Opinion - News Analysis   

City populations set to outnumber country dwellers

David Adam

Globally, the slum population will swell by 27 million people each year over the next 20 years.

MORE PEOPLE will live in cities than in the countryside in 2007, for the first time in the history of the human race, a United Nations report said on Thursday — and a growing number of them will be living in slums.

The report says the number of slum dwellers will pass the one billion mark in 2007, which means that one in three city residents will live in inadequate housing with no or few basic services. It adds that urban growth and slum expansion rates are nearly identical in some regions and that the world's urban poor are rapidly becoming one of its biggest problems.

Anna Tibaijuka, the executive director of UN-Habitat, which published the State of the World's Cities 2006/7 report, said: "For a long time we suspected that the optimistic picture of cities did not reflect the reality on the ground. This report provides concrete evidence that there are two cities within one city. One part of the population that has all the benefits of urban living, and the other part, the slums and squatter settlements, where the poor often live under worse conditions than their rural relatives."

She called for aid agencies and governments to target help for slum dwellers, saying encouraging results from countries including Egypt and Thailand showed such projects could improve living conditions.

The report says the conditions in slums are remarkably similar to those in impoverished rural areas in terms of health, education, employment, and mortality. In Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Haiti, and India, child malnutrition in slums is almost the same as in rural regions. In many sub-Saharan African countries children living in slums are more likely to die from water-borne and respiratory illnesses than those in rural villages. Women living in slums are more likely to contract HIV.

Ms. Tibaijuka said the trend threatened one of the U.N.'s key millennium development goals: to improve the lives of at least 100m slum dwellers by 2020. "The millennium goals might be lost in the slums," she said.

The report analyses more than 200 of the world's cities. Globally, it says the slum population will swell by 27 million people each year over the next 20 years — the vast majority in the developing world, which will have to absorb 95 per cent of all urban growth.

In a foreword to the report, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan says: "Governments and aid agencies have traditionally emphasised the improvement of rural areas, because that is where the vast majority of the world's poor live.

But as rapid urbanisation continues, similar energies are needed in urban areas. The problem is not urbanisation per se, but the fact that urbanisation in many developing regions has not resulted in greater prosperity or a more equitable distribution of resources."

There is some good news. The U.N. praises countries in north Africa, including Morocco and Tunisia, which have reduced the growth of city slums.

"Some low-income or middle-income countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, South Africa, and Sri Lanka, have managed to prevent slum formation by anticipating and planning for growing urban populations — by expanding economic and employment opportunities for the urban poor, by investing in low-cost affordable housing for the most vulnerable groups, and by instituting pro-poor reforms and policies that have had a positive impact on low-income people's access to services," it says.

But it says that the situation is worsening quickly in many sub-Saharan African countries. Last year the world's urban population was 3.17 billion out of a total of 6.45 billion. Current trends suggest the number of urban dwellers will rise to almost 5 billion by 2030, out of a world total of 8.1 billion. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

From Anuradhapura to Anuradhapura
Politics as farce in Meghalaya
Is the `war on terror' going out of control?
Iran's tactics pay off in nuclear standoff
City populations set to outnumber country dwellers
Corrections and clarifications
Ego clash?
Rescuing medicine
The Da Vinci Code
Citizen Kannagi
Remarkable person
"We are trying to build an inclusive society"

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu