IUESA: Noting that today, the earth is changing into an urban planet, Dr. Hossein Mohammadpour Zarandi, the president of IUESA in his lecture entitled “urban prosperity” at the first world conference of mayors and councilors 2016 said, currently, 3.9 billion people live in cities and urban areas and it is estimated that it will be reached to more than 75 percent i.e. 6.3 billion people; that is why UN-HABITAT call the 21st century as the century of cities. 
Emphasizing that urbanization has been changed into a rule and norm in less-developed areas in the last few decades, he said urban areas of Asia and Africa would cover almost all population increase during 2015 to 2050. 90 per cent of 5.2 billion people that are predicted to be added will be lived in Asia and Africa.
Saying that managers, planners, and policy-makers should know that they will be faced with more populated and densely cities in the future, he said according to the statistics, there were only 13 metropolitan areas in the beginning of the 20th century with more than one million people, but we consider more than 300 metropolitan areas in the beginning of the 21st century.
Economically, one of the most important reasons of metropolises’ success is that they are bottlenecks of knowledge and innovation production. Metropolitan areas absorb people with all of their skills and experiences in themselves.
Geographic concentration of people and skills as well as their creativeness provide unique opportunity and condition for metropolitan areas. Because of this process, new industries are established, the speed of innovation is increased, and advanced technologies with high efficiency are applied. Therefore, it can be said that metropolises in today’s world launches a constant flow of creativity and innovation and they act as the centers of economy, technology, culture, free time, education, and transport market.
On the other hand, metropolises, particularly in developing countries, are suitable place for investment. According to the statistics, solving the problem of housing and urban infrastructures in the metropolises of developing countries require more than 6.3 trillion dollars investment by 2030.
It seems that the phenomenon is an objective reality that should be accepted for development. National and international economic-political framework should be planned for its development as well. The important point regarding prosperity of metropolises in national and global economic arena is to have economic strategy. One of the key points in management or good urban governance is the issue of developing macro-economic strategy of the city.
Good urban management should be combined with governmental, private, civil sectors to develop a mechanism to consider the interests of all groups. Such management can act in times of economic crisis and survive economic life of the city. Barcelona is a good instance in this case that confronted with unemployment and slump crisis in 1970s, but good management proposed to host Olympic Games in 1992 as a catalyst and economic stimulus in order to re-boost in the city.
