Urban Designers Ponder a Future Defined By Megacities

A megacity, as defined in this article on Wired, is an urban area with over 10 million inhabitants. There are, depending on which population numbers you trust, about 20-30 megacities on Earth today. By 2025, that figure is expected to rise to near 40. All told, about half of the planet’s population could reside in megacities by 2030.

The Wired article highlights a new exhibit opening this week in New York at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit, titled Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Growing Megacities, is composed of futurist designs for tackling the urban challenges involved with population growth. A particular focus is poverty.

From the Wired article:

“One number that isn’t referenced often is that two-thirds of that population will be poor,” says Pedro Gadanho, who curated Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Growing Megacities at MoMA. That poverty translates into informal cities, like the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or illegally subdivided high-rises of Hong Kong.

Teams of urban planners visited several major metropolises — New York, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, and Lagos — to inform their designs. For a slideshow of images from the exhibit, take a look at the Wired piece linked again below.