The Good City is an initiative launched together with Nippon Koei to help cities across the world become better. It brings together our designers, urbanists, engineers, environmental scientists, and technologists to provide a package of services targeted at cities and municipal authorities.

The Challenge

Urban centres accommodate 56% of the world’s population, generate 85% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and are also responsible for 70% of its CO2 emissions. Too many cities are congested and polluted, they are car dependent with ineffective public transport, and they fail to provide good housing and quality of life to all their residents.

Despite all of this, cities also provide many of the solutions to the problems we face. They exist to bring people together to foster community, creativity, innovation, and economic activity. They are vital to the economy as well as being central to governance, culture, and national life.

For much of the period since the second world war the problems of cities have mostly concerned growth. In mega cities across the world, population growth has outstripped the capacity of urban authorities to provide housing and infrastructure. This is still the case in India and many African cities.

Elsewhere assumptions of perpetual growth are being challenged by falling national populations as well as by changing patterns of living and working, post COVID. How do cities cope when the outward flow of people exceeds the numbers arriving? The experience of urban decline in Europe and North America in the late 20th Century is a warning of what could happen as the world passes the point of peak population.