Overflowing Cities: The State of the World's Toilets 2016

Human beings are now largely an urban species: for the first time in history, more than half of the world's population (54%, or 3.9 billion people) lives in towns, cities and megacities. By 2050, that's expected to rise to two-thirds.Many new urbanites, and particularly the poorest, are not moving into gleaming apartment blocks or regenerated postindustrial areas. They are arriving – or being born into – overcrowded, rapidly expanding slums. Economic growth is usually driven by urbanization, and all industrialized countries already have a mostly urban population. This means that nearly all the current urban population growth is happening in developing countries.UN Habitat estimates that more than one-third of the developing world's urban population – over 863 million people – live in slums.Often, city planning and infrastructure building have been unable to keep pace

Migration, urban population growth and regional disparity in China

The main objective of this paper is to study the determinants of city population growth in China during the 1990s', as well as the determinants of migrations towards cities, which constitutes the main source of urban population growth in this period. A second objective is to identify regional differences in the urban growth and migrations, that is, whether urban growth and migration patterns are different between coastal and inland provinces. Additionally, we are interested in the differences between temporary and permanent migrations towards urban areas.cerdi

Voices from Urban Africa: The Impact of Urban Growth on Children

Urban poverty -- and its impact on children -- is often overlooked and misunderstood. More than half of the world's population now lives in cities. Each year the number of urban residents increases by nearly 60 million.1 By 2050, it is projected that two thirds of the global population will be living in urban areas.2 It is estimated that 94 percent of urban growth will take place in less developed countries.3Africa, though it is the least urbanized continent today, is predicted to have one billion urban dwellers by 2040, with a substantial youth majority. Over the next 40 years, 75 percent of urban population growth in Africa will take place in Africa's secondary cities.4 Currently, over half of the African urban population lives in slum conditions. These figures alone demonstrate the growing importance of prioritizing the urban context in development work.Coupled with this growing urban population, the development community's reliance on aggregate data, which generally compares development indicators for urban and rural areas within a country, means that children and adults living in urban areas appear to be better off than those living in rural areas.Citywide statistics and the 'urban advantage' allow the wealth of some urban individuals to obscure the hardships faced by those living in urban poverty and the vast inequalities present within urban communities. The absence of detailed data means that the depths of urban poverty are often missed and children living in urban poverty are at risk of not being reached by development efforts

Sero-epidemiology of rubella in the urban population of Addis Ababa Ethiopia

We conducted a community-based cluster sample survey of rubella sero-epidemiology in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1994. Among 4666 individuals for whom complete data were available, rubella antibody prevalence was 91% (95% confidence interval: 90, 92). On multivariable analysis, seroprevalence was lower among individuals who were resident in Addis Ababa for 1 year or less. Approx. 50% seroprevalence was attained by age 4 years, and the estimated average age at infection was 5·2 years. The highest age-specific force of infection was estimated to occur in 5- to 9-year-olds. The early age at infection corresponded with a low estimated incidence of congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) of 0·3 per 1000 live births, equivalent to nine cases of CRS in 1994. The predicted critical level of immunity for elimination of rubella via vaccination was 85–91%, requiring 89–96% coverage with a vaccine of 95% effectiveness. Unless very high coverage of rubella vaccine could be guaranteed, the introduction of childhood vaccination could increase the incidence of CRS in Addis Ababa

Initial Value Dependence of Urban Population''s Growth-Rate Distribution and the Long-Term Growth

This paper uses census municipal population data for the United States, Italy, and Spain to analyze the statistical properties of their 10-year growth (short-term property). As a result, it was confirmed that the smaller the initial urban population is, the greater the probability that the urban population will decrease and that the probability that the urban population will increase does not depend on the initial urban population. We also observed the statistical properties of long-term growth of urban populations in each country over 100 years. Specifically, we identified the following properties by observing the geometric mean of logarithmically equal sized bins of the oldest urban population in the data used in the analysis. (1) The average urban population increases or decreases exponentially with time. (2) The smaller the initial average urban population, the smaller the exponent, which can be negative in Italy and Spain. (3) When the average urban population is large, exponential growth may stop. We showed that these long-term properties are derived from the short-term property by random sampling simulations from real data

Feeding the cities through urban agriculture the community esteem value

The growth of global urban population produces an increase in food demand. With the aim of facing this demand, mainly concentrated in large urban areas, urban agriculture should be fostered to integrate traditional agriculture production, no longer considered sustainable. After suggesting the implementation of integrated systems of urban agriculture, in order to measure their social appreciation expressed by the community, the paper proposes the Community Esteem Value, obtained with a deliberative appraisal procedure