John Vidal - The 100 million city: is 21st century urbanisation out of control?
The 1960 street map of
Lagos, Nigeria,
shows a small western-style coastal city surrounded a few semi-rural African
villages. Paved roads quickly turn to dirt, and fields to forest. There are few
buildings over six floors high and not many cars.
No one foresaw what
happened next. In just two generations Lagos grew 100-fold, from under 200,000
people to nearly 20 million. Today one of the world’s 10 largest cities, it
sprawls across nearly 1,000 sq km. Vastly wealthy in parts, it is largely
chaotic and impoverished. Most residents
live
in informal settlements, or slums. The great majority are not connected to
piped water or a sanitation system. The city’s streets are choked with traffic,
its air is full of fumes, and its main dump covers 40 hectares and receives
10,000 metric tons of waste a day.
But new
research suggests that the changes Lagos has seen in the last 60 years
may be nothing to what might take place in the next 60. If Nigeria’s population
continues to grow and people move to cities at the same rate as now, Lagos
could become the world’s largest metropolis, home to 85 or 100 million people.
By 2100, it is projected to be home to more people than California or Britain
today, and to stretch hundreds of miles – with enormous environmental effects…
read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/19/urban-explosion-kinshasa-el-alto-growth-mexico-city-bangalore-lagos