We saw a fab exhibition at the Tate Modern on Sunday “Global Cities“. The introduction states that more than 50% of us now live in cities and, according to the UN, this number is set to rise to 75% by 2050. A century ago only 10% of the planet’s population lived in cities.

The exhibition attempts to encourage us to take account of the scale and pace of this change and consider its consequences on the way we live and the decisions we take. It examines the social and spatial conditions in ten large, dynamic cities spread across the globe: Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo. Cities are changing. There are now over 20 mega-city regions with more than ten million people. There are also nearly 450 city regions with over one million residents. Together they house more than one billion people in a relatively small surface of the earth. This footprint, as you can imagine, will have a direct impact on climate change and the ecological balance of the planet.

The figures are amazing. The exhibition was amazing. If you can, get down to see it – it finishes August 27th, Tate Modern London. I have a couple of copies of the exhibition in booklet form if anyone’s interested I can send one to you…