ABSTRACT
Population dynamics have enormous impacts on national and global development and pose particular challenges to urbanization. The growing differences between Europe, Japan and the Land-Rich Developed Countries and Sub-Saharan Africa require focus- and speed-differentiated approaches to good urbanization. Urban development can no longer just assume that water can be simply extracted from the ground and moved to where it is needed. The relatively similar urbanization patterns of the resulting eight world regions of the sample facilitate monitoring and reporting. Urbanization, in turn, generally has had a positive impact on economic development and poverty reduction. The demographic theory of the urban transition posits a 'pre-transition' period characterized by high birth and death rates. Complexity and incompleteness also facilitate the shaping of an urban subject that overrides the religious subject, the ethnic subject, the racialized subject, and, in certain settings, also the differences of class.
