Urban society
City Mayors reports on developments in urban society and behaviour and reviews relevant research

Urban population is growing
by one million people a week
The world’s urban population will grow from 2.86 billion in 2000 to 4.98 billion by 2030, of which high-income countries will account for only 28 million out of the expected increase of 2.12 billion. The world’s annual urban growth rate is projected at 1.8 per cent in contrast to the rural growth rate of 0.1 per cent and about 60 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities. More

Supreme Court rules against
US cities fighting gun violence
28 June 2008: A June 2008 US Supreme Court ruling on gun control appears to be a clear defeat for American cities struggling to control gun violence. The ruling struck down the city of Washington, DC’s ban on handguns and will likely lead to fewer restrictions on the ownership, sale, and possession of firearms. More

American Catholic Church struggles
to maintain presence in inner cities
20 April 2008: Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States demonstrated his support for the 67 million Roman Catholics in America, about 25 per cent of the total population. It also provided an opportunity to examine the changing role of the Catholic Church in US cities. More

America prefers to punish
rather than to provide care
22 March 2008: An African-America boy born in the US in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime.  A Latino boy has a 1 in 6 chance. These statistics are from a recently released report America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline by the Children’s Defense Fund, a nonprofit organization that encourages preventive investment in youth and families before problems occur.  The report blames America’s disproportionate investment in punishment rather than prevention for trapping many children in a trajectory that leads to marginalized lives and imprisonment. More

Hunger and homelessness
persists in American cities
23 December 2007: Although more than 85 per cent of America’s wealth is generated in its cities, hunger and homelessness persists in most of the country’s urban areas. Many cities report that they were unable to meet the need for providing shelter for homelessness people, with more than half of mayors admitting that they turned people away. More

Blacks increasingly wary as Latinos
become fastest-growing US minority
28 November 2007: Traditional minorities – Blacks, Latinos, Asians -- are expected to become the majority in the US by 2050. This is the consensus of most American demographers. According to data released in 2007 by the US Census Bureau, Latinos continue to be the largest minority group in the US at 42.7 million. They are also the fastest growing minority group, increasing 3.3 per cent over the past year, and 19.7 per cent in the past five years. Most of the growth is due to immigration from Mexico. More

With good government, urbanisation
will produce higher living standards
20 November 2007: Almost every part of the inhabited world has been urbanising. Today, half the world’s population lives in urban areas and most of the world’s growth in population is likely to be in urban areas. In addition, there is a profound long-term shift in the distribution of the world’s urban population. Neither Europe nor North America have most of the world’s urban population or most of its largest cities. Europe now has none of the world’s 100 fastest-growing cities — but most of its declining ones. More

Asia has become home to the
world’s fastest growing cities
24 October 2007: Africa now has a larger urban population than North America and has 25 of the world's fastest growing large cities. Half of the world's urban population now lives in Asia, which also has half of the world's largest cities and fastest growing large cities. Europe's share of the world's 100 largest cities has fallen from more than half to under ten per cent in the past century. It now has none of the world's 100 fastest growing cities and most of its declining ones. More

The world’s urban poor suffer most
from crime, violence and disasters
4 October 2007: The world’s poor are the worst affected by urban crime and violence, insecurity of tenure and forced eviction, and natural and human-made disasters, regardless of their geographical location. “Over the past decade the world has witnessed growing threats to the safety and security of cities and towns. Some have come in the form of catastrophic events, while others have been manifestations of poverty and inequality or of rapid and chaotic urbanization processes,” said the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. More

Cities will benefit from and must care for
an increasing number of older residents
3 October 2007: The world is rapidly ageing. The number of people aged 60 and over as a proportion of the global population will double from 11 per cent in 2006 to 22 per cent by 2050. By then, there will be more older people than children (aged 0–14 years) in the population for the first time in human history. And, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), already 75 per cent of older people in developed countries live in cities. More

US mayors concerned about
collapse of immigration reform
15 July 2007: The collapse last month of US immigration reform legislation in June 2007 heightened concerns of mayors. “We will not have an economy, we will not have an America without a constant stream of immigrants coming into this country,” New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg told the New York Post newspaper. Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigoas set up a special commission to explore ways his city can deal with illegal, but necessary, immigrant workers. More

NYC Mayor offers innovative
approach to tackling poverty
10 July 2007: Even for public servants with the best of intentions, the seeming intractability of poverty in America can be awfully discouraging. Its causes are complex and past efforts have met with limited success. Until Hurricane Katrina hit land, poverty had been absent from the public agenda for so long that there was little consensus among policymakers in how to respond. Not only was the toolbox of effective antipoverty proposals empty but partisan gamesmanship often seems to block innovative, good faith efforts to address it. More

For humanity’s sake, developing world
must prepare for soaring urbanisation
28 June 2007: In 2008, the world reaches an invisible but momentous milestone: For the first time in history, more than half its human population, 3.3 billion people, will be living in urban areas. By 2030, this is expected to swell to almost five billion. Many of the new urbanites will be poor. Their future, the future of cities in developing countries, the future of humanity itself, all depend very much on decisions made now in preparation for this growth. More

US cities offer very different ways
of dealing with illegal immigration
31 May 2007: Illegal Immigration has become one of the United States’ most difficult social and economic problems. More than 12 million ‘undocumented immigrants’ – mostly from Mexico – are now estimated to be in the US. American cities have been dealing with this reality for years. More

It’s time for Canadians to
know and love their cities
25 May 2007: In a new book, prominent journalism professor and columnist Andrew Cohen slams Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, as a boring, unimaginative place content with mediocrity and bad restaurants, drowning in urban sprawl, whose downtown is choking in truck exhaust and with so-called grand avenues that have become seedy places for drifters and tattoo shops. More

Britain’s ‘irregular’ immigrants
demand integration in society
16 May 2007: A very rainy Bank Holiday in central London. People motivated to give up their time in the hope of inspiring a debate about immigration. If I told friends I was going to spend my day marching past the national war memorial on Whitehall amid an array of British flags then they’d probably, and understandably, assume I’d taken leave of my senses and was taking part in a Nazi skinhead parade. However, the presence of samba rhythms and pro-immigration banners would alter such preconceptions considerably. More

Economists question 'official' poverty
statistics used for US mayors' report
1 April 2007: In 2006, the US Conference of Mayors formed a task force to address “persistent poverty and middle class erosion” in American cities. The Task Force on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity, chaired by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, worked over a year to craft an action plan. In March 2007, the Task Force released a set of recommendations. While the report makes a convincing argument for a national strategy, its figures probably understate the true extent of poverty in the US. More

Up to 10 million American children suffer
the consequences of convicted parents
17 March 2007: Since 1970, the rate of imprisonment in the US has risen over 400 per cent, and the average length of prison sentences has grown substantially. These increases are primarily the result of mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, long and mandatory sentences for third-felony convictions, and other ‘zero-tolerance’ polices. Whatever effect these ‘get-tough’ measures have had on crime, unintended victims have been punished along the way. These victims are children, separated from their parents – and the cities in which most of these children live. More

21st century cities: Home to
new riches and great misery
14 February 2007: Sometimes it takes just one human being to tip the scales and change the course of history. In 2007, that human being will either move to or be born in a city, and demographers watching urban trends will mark it as the moment when the world entered a new urban millennium in which the majority of its people will live in cities. It will also see the number of slum dwellers cross the one-billion mark, when one in every three city residents will live in inadequate housing, with no or few basic services. More

Progress in the world’s cities will
decide the future of Planet Earth
13 January 2007: If global development priorities are not reassessed to account for massive urban poverty, well over half of the 1.1 billion people projected to join the world’s population between now and 2030 may live in under-serviced slums, says a report published in January 2007. Additionally, while cities cover only 0.4 per cent of the Earth’s surface, they generate the bulk of the world’s carbon emissions, making cities key to alleviating the climate crisis, notes the report. More

Affordable housing crisis casts a
shadow over the American Dream
20 January 2007: The United States government defines affordable housing as housing for which the owner or tenant pays 30 per cent or less of his or her income. Using this standard, the National Low Income Housing Coalition calculates that nearly 95 million Americans - 35 per cent of US households - have a housing affordability problem. More

Harare’s middle-class residents take up
urban farming to counter food shortages
10 January 2007: Urban faming, widely practiced by the poor and lower-income groups in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, is fast becoming de rigeur among the city's wealthy set. In affluent suburbs like Avondale and Mabelreign, maize and vegetable plots are sprouting up to counter expected food shortages brought on by an economic meltdown that has seen the inflation rate remaining well above 1,000 per cent, the highest in the world. More

Basketball star unveils low-cost clothing
range to curb violence in US inner cities
17 December 2006: In September 2006, professional basketball star Stephon Marbury of the New York Knicks announced that he was producing a line of inexpensive athletic clothes and shoes. The Starbury-brand items retail for less than US$15, far less than the $150 to $300 for name brands of sportswear such as Nike or Adidas. One of the reasons Marbury gave for entering the apparel business was to “keep kids a little safer.” Marbury reasoned that children wearing low-priced jackets and sports shoes would be less likely to become crime victims. More

Canary Islands: Refugee crisis
on the Afro-European fault line
5 November 2006: The large-scale movement of populations is without doubt one of the great calamities facing the western world – not least in the Canary Islands. On the one hand there are desperate people with no hope of any sort of life either now or in the future in their homelands and desperately seek a new beginning elsewhere. On the other hand, the inhabitants of the developed countries are faced with illegal immigration, and its associated problems, on an unprecedented scale. More

Neglected neighbourhoods
create new Paris underclass
5 October 2006: Between April and September 2005, three fires ravaged residential buildings in Paris, killing 48 African immigrants, primarily from Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali. Most of the victims were children; many were undocumented. The immigrants lived in cheap hotels and apartment houses ill-equipped for emergencies, lacking smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, emergency exits, and, in one case, even running water with which to put out the blaze. More

Mexican city paralysed as people wait
for government to end teachers strike
29 September 2006: After more than four months, there is still no solution in sight to the mayhem resulting from the conflict between teachers and the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. So far it has resulted in two deaths, widespread disruption and the loss of two billion pesos. On 28 September 2006, the state was paralized by a shut-down of most businesses and bus services. Almost 6,000 shops closed for 48 hours. Earlier more than 300 mayors travelled to Mexico City urging the government to end the conflict. More

Urban poor worse off than rural poor
but good policies can reduce slums
The world’s urban poor are worse off than their rural relatives. According to a report by UN-Habitat, the UN’s human settlement programme it is a myth that urban populations are healthier, more literate or more prosperous than people living in the countryside. The report provides concrete data that shows that the world’s one billion slum dwellers are more likely to die earlier, experience more hunger and disease, attain less education and have fewer chances of employment than those urban residents that do not reside in a slum. But the report also cites examples of how good housing and employment policies can prevent slums from growing. More

“Take care of the cities and
you take care of the people”
As delegates to the 2006 United Nations' World Urban Forum have heard over and over again, cities around the world are overburdened and underfunded. Rich and poor, large and small, the situation is the same: national and state governments starve cities so they can keep valuable tax revenues for their purposes. More

Megacities must urgently address the needs
of slum dwellers to prevent human disaster
The world's population is booming - no more so than in its cities. Today, there are 21 megacities around the world, three-quarters of them in developing nations like India. By 2020, research by City Mayors predicts there will be at least 27 megacities. That staggering rate of urbanization brings its own problems, especially in developing nations, where the majority of the megacities will be found. Mumbai (formerly Bombay) is one of India's megacities and forecast to become the world’s second-largest urban agglomeration. More

Success of future megacities will depend on
cooperation between citizens and authorities
With just under half of its population living in cities, the world is already urbanised. When measured in knowledge, attitude, aspiration, commercial sense, technology, travel and access to information, most societies are now being woven into a global network of cities. Globalisation seriously took off during the industrial revolution of the late 18th century. Since then, the steam engine, the telephone, the elevator, and now, the Internet and cheap air transport, have conveyed people, goods and ideas both horizontally and vertically at an unprecedented volume and velocity. More

Mauritania’s urban slums offer
no support to rural newcomers
Meeting the humanitarian challenge of Mauritania's unpredictable climate is no longer just a question of long forays across the trackless desert to locate and assist remote villages. More and more rural Mauritanians are packing up and heading for urban areas to scratch out a living. More

Authorities ready to go to war
against criminal street gangs
Poverty, family disintegration, violence at home, lack of opportunity, poor education, social inequality and drugs. Those are the ingredients of an explosive cocktail making Latin American cities some of the most violent areas of the world. More

China is at the forefront of the greatest
urban-industrial revolution of all time
As the United Nations reports, urban growth today is proceeding at a pace unheard of in history. Nowhere in the world is this more evident than in the cities of the People’s Republic of China. It has been described there as being part of the greatest urban-industrial revolution of all time. The policies that have fuelled this growth and evolution of Chinese cities have demonstrated that urban development is an integral feature for China’s development planners in the post-1978 reform era when market reforms were undertaken. In sheer numbers this has also produced what has been called the greatest internal migration in history, with urban migrants now sending home more money than foreign migrants of China or any other country. More

With America’s population approaching 300 million
the country’s cities will become ethnic melting pots
Census officials say the US population will reach 300 million in October 2006, and that the 300th million American may well be a Latino living in the Southwest. The U.S. population is increasing at nearly one per cent a year, making the United States the world's fastest growing industrial nation. More

America’s poor caught up in clash
between cities and nonprofit groups
Rochester, New York, has a generally poor but vibrant Latino population. In 2005, a private developer announced plans to build a multi-million dollar enclosed market in the heart of the Latino community. The plan was contingent on the City purchasing and demolishing an adjacent building. Because the clinic could not find another neighborhood willing to accept it, the building’s owner refused to sell. The City of Rochester then agreed to acquire the building through an expensive and controversial eminent domain process, a legal maneuver, which allows US municipalities to confiscate private property for 'beneficial' public purposes. More

Black American men hardest hit
by dysfunctional US inner cities
In the United States, the term ‘inner city’ is commonly understood to mean poor, dysfunctional and Black. Nearly every large and mid-size American city has a core of neighborhoods where 40 per cent or more residents live below the federal poverty level. These concentrated poverty neighborhoods are characterized by abandoned and deteriorated properties, high crime, poorly-performing schools, drug markets and family breakdown. Concentrated poverty neighborhoods also produce their own urban culture - distinctive dress, music, speech patterns and behavior - that further isolates residents from the mainstream. More

Hispanic, Black and Asian Americans
are spreading out across the country
Although the United States has been described as a "melting pot" for a century, American society has seldom lived up to that image. But a new study issued by the Brookings Institution indicates that not only is the nation becoming more of a melting pot, but that diversity is spreading. Using the most recent data available from the US Census Bureau, demographer William Frey determined that minority groups are settling outside of large metropolitan areas much more than they were at the time of the 2000 Census. More

NYC Mayor’s policies on welfare
contribute to city’s rising poverty
According to his deputy Linda Gibbs, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg believes that "every New Yorker who can work should work." Acting on this belief, the mayor has just refused to extend the period during which an able-bodied adult can get food stamps beyond the current three months. The mayor is, of course, entitled to his beliefs, but not when hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers will be harmed. More

Eight cities in final round
to become ‘British Vegas’
Eight British cities and towns have made it into the final round of bids to build the country’s first ‘super-casino’. Of 27 applicants, the final eight will have to make a further case to be chosen as the site for Britain’s only Las Vegas-style unlimited gambling hotspot. The already unsuccessful candidates expressed dismay at the decision of the government’s new Casino Advisory Panel, though 16 licenses for smaller casinos will also be awarded. More

Economic circumstances discouraged
one million migrants from settling in LA
Conventional wisdom holds that cities and metropolitan areas are powerless to deter immigrants from moving in. Evidence suggests otherwise. Between 1980 and 2000, the Los Angeles metropolitan area deflected nearly one million Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, to other US cities. More

Amnesty International calls on African
governments to stop forced evictions
In Africa, the process of urbanisation is faster than in any other region of the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 72 per cent of the urban population live in slums while in North Africa the figure is 28 per cent. In addition to appalling health conditions and lack of access to basic services such as water and sanitation, those living in slums and informal settlements are regularly exposed to forced evictions. More

Thousands still homeless one year
after Zimbabwe’s forced evictions
A year after Operation Murambatsvina (Drive Out Filth), the Zimbabwean government's sudden campaign to purge informal settlements, the lives of thousands of those affected have not changed. Uprooted last year from homes built illegally in the capital, Harare, families with five or more members have been squeezed into tiny living spaces authorised by the government on the outskirts of the city, with no source of employment and, in some cases, no access to medical facilities. More

Report accuses US cities of
criminalising the homeless
An unfortunate trend in US cities over the past 25 years has been to turn to the criminal justice system to respond to people living in public spaces. This trend includes measures that target homeless persons by making it illegal to perform life-sustaining activities in public. These measures prohibit activities such as sleeping/camping, eating, sitting, and begging in public spaces, usually including criminal penalties for violation of these laws. More

Closing the divide between those who
are starving and those who waste food
Belo Horizonte, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, has established a number of ambitious projects to supply cheap, nutritious food to the poor, cut down on food waste, teach people how to handle and prepare food and encourage the planting of organic food by small agricultural holdings. In Brazil 70,000 tons of food are wasted every year. Belo Horizonte’s Food Bank program attempts to close the gap between those who are starving and those who waste food. More

Changes in Asia’s fast growing cities
are closely watched across the world
Whereas London took 130 years to grow from one to eight million, Bangkok took 45 years, Dhaka 37 years and Seoul only 25 years, says research by UN-Habitat. By 2015, Asian developing countries will hold three of the world’s five largest urban agglomerations: Mumbai, Dhaka and Delhi. Despite the growth of Asia’s urban population, there has been an unprecedented decline in poverty in Asia-Pacific. UN-Habitat describes the recent progress in the region’s poverty reduction as one of the largest decreases in mass poverty in human history. Of all the world’s regions, Asia also ranks lowest in almost all types of crime. People in African and Latin American urban areas are twice as likely to become victims of crime than those living in Asian cities. More

Attacks on welfare largely to blame
for New York City’s hidden poverty
One of the poignant questions that Hurricane Katrina raised was this: How could so many people be so poor for so long without anybody noticing? But poverty is just as invisible in New York City as it was in New Orleans. The last five years of the 1990s were widely touted as years of a spectacular boom. Yet when Census 2000 was released, it revealed that poverty in New York City had increased by 10 per cent during the course of the 1990s. How could the euphoria of the boom be reconciled with the alarming census figures? More

Mexico’s urban poor
work harder for less
Even though Mexico’s 2002 to 2004 poverty-reduction trends are encouraging – particularly as far as rural poverty is concerned – the country still faces challenges such as reducing urban poverty, which has fallen into a rut of sorts, as well as the challenge of making its social protection system less regressive and more equitable so as to provide coverage for more of its poor. More

By 2030 Africa will change
from rural to urban society
Urban poverty is one of the biggest challenges facing African countries. According to UN-Habitat, currently two-thirds of Africa's urban population live in informal settlements without adequate sanitation, water, transport or health services. The Nairobi-based organisation projections indicate that Africa's population will cease to be a predominantly rural in 2030. Africa's urban population is increasing at above three per cent, and in just a decade, 40 per cent of Africa's people will live in urban areas, most condemned to slums and shanties. More

Kyrgyzstan rural young move to cities
in search for better jobs and education
In economically deprived Kyrgyzstan, young people are increasingly migrating from rural areas to urban centres such as the capital, Bishkek, in search of improved employment prospects and education. For thousands of young people from rural Kyrgyzstan, moving to cities is one of the few options they have. More

Afghan cities offer few opportunities
for rising numbers of rural migrants
The number of young landless and homeless rural Afghans migrating to the country’s cities is rapidly increasing. Most migrants are young adults, with the majority being married. Once in the cities, rural migrants spend most any earning on basis living necessities such as food and housing with little chance of accumulating savings. Women earn less than half than men in the same job sectors. More

The US to spend $1.4 billion on homeless
but cities will have to conduct headcount
More than 4,400 local homeless programs across America will receive $1.4 billion in grants City Mayors was told by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the largest single commitment of federal funds, designed to provide shelter and care for those without a home of their own. HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson said the funding represents the largest level of support for an unprecedented number of local projects on the front lines of caring for people who might otherwise be living on the streets. More

Poverty, crime and migration are acute issues
as Eastern European cities continue to grow
Migration, poverty and crime are singled out by UN-Habitat as the greatest problems facing the cities of the former USSR in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Some 33 million people, or more than eight per cent of the population, of Russia and other eastern European countries are international migrants and the vast majority of them are living in the region’s cities. Murder rates in Russia soared from 9.4 per 100,000 people in 1990 to 21.9 by 2000, while the Ukraine has become one of the largest global suppliers of women for prostitution. More

Cities can offer the best security
to the greatest number of people
Cities today are far more susceptible to external threats such as SARS because of their greatly increased connectedness and interdependence; conversely, their ability to anticipate and respond effectively is more constrained.  However, a new Canadian report says that cities were not only the place where human securities was most deeply challenged, they also represented the best hope for achieving the highest level of security for the greatest number of people. More

FCM report warns of erosion of
quality of life in Canadian cities
The quality of life in Canada’s cities is at risk, according to a report produced by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM). It finds that, despite general improvements in rates of post-secondary education, employment growth and home-ownership, quality of life deteriorated for a growing number of people during the 1990s. In addition, improvements in income and poverty rates since 1996 have been offset by a growing income gap, housing affordability problems and changes to social programs. More

Chirac asks cities to respect everyone’s
origins, beliefs, traditions and aspirations
French President Jacques Chirac characterised the city as the cradle of civilisation, the birthplace of democracy, but also the place where violence and injustice wreak the cruellest havoc. After the rapid expansion of industry and urbanisation in the last century, we now face the challenge of achieving sustainable development while handling population and urban expansion. More

Little behavioural difference between
urban and suburban teenagers
For the last several decades American middle-class families have been fleeing from the US cities to the country's suburbs, in part because many parents see the suburbs, and suburban public schools in particular, as refuges from the disorder and social collapse they see as endemic to America's urban school districts. Parents believe that suburban public schools provide children with safer, more orderly, and more wholesome environments than their urban counterparts. A new report by the Manhattan Institute, a New York-based conservative think tank, finds that those perceptions are unfounded. More

South American cities spearhead
development of direct democracy
At a time when many ordinary people in nominally democratic countries feel themselves bereft, in practice if not in theory, of influence in the political processes of their communities, cities in Europe and South America are seeking to rediscover the meaning of local democracy together through an organisation called the Observatori Internacional de la Democracia Participativa (OIDP), the literal translation into English of which is International Observatory of Participatory Democracy. More