Since 2005, LSE Cities (London School of Economics) has been collecting comparative data on how global cities perform in terms of key spatial, socioeconomic, and environmental indicators.
This is their latest data matrix:
To be clear, it is not a ranking of cities. It is intended to help us better understand how different cities around the world are performing.
Depending on how you're consuming this post, the text may be difficult to read. So here's what each column represents, moving from left to right:
Current population in the administrative city (millions)
Current population in the urban agglomeration (millions)
Average hourly population growth of urban agglomeration 2015 to 2030 (people per hour)
Administrative city area (km2)
Average density of built-up administrative area (people/km2)
GDP per capita in urban area ($, PPP)
Percentage of country's GDP produced by the metro region
Population under 20 (%)
Murder rate (homicides per 100,000 inhabitants)
Percentage of daily trips made by public transport
Percentage of daily trips made by walking & cycling
Car ownership rate (per 1,000 inhabitants)
CO2 emissions (tonnes per capita)
If you'd prefer to download a full PDF of the chart, click here.
Shaping Cities in an Urban Age is the third book to come out of the London School of Economic's Urban Age project. It was published last fall. The first two titles were, Living in the Endless City (2011) and The Endless City (2007).
If you're familiar with the first two publications, you'll know that these books are heavily illustrated. Lots of maps, charts, and diagrams. So they make great coffee table books. But they're also filled with insightful essays -- this one has 37 of them.
In this particular book the focus is on the following:
"It identifies current trends that are making cities more fragmented, less equitable and environmentally more damaging, and argues powerfully for a more integrated social, environmental and spatial approach that can inform and inspire city-makers that are shaping an increasingly urban world."
I am sharing this with all of you today because I have always really enjoyed these books. They have a way of quickly putting things into perspective globally.
Around 2.5 billion more people are expected to live in an urban agglomeration by 2050. And 90% of this growth is expected to happen in just two places: Asia and Africa. This is an unprecedented shift that will obviously create many challenges and many opportunities.
This book is about that.
Image: Phaidon
I’ve been thinking about land markets as of late and so today I thought I would share a post by Toby Lloyd that I recently discovered called: Understanding and adapting the land market is key to solving our housing crisis (2014). It’s from the London School of Economics’ British Politics and Policy blog.
His argument, as the title suggests, is that we need to dig deeper and look at how our land markets are functioning if we want to address some of the challenges facing our cities today.
The post is obviously written from a UK perspective, but many of his points will probably ring true for a lot of you in the industry. One remark that stood out for me was his point about developers always operating at the margins:
“The result of the land auction process is that the worst scheme, the one that offers the least to the community, the poorest quality homes, and charges the most for them, is generally the one that will happen, because this is the one that offers the most cash up front to the landowner. As a result, development is always already at the margins of viability. Even a relatively small shock can see construction grind to a halt rapidly, because there is simply not enough margin left after the landowner’s cut has come out for the developer to want to build.”
When it comes to building, most people tend to think about the developer, the architect, and so on. But what I think many people overlook is that this entire process starts with a land input and a landowner. And the cost, availability and usability of that land input has a significant impact on everything that happens downstream.