By Mark Swilling

Sometime within the next five to ten years, the world will step through a crucial barrier: the majority of the world's population will be living in cities for the first time in human history, and the majority will be – and already are – massive sprawling megalopoli located mainly in developing countries. By 2015, there will be 26 "megacities" – cities with more than 10 million inhabitants (of which Tokyo, Bombay and Lagos will be the three largest).

These cities are already the most unequal and unsustainable places in the world, but they are also the leading centers of increasingly intense social innovation, cultural integration and synergy, economic development, and political transformation. Nobody knows what will emerge from these grand melting pots: from Shanghai to Santiago, Mexico City to Manila, Cape Town to Cairo, and Istanbul to Sao Paulo – this is where the future is being crafted, for better or for worse.

One thing is sure: much will depend on how the urban poor get organized, and whom they form alliances with. This month's Changemakers Journal profiles three social entrepreneurs whose work emphasizes the importance of incremental action to empower and build alliances, linked to action for fundamental change.

Nobody disputes that humanity is facing a global economic, social and ecological crisis. What is less clear is the spatial manifestation of this crisis, and what actions provide hope for how humanity can survive the crisis and evolve into a new order.

The Search for Ingenious Solutions

Cities, especially (but by no means exclusively) those in the developing world, are now places of hopelessness and hope: hopelessness due to the shear magnitude of the challenges we face; and hope due to the efforts of countless social entrepreneurs. They are finding ingenious solutions to intractable problems in the complex interstices of these awesome, unsustainable social constructions.

In Dhaka, Bangladesh, Mashuda Khatun Shefali is organizing women to give them safe shelter as they search for an independent means of survival and identity. She has helped create protected spaces for free association where women can talk, socialize, share experiences and support each other as they renegotiate their roles in extremely harsh urban systems.

Over time, this creates networks of solidarity based on trust, and new leaders who spread throughout the city while remaining in touch with each another. They eventually create information links that support movements to articulate a different future than that imposed by men and traditional roles, exploitative employers, or corrupt politicians.

Equally instructive, Sayed Iqbal Mohamed's work in Durban, South Africa links grassroots organizing to address local tenants' problems with demands at the national level for fundamental changes in the law and structure of funding for housing. Mohamed is taking advantage of the wide-open democratic space now available for this kind of action in South Africa to use a language, and build a set of coalitions, that would be riskier in less democratic environments. Nevertheless, the democratic environment will do little to make it easier to achieve his ultimate goal, which is to end to homelessness in the most unequal society in the world.

In Thailand, Somsook Boonyabancha's work is an exemplary case of the gains that can be made by negotiating agreements between slum dwellers and landowners to build new communities, solidarities and alliances. This, in turn, creates a social base for wider alliances and coalitions, as seen in the emergence of the Asian Coalition of Housing Rights committed to action for systemic change.

These three stories are typical. Replicate them tens of thousands of times across cities throughout the developed and developing world, and a picture forms of the kinds of people and activities that hold countless poor local neighborhoods together. They all share the same three ingredients: a key person with appropriate personal experiences and leadership ability, local actions to resolve local problems, and linkages to wider movements for more fundamental change.

While often it is impossible to draw direct causal linkages between their work and systemic improvements affecting the massive challenges facing growing cities – and in any case the media often misses these connections – a closer look always reveals these linkages. They range from outright political victories in local elections for political parties rooted in the local initiatives; to the adoption of policies designed and advocated by coalitions of local initiatives; to very localized improvements that would not otherwise have occurred.

Urbanization of the Planet

In 1950, 30 percent of the world's population was living in cities. This reached 45 percent in 1995, and is estimated to cross the crucial 50 percent mark in 2005.

This urbanization process takes different forms in different regions. 75 percent of the population in developed countries and Latin America live in urban areas, whereas less than one-third Asia and Africa's population lives in cities.

Nevertheless, the urbanization rate in these less developed Asian and African countries is around 3.6 percent annually, which is equal to 170,000 more people per day living in urban areas. It is estimated that by 2030, two-thirds of the total population of all developing countries will be living in urban areas.

This movement to an urban world must be seen within the context of population expansion during the past century. The total number of people living in the largest 20 cities in the world in 1875 did not exceed 10.5 million (with 4 million living in London alone).

The urban population of Mexico City in 1990 was double this, at just over 20 million people. Six of the twenty largest cities in the world in 1990 were in the developing world: Mexico City (20.2 million), Sao Paolo (18.7 million), Calcutta (12.5 million), Shanghai (11.9 million), Bombay (11.7 million), and Buenos Aires (11.7 million).

Tokyo was the largest city in the world in 1990 with a staggering 23.3 million people. Between 1950 and 1990, the number of "million cities" more than tripled from 76 to 276 and is projected to reach 511 in 2010.

By 2015 there will be 26 "megacities" – cities with more than 10 million inhabitants (of which Tokyo, Bombay and Lagos will be the three largest). Without planning it, the human species has built up – in the space of little more than a century – massive social organisms that have irrevocably transformed the way society works, and the consumption, distribution and replenishment of the planet's natural resources.

In short, three trends will collide within the lifetimes of people below the age of 50: another three billion people will live on the planet (taking us to 9 billion), the majority of the total population will live in towns and cities, and the biggest urban expansions will be in developing countries where often the resources to cope are most scarce.

In short, no matter what else happens, the world's future is an urban one. So what is happening in these places? And what does this future look like?

Rise of New Solidarities

For today's traveler, most cities across the developed and developing world look the same at first glance: on the one hand, there are the rising skyscrapers, converted waterfronts, expanding motorways leading to increasing traffic congestion, rejuvenated neighborhoods as the middle class expands, burgeoning urban markets, and the mushrooming of Internet cafes where formerly there were food and clothing sellers.

And on the other hand, there is the rickety, noisy, congested and stench-filled poor neighborhoods where the buzz and drudge of daily survival keeps the city awake around the clock. Survival in these neighborhoods is about selling anything in informal markets (no matter where it may have come from, by legal or illegal means), or selling labor to an employer (often located far away via a costly bus or taxi trip), or one's body for abuse – in return for enough to live for another day.

Daily life, as a permanent set of negotiated arrangements without routine or certainty about tomorrow, is a recipe for an impenetrable culture of unwritten rules, protocols and norms that simultaneously favor the entrepreneur who knows how to "move and make it happen," and eliminates all hope that anything fundamental can change in the near future.

This is a world ideally suited for incrementalism, where the atomizing impact of organized violence and the decline of the family sit cheek-by-jowl with the rise of new solidarities: faith-based fundamentalism, new social movements and the increasingly important role of the social entrepreneur.

Social entrepreneurs' only competitive advantage is their deep local knowledge of how things work – knowing who is who and how to get things done most effectively under the circumstances. The three stories presented in this month's Changemakers Journal exemplify the kinds of people who play these roles, and the strategies they pursue.

Growing Prosperity, Deepening Poverty

This crude snapshot of an urbanizing planet must be located in a larger macro-economic context. The annual output of the world economy grew from $31 trillion in 1990 to $42 trillion in 2000 – most of this growth took place in the cities of the world.

In 2000 alone, the world economy surged by 4.6 percent – the highest growth rate in a decade. It is these growth rates that allowed millions of (mainly, but not exclusively, middle class) urban dwellers to buy all the paraphernalia of modern living (fridges, TVs, PCs, cell phones, stereos, furniture, cars, houses).

Much of this growth has been generated by the urban centers: 55 percent in low-income countries, 73 percent in middle-income countries, and 85 percent in high-income countries. But this awesome growth has been accompanied by increased inequalities – again, most starkly in the urban centers.

In the U.S., the top 10 percent of the population has six times the income of the lowest 20 percent; in Brazil the ratio is 19:1. World Bank figures show that 2.8 billion people – nearly half the world's population – survive on $2 per day, while one-fifth (1.2 billion) live on less than $1 per day.

It is therefore not surprising that 220 million urban dwellers in the world's towns and cities lack access to clean drinking water, and almost twice as many have no access to even the simplest latrines. Between a one-third and two-thirds of solid waste is uncollected, piling up on streets and in drains, contributing to flooding and the spread of disease.

All this boils down to one simple fact: 2.4 billion people will need access to basic urban services within the next 30 years. In Asia alone, this will cost $280 billion.

Who is worrying about all these needs? Who is responding to these challenges? What are their strategies? What are the chances of success?

A Love Affair with TINA

The first global summit on urban challenge took place at the Habitat I conference in Vancouver in 1976. Looking at the world then was easier – this was before Keynesianism was a swear word, development still meant progress towards a better society, and the nano-second culture of the Information Technology revolution had not yet hit the global middle class.

Not surprisingly, the prescriptions for the urban challenge that emerged from Habitat I were based on faith in a rational, comprehensive, government-centered development planning model paternalistically supervised by the benign UN and Bretton Woods institutions. The substance of this planning was to resolve poverty (in particular homelessness) by redistributing assets from richer to poorer communities, prevent environmental degradation via government regulation, and urban sprawl by imposed spatial controls.

By 1996, when Habitat II took place in Istanbul, the world had changed. Gone was the faith in development planning, replaced now by the new gods of the free market; ever-present was the hype of high-velocity capital flows and a passionate love affair with "TINA" ("there is no alternative").

The language was about free trade, voluntarism, social capital, the limits of government capacity, and competing cities (not "nations") as nodal points in a globalized economy where nation-states had been "hollowed out" by a combination of rationalization (above them) and localization (below them). The Global Plan of Action that emerged was essentially an optimistic vision depicting cities as the wealth generators of the new millennium, driven primarily by "entrepreneurial" private investors (via free trade, privatization, and deregulation), with non-profit organizations replacing the crippled state as the care-givers of society.

There is a remarkable global consensus that local government is the key player when it comes to resolving the problems of the cities. Massive aid and government programmers are in place to decentralize power, build local government capacity to plan and manage (and in particular finance), establish and/or improve local tax bases, democratize accountabilities, etc. Experiences vary considerably and studies of these experiences are pouring out of the consulting, NGO and academic communities.

The current flavor of the month is "city development strategies": Can cities develop multi-stakeholder strategic plans for the future? Which ones are doing it? Does it help?

At the core of all these studies and actions is one simple question: if cities are the nodal points of ever-faster globalized capital flows over which national and local governments exercise less and less control, can this be reconciled with the elimination of urban poverty, or will this increase urban poverty?

Incremental Empowerment – Radical Change

In general, the evidence suggests that cities are being ripped apart: those sectors (that often correspond to specific places in cities) connected to the globalized capital flows are being transformed and connected to the new information networks, those that are not collapse ever deeper into the abyss of marginalization, normalization and survival.

In many African countries, entire cities – not just parts of them – are disappearing off the global network. Hence, the evidence of rising instabilities everywhere, often expressed in violent looting as angry people take back what they perceive has been stolen from them – not the least of which is a sense of community.

It is in this context that much will depend on how the urban poor get organized, and with whom they form alliances. The mushrooming of community-based organizations across many cities is a sign of hope. Often constituted at the neighborhood level by local leaders steeped in local knowledge and networks, these organizations have started to express new voices, new visions and new ways of getting things done.

While clearly there is room for classic forms of mobilization behind demands addressed to others for change, the more successful movements are those that emphasize the need for the poor to work out and implement their own solutions. Over time, this builds confidence, leadership, defensive capacity and a language that can underpin mass mobilization when it happens – while building trust, reciprocity and survivalistic solidarities across networks for those long periods between mobilizations and uprisings.

It is during those periods between mobilizations and uprisings when wider alliances are formed: with local businesses that have an interest in a sustainable society; local governments that have been captured by independent political parties connected to the grassroots; and with NGOs that have resources and technical expertise. Skeptical anti-globalization activists dismiss this kind of incrementalist grassroots work, arguing for continuous radical action.

But change is never just about a radical rupture, nor is it just about incrementalism – it is always both feeding off each other. Without incremental grassroots empowerment, radical changes turn into elite transitions, and without radical changes, incrementalism remains a narrowly-focused means of survival.

But as networks form between the multitude of local initiatives within and across cities, and as alliances with business and political actors deepens, movements coalesce that can challenge the seeming omnipotence of "TINA." The work of the three social entrepreneurs profiled here emphasizes the importance of incremental action – to empower and build alliances – that is linked to action for fundamental change.