UN Warns Urban Populations Set To Double

The combined forces of population growth and urbanisation are creating a planet of slums, where the urban population will have doubled by 2030, according to a report released by the United Nations today.

The shanty towns that choke the cities of Africa and Asia are experiencing unstoppable growth, expanding by more than a million people every week, according to the “state of the world’s population” report

The UN’s findings echo recent predictions that 2008 will see a watershed in human history as the balance of the world’s population tips from rural to urban. Many of the new urbanites will be poor and the shelters into which they move, or are born, will be slums.

“The growth of cities will be the single largest influence on development in the 21st century,” the report states. It maintains that 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

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/27/2139