Bigger cities mean more poverty - UN

Urbanisation in the Asia-Pacific region has driven up poverty, says the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Escap).

The agency's latest yearbook showed that with an increase in urbanisation and growth, urban poverty had also worsened. This year represented a turning point in human geography. For the first time in history, more people now live in cities than in rural areas.

Although the Asia-Pacific region, along with Africa, was still one of the least urbanised regions of the world, its urban population had grown at the fastest pace in the last 15 years, said the yearbook, which describes economic, social and environmental trends in Asia and the Pacific.

Only 33 per cent of people in Asia lived in urban areas in 1990, compared with 41% today. This growth was having an effect on the way people lived, said Pietro Gennari, the chief of Escap's Statistics Division. In Asia and the Pacific, two in five urban dwellers live in slums, compared with three out of five in Africa.

Energy consumption per capita in Asia and the Pacific more than doubled between 1990 and 2004, a pace unmatched anywhere else in the world, said Gennari. Motorisation rates measured by the number of passenger cars in use per 1,000 people had also increased significantly in the Asian and Pacific region.

Personal mobility levels in many South and Southeast Asian countries were higher than the number of cars in use suggested, as two-and three-wheelers made up more than two-thirds of all motorised vehicles in Cambodia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Laos, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam. Bangkok Post