More than 55 percent of the world’s population now lives in urban regions, with urbanisation rapidly increasing in low- and middle-income countries in Asia and Africa (UN, 2018). As we move towards an increasingly urban planet, urban regions and their governments need to avoid getting locked into development pathways that put an increasing pressure on their natural and economic resources and may not be sustainable in the long run. Most key urban Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) assume the provision of some form of grid-based infrastructure to enable universal service provision in the areas of water and sanitation (SDG6), clean energy (SDG7) and sustainable mobility and ICT connections (SDG11). This is based on the 20th century experience of urbanisation in Europe, North America, Australia and parts of Latin America. This is neither true and may be unsustainable and unaffordable in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America for the bulk of the incremental urbanisation of the 21st century, which will see an addition of 2.5 billion people to urban areas by 2050 (UN, 2018).