ABSTRACT
It is reliably estimated that at the present time, in the region of 50,000 people migrate to urban areas within Third World territories every day. It is as a result of this rapid cityward migration and the accompanying high rates of natural increase of urban population that the total number of urban dwellers in Third World countries is projected to double between 1980 and 2000. This absolute urban increase, from 1,045 millions to 2,080 millions will entail the provision of homes, jobs and services for the addition of the equivalent of almost one quarter of the world's existing population. The scale of the problems that this will involve is immense. In late 1983, under the title “An age of nightmare cities: flood tides of humanity will create mammoth urban problems for the Third World”, the magazine Newsweek presented the following hypothetical scenario:
It is a sweltering afternoon in the year 2000, in the biggest city ever seen on earth. Twenty-eight million people swarm about an 80-mile-wide mass of smoky slums, surrounding walled-in, high-rise islands of power and wealth. Half the city's work force is unemployed, most of the rich have fled and many of the poor have never even seen downtown. In a nameless, open-sewer shanty-town, the victims of yet another cholera epidemic are dying slowly, without any medical attention. Across the town, the water truck fails to arrive for the third straight day; police move in with tear gas to quell one more desultory riot. And at a score of gritty plazas around the city, groaning buses from the parched countryside empty a thousand more hungry peasants into what they think is their city of hope (Newsweek, 1983, p. 26).
