UN Presents Our Urban Population Future

[Snowy Owl]

UN Presents Our Urban Population Future
World?s population will tip from rural to urban

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2008 will prove to be a milestone year, a United Nations report reveals today. The balance of the world?s population will tip from rural to urban, and half of the world?s people will find themselves residing in cities.

According to British newspaper The Independent, the UN is reporting that the combined forces of population growth and urbanization are creating a planet of slums on which the urban population will have doubled by the year 2030. This ?state of the world?s population" report shows that shanty towns such as the ones filling African and Asian cities are experiencing unstoppable growth, expanding by more than a million people every week. Such growth will create new urbanites that will be poor, and the shelters in which they live will be slums.

"The growth of cities will be the single largest influence on development in the 21st century," the report states. Over the next 30 years, the population of African and Asian cities will double, adding 1.7 billion people - more than the current populations of the US and China combined.

In the UN?s projected new world, the majority of the urban poor will be under 25, unemployed and vulnerable to fundamentalism, both Christian and Islamic. According to Fox News, the report shows that the growth of new religious movements, such as radical Islam in the Middle East or Pentecostal Christianity in Latin America, has been a primarily urban phenomenon. UN Population Fund Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid stated that when cities fail to meet the needs of growing populations, religious beliefs tend to become extreme.

?Extremism is often a reaction to rapid and sudden change or to a feeling of exclusion and injustice, and the cities can be a basis for that if they are not well managed,? Obaid said.

The author of the UN report, demographer George Martine, said in The Independent today that "urbanization is jolting mentalities and subjecting them to new influences. This is a historical situation. And now one of the ways for people to reorganize themselves in this urban world is to associate themselves with new or strong, fundamentalist religion.?

The report warns that urbanization is inevitable, making it crucial that planners accept the the right of the world's poor to places to live in cities. ?It's pointless trying to control urban growth by stopping migration,? Mr. Martine said. "It doesn't work. We have to change mindsets and take a different stance. We're at a crossroads and can still make decisions which will make cities sustainable. If we don't make the right decisions the result will be chaos.?

Up until now, the response of governments on the national and local levels to this exponential growth has been to discourage newcomers. The report argues that this is a failed policy: "It has resulted in less housing for the poor and increased slum growth," the reports say. "It also limits opportunities for the urban poor to improve their lives and to contribute fully to their communities and neighborhoods."

Despite the gloomy situation this report predicts, the UN argues that this influx of population, if properly managed, can be a positive development. No country in the industrial age has enjoyed economic growth without urbanization. In order to properly deal with this situation, the report states that some changes will have to be made regarding how smaller cities handle increases in population, since smaller cities will be absorbing the bulk of urban growth.

According to Fox News, the report suggests smaller cities become more flexible in expanding their boundaries and adapting their policies. Smaller cities will need more of the resources made available to larger cities to keep up the pace.

Cities should view poor people as an asset: "Investing in them in terms of shelter, education and so on would mean you have a good economic force that can work and create even further economic growth coming from cities," Obaid said.

Since birth rates are the driving force behind urban population growth, the report contests that family planning policies will be the most effective way to slow population expansion. This would include reproductive health services and sex education. "Urban growth, in a sense, encourages low fertility because city people have access to information and access to services and can plan their families better," Obaid said. "In an urban economy, women need less children but [want children] with a better quality of life and better possibilities of education."

Population trends revealed in the UN report include:

* By 2008, more than half of the world's 6.7 billion people will live in cities.
* By 2030, the urban population will have risen to 5 billion, 60 per cent of the world's population.
* Half of the world's urban population is currently under 25. By 2030, young people will make up the vast majority of the 5 billion urban dwellers.
* Between 2000 and 2030, Asia's urban population will increase from 1.3 billion to 2.64 billion. Africa's population will rise from 294 million to 742 million; Latin America and the Caribbean from 394 million to 609 million.
* Mega-cities do not have a monopoly on population growth. More than half of the urban world lives in cities with a population of less than 500,000.