Cities will be our worst nightmare

Hundreds of cities will be in real trouble within a decade, says the United Nations in recent report. In China, where urbanization has been extreme in the past fifteen years, 400 out of the 670 biggest cities already have serious water deficits. Elsewhere, many cities are depleting underground stocks and finding that salt water is getting into the aquifiers. Competition for supplies is leading to increased conflicts between industry and agriculture, and, while better management could clearly improve supplies in many places, cities are often right up against their financial or physical limits.
Massive urbanization means hundreds of already near-bankrupt cities trying to cope in 20 years with the kind of problems London or New York only managed to address with difficulty in the last 150 years. The strains are showing in a growing global fresh water and sanitation water crisis, air pollution leading to continent wide smogs and 48-hour traffic gridlocks, and reports of dwindling food reserves in many countries.
Exodus?
The scale of the redistribution of people now taking place is vast. Only a 100 years ago, only one in seven in the world lived in a town or city. There were 16 places that were then thought to have more than one million people. Today, there are more than 400 cities with over one million and in fifteen years, a further 150 are expected to join the club. The global urban population increased 36 per cent in the 1990s alone.
Contrary to popular imagination, however, the future is not expected to be a world of megacities like Dhaka, Cairo or Manila. According to a new book by a group of demographers. What scares many governments, planners and policy-makers, though, is the real prospect that the majority of cities in developing countries will become sprawling slums, with people living without piped water or sanitation, poor standards of housing, and health and nutrition problems on a par with anything found in the most poverty-stricken rural areas today.