ABSTRACT
Urban growth patterns, rural-urban migration, the provision and adequacy of urban services and infrastructure and the nature of urban employment and urban household's livelihoods have all experienced significant change in eastern and southern African urban settlement systems since the independence and modernisation decade of the 1960s. This chapter focuses on Urban boundaries and misleading population growth rates. The urban growth rates recorded by the various censuses in Kenya and Tanzania exhibit some curious features, with certain centres seeming to grow suddenly and unexpectedly. The chapter provides an overview of post-apartheid housing policies in South Africa, both to exemplify some of the dilemmas faced in this sector in the region, and to indicate ways in which the housing legacies of the southern white minority regimes affect contemporary urban housing issues. The impact of AIDS will undoubtedly have had a dramatic effect on the contribution of natural increase within the city to its growth during the 1990s.
