Urbanization of the Earth

Report Outline
Urban Effects of Population Implosion
Changing Patterns of Metropolitan Growth
Future Survival in an Urban Environment
Special Focus

Urban Effects of Population Implosion

Fast Pace of Urban Growth Around the World

Throughout the world cities and towns are growing at a pace that far outstrips the population increase of the countryside. Rapid and widespread urbanization adds another dimension to man's already serious population problem. The issue is not merely one of numbers, but of distribution. Excessive crowding brings a multitude of urban ills—air and water pollution, traffic jams, housing shortages and crime. Perhaps worst of all is the apparent inability of governments to deal with such problems.

It can be argued that the major crises facing man, from environmental pollution to crime and violence to poverty, are all related in some way to the groundswell of urbanization. Paradoxically, as human society becomes more and more urbanized, the cities themselves deteriorate at an alarming rate. The “inner cities” and downtown areas of some of the world's principal urban agglomerations are decaying shells, becoming increasingly unfit for human habitation. In city after city, the downtown area is losing population to the burgeoning suburbs. To some observers, “the age of the city seems to be at an end” at the very moment urbanization of the earth is at hand.

Rapid urbanization is not confined to the United States, nor even to industrialized countries. “Before 1850 no society could be described as predominantly urbanized, and by 1900 only-one—Great Britain—could be so regarded. Today, all industrial nations are highly urbanized, and in the world as a whole the process of urbanization is accelerating rapidly.…Clearly the world as a whole is not fully urbanized, but it soon will be.” In the past decade. Middle America (Central America and Mexico) and Tropical South America became predominantly urban. Demographers now class all of the Western Hemisphere urban—50 per cent or more of the people live in urban areas—except the underdeveloped islands of the Caribbean.