Publication Announcement

April 10, 2003

Send this announcement to a colleague

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs (JHU/CCP) announces publication of its latest Population Reports issue, Meeting the Urban Challenge.

Within four years half the world's population will live in urban areas, placing urban residents-especially those in developing countries-at the crux of the struggle to achieve better living standards, according to the Population Reports issue, published by JHU/CCP's Population Information Program. The level and pace of urbanization will vary among regions and countries. The developed world is already 75% urban. But in the developing world, migration to urban areas, population increase, and reclassification of some rural areas as urban is expected to continue with the percentage of urban residents rising from 40%, currently, to 56% by 2030. In the future, virtually all population growth worldwide will be in urban areas of the developing countries.

Every week urban areas gain another million people. By 2030, according to the report, 5 billion people are expected to live in urban areas-60% of the projected global population of 8.3 billion. Although big cities capture attention, most of the world's urban population lives in smaller, urban settlements. In 2000, for example, about 37% of the world's urban population lived in cities of 1 million or more, while 53% lived in urban areas with fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, according to the report, based on data from the United Nations.

Urban areas generally offer better economic opportunities and standards of living than rural areas, but at the same time many urban residents live in poverty. The urban poor, according to the report suffer in many ways-from insufficient incomes, inadequate housing and services, high infant mortality, polluted water and poor sanitation, as well as indoor and outdoor air pollution. Over one billion urban residents live in inadequate housing, mostly in slums and squatter settlements, where living conditions are poor and services insufficient. Worldwide two-thirds of the sewage from urban areas is pumped untreated into lakes, rivers, and coastal waters.

As urban areas grow in size and their economies develop, they rely on natural resources from further and further away to meet their production, consumption, and waste disposal needs. For example, some 60% of freshwater withdrawn for human use ends up in urban areas-either directly for use in factories, for drinking and sanitation, or indirectly through the consumption of irrigated crops.

Urban areas in developed countries consume far more resources than those in developing countries. At current consumption levels, for example, a typical North American city with a population of 650,000 requires about 30,000 square kilometers of land to support its needs-more than 10 times that of a similar sized city in India. Authors Don Hinrichsen, Ruwaida Salem, and Richard Blackburn point out that "the urban poor usually suffer most from a lack of basic services but are the last to be included in urban planning and infrastructure improvements." They outline the following strategies for improving urban life:

• Improve urban governance using a wide range of local governments, private-sector firms, and community organizations to deliver infrastructure and services. In the Philippines it costs the government 250,000 pesos (55 pesos = US$1) to build a 22-meter square dwelling in a relocation center. The community-based Philippines Homeless Peoples Federation, in contrast, can build a dwelling twice the size for less than a quarter of the cost. Cost savings are achieved by pooling resources and supplying Federation labor.
• Improve water supply and sanitation with community participation and price water to reflect its value as a scarce resource. The Orangi pilot project in Pakistan implemented a self-financed and self-managed sewerage system which now covers some 84% of the Orangi squatter settlement, after residents raised US1.7 million dollars to self-finance the construction of more than 72,000 latrines and 1.3 million feet of sewer lines.
• Upgrade slums and extend security of land and housing tenure to those who lack it. The report cites World Bank estimates which show that improvement of living conditions in slums need not cost governments enormous sums of money. When spread over a 20-year period, upgrading programs that would provide services to all slums in developing countries could be implemented at a total cost of 0.2% to 0.5% of Gross Domestic Product.
• Curb air pollution by designing transport systems to move people rather than vehicles. In Singapore, where there is widespread use of public transportation, only 1 person in every 10 owns a private vehicle.
• Implement programs to recycle waste such as in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) where an association of 2,000 women collects and recycles wastes from households and municipal dumps around the city.

Population Reports is an international review journal of important issues in population, family planning, and related matters. It is published four times a year in three languages by the Population Information Program at the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, Bloomberg School of Public Health, for more than 170,000 family planning and other health professionals worldwide, with support from the US Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID administers the US foreign assistance program, providing economic and humanitarian assistance in more than 80 countries worldwide. For printed copies of the report send an e-mail to Orders@jhuccp.org, or write to Orders Department, Johns Hopkins University, Center for Communication Programs Bloomberg School of Hygiene and Public Health,111 Market Place, Suite 310, Baltimore, Maryland 21202 USA. A web based order form can also be found at: http://www.jhuccp.org/pr/poporder.shtml.

Disclaimer: The information provided on this web site is not official U.S. Government information and does not represent the views or positions of the U.S. Agency for International Development or the U.S. Government.