Ask any geographer and they will tell you that urbanisation in the Western world, in it purest sense, began to tail off at some point in the mid-20th century.

Today, the real movement from rural to city life is taking place in countries such as India and China. The United Nations has said that the proportion of the world’s population living in urban areas is expected to increase from 55 percent to 68 percent by 2050 and that 90 percent of that escalation will take place in Asia and Africa, where less than half of both continents’ inhabitants currently live in conurbations. In contrast, over four-fifths of North America’s population, and three-quarters of Europe’s, lives in a city.

But that does not mean that urbanisation in the West has ground to a virtual halt. Far from it. According to Savills Investment Management’s head of research, Europe, Irfan Younus, the population within Europe’s top 40 cities is expected to grow by some 10 percent. And within the