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Cities are agents of change—economic, political, geostrategic, technological and cultural—transforming domestic societies and the world beyond their boundaries. Contemporary China is urbanizing faster than any other significant part of the planet and therefore catalyzing domestic and global change. Rome and Athens shaped their worlds militarily, economically, politically and culturally in pre-modern times. British cities propelled the age of global industry, commerce and empire. And as American cities have fostered technological, popular culture, political and financial transformations in the 20th and 21st centuries, the next wave of urban-induced change will be propelled by the explosive development of Chinese cities.

Karachi, the “City of Lights,” is a metropolis bursting with life. It is, in many ways, a microcosm of Pakistan—a culturally rich, young and engaged nation—yet it simultaneously amplifies the country’s failings on a daily basis. Karachi’s shortfalls are splashed across news outlets in headlines portraying a disastrous forecast attributed to an array of social, political and economic drivers. But despite the troubling press and claims of “Karachipocalypse” inside the city itself, the reality is a mosaic of distinct experiences.

Growing up in what by the 1980s was the biggest metropolis in the world, my friends and I thought we were very tough. Taking to heart the naïve view that “things that do not kill you make you stronger,” there was plenty to choose from in Mexico City. To name but a few, the city had the worst quality air anywhere, and we still managed to play soccer, basketball and water polo at 7,300 feet above sea level without collapsing. We learned fortitude and patience from the three-plus hours lost in traffic as we fulfilled our daily obligations. We developed good negotiating skills, given that by 18 or 19 years of age we each had been mugged at knife or gunpoint at least a couple times without suffering major consequences. Of course, our smugness was baseless because we were among the lucky minority to have been raised in middle-class or well-to-do households, and therefore our exposure to the dangers and hazards of the city were minuscule in relative terms.

In the story of human history, the city quickly emerges as the main protagonist, leaving the countryside in a supporting role. As historian Samuel Kramer tells it in his widely read account, it was with the rise of the ancient city of Sumer that “history begins.” There, the development of an urban way of life accompanied by specialization and commercial activity added impetus to the development of many new technologies. The need for sophisticated record keeping, for example, went hand-in-hand with the revolutionary development of cuneiform script.

Most insurgencies have been quintessentially rural struggles. Guerrilla bands have historically relied on dense, leafy jungles and rugged mountains to organize clandestine resistance movements. But urbanization and population growth have contributed to the rise of campaigns in teeming cities such as Baghdad and Damascus. This trend toward urban insurgencies likely will have a profound impact on the nature of insurgency and counterinsurgency.

For the first time in history, more than half of the world's population lives in cities. An estimated 200,000 people move from rural to urban areas every day—about enough to create a new New York City every month. More than 90 percent of this migration is occurring in developing countries.

The term “smart cities”has come into vogue in recent years and, like many short-hand expressions—sustainability, globalization, the digital age, to name a few others—it is an important concept, but neither simple nor well defined. Although most commentators build into their description of a smart city the wide use of information and communication technology (ICT), they argue, sometimes consistently, and sometimes not, that a smart city is more than a digitized city—that is, more than a city with a well-developed ICT hardware infrastructure.

Ours is the century of cities. Already by 2010, 50.5 percent of the world’s population was living in urban areas. In a few decades that number will rise to 70 percent. During the 21st century, the world as we know it will be defined by the tempo, geography and challenges of city life. Cities will be hubs of commerce, culture and technology. This is not entirely new to world history. Going back to medieval burghers of northern Europe and grand cities of China, India and the early Islamic empires, cities have been where culture and innovation have shaped civilization. But the pace and manner in which the realities of city life will define politics, economics, global relations, climate change, energy consumption and integration of our world into one shared global reality is new. It represents the next frontier in human development.

Baltimore was the sixth-largest city in the United States in 1950, home to nearly 1 million people. But over the next 50 years, nearly a third of that population seeped away. The city fell out of the nation’s top 10 and wrestled painfully with the challenges of urban decline.