Humanity on the Move - the transformative power of cities

We would like to inform you that the full version of the report: Humanity on the move – Unlocking the transformative power of cities has now been published online.

Cities play a key role for climate change. The momentum of urbanization and its impacts are so massive that we must face up to this trend. In view of the existing cognitive, technical, economic and institutional path dependencies, a policy of business as usual – i.e. an unstructured, quasi-automatic urbanization – would lead to a non-sustainable ‘world cities society’. Only if cities and urban societies are sufficiently empowered can they make use of the opportunities for sustainability and successfully follow the urban transformation pathways. The success or failure of the Great Transformation towards a climate-friendly and sustainable future will be decided in the cities. The WBGU discusses the relevant conditions for the success of this transformation in this report.

A Spanish and a Chinese version of the summary of this report are also now available.

The PDF can also be downloaded from our website.

English: www.wbgu.de/urbantransformation

Español: www.wbgu.de/transformacionurbana (resumen)

Chinese: www.wbgu.de/fr2016_summary_chn (summary)

With kind regards,