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FT series - Urban planet
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From some time next year, a majority of the world’s population will be living in cities. This series looks at the forces behind urbanisation and the environmental and social consequences
How the Bolivian state is held to ransom
The plight of La Paz provides an illustration of how a city’s unchecked growth can threaten stability. Situated on a plateau above it, El Alto is often thought of as a slum but it has all the hallmarks of a city in its own right.
Ask the experts: Urban planet
Anna Tibaijuka, executive director at UN-Habitat and Fiona Harvey, FT environment correspondent answer your questions on rapid global urbanisation.
People power may offer a little hope
The influx of refugees has made Luanda one of the world’s fastest-growing cities – and surely one of its most squalid. Could decentralisation help?
São Paulo shows the way to civilise a megacity
Violence plagues the biggest metropolis in South America, but it is starting to profit from efforts to improve its poorest areas, writes Richard Lapper.
Mumbai’s best hope lies in building anew
A vast development about to start across the harbour could relieve pressure on India’s business capital, but millions of unskilled migrants will continue to arrive, writes Jo Johnson.
Little comfort for Jo’burg’s poor
The contrasts in South Africa’s largest city reflect the country’s tumultuous history, which up-ended apartheid’s repressive controls of movement. But Johannesburg’s problems are not unusual in middle-income developing countries.
Lure of the city swells the world’s slums
The UN predicts in its State of the World’s Cities report that urban growth “will become virtually synonymous with slum formation in some regions”.
Engine of enterprise in push and pull of rural desertion
Next year most of the world’s population will be living in cities. Alan Beattie looks at the motive forces that underlie urbanisation and where the trend may lead.
Welcome to Megacity...
...twinned with Slumsville, Asia. Millions of people are leaving their villages for the cities of China and India, lured by the hope of a better life. Urban areas have never grown this big this quickly - how will they cope?
Slums on the rise as people gravitate to cities
More than half the world's population will live in a city by 2007, but for one in three people that will mean a crime-ridden slum with inadequate housing and services...
