A century ago, the Democratic Republic of Congo capital Kinshasa was a small town of barely 20,000 people. By 2050 it is expected to be the fourth-largest city in the world, with 35 million inhabitants. As many as 10 cities around the world are expected to have more than 50 million inhabitants, making them bigger than all but 48 countries in the world. Alongside many other global red alerts —climate change, pollution, hunger, poverty, and lack of biodiversity— we need to add bloated cities that will collapse on themselves unless dramatic changes are made in our urban planning systems. Large cities in the developing countries, and even many in the developed world, are already creaking under their weight as urban planners and city councils have failed to keep pace with population growth —an endless flow from rural areas to urban centers in search of a livelihood, and better social services such as education or healthcare. With old and inadequate infrastructure, cities have been struggling for decades to keep pace with rising population, and there is hardly one in the world that can rest easy. The situation in the developing countries,especially in Asia and Africa is already calamitous; over two-thirds of urban populations live in shanties, without access to reliable water or power, simply struggling to eke out a living. The cities are choking with water and air pollution and terrible waste management systems have led to almost every city sitting next to mountains of garbage landfills. If this is the situation today, it would be foolhardy to imagine these cities managing with four or five-fold population growth. Cities have also become hotbeds of climate change; they account for about half the world’s population butare responsible for over 70 percent of carbon emissions, most of which come from industrial and motorized transport systems that use huge quantities of fossil fuels and rely on far-flung manufacturing infrastructure with carbon-intensive materials. Moreover, the cities also consume a far greater per-capita share of natural resources such as water than rural areas.Urbanization has long been propagated by planners as the key to the world of tomorrow, making the most efficient use of resources. Instead, after six decades of massive urbanization — most of it unplanned, at least in the developing world — cities are unwieldy giants with all kinds of problems, from high air pollution to lack of housing and other urban infrastructure that is supposed to come with a city. The migration from rural areas has put too many people in a race for too few facilities, leading to high unemployment and crime. When even large, wealthy cities such as San Francisco or New York cannot solve their housing, healthcare and education problems, it is downright stupid to imagine that cities in countries with scarce resources to fix today’s issues can prepare themselves to be five times their current size. It is time for planners, especially those in governments, to return to the drawing board and look back at what Mahatma Gandhi preached all his life — decentralization, making every village or cluster of villages entirely self-dependent, from social services to their economy. That may sound utopian, but it is still possible to implement in South Asia and Africa, where a large majority of the population is still rural. Indeed, a new look at the development model is needed most in these two regions, since they will have the largest burdens of nation-sized behemoths called urban conglomerations. If the rot can be slowed immediately and reversed over time, it may yet be possible to offer every citizen a lifestyle in harmony with nature. • Ranvir S. Nayar is managing editor of Media India Group Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News" point of view