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Notes
Nowadays, there are 20 megalopolis with more than 10 million inhabitants each. But they lodge only 9% of the world population, while more than half of urban population lives in towns with about 500,000 inhabitants.
In 2008, for the first time ever, more than half of the world population (that is to say 3.3 billions of people) will live in cities. This number will progressively grow to 5 billions in 2030 (UNFPA, 2007).
UNFPA 2007 report talks on ‘The unseen dramas of the urban poor’ and on slums as ‘Unparalleled concentration of poverty’, but also on ‘The discreet charm of suburbia’. A major issue concerns how to consider cities (‘Cities: Burden or Blessing?’) and, as to Urbanization and Sustainability in the 21st Century, there is an explicit address to ‘Looking beyond the local’.
Cities are considered the main beneficiaries of globalization, but they are not able to generate enough job opportunities and the number of poor is increasing. Anyway, most immigrants prefer their new urban life rather than the one they lived before (UNFPA, 2007).