The Exploding Cities of the Developing World.

CITIES & towns; POPULATION forecasting; DISEASES; POLLUTION; UNEMPLOYMENT; VIOLENCE; INTERNAL migration; POLITICAL leadership; UNITED Nations; DEVELOPING countries

This paper offers a look at problems facing cities in the developing world. The United Nations estimates that rural numbers will remain virtually steady while urban populations continue to soar: by 2025, it predicts, more than 5 billion people, or 61 percent of humanity, will be living in cities. Diseases transmitted by insects are staging a comeback from the ditches and trash heaps of squatter settlements. While diseases vary from city to city, one motif the megacities of the developing world share is pollution. Unemployment rates in scores of African cities top 20 percent and are unlikely to drop soon. Disease, squalor, hopelessness, stress, and the decline of traditional cultural constraints in the atomized contemporary city conspire to aggravate yet another health hazard: violence. Internal migration may also drive coastal cities to break with China. Concentration in urban areas may well be the only efficient way to house people and still preserve agricultural acreage and wilderness, given inexorable population growth. Curitiba, the Indian city of Bangalore, and a few other examples may indicate that the real problem facing poorer cities is not so much population growth or their resource base but a lack of competent leadership and sound regulations and policies that last beyond one administration.