ABSTRACT
Worldwide, many things have impacted on children’s health and well-being. Industrialization, population growth, poverty, environmental degradation, crime and war, and the constant dumping of toxic waste into the atmosphere, the waterways and the soil have all played their part. During the past 50 years population growth and resource consumption have both been increasing exponentially. Consequently, cities have been growing at alarming rates. Almost two billion people worldwide live in urban regions of the developing world. This figure is projected to double over the next 30 years, at which time urban dwellers will account for nearly half the global population (UN 2003). Moreover, most of these urban dwellers are likely to be living in slums, which will result in the ‘urbanization of poverty’. According to the United Nations (2003) report on its progress towards its Millennium Development Goals, Improving the Lives of 100 Million Slum Dwellers: ‘Slums are a physical and spatial manifestation of increasing urban poverty and intra-city inequality.’ UN (2003) estimates based on figures from the Global Urban Observatory demonstrate that 31.6 per cent of the world’s urban population, or 924 million people, are living in slums. Breaking this down further to least developed countries (LDCs), the number increases dramatically to 78.2 per cent. This means that 140 million people of 179 million urban dwellers are living in slums. With the world’s largest cities (megacities) growing by over one million people per week (Satterthwaite 1996; United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS) 1996), it has been estimated that by the year 2025 the world’s largest cities would need to accommodate four billion people (UNCHS 1996). With an average of one-third of the population in developed nations consisting of children under the age of 18 years, the majority of these
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Rapid urban growth creates huge imbalances between available resources and the needs of the population. With one-third of children in the developing world already living in sub-standard housing or homeless (UNICEF 2001a), this situation is bound to get worse as cities become larger and resources scarcer. As Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the UN, clearly articulates in the foreword of the State of the World’s Children document for 2005:
The consequences on children’s lives of not planning for the future are clear. If cities do not address ways of growing in sustainable ways, and provide adequate infrastructure to support population growth, the impact will be the continuance or exacerbation of large-scale poverty and urban slums. It is for these reasons that action based on the principles of sustainable development and children’s rights has been launched by the UN.
