Majority Will Soon Live in Cities

by Celia W. Dugger, New York Times
This article appeared on page A - 16 of the San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, June 28, 2007
By next year, more than half the world's population, 3.3 billion people, will for the first time live in towns and cities, a number expected to swell to almost 5 billion by 2030, according to a U.N. Population Fund report released Wednesday.
The onrush of change will be particularly extraordinary in Africa and Asia, where between 2000 and 2030 "the accumulated urban growth of these two regions during the whole span of history will be duplicated in a single generation," the report says.
This surge in urban populations, fueled more by natural increase than the migration of people from the countryside, is unstoppable, said George Martine, author of the report, "State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth."
Cities will edge out rural areas in more than sheer numbers of people. Poverty is now increasing more rapidly in urban areas as well, and governments need to plan for where the poor will live rather than leaving them to settle illegally in shanties without sewage and other services, the United Nations says.
In Latin America, where urbanization came earlier than in other developing regions, many countries and cities ignored or fruitlessly tried to retard urban growth.
"Now the levels of insecurity and violence are a product of this approach," said Martine, a demographer and sociologist. "People have been left to fend for themselves and have created these enormous slums."
A billion people, a sixth of the world's population, already live in slums, 90 percent of them in developing countries. In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 7 in 10 urban dwellers live in a slum. The region's slum population has almost doubled in just 15 years, reaching 200 million in 2005. Its urban population is already as large as North America's.
China, the world's most populous nation, is now at the peak of its urban transition, the report says. Urbanites will outnumber peasants within a decade. China will then have 83 cities with more than 750,000 residents, but only five with a population of more than 5 million, according to the report.
In fact, the report predicts that the bulk of the urban population growth is likely to be in smaller cities and towns, not the 20 mega-cities that dominate the public imagination. Among the mega-cities with populations of more than 10 million, only Lagos and Dhaka, Bangladesh, are expected to grow at rates exceeding 3 percent over the coming decade. Such super-size cities today contain 9 percent of all urban inhabitants, while smaller cities and towns account for more than half.
"Many of the world's largest cities -- Buenos Aires, Calcutta, Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Seoul -- actually have more people moving out than in, and few are close to the size that doomsayers predicted for them in the 1970s," the report says.
The report notes that while rates of urban growth have slowed in most regions of the world, the story now lies in the scale of growth in the sheer numbers of people.
If the coming population growth is helter-skelter, with inadequate services and sprawling slums, it could pollute urban watersheds with untreated sewage and contribute to rising crime and violence, Martine said. The result of that approach is already apparent in existing slums.

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