Poor Abandon Rural Past for Big Cities

We've known this for years, but it bears repeating all the time: "among the more than three billion people currently living in cities, one billion live in slums and squatter settlements." Inter Press Service News Agency has the details of a new UN Population Fund study. The conclusion? "The battle to reach the Millennium Development Goals, halving extreme poverty by 2015, will be waged in the world's slums."

Now let's draw out a corollary: it's the slum-dwellers themselves -- the world's squatters -- who will have to lead the mega-cities of the future towards a more equitable distribution of housing and wealth.