Article at a glance:

Meeting the challenges of China’s growing cities

• Within a generation, a billion people will live in China’s cities. The changes wrought by mass migration will be severe. Farmland will be lost to urban development, demand for energy and natural resources will spiral upward, and pressure to provide migrants with basic services such as health care and education will strain city budgets.
• Urbanization in China is inevitable, and policy makers must rethink the way they guide these significant changes. A study by the McKinsey Global Institute shows that encouraging more concentrated development, with growth channeled to the largest cities, offers the optimal trade-off between the benefits and potential problems of urbanization.