Researching-the-Urban-Dilemma-Baseline-study

Europe and later North America. 217 The impacts of urbanization on new and old migrants were complex, and
generated a host of impoverishment effects while also generating new opportunities. What distinguishes
contemporary urbanization from historical trends is how urbanization is transpiring on a genuinely global scale
involving most, if not all, developing countries. In 1950, just 30 per cent of the world´s population were
considered urban dwellers but by 2050 this is expected to grow to over 70 per cent (see Figures 4a and 4b).
What is new is how most of this growth is concentrated in less developed regions, with growth concentrated
especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
It is the pace of urbanization, together with its sheer scale, that is likely to stress national and urban
institutions in many developing countries to their breaking point. With few exceptions, the speed of
urbanization is proceeding at a rate that exceeds the ability of city authorities and residents to respond. To put
this in perspective, it took New York approximately 150 years to grow to 8 million people, while Mexico and
Sao Paulo generated the same interval of population growth in less than 15 years. At the time of Pakistan’s
independence in 1947, Karachi had a population of less than 500,000. By 2011, the metropolitan region
included more than 18 million and generated almost three quarters of the entire country’s GDP. 218 In the
meantime, the number of cities with at least 1 million has increased more than fifteen-fold between 1950 and
the present. Dhaka, Kinshasa, and Lagos today are each approximately forty times larger than they were in
1950. Taken together, cities have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950,
and according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), are currently adding a million infants and
migrants each week.
Figure 4a: Urban population growth (thousands): 1950-2050
7,000,000
6,000,000
5,000,000
World
More developed regions
4,000,000
Less developed regions
3,000,000
2,000,000
1,000,000
0
1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050
Statistics compiled from http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/index.htm
Least developed
countries
Less developed regions,
excluding least
developed countries
217 In 1800, for example, less than 10 per cent of the US population lived in communities with populations of more than 2,500 people.
Today, more than 75 per cent of the population does so. Some analysts contend that structural adjustment programs (SAPs) supported
by the World Bank and IMF during the 1970s and 1980s also hastened urbanization across Sub-Saharan Africa. Credit to IDRC – Nairobi
for these comments, January 2012.
218 See Richardson and Bae (2005).
40