ABSTRACT

Ever since we have had records about the development of cities, a major concern has been how to cope with urban growth. However, as Potter and Lloyd-Evans (1998) point out, we are living during a period in which the number of people living in cities around the world is growing faster than at any previous time. Most urban population growth is taking place in the developing world. The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) reported that about half of the world’s governments considered their population distribution to be unsatisfactory and wanted to change it in some way (Johnson, 1995). In most of these cases the focus of concern was the speed of growth of the cities in the developing world. This chapter focuses on the flows of people across the urban-rural interface.