One of the biggest challenges for the world this century is how to accommodate the hundreds of millions of people who will flock to cities, especially in emerging economies. Coping with this human torrent will be fearsomely dimcult-but at least the problem is widely acknowledged. That is not true of another pressing urban dilemma: what to do with cities that are losing people. They are hardly unusual. Almost one in ten American cities is shrinking. So are more than a third of German ones-and the number is growing (see page 57). Although Japan's biggest cities are thriving, large numbers of its smaller ones are collapsing. Several South Korean cities have begun to decline-a trend that will speed up unless couples can somehow be persuaded to have more babies. Next will come China, where the force of rapid urbanisation will eventually be overwhelmed by the greater power of demographic contraction. China's total urban population is expected to peak by mid-century; older industrial boom towns are already on a downward slope.
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