Big City crush: Mumbai, Delhi will get a lot more crowded

New York: If you live in one of the teeming megacities in the world like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata or New York, be prepared for an unstoppable surge in the crush of people. India, China, Nigeria, Indonesia and the US are set to lead the world’s growth in urban populations during the next four decades, the United Nations (UN) said on Thursday. India’s cities are to add 497 million people, increasing the current total population by more than 40 percent; and US cities are forecast to add 103 million people, raising the country’s total population by a third, according to the United Nation’s “ 2011 Revision of the World Urbanization Prospects” report. [caption id=“attachment_258570” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“It’s getting awfully crowded in our cities. Reuters”]  [/caption] China is also due to bump up its total urban population by a quarter, with an increase of 341 million in its cities. With half the world’s 7 billion people currently living in cities, they have edged out rural areas in more than sheer numbers of people. Poverty is increasing more rapidly in urban areas, and the UN says governments around the world need to plan for where the poor will live rather than leaving them to settle illegally in slums without sewerage and other services. The report has been released ahead of a UN sustainability summit in Rio in June to galvanise countries to come up with plans to build sustainable cities with better housing, electricity and mass transportation. It goes without saying that countries like India and China need to put massive infrastructure in place as this surge in urban population fuelled by births and the migration of people from the countryside is unstoppable. “Cities are where the pressures of migration, globalisation, economic development, social inequality, environmental pollution and climate change are most directly felt,” the UN said in a statement. The report notes more optimistically that cities are also engines of economic growth. Cities concentrate poverty, but they also represent the best hope of escaping it. “Yet, at the same time, they are the engines of the world economy and centres of innovation where many solutions to global problems are being piloted,” the UN said. According to population experts, the first great wave of urbanisation evolved over two centuries, from 1750 to 1950, in Europe and North America, with urban populations increasing from 15 million to 423 million. The second wave is happening now in the developing world and the urban metamorphosis is expected to be particularly swift in Africa and Asia. Africa’s urban population will increase from 414 million to over 1.2 billion by 2050 while that of Asia will soar from 1.9 billion to 3.3 billion people. By 2030, developing nations are expected to have 80 percent of the world’s urban population. (More details of the report, including country profiles and raw data, available here.)