We see all of those problems in both high-density and low-density environments. To be sure, we should always respect traditions and individual preferences that can lead to many different choices. But the challenge I see when I look around the world is that something like three billion to five billion people will want to move into cities in this century. That is more people than have moved into cities in all of human history. Without making a judgment about whether they're right or wrong, I think policy-makers around the world have to accept the fact that these billions of people want to move to cities. If that's what they want, the imperative is to try to create the conditions where they can do so in safety and health, and with opportunity, inclusion, and dignity.
There will always be people who work in agriculture, minerals, and traditional lifestyles, and live in less-dense areas. People may move back and forth. These are not lifetime commitments. Someone might spend a period of time in a dense area saving money, and then use it to move back to a less-dense area. But around the world as a whole, the reality is that there is a tsunami of urbanization coming.
That gives us the chance to create a number of entirely new communities under these new conditions, and to use that as a chance for reform and progress we wouldn't have if we didn't have the chance to create new communities.
This proposal does not have any immediate easy answers for problems we see in some rural communities. That is its own problem that deserves its own attention. But it is a proposal that can get us out of thinking about aid as charity and into thinking of aid as the costless facilitation of the development of these new norms that support modern, dense social life. Enormous benefit around the world will come from that kind of facilitation—benefit for people from the developing world who can take advantage of it, but also benefit for the people from the developed world who can finance things like infrastructure, outsource the manufacturing activities, and trade productively with these growing centres around the world.