Day to celebrate cities

At China's suggestion, a UN General Assembly committee adopted a resolution on human settlement on Friday, designating Oct 31 as World Cities Day.

World Cities Day will provide a good opportunity for countries around the world to cooperate on urbanization and jointly explore ways to achieve sustainable urban development, said a commentary in People's Daily on Wednesday.

The idea of the international day dates back to Oct 31, 2010 when a declaration issued on the closing day of the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai proposed a day be designated as a special day to recall, renew and advance ideas and practices for sustainable urbanization displayed at the Shanghai Expo.

The history of human civilization is also the history of the development of cities. Urbanization is a universal trend as well as an inevitable process for countries to advance modernization. International practices show the income level of a country or a region is proportional to its rate of urbanization.

According to UN statistics, more than 50 percent of the world's population now live in cities, and it has been estimated that from 2007 to 2050 the world will witness 3.1 billion new urban residents, and among them 2.9 billion will come from the developing world.

The experiences of developed countries show that when the urbanization rate reaches 40 to 60 percent, social and economic development will face a series of challenges, such as a resources crisis and degradation of the environment.

In an interdependent world, the fate of a country's development and even the future of humanity hinges on whether the problems in the ongoing process of urbanization can be properly tackled.

There is no panacea for the woes cities are facing today. Different cities may need different remedies, and sharing and exchanging experiences with one anther would illuminate the road of urbanization ahead.

China has embarked on the fastest and biggest urbanization drive in human history, and it wants to share its audacious exploration and practices in this regard with the rest of the world and learn from the experiences of others. World Cities Day can be a marker on the road to people-oriented and quality-minded urbanization.

(China Daily 12/12/2013 page8)