How to protect fast growing cities from failing_ RobertMuggah_2014 We can cut ( ) deaths around the world by 50 percent in the next three decades. All we have to do is drop killing by 2.3 percent a year, and we'll hit that target. You don't believe me? Well, the leading ( ) and ( ) around the world seem to think we can, and so do I, but only if we focus on our cities, especially the most ( ) ones. You see, I've been thinking about this a lot. For the last 20 years, I've been working in countries and cities ripped apart by ( ) , violence, ( ) , or some ( ) combination of all. I've tracked gun ( ) from Russia to Somalia, I've worked with warlords in Afghanistan and the Congo, I've counted cadavers in Colombia, in Haiti, in Sri Lanka, in Papua New Guinea. You don't need to be on the front line, though, to get a sense that our planet is ( ) out of control, right? There's this feeling that international ( ) is the new normal . But I want you to take a closer look, and I think you'll see that the geography of violence is changing, because it's not so much our nation states that are ( ) by conflict and crime as our cities: Aleppo, Bamako, Caracas, Erbil, Mosul, Tripoli, Salvador. Violence is migrating to the metropole. And maybe this is to be expected, right? After all, most people today, they live in cities, not the countryside. Just 600 cities, including 30 ( ) , account for two thirds of global GDP. But when it comes to cities, the conversation is ( ) by the North, that is, North America, Western Europe, Australia and Japan, where violence is actually at historic lows. As a result, city ( ) , they talk about the ( ) of the city, of the creative classes, and the mayors that will rule the world. Now, I hope that mayors do one day rule the world, but, you know, the fact is, we don't hear any conversation, really, about what is happening in the South. And by South, I mean Latin America, Africa, Asia, where violence in some cases is( ), where infrastructure is ( ) , and where governance is sometimes an ( ) and not a reality. Now, some diplomats and development experts and ( ) , they talk about 40 to 50 fragile states that will shape security in the 21st century. I think it's fragile cities which will define the future of order and disorder. That's because warfare and ( ) action are going to be concentrated in our cities, and the fight for development, whether you define that as ( ) poverty , universal healthcare, beating back climate change, will be won or lost in the ( ) , slums and favelas of our cities. I want to talk to you about four megarisks that I think will define fragility in our time, and if we can get to grips with these, I think we can do something with that ( ) violence problem. So let me start with some good news. Fact is, we're living in the most peaceful moment in human history. Steven Pinker and others have shown how the ( ) and ( ) of conflict is actually at an all-time low. Now, Gaza, Syria, Sudan, Ukraine, as ( ) as these conflicts are, and they are horrific, they represent a relatively small blip upwards in a 50-year-long ( ) decline. What's more, we're seeing a dramatic reduction in homicide. Manuel Eisner and others have shown that for centuries, we've seen this incredible drop in murder, especially in the West. Most Northern cities today are 100 times safer than they were just 100 years ago. These two facts -- the decline in armed conflict and the decline in murder -- are amongst the most extraordinary, if unheralded , ( ) of human history, and we should be really excited, right? Well, yeah, we should. There's just one problem: These two scourges are still with us. You see, 525,000 people -- men, women, boys and girls -- die violently every single year. Research I've been doing with Keith Krause and others has shown that between 50,000 and 60,000 people are dying in war zones violently. The rest, almost 500,000 people, are dying outside of conflict zones. In other words, 10 times more people are dying outside of war than inside war. What's more, violence is moving south, to Latin America and the Caribbean, to parts of Central and Southern Africa, and to bits of the Middle East and Central Asia. Forty of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world are right here in Latin America, 13 in Brazil, and the most dangerous of all, it's San Pedro Sula, Honduras' second city, with a ( ) homicide rate of 187 murders per 100,000 people. That's 23 times the global average. Now, if violence is re-concentrating geographically, it's also being ( ) to the world's new ( ) , because when it comes to cities, the world ain't flat , like Thomas Friedman likes to say. It's ( ) . The dominance of the city as the primary mode of urban living is one of the most extraordinary ( ) reversals in history, and it all happened so fast. You all know the figures, right? There's 7.3 billion people in the world today; there will be 9.6 billion by 2050. But consider this one fact: In the 1800s, one in 30 people lived in cities, today it's one in two, and tomorrow virtually everyone is going to be there. And this expansion in urbanization is going to be neither even nor ( ) . The vast majority, 90 percent, will be happening in the South, in cities of the South. So urban geographers and demographers, they tell us that it's not necessarily the size or even the ( ) of cities that predicts violence , no. Tokyo, with 35 million people, is one of the largest, and some might say safest, urban ( ) in the world. No, it's the speed of urbanization that matters . I call this turbo-urbanization, and it's one of the key drivers of fragility . When you think about the incredible ( ) of these cities, and you think about turbo-urbanization, think about Karachi. Karachi was about 500,000 people in 1947, a ( ) , bustling city. Today, it's 21 million people, and apart from accounting for three quarters of Pakistan's GDP, it's also one of the most violent cities in South Asia. Dhaka, Lagos, Kinshasa, these cities are now 40 times larger than they were in the 1950s. Now take a look at New York. The Big Apple, it took 150 years to get to eight million people. São Paulo, Mexico City, took 15 to reach that same interval. Now, what do these medium, large, mega-, and hypercities look like? What is their profile ? Well, for one thing, they're young. What we're seeing in many of them is the rise of the youth bulge . Now, this is actually a good news story. It's a function of reductions in child ( ) rates. But the youth bulge is something we've got to watch. What it basically means is the proportion of young people living in our fragile cities is much larger than those living in our ( ) and ( ) ones. In some fragile cities, 75 percent of the population is under the age of 30. Think about that: Three in four people are under 30. It's like Palo Alto on steroids. Now, if you look at Mogadishu for example, in Mogadishu the mean age is 16 years old. Ditto for Dhaka, Dili and Kabul. And Tokyo? It's 46. Same for most Western European cities. Now, it's not just youth that necessarily predicts violence. That's one factor among many, but youthfulness combined with unemployment, lack of education, and -- this is the kicker -- being male, is a deadly ( ) . They're statistically ( ) , all those risk factors, with youth, and they tend to relate to increases in violence. Now, for those of you who are parents of teenage sons, you know what I'm talking about, right? Just imagine your boy without any structure with those ( ) friends of his, out there ( ) about. Now, take away the parents, take away the education, limit the education possibilities, ( ) in a little bit of drugs, alcohol and guns, and sit back and watch the fireworks. The implications are disconcerting . Right here in Brazil, the life expectancy is 73.6 years. If you live in Rio, I'm sorry, shave off two right there. But if you're young, you're uneducated, you lack employment , you're black, and you're male, your life ( ) drops to less than 60 years old. There's a reason why youthfulness and violence are the number one killers in this country. Okay, so it's not all doom and gloom in our cities. After all, cities are hubs of ( ) , ( ) , prosperity , excitement , connectivity . They're where the smart people gather. And those young people I just mentioned , they're more digitally savvy and tech-aware than ever before. And this explosion , the Internet, and mobile technology, means that the digital divide separating the North and the South between countries and within them, is ( ) . But as we've heard so many times, these new technologies are dual-edged, right? Take the case of law enforcement . Police around the world are starting to use remote sensing and big data to anticipate crime. Some cops are able to predict criminal violence before it even happens. The future crime scenario , it's here today, and we've got to be careful. We have to manage the issues of the public safety against rights to individual privacy. But it's not just the cops who are innovating . We've heard extraordinary activities of civil society groups who are engaging in local and global collective action, and this is leading to digital protest and real revolution . But most worrying of all are criminal gangs who are going online and starting to colonize cyberspace . In Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, where I've been working, groups like the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel are hijacking social media. They're using it to recruit , to sell their products, to coerce , to intimidate and to kill. Violence is going virtual. So