He warned that a soaring urban population - rising from 50% of all the world's inhabitants today to 70% by 2050 - could only be accommodated without disastrous social and environmental consequences by developing local urban design rather than "a single monoculture of globalization".
"I strongly believe that the west has much to learn from societies and places which, while sometimes poorer in material terms are infinitely richer in the ways in which they live and organize themselves as communities," he told planners, charity workers and government officials.
"It may be the case that in a few years' time such communities will be perceived as best equipped to face the challenges that confront us because they have a built-in resilience and genuinely durable ways of living."
Dwellers go about their daily routine in the Dharavi slum in Mumbai. Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images
Dharavi, a Mumbai slum where 600,000 residents are crammed into 520 acres...Haase - "the words these men use" are lost in the reality of the pictures that depict a world of waste, suffering disease and lost hopes and dreams... no is this the future our leaders see as 'sustainable'? YIKES!
