World Population Now Majority Urban

[Wounded Healer]

World Population Now Majority Urban


For the first time in recorded history, the majority of the world's population is living in cities.

"It's a wake-up call," said Ron Wimberley, distinguished professor of sociology at North Carolina State University. "It's always been assumed that rural areas will always produce what they're supposed to produce: natural resources, food, fiber, water, air, timber -- the things that are our daily basic needs."

"But if we keep extracting all the good things out of these areas and then dumping the bad things like pollution back on them without giving anything back, we're going to be heading for some big problems," Wimberley said.

Wimberley, together with other scientists from North Carolina State and the University of Georgia, pinpointed May 23, 2007 as the specific day the world's population would tip from majority-rural to majority-urban.

Working with the United Nations, they predicated the Earth would have an urban population of 3,303,992,253 last Wednesday, exceeding that of 3,303,866,404 rural people.

According to the Washington, DC-based Worldwatch Institute, the highest rate of urban growth is now occurring in the world's poorer countries -- particularly in Asia and Africa. Unlike previous periods of urban growth, however, this one is not necessarily tied to improved conditions for the poor, the organization said.

"Cities have [traditionally] been seen as rich places, but they haven't been invested in," said Zoe Chafe, a research associate at Worldwatch. "There are still economic opportunities, but the living conditions that come along with them are deplorable," she told OneWorld.

According to Worldwatch, 1 billion urbanites -- or approximately one sixth of the world's total population -- currently live in "slums," defined as areas where people cannot secure key necessities such as clean water, a nearby toilet, or durable housing.

An estimated 1.6 million urbanites die each year due to the lack of clean water and sanitation.

The fact that a majority of the world's population lives in cities, Chafe said, means that cities will be "the indicators of where we're going to go."

"Cities are going to be the places where development battles are lost or won."

Still, in its annual "State of the World" report, Worldwatch noted that many cities are developing innovative solutions that, if replicated, could both fight poverty and save the environment.

In Pakistan's largest city, Karachi, where the population recently passed 20 million, the government has linked hundreds of thousands of low-income households into settlements with good-quality sewers.

In the Chinese coastal city of Rizhao (population 3 million), a government program enabled 99 percent of households in the central districts to obtain solar water heaters. Most traffic signals and street and park lights are powered by solar cells, limiting the city's carbon emissions and local pollution.

"The fact that Rizhao is a small, ordinary Chinese city with per capita incomes even lower than in most other cities in the region makes the story even more remarkable," the Worldwatch report states.

"The achievement was the result of an unusual convergence of three key factors: a government policy that encourages solar energy use and financially supports research and development, local solar panel industries that seized the opportunity and improved their products, and the strong political will of the city's leadership to adopt it."

Still, Zoe Chafe and the Worldwatch Institute are concerned that international aid agencies are giving most of their development assistance to rural areas -- at the expense of city dwellers.

"Over a thirty year period, from 1970 to 2000, all urban development assistance was estimated at $60 billion -- just 4 percent of the total $1.5 trillion," the Worldwatch report reads. "Few bilateral aid agencies have any kind of urban housing program, or any serious urban program at all."

In the United States, only 21 percent of the population is rural, though North Carolina State's Wimberley said the actual number of rural Americans has remained relatively steady at around 60 million people over the last few decades.

The tipping point from rural to urban occurred in the United States nearly 100 years ago, in the late 1910s, according to the researchers.

Wimberley said in the United States, governments have historically invested much more heavily in urban communities than rural ones, resulting in a "blight belt" that runs through much of the old Confederacy, from Virginia to Mississippi.

"A lot of people would prefer to live in rural areas or small towns instead of cities," he said, "but basic technologies like clean water and electricity are not necessarily readily accessible. Health care is not as accessible; public transportation and education are not good. There's not the investment in infrastructure and opportunity in rural areas. So people have no choice but to move to the city."