Today, for the first time in history, more than half of the global population lives in cities. Urbanization is currently one of the most powerful transformation processes on our planet, and megacities — an extreme product of this development — are posing new challenges while opening new opportunities.

“The Megacity Resilience Framework”, a 12-page UNU-EHS Policy Brief by Carsten Butsch (University of Cologne), Benjamin Etzold (University of Bonn) and Patrick Sakdapolrak (University of Bonn), provides a brief overview of the global urbanization process and introduces vulnerability and resilience as concepts that allow for new perspectives on megacities. These perspectives are “the global and the local”, “the formal and the informal” and “the social and the ecological”.

Rather than concentrating on the negative effects (like poverty and slums), the authors draw attention to the new opportunities that megacities provide. For example, the more people that are living in one space, the potentially faster and more sustainable the exchange of goods between them or services access to them. Showing the development and complexity of modern megacities, the authors give research suggestions and define a megacity resilience framework that is the basis for their practical proposals for policy makers.