Urbanization is one of the major social changes sweeping the globe especially in developing countries where urban growth rates are the most intense. Soon the majority of the world’s people will be living in urban environments quite unlike the rural settings that have been home to most of human society to date. Urbanization brings fundamental changes in the ways people live—in the number of people they see, in the places they work, and often in the quality of the water they drink, the air they breathe and the housing in which they live.
Such changes have profound implications—both positive and negative—for the health of city residents. On the one hand, urbanization and economic development have brought dramatic improvements in health, largely because of environment improvements and, in part, increased access to health services. However, urbanization can also have many negative influences on human health. For much of the world growth in urban population is synonymous with growth in urban poverty, both in absolute and in relative terms. Increasingly, cities are becoming the world’s starkest symbol of the unbalanced distribution of resources, which have serious impacts on the health of urban residents everywhere, but especially in the fast-growing towns and cities in the developing countries.
