Today, a majority of the world’s population<span> lives in cities</span>. By 2050, two-thirds of all people on the planet are projected to call urbanized areas their home. This trend will be most prominent in developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America: More than 90% of the global urban growth is taking place in these regions, adding 70 million new residents to urban areas every year.
For the many poor in developing countries, cities embody the hope for a better and more prosperous life. The inflow of poor rural residents into cities has created hubs of urban poverty. One-third of the urban population in developing countries<span> resides in slum conditions</span>. On the other hand, urban areas are engines of economic success. The 750 biggest cities on the planet account for 57% of today’s GDP, and this share is projected to rise further. It is thus unsurprising that rapid urban growth has been dubbed one of the biggest challenges by skeptics and one of the biggest opportunities by optimists.
One reason for this disagreement is that the relationship between economic development and urbanization is complex; causation runs in both directions. In the study “Growing through Cities in Developing Countries,” published in the World Bank Research Observer, Gilles Duranton from the University of Pennsylvania examines this relationship in depth. The strong positive correlation between the degree of urbanization of a country and its per-capita income has long been recognized. Still, the relationship between these two variables is only partially understood in the context of developing countries. In reviewing studies that focus on the impact of cities both in developed and developing countries, Duranton tries to identify the extent to which urbanization affects economic growth and development. (“Agglomeration” economies refers to physical clustering.
The largest empire of the early (pre-Columbian) American civilization was the Inca Empire. The Incas called their own empire Tawantinsuyo, meaning 'Land of the Four Quarters' or 'The Four Parts Together'.
Answer - Race as a categorizing term referring to human beings was first used in the English language in the late 16th century. Until the 18th century it had a generalized meaning similar to other classifying terms such as type, sort, or kind. Occasional literature of Shakespeare’s time referred to a “race of saints” or “a race of bishops.” By the 18th century, race was widely used for sorting and ranking the peoples in the English colonies—Europeans who saw themselves as free people, Amerindians who had been conquered, and Africans who were being brought in as slave labour—and this usage continues today.
The peoples conquered and enslaved were physically different from western and northern Europeans, but such differences were not the sole cause for the construction of racial categories. The English had a long history of separating themselves from others and treating foreigners, such as the Irish, as alien “others.” By the 17th century their policies and practices in Ireland had led to an image of the Irish as “savages” who were incapable of being civilized. Proposals to conquer the Irish, take over their lands, and use them as forced labour failed largely because of Irish resistance. It was then that many Englishmen turned to the idea of colonizing the New World. Their attitudes toward the Irish set precedents for how they were to treat the New World Indians and, later, Africans.
