CBA Record October 2017

PRO BONOWEEK 2017– FOR THE SAKE OF THE COMMUNITY

By Anne Dodge, Angela Hall, and Jan Feldman

Pro Bono Week 2017 Community Development Through Pro Bono

C i ties–ask anyone in Chicago what a city is, and you’ll hear similar things. It’s a place where people come together live, work, play, buy, sell, create things. It’s a place with more tall buildings than small ones; it’s a place where people share limited space, and where the public realm is more visible and more contested. It’s also a place where time is a currency, for both the poor and the rich.

account for 70% GDP and CO2 emis- sions.) Mumbai, Delhi, Jakarta, and Lagos will all double in 18 years to become the largest cities ever seen on earth, with 50-60 million people by 2050. These numbers can help put our own city, Chicago, into perspective, as our population of 2.7 mil- lion (city) or 9.4 million (Chicagoland metro) is small in comparison to that of the megacities of the global south.

What helps to understand cities is to think of them beyond our direct experience as urban residents–as the components of a global ecosystem of human settlement. Today, in 2017, there are 4,000 cities with more than 100,000 people worldwide. Worldwide, more than 1 million neighbor- hoods (1 billion people) live in extreme poverty. This is despite the fact that cities occupy only 2% of the earth’s land (and

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