Human Settlements in National Development Policy: The Year 2000 Agenda

Abstract

High population growth rate and rapid urbanization are the twin forces accentuating the crisis of human settlements in many developing countries. Soon the population of our planet is expected to surpass the five billion mark. Most of these five billion people are already living in the developing countries and in substandard settlement conditions from which there are not easy prospects of escape. At the same time, the process of urbanization is currently transforming settlement patterns in developing countries at an unprecedented pace. In 1950 less than 300 million people lived in towns and cities in developing countries: by 1985 this number had swollen to 1.1 billion and by the year 2000 there will be approximately two billion urban inhabitants in the developing countries, with a sizeable proportion concentrated in a number of agglomerations of tens of millions of people, the so-called mega-cities.