BDP believes that cities are good for us, at least they can and should be. They have the potential to be good for economic growth, for our quality of life and wellbeing, for arts and culture and for the environment. However too often, around the world, cities fail to live up to this potential.
The Good City is an initiative launched together with our parent company 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.
Urban centres accommodate 56% of the world’s population, generate 85% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) but 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.
But 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.
However 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.
BDP and Nippon Koei bring together design and advisory services to address these issues, from urban regeneration and spatial planning to civil engineering and transport infrastructure.
We have launched The Good City as an initiative to bring together experts from across the world to focus on what makes a good city. Of course, cities vary hugely in their size, function, culture and geography but they all face the following ten issues even if the solutions may not always be the same. The Good City sets out our view on each of these issues and recommended ways in which they are addressed.