The world's urban population now exceeds the world's rural population. What does this mean for the state of our cities, given the strain this global demographic shift is placing upon current urban infrastructures?

In our rapidly urbanizing global society, solid waste management will be a key challenge facing all the world's cities. Solid Waste Management in the World's Cities provides a fresh perspective and new data on one of the biggest issues in urban development.

With rapidly increasing urban populations, cities in Africa are faced with enormous challenges and will have to find ways to facilitate by 2015 urban services, livelihoods and housing for more than twice as many urban dwellers than it has today.

The Global Report on Human Settlements is the most authoritative and up-to-date global assessment of human settlements conditions and trends. It is an essential reference for researchers, academics, public authorities and civil society organizations all over the world.

This report adopts the concept of Harmonious Cities as a theoretical framework in order to understand today’s urban world, and also as an operational tool to confront the most important challenges facing urban areas and their development processes.

Only recently have world leaders paid attention to the crisis of slums. In 2000, one of the Millennium Development Goals called for ''improving the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers''. But the goal is far too modest. Already, since 2000, the population of slum dwellers has increased by the same figure. And it is estimated that 180,000 people are added to the urban population everyday.

The first in-depth examination of a broad range of urban security issues, focusing on three key aspects of urban safety and security: crime and violence; security of tenure and protection against forced eviction; and natural and human-made disasters • The UN Human Settlements Programme’s Global Report – the most authoritative source of information on the conditions and trends in the world’s cities • An essential tool and reference for researchers, academics, public authorities and civil society organizations around the world.

International migration has long been an important feature of Senegalese society, and migrants’ remittances play a significant role in the livelihoods of rural households and the growth of small and intermediate urban centres.

This paper specifically describes the urbanization experience of Brazil, by far the largest country in Latin America, and which has attained levels of urbanization that surpass those of most European countries.

Small towns play a significant role in the economic growth and urbanization of China, attracting migrants from rural areas and other urban centres.

The recent spike in food prices has led to a renewal of interest in agricultural issues and in the long-term drivers of food prices. Urbanization has been mentioned as one possible cause of higher food prices.

Rapid increases in food prices in 2007 and the first half of 2008 attracted high-level policy attention. During the course of 2008, the United Nations organized an inter-agency High-Level Taskforce on the Global Food Security Crisis and issued a Comprehensive Framework for Action.

Africa is in the midst of an urban transition, and getting this transition right is critical.

This paper engages with the global debate about the meaningfulness, validity and reliability of the poverty-line approach by examining the Egyptian poverty lines in relation to the reality of the lives of the urban poor in Greater Cairo.

Migration has long played a key role in shaping the size and distribution of the population of Pakistan. Since the partition of the British Indian Empire in 1947 and up to recent and on-going conflicts within the region, Pakistan has been the destination for large numbers of cross-border migrants and refugees.