Urbanization and Population

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Population Growth and Urbanization as it challenges Sustainable growth in Pakistan Urbanization is an important social process of human society in the 21st Century. People keep flowing into cities, making cities grow on a continuous basis. When people stop moving to cities, urbanization will also stop accordingly. Urbanization mainly refers to the transformation process experienced by rural population toward an urban life style, showing as the increase of urban population, the expansion of urban built-up area, the creation of landscape and urban environment with social and life style changes. There are three meanings of definitions on urbanization: first, urbanization accompanied by the increase of proportion of urban population; second, urban growth, meaning the growth of urban population; third, urbanism, referring to the urban lifestyle, social and behaviour features extending to the entire society. According to a report by the United Nations (2010), the ratio of urban populations rose from 13% in 1900, to 29% in 1950, to 50% in 2009, and it is projected to be 69% in 2050. Importance of Urban areas: Achieving the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the international community’s unprecedented agreement on targets towards the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, will depend to a large extent on how well developing country governments manage their cities. Urbanization brings many benefits, such as diversity, market efficiency, jobs, education, and health improvement. Cities are currently home to nearly half of the world’s population and over the next 30 years most of the two-billion-plus person increase in global population is expected to occur in urban areas in the developing world. This represents a significant departure from the spatial distribution of population growth in the developing world that occurred over the
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