ABSTRACT
Urban growth in the Middle East must be seen in the context of that in the world as a whole, which is even faster than the much more publicised population growth. While at the beginning of the nineteenth century only about 20 million people in the world lived in towns, say one in 40 of the total world population, by 1970 the number had risen to 1,500 million, two out of five, 1 with the highest proportions of town-dwellers in the most developed countries and the lowest proportions in the least developed countries. By the end of this century the number living in towns may reach 3,000 million, roughly half the world population, and most of these will be living in less developed countries, which account for at least 85 per cent of world population growth and for an increasing proportion of its urban growth. Moreover, much of this mercurial urban growth in the world is localised in large cities; between 1950 and 1970 the number of cities with a million inhabitants or more rose from 75 to 162, nearly half of which were in the Third World. During the 1960s alone the number of cities with 100,000 inhabitants or more increased more than threefold from 249 to 837.
