New Scientist recently reported a striking new estimate: 81% of the world’s population is now urban. Whether the modelling is debated or refined, the trajectory is indisputable – humanity has become a predominantly urban species. We increasingly inhabit dense clusters of concrete, mobility, infrastructure, and capital flows, but also of precarity, ecological strain, exclusion, and democratic anxieties. This shift is not abstract. It changes everything we know about resources, governance, climate, and justice.The timing of this is extraordinary.As the IPCC enters its Seventh Assessment cycle (AR7), the world’s scientists are once again asking whether a habitable planet is still within reach. And this time, more than ever, the answer hinges on cities – how they expand, who they serve, and what they deplete. Importantly, AR7 is not ignoring cities – it is placing them at the centre of climate risk, climate solutions, and systemic transitions. Its working groups have a clear mandate: to examine how urban systems, infrastructure transitions, social vulnerability, and place-based justice shape global mitigation and adaptation pathways.But the meaning of “81% urban” is radically different depending on where one stands. A resident of Lagos, Dhaka, Mumbai, Nairobi, or Manila does not experience urbanisation as a neat demographic transition. It arrives instead as overcrowded housing, unaffordable utilities, floods, heatwaves, impossible commutes, and fractured livelihoods. The Global South carries the burden of urbanisation without having enjoyed the material privileges that historically accompanied it in the North. This is why any global conversation on urban futures must be anchored in Southern realities.The Global South: Urbanisation without industrialisationIn much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, cities are expanding not because of stable jobs or manufacturing boom but because rural life has become unviable. Climate stress, land degradation, agrarian distress, and speculative land markets push millions towards cities – often into slums, informal settlements, and precarious service economies. This means the world’s urban majority is increasingly composed of people who lack secure rights, secure incomes, and secure access to water, sanitation, and housing.This is urbanisation without industrialisation, without redistribution, and without ecological buffers – a uniquely dangerous pattern. If the world is 81% urban, it is also 81% exposed to cascading risks, particularly in the Global South where infrastructure deficits meet climate extremes.This is the context that IPCC AR7 must internalise, rather than viewing cities as homogenous spaces of “opportunity”.India: A microcosm of global urban contradictionsNowhere are these contradictions sharper than in India, home to one of the world’s largest urban transitions – messy, unequal, climate-vulnerable, yet full of democratic possibility. Indian cities display the duality of the Global South: expanding skylines above and expanding slums below; high-tech corridors alongside water-stressed neighbourhoods; monumental flyovers covering streets where informal workers battle for foothold.Urban water shortages coexist with luxury swimming pools. Air purifiers buzz inside gated towers while pollution chokes the public realm outside. Climate extremes hit hardest those who contribute the least to the problem: street vendors, sanitation workers, construction labourers, domestic workers, migrants, and informal settlers.This is where the meaning of 81%urban becomes clear: more people than ever are living in cities that are not ready for them.But India also shows pathways of possibility: community-driven sanitation, decentralised water harvesting, digital public infrastructure (when democratised), local climate adaptation plans, progressive urban commons movements, and experiments in participatory budgeting. These offer lessons for the world – if sustainability is reframed around justice, not just technology.Cities cannot be extractive engines of growthFor decades, global urban policy has celebrated cities as “engines of growth”. But in practice, this has meant engines of extractive capitalism, where land is commodified, utilities are privatised, and planning privileges elites while displacing the poor. The Global South knows this intimately: slum clearance for real estate corridors, mega-projects that drain wetlands, coastal highways that erase fishing livelihoods, and privatised water that prices out the working class.A world that is 81% urban cannot afford this model. Cities must transition from being sites of extraction to being ecological habitats, embedded within regional water cycles, local food systems, and circular economies that minimise waste and maximise public good.This requires rethinking value itself. Water, sanitation, housing, mobility, drainage – these cannot be governed through exchange value, where profit defines access. They must be governed through use value, where life, dignity, health, and ecology determine policy design.Southern cities – because they sit at the frontline of scarcity – can lead this transition if they resist the pressures of financialisation and insist on public provisioning.Where will the money come from? Start with progressive taxationThe transformation of 21st-century cities will demand immense resources. And the question is always asked with a cynical shrug: Where will the money come from?The answer, internationally and domestically, is increasingly clear. Tax the rich. Tax the big guzzlers. Tax the hyper-consumers who generate ecological footprints multiple times larger than the average citizen.Globally, the top 1% is responsible for more emissions than the poorest half of humanity. In India, too, luxury consumption – giant SUVs, private jets, cooling towers, gated communities – drives urban ecological stress far more than the informal settlements that are routinely blamed for “encroachment” or “pollution”.Progressive property taxes, wealth taxes, carbon taxes on high emitters, congestion pricing for luxury vehicles, steep penalties on excessive water use, and strong environmental regulation are not ideological positions. They are survival strategies.The revenue must be redirected towards green public transport, affordable rental housing, urban wetlands and forests, resilient utilities, and community-led climate adaptation.Nothing else will work – not PPP fantasies, not philanthropy, not “smart city” dashboards that digitise inequality.Sustainability requires habitat, labour, and livelihood securityA fatal flaw in global urban discourse is its obsession with infrastructure while neglecting the social foundations that make a city liveable. The Global South cannot build sustainable cities without addressing housing insecurity, precarious labour, gendered vulnerabilities, and informal livelihoods.Net-zero targets mean little if workers faint on overheated construction sites. Green corridors mean little if hawkers are evicted in the name of beautification. Electric buses mean little if women do not feel safe on them. Climate resilience means little if migrants cannot access welfare because of rigid documentation norms.Sustainable cities are not just low-carbon – they are socially secure.Digital democratisation: The new urban commonsAs cities digitise, Global South cities must guard against a new form of exclusion: digital mapping without accountability, algorithmic planning without transparency, and data monopolies without public control. Digital infrastructure – GIS platforms, property databases, welfare systems – should not become tools of privatisation or technocratic overreach.Instead, digital systems must function as urban commons, governed by public standards, open access, community consultation, and democratic oversight. India’s ongoing evolution of digital public infrastructure offers potential – if it remains open, accountable, and rights-based rather than captured by private interests.A global urban majority demands a new urban imaginationThe world is now, effectively, an urban civilisation. Whether this civilisation thrives or collapses will depend on what the Global South does, and what the Global North chooses to support – or obstruct.This moment requires courage:to dismantle extractive urbanism,to reclaim public utilities as public goods,to tax ecological privilege,to centre labour and habitat in climate policy,to democratise digital and physical planning,and to recognise that Southern cities are not latecomers but leaders in the fight for a liveable planet.The IPCC’s AR7 cycle focuses on the urban question, which should be the central battleground for climate justice. The world is 81% urban. But it is not yet sustainable. The path to a survivable future runs through the streets of the Global South – and through the choices we make about what a city should be, whom it should serve, and what kind of planet it leaves behind.Tikender Singh Panwar has authored three books on urbanisation. He is the former deputy mayor of Shimla, and currently a member of the Kerala Urban Commission.