For many, Johannesburg resembles the imagined spectre of the urban future. Global anxieties about catastrophic urban explosion, social fracture, environmental degradation, escalating crime and violence, and rampant consumerism alongside grinding poverty, are projected onto this city as a microcosm of things to come.

By many estimates, the world has recently crossed the point where more than half the global population is urban, a trend driven by rapid urbanization in developing countries. Urban centres offer economies of scale in terms of productive enterprise and public investment. Cities are social melting pots, centres of innovation, and drivers of social change. However, cities are also marked by social differentiation, poverty, conflict, and environmental degradation. These are all issues that not only matter to cities, but also lie at the heart of development. As such, the time is right to consider...

Over the last few decades, globalization has had a visible effect on urbanization and migration patterns across much of Asia. Analyses of migration patterns reveal that some of the largest movements of people in the world actually take place in the form of internal migration within certain regions and countries, as people move from rural areas to booming urban centres. With the help of selected case studies from India, China, Japan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Phillipines, this volume examines the following issues: Why do people move from rural to urban areas? In what ways does...

By the dawn of the 21st century, more than half of the world's population was living in urban areas. This volume explores the implications of this unprecedented expansion in the world's most urbanized region, Latin America, exploring the new urban reality, and the consequences for both Latin America and the rest of the developing world.