ABSTRACT
Urban development and the migration of population from rural to urban areas are significant global phenomena. Increasingly, more small, isolated population centres are changing into large metropolitan cities, with the conversion of natural land to urban use becoming quite obvious. According to the 2005 Revision of World Urbanisation Prospects reported by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ Population Division of the United Nations (United Nations 2006), in 1900, only 13% of the world’s population lived in urban areas; this proportion increased to 29% by 1950, and it reached 49% in 2005. The latest U.N. population projection also indicates that the proportion of urban population will rise to 60% by 2030, which means that about 4.9 billion people out of a total world population of 8 billion are expected to be urban dwellers in 2030 (United Nations 2006).
