An article on the BBC website last week reported that a half of the population of the earth now live in cities. This represents an amazing change in natural habitat for human beings, only 14% of whom in 1900 were city-dwellers. The report brought to mind an article I read in the New Left Review some time back by Mike Davis entitled Planet of Slums. In the piece, Davis pulls together some astonishing statistics on urbanisation and the effects on the world's poor. I understand that he is now writing a book based on the article which is due out this month. The Davis article is my principal source for the statistics in this post, and I recommend it as a great read. Here are some of the facts and figures relating to urbanisation:-

While the world's urban population was just one billion in 1804, by 1985 it had risen to two billion and by 2002 it was three billion.

The present urban population (3.2 billion) is larger than the total population of the world in 1960. The global countryside, meanwhile, has reached its maximum population (3.2 billion) and will begin to shrink after 2020. As a result, cities will account for all future world population growth, which is expected to peak at about 10 billion in 2050.

Cities have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950 and are currently growing by a million babies and migrants each week.

By 2025, according to the Far Eastern EconomicReview, Asia alone could have ten or eleven conurbations with more than 20 million inhabitants (the estimated urban population of the world at the time of the French Revolution).

The population of Lagos, Nigeria has grown from 300,000 in 1950 to 10 million today. Lagos is located within a slum/shanty town corridor housing a population of 70 million people which stretches from Abidjan in Cote d'Ivoire to Ibadan, Nigeria

The impact of these statistics is liable to be clouded by our common conceptions of the relative merits of rural and urban life in the non-industrialised world. It is easy to fall into the trap of comparing the starving subsistence farmer with an, albeit underpaid and overworked, city-dwelling factory worker who at least has a roof over his head and food on the table. Television news normally brings us reports of famine from the fields and villages, not from cities, and thus our stereotype of Third World poverty is associated with rural lifestyles, while those in cities keep themselves busy and get by. The truth, however, is not so simple.

Our point of reference for rapid urbanisation is the Industrial Revolution, which pulled much needed workers from the fields and into the factories. Living and working conditions were appalling in the early days, but the wheels were set in motion for the new working class to bootstrap themselves towards much higher standards of living in a newly industrialised society. Even in countries such as Ireland where the urban sector could not cope with the influx from the countryside, the promise of a new life in the empty New World countries offered a safety valve which is no longer on offer due to the 'gated community' immigration policies of the today's developed nations.

The problem is that the current wave of humanity crashing onto the shores of our cities is arriving to find no signs of any industrialising boom. Instead, exacerbated by the neoliberal experiments perpetrated by the IMF/ World Bank, many cities are experiencing negative growth, and are shedding jobs rather than creating them. Average incomes in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, have fallen by around 20% since 1980. As the UN Report The Challenge of the Slums puts it:

Instead of being a focus for growth and prosperity, the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries and trade...The rise of [this] informal sector is . . . a direct result of liberalization.’

There are nowhere near enough jobs to go round. For example, in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s only around 10,000 new urban jobs were created per year in face of an urban workforce increasing by more than 300,000 per annum. The result is that people are pushed into the 'informal' economy, working for example as street vendors, collecting recyclable waste, panhandling or indulging in petty criminal activities such as black marketeering or prostitution. In short, denied the opportunity of a job, these people have to use their own initiative to find any opportunity to make the money to survive. It is estimated by the UN that informal workers make up about two-fifths of the economically active population of the developing world. In Latin America, 57 per cent of all jobs lie in this sector, and 80 per cent of all new 'jobs' are in the informal economy. There is barely enough money for subsistence level rations, never mind about rent for accommodation. It is estimated that 85 per cent of urban residents in the developing world occupy property illegally.

Living conditions in the slum cities are routinely horrific. Two million urban babies die each year due to contamination of water by human or animal waste. 57 per cent of the urban population of the developing world lack basic sanitation. 40 per cent of slum-dwellers, according to the UN, live in such extreme poverty that it is deemed life-threatening.

The scale of the problem is hard to get one's head around. The UN estimates the total number of urban slum-dwellers in the world at 921 million people - one sixth of humanity, 78.2 per cent of total urban population of the developing world (rising to over 99% in countries such as Ethiopia and Chad). Incredibly, the figure is projected to rise to 2 billion by the 2030's, and shows no sign of slowing down.

What hope is there for these people? Very little it would seem without radical change in the world economy. The combination of radical free market reforms and privatisation of the public sector at home, while export markets in the industrialised world remain largely closed due to direct and indirect protectionist barriers, have exacerbated rather than improved the situation. No short term measure or injection of cash is going to resolve the problem, but it is important that measures are taken to at least turn the tide and inject some hope into these communities.

More than half of the slum-dwellers are under the age of twenty. This represents an enormous force of humanity growing up disaffected and without hope of improvement in their lives. Such forces of disaffection have always sought outlets for their anger and helplessness. The danger is that politics is the opium for these desperate people, while religion is the amphetamine. For example, Palestine has seen a gradual erosion of support for left-wing activist organisations while those such as Hamas continue to increase in popularity based on their combination of humanitarian support in the community and violent jihad against their perceived oppressors. Realistic hope is usurped by fundamentalist blind faith.

It is important that we provide these people with opportunities to escape from urban poverty. In this context at least, the rhetoric of Bush is correct. Working democracy is an essential pre-requisite to give these people the chance of being heard, and to offer political representation for their cause. Their sheer numbers give them plenty of political clout given a level playing field. The populist regime led by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, which has implemented significant reforms and aid for the urban poor, is a classic example of what their democratic power can achieve.

Backing this up, the governments of these countries must be given sufficient support in tackling these issues, not just in terms of aid, but in creating a fair global trading system and offering the necessary expertise where required. Free market dogma needs to be replaced with practical development models to support growth in a sustainable manner.

Finally, our attitudes to poverty need to evolve. The fact that so many of these slum areas are dangerous no-go zones, and are often less telegenic for those wishing to tug at our heart-strings, should not prejudice our understanding of global poverty in the 21st century. Rural poverty will remain and agricultural famines will affect all citizens, but we should keep in mind that the world poverty crisis has now by-and-large moved to the big city.