管理论文：城市化管理对加纳人口生活水平的影响.docxVIP

管理论文：城市化管理对加纳人口生活水平的影响  Chapter 1 Introduction  1.1 Background, Objective and Significance of the Study The world is increasingly becoming urbanized with about half of theworldlsquo;s population already living in urban areas. (Thomas, 2008; Olujimi 2009;Satterthwaite et al, 2010)[1, 2, 3].The driving forces behind the rapid urbanization in Africa today are thetwin processes of rural-urban migration and natural increase within towns andcities (Songsore, 2009; Thuo, 2010)[4,5].By birth or through rural-urban migration, the poor of the world areincreasingly concentrating in cities, both large and small. It is expected that verysoon the majority of mankind will live in cities. By definition, cities are spatialconcentrations of people and their economic and social activities, other thanprimarily agricultural. They are therefore both a concentration of poverty andwealth, and problems as well as solutions. Urbanization takes place in the wholeworld, in poor and affluent regions alike. But in the poorer ones, urban growth isthe strongest, nearly half of it caused by migration of poor peasants to the cities.By definition, urbanization is the growth in the proportion of a country#39;spopulation living in urban areas (Thomas, 2008).The urban population may also be thought of more as nonagricultural thanurban in the way those in industrialized countries would naturally tend toperceive it. (United Nations statistics division 2007 demographic yearbook)In 1950, about 30% of the worldsrsquo; population lived in cities and is projectedto rise to 61% by 2030 (Trzyna, 2007)[6]. The current statistics seem to suggestthat almost every country in the world has experienced some form ofurbanization, and the process is proceeding unabated, especially in Africa.Rakodi, (1997 cited in Thuo, 2010) argued that it is almost a truism that theplanetrsquo;s future is an urban one, and that, the largest and fastest growing cities areprimarily in developing countries. This statement is prove