in countries of the developing world. As most people will live in urban areas we had better work to build and organize them as both attractive and less resource consuming places. That is, to promote sustainable urban development is to promote the creation of dense human settlements that are livable and have reduced their impacts on larger scale ecosystems. While much attention has been focused on the "mega-cities," those with a population of over 10 million, the amount of people living in these places will remain almost constant while the smaller and medium size cities will be the great absorbers of the world's urban population. Indeed, it is predicted that while the absolute number of people that will live in urban centers of 10 million or more will increase from approximately 263 to 375 million between 2000 and 20 IS, their share of the total urban population will only increase from 9. 2 percent to 9. 8 percent, a 6. 34 percent increase.