@mpeers

Today, after close to two years of painstaking research, lots of trial and error, and an incredibly sincere and dedicated effort to educate and solicit input from a very diverse group of stakeholders (of which I was one, see reflections on our first, second and third meetings), the Great Lakes Commission and Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative released Restoring the Natural Divide: Separating the Great Lakes and Mississippi River Basins in the Chicago Area Waterway System. It is a bold and visionary statement of what is possible, and for that I applaud them.

The project is innovative and ambitious. It crosses demographic data, lists of cities, satellite pictures, identifies inhabited areas and integrates West Africa into a global cities database (e-Geopolis). Maps and results from this geostatistical approach make a marked improvement on the way African urbanization is usually interpreted, such as can be seen with UN statistics. They highlight modes of urbanization that development partners need to know about: from a “metropolization from the top”, urban sprawl in major cities, to an “urbanization from the bottom”, which results from the gradual slowing down of the rural exodus against a backdrop of strong demographic pressure.