While much of the attention in international development and academia has focused on mega and primary cities, rapidly growing secondary cities will play a significant role in global economic development in this, the urban millennium. [Video Below]

On October 1, the Wilson Center’s Urban Sustainability Lab and Cities Alliance, a global partnership of governments and NGOs, co-hosted a panel of experts to discuss the significant role of rapidly growing secondary cities in global economic development and strategies to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 11: to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.

William Cobbett, director of Cities Alliance, a global collection of NGOs and governments, identified three “baskets” of challenges facing secondary cities on their way to achieving SDG 11: governance structures; policy responsibilities; and, the most difficult, lack of resources and skills.

“Traditional approaches to capacity building and workshops are not going to cut it at all,” Cobbett said. “We analyzed all 17 SDGs, not to make the case for SDG 11, but to ask to what extent local government involvement in achieving the whole range of developmental targets was essential…Our assessment was a total of about 65 percent of the entire system of SDGs will require local government involvement to some degree.”

As gateways between rural and metropolitan areas, secondary cities are growing rapidly but struggling to attract investment needed to build infrastructure and vibrant communities.

“What we’ve got to start looking at is the systems of cities, because all cities are linked,” said Brian Roberts, emeritus professor at University of Canberra and author of Managing Systems of Secondary Cities. “They’re parts of supply chains, forward and backward linkages through various systems.” Secondary cities work behind the scenes to provide manufacturing, logistical, and other critical services to keep megacities, like Tokyo, London, and New York, functioning and growing.

“If the whole urban system functions well, then we will be able to deliver growth and jobs and all the good things cities can do,” said Somik Lall, lead urban economist at the World Bank. “But if we have favoritism towards few cities at the expense of the whole distribution of cities consisting of secondary and small cities, then we have a problem.”

Melinda Laituri from the Humanitarian Information Unit of the U.S. Department of State called for more research attention to secondary cities. “We’re really lacking geospatial data about these locations,” she said. “We don’t understand them in terms of their spatial structure, in terms of the extent that they occupy the landscape, and then how they are dependent upon all the areas around them for resources and goods.”

Laituri detailed how geospatial technologies can contribute to a better understanding of emerging and secondary cities. Tools like ArcGIS and the open-source platform OSGeo have been used by Laituri and her colleagues to develop hazard maps for natural disasters and vulnerability assessments for marginalized populations in Cusco, Peru.

Martin Soulier with the Inter-American Development Bank presented the Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative. Launched in 2010 with five pilot cities, the initiative now works in over 50 rapidly growing secondary cities in Latin America to develop mitigation, vulnerability, and urban growth studies to help local governments address financial, technical, and climate change-related challenges.