Megacities: A Narrative Report

To better understand the different challenges in megacities several theories exist like; the ‘Triple bottom line’ of John Elkington; the ‘Circles of sustainability’ (ecology, culture, politics, economics) (United Nations Agenda 21, 1992); and the Sustainable society index (human well-being, environmental well-being and economic well-being) (Sustainable society index, 2014). In fact these theories all have very similar approaches of categorizing. The main differences are the terminology that is used and some small differences can be found in categorization. Most of them find their origin from the definition of the Brundtland commission:

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the presents without compromising future

Due to the differences between cities they are encountering different sustainability challenges. To understand these different challenges better, a distinction can be made depending on the stage of economic and social development of the city. In the report ‘Megacity challenges’, three ‘archetypes’ are used to make this distinction; emerging megacities, transitional megacities and mature megacities (Globescan, 2004). The same kind of categorisation is made in the ‘urban environmental transition’ theory (Marcotullio, 2007), this theory describes that as cities become wealthier, their environmental focus changes from so called ‘brown’ to ‘grey’ and finally ‘green’ challenges. Although the cities are divided by their problems instead of city type, the three categories in both theories make the same distinction between cities and can almost be used

They grow about one percent on average per year because there is almost no migration from rural areas anymore. The challenges that these cities face are described as “green” challenges (Marcotullio, 2007; McGranahan et al., 1999). They already overcome the “brown” and “grey” sustainability challenges. Their infrastructure has been built simultaneously with the emergence of the city (Aggarwal, 2014) and therefore they do not have to deal with these challenges anymore. They can afford themselves to focus on sustainability challenges and the adaptation to the consequences of climate