1st Global State of Metropolis - Preliminary Findings and Key Messages Booklet

As the world continues to urbanize it is also becoming metropolitan. Whether horizontal spreading, dispersed urbanization or periurbanization, the physical extent of urban areas is growing much faster than their population, thereby consuming more land for urban development. Those phenomena have made many cities grown beyond the boundaries of their central municipality or “city proper” configuring bigger and denser metropolises. This is a trend still present in all world regions and affecting all kind and size of cities, from megacities, to intermediate cities and even small towns.

However, most of the world’s metropolises are not managed in a differentiated way, meaning they do not have neither a metropolitan plan nor institution, configuring a global metropolitan management gap. In addition, existing metropolitan management systems are currently unbalanced. While several metropolises have advanced their governance arrangements and planning instruments, the financing mechanisms both for implementing projects with metropolitan impact and maintaining metropolitan institutions working properly, are highly relegated. For their part, metropolitan policies and legal frameworks are emerging in many parts of the world.

This Booklet presents the preliminary findings and key messages from the metropolitan management assessment made to a Global Sample of Metropolises defined and analysed jointly by UN-Habitat and metropolitan authorities and experts between 2019-2022. The trends distilled from the analyses configure a sound milestone towards the forthcoming UN-Habitat’s 1st Global State of Metropolis Report.