Convenors: Frauke Kraas and Claus Milkereit
Session language: Englisch

Topic:
By 2015, more than 600 million people will live in approx. 60 megacities worldwide. Megacities as new phenomena of the worldwide urbanisation processes associated with accelerating globalisation are subject to global ecological, socio-economic and political change. Conversely, they also influence these changes due to their strong development dynamics, achieving unprecedentedly high spatial and demographic expansion and concentrations of population, infrastructure, economic power, capital, and decision-making, as well as excessive and partially self-energising acceleration of all the development processes. Increasingly, megacities are subject to an as yet unmeasured loss of formal governability and control – with the consequence that processes are unregulated and take place informally or illegally. Megacities have developed into new socio-economic and political ‘laboratories of the future’, as they seem to reflect global development trends compactly, sometimes anticipatingly. In Germany, three programs are investigating key dynamics of development within selected megacities. The session will focus on main challenges of sustainability, governance and informality, risks and conflicts as well as resource security. Moreover, action models and strategic solutions will be addressed.