UN Report: Asia's Urban Divide Widens as World Population Continues to Gravitate to Mega-Cities

Dr. Eduardo Lopez Moreno

HONOLULU (April 2, 2010) – While inequalities in the big cities of Latin America are declining slightly and Africa presents a mixed picture, the urban divide continues to widen across Asia's biggest metropolitan areas, according to a sometimes stark, sometimes optimistic UN update on what is now a half-urban world.

This was among the findings shared by Dr. Eduardo Lopez Moreno this week at the East-West Center in Hawai'i, where he presented the United Nations' latest biennial report on the state of the world's cities during a conference on Asian urbanization issues. The report, State of the World's Cities 2010/2011: Bridging the Urban Divide, was released worldwide on March 18.

Dr. Moreno, principal author of the report and head of the City Monitoring Branch at UN-HABITAT, the United Nations' Nairobi-based agency for human settlements, highlighted the gap between urban slum dwellers and the millions of city residents who thrive in what he called the "new conglomerates of urban development."

"The good news," Moreno said, "is that … we have improved the lives of 220 million people in the world." That's the number of slum dwellers helped through a 20-year global effort that has achieved more than double its goal in its first decade.

"The bad news," he said, "is that slum populations have grown in the world by 6 million every year," to 823 million in 2010.

The new report confirms that these impoverished urban settlements continue to breed hunger, poor health and lagging education, along with a host of other social, environmental, cultural and political challenges. The 220-page report counts 61 percent of the world's slum population in Asia, topping half a billion people.

While some of the best progress in helping alleviating slum conditions has been in China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam, Moreno said, on a global basis the numbers of slum dwellers and the inequalities within cities continue to grow, particularly when it comes to education.

"It's very clear that when you compare the poor and rich within cities, the gap is increasing in terms of education," he said. Studies across the world's biggest urban areas found that just 20 percent of slum children go to school, while 70 percent of children in other parts of the same cities are enrolled.
The UN report affirms that the world's urban areas are growing at a faster rate than the global population overall, Moreno said, with 50.6 percent of humans now living in cities.

He also noted that cities are engines of growth and progress. The 40 largest urban regions now have 18 percent of the world's population, 66 percent of global output and 85 percent of technological innovation, according to the UN-HABITAT study.

Moreno told the metropolitan leaders and experts meeting at the East-West Center's URBAN ASIA seminar that urban areas are becoming so large and expanding so rapidly that they can no longer can be classified just as big or small cities. The biggest now form mega-regions, urban corridors or city regions, he said, and Asia has all three.

Two of the largest emerging mega-regions are Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Guangzhou, with 120 million people, and Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe, with 60 million.

A major multi-nation urban corridor examined in the UN report runs through Beijing, Tokyo, Pyongyang and Seoul, connecting 77 cities with 97 million inhabitants.

An example of an expanding city region is Bangkok, expected to push its borders by some 200 kilometers by 2020, with its 17 million population growing along with the expansion, Moreno said.

Returning to the disparities between urban haves and have-nots, Moreno said that four factors determine success in improving the lives of slum dwellers: recognition of the problem, help from national governments and institutions, the location, and monitoring of clear goals and resource allocation toward them.
Breaching the urban divide is a major challenge facing the world, he said. It involves recognizing everyone's "full rights to the city," so that not only the rich benefit from urbanization.

"For me, a fundamental challenge in the coming years will be what kind of paradigm shift will be necessary in order to deal with regional governance, but linked to city development," he said.

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The East-West Center promotes better relations and understanding among the people and nations of the United States, Asia, and the Pacific through cooperative study, research, and dialogue. Established by the U.S. Congress in 1960, the Center serves as a resource for information and analysis on critical issues of common concern, bringing people together to exchange views, build expertise, and develop policy options.

Launched in 2008, the Center's URBAN ASIA seminar series facilitates informal, roundtable dialogue to examine the challenges of urban transition and governance using a knowledge-based approach that integrates experience and data. Through peer-to-peer exchanges on policy options, these diverse groups share and reflect on long-term strategic visions for managing urban growth in the region.

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