Rapid slum growth breeds crime and terrorism, says U.N.
Next year will mark the beginning of a new urban era, according to the United Nations, where half of humanity will be living in towns and cities -- and one billion of them living in slums.
At an international conference on housing in the Asia-Pacific region, Anna Tibaijuka, head of the U.N. housing agency Habitat, said urban poverty was a severe, pervasive and largely unacknowledged feature of modern life which threatened everyone.
"The locus of global poverty is moving to the cities, a process now known as urbanization of poverty," said Tibaijuka, quoting Kofi Annan, the U.N.'s outgoing Secretary-General.
"In this global village, someone else's poverty very soon becomes one's own problem: of lack of markets for one's products, illegal immigration, pollution, AIDS and other diseases, insecurity, crime, fanaticism, terrorism."
According to U.N. Habitat, rapid and irreversible urbanization is taking place across cities in the developing world where the fastest growing neighborhoods are slums.
Experts say the Asia-Pacific region is already home to half of the world's slum population, and that action needs to be taken to ensure cities and towns, already grappling with mass migrations, are better prepared.
Tibaijuka said by 2020, Asia will be home to 12 of the world's 20 largest cities with populations of more than 20 million.
While India and China have made some progress in dealing with urban poverty, she said, the gap between rich and poor is growing.
"It is unacceptable that today millions of people in cities across the Asia-Pacific do not have adequate shelter, that children are growing up undernourished, exposed to disease without hope of education or a future," she said.
Tibaijuka said the urban poor were the most vulnerable to natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and typhoons.
"They live in places where no one else would dare set foot -- in places prone to flooding or landfalls, polluted places or in shaky structures that would be destroyed the instant a hurricane hits, causing untold loss in lives."
Ministers, experts and members of civil society from more than 35 countries in the Asia-Pacific region are attending the conference to agree on how best to develop and prepare their urban centers for increased migration pressures.
