| Global Issue: Urban Mission |
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A Message from Dr. Glenn SmithLausanne Senior Associate for Urban MissionIn 1700, fewer than two percent of the world’s population lived in urban places. Beijing and London were the only cities that had populations surpassing one million. By 1900 an estimated nine percent of the world’s population was urban. London was then the only “super-city” on the globe. In 1950, 27 percent of the world’s population lived in cities, and 73 percent of the world’s people lived on the land. By 1996 however, the world was growing by 86 million people a year, 73 million in cities alone and for the first time better than 50% of the world’s population lived in cities. While the rural percentage of the world’s population is declining, rural population is still growing in absolute numbers. The United Nations – which offers the most conservative growth estimate – projects that by 2025 over 60 percent of the world's estimated 8.3 billion people will live in urban areas.
According to the World Heritage Centre, by 2020 – just 16 years from now – the urban population of Asia will be around 2.5 billion, having doubled in 25 years. By then, more than half of the urban areas of the planet will be in Asia, and those urban areas alone will contain over one-third of the world’s population. The same organization predicts that the cities of Asia will be growing twice as fast as cities in the rest of the world. The chart on page three lists the largest urban areas of the world. Richard Sennett defines a city as a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet. The United Nations Population Fund documents the diversity of definitions for an urban category in its 1996 State of the World Population report. British urbanologist, David Clark has clarified many of these issues in his most recent book. He calls a population of 50,000 people or less a town or a village. On the other hand, cities are human agglomerations that have up to 200,000 residents. A metropolitan area or city-region has more than two million people, but a megalopolis is an urban region over five million. These distinctions are helpful because a country like Norway considers any human settlement of 200 people as urban while, Bénin, for example, only uses “urban” for places of 10,000 or more people. For all the challenges of urban areas - traffic, pollution, noise, high cost of living, crowded and often substandard living conditions, economic disparity, stress, psychological overload, long hours of commuting, violence – cities provide people in the developing world the best hope of education and income. So, people continue to be drawn to the city through migration and immigration. But does God have a purpose in this? In assuming this role of Senior Associate for Urban Mission for LCWE, we need to prioritize the following outcomes:
The world's largest urban areas 1Capital letters denote country capitals. This table provides population
figures for urban areas with populations of near to and more than three million
people. The table includes cities in countries which do not statistically
recognise urban areas. On 7 September 2003 the data for Indian urban areas
was updated to include the latest census figures. (The world's 300 largest cities
are ranked separately)
Introduction to urban areas | World's largest cities | Cities ranked 1 to 100 | Cities ranked 101 to 200 | Cities ranked 201 to 300 | Urban slums | Capital cities | Related Links:
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