Demand for essential infrastructure is exploding. The world’s population is projected to increase by one-third, to exceed 8 billion by 2050, with--for the first time in human history--more than 50 percent of humanity living in metropolitan areas.
The requirements for water, power, and mobility will rise accordingly, even as population density makes it more difficult to build and protect the robust infrastructure needed to satisfy that demand.
The typical life cycle of urban development also reinforces demand for infrastructure. As more people live and work in metropolitan areas, they need and expect more affordable housing. The default result, barring a coordinated effort to align mass transit systems and transit-oriented development, is a sprawling metropolitan area encompassing miles of suburbs--and in less--developed countries, shantytowns.
In such low-population-density environments, roads and highways become the only transportation mode that works. This, as we have seen time and again, becomes a recipe for gridlock. Water and electricity grids must also serve more people over greater distances than in the past.
Meanwhile, the quality and quantity of supply are increasingly threatened everywhere in three primary areas: power, transportation and water. The need for better facilities and infrastructure to deliver more of these to growing populations is greater than ever.
An estimate developed by Booz Allen Hamilton suggests the magnitude of the problem. Over the next 25 years, modernizing and expanding the water, electricity, and transportation systems of the cities of the world will require approximately $40 trillion--a figure roughly equivalent to the 2006 market capitalization of all shares held in all stock markets in the world.
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