27th ALNAP Meeting: Background paper

This is a background paper presented at 27TH ALNAP MEETING IN CHENNAI, INDIA.

Urbanisation is a social phenomenon and a physical transformation of landscapes that has been described as ‘one of the most powerful, irreversible, and visible anthropogenic forces on Earth’ (IHDP, 2005).

It may well amount to the most significant change in human civilisation since the coming of agriculture. The total urban population, which stood at just 10 per cent of the global population at the start of the 20th century, has in the past few years reached an unprecedented 50 per cent (UN, 2005). This much-reported event has been described as an irreversible tipping point (Crane and Kinzig, 2005) - the threshold of a new ‘urban millennium’ (UNFPA, 2007). Much of the available data indicates that urbanisation will continue at a scale and speed that redefines our relationship with each other and with the planet. (IHDP, 2005).