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- Complete Peirce article 8/12
- Complete Peirce article 7/15
- Causes and Consequences of Urban Expansion Stephen Sheppard; Williams College
- RF Bellagio homepage
World's Slum Dwellers: More Like Us Than We Think
August 12, 2007
By Neal Peirce
Washington Post Writers Group
Summary
Already some 1 billion people live in urban poverty in such settlements as the vast "favelas" of Brazil, the huge Kibera slum in the heart of Nairobi, Kenya, or the Dharavi slum on the outskirts of Mumbai, India.
Life for the worst off means existence in seemingly total squalor -- tightly packed shacks, piles of litter and sewage running freely. Women routinely risk robbery and rape to bring a bucket of water from some central well or tap.
Are these slum dwellers a different species? Or are they more like us than we think?
Dreams abound even in these hard-pressed places. Schools and churches get founded. And youth have dreams easy to identify with. An Asian researcher at the Rockefeller Foundation's just-concluded Global Urban Summit here told of interviewing young people from low-income families in Karachi, Pakistan:
"Every boy wants a motor bike, a cell phone and a girl sitting on the bike behind him. Every girl wants a job so she can be more independent, a cell phone, and a boy on whose motor bike she can ride."
© Copyright 2007, Washington Post Writers Group.
Plan or Be Engulfed: Harsh Lesson For World Cities
July 15, 2007
By Neal Peirce
Washington Post Writers Group
Summary
BELLAGIO, Italy -- Will Planet Earth be able to handle the mega-surge of people pouring into the cities of Africa, Asia and Latin America?
...If today's birthrates continue unaltered, U.N. figures suggest there could be 11.7 billion people by 2050. There is some good news here. Birth rates have declined as rural people migrate into cities and have fewer children than farm and rural families typically do. The mid-range population expectation for 2050 is 9.1 billion.
And humans have the power to effect huge change on our future numbers, Joel Cohen, head of the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller and Columbia universities, told a global Urban Summit, assembled by the Rockefeller Foundation, here last week.
...Cohen calculates that if we do add 2.5 billion people by 2050, and virtually all this population increase, as expected, happens in poor countries, then the world will have to build one city of 1 million people every week for the next 43 years. "Is this," he asks, "feasible -- physically, environmentally, financially, socially?"
...there is a first step: Get a handle on growth of the world's cities. Without that, how can city leaders estimate the peripheral areas they'll have to urbanize or, alternatively, how much they'll have to "infill" their current territory with higher density development?
Breakthrough research on that very point, by Stephen Sheppard and his Williams College colleagues, was presented at the Bellagio conference...
...The bottom line is clear: The developing world's cities -- and the developed world's cities still expanding significantly -- must plan early, much more carefully, or expect to be overwhelmed by a virtual growth tsunami.
© Copyright 2007, Washington Post Writers Group.
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