Singapore has proven that city-states can flourish and for Chris Anderson, urban sites will be the place that the world will heavily rely on as its population expands and its resources feel the demand of greater pressure.

"I think urbanisation is going to save humanity," The Daily Telegraph reported Mr Anderson as saying on Monday night in Sydney, where the TED (Technology, Entertainment & Design) founder tickled his audience's imagination on a futuristic world set-up that is largely dominated by its bustling cities.

He clarified though that cities in the future must be governed by architectural ingenuity, in which people would be convince to give up their spacious dwellings in exchange for homes in high-rise structures that hold the normal trappings of a functional family house.

Future house designs, Mr Anderson said, must evoke the usual comfort that man has experienced in the 'home-in-a-lot' settings that the world would have to give up in order to attain a population level that is sustainable.

Within the current century, the global population is expected to balloon and reach the 10-billion mark over the next seven decades, the TED founder predicted, and naturally Earth's resources will be more hard pressed to supply the world's ever growing demands.

"One million people a week, every week, are moving into cities. That will go on for the next 70 years. There will be seven billion, out of nine or 10 billion people living in cities," Mr Anderson said.

The key in solving such daunting reality lies on nations' metropolis, he added, where families will have to forego their usual lifestyles.

He painted an urban picture that is dotted by high-rise apartment buildings and where people move around either by walking, riding a bike or using an efficient public transport system, eliminating the need for a family car.

Most importantly, families will have less number of children and this scenario will be made possible by the accessibility of higher education and quality medical services to everyone, women especially.

In doing so, "we can get to a sustainable number of people," as more women take the lead in determining the size of their respective families, which in the decades ahead would be mostly composed of two to three members.

In short, Mr Anderson said that vertical living will be the alternative answer as national governments cope with the complicated task of keeping order in a constantly expanding nationwide setting, which inevitably will be replicated in countries all over the world.

"At a city level, things can get done," Mr Anderson said, as compared to the complexities at the national level.

And model cities would be New York in the United States and Sydney in Australia, he added, where in the future people would live productive and rewarding lives in limited space and observe practices that would assure the sustainability of the world's natural resources.

By the time that much of the global population, as much as 70 per cent of the future population numbers according to Mr Anderson, have been re-settled to countries' urban locations, forests would have been given a breather and would have reclaimed the space they lost to man's rapid settlement of rural sites in the previous centuries.