Habitat II: not just another "doomed global conference."

• Author: Tunali, Odil

With half of humanity living in urban settlements by the turn of the millenium, it is critical that the "City Summit" effectively address the mounting challenges of urbanization.

In the past five years, five of the world's major cities - Rio, Vienna, Cairo, Copenhagen, and Beijing - have hosted global conferences concerned with the sustainability, of human societies. The movement toward accelerated global cooperation, perhaps spurred by accelerating social and environmental breakdown, began with the Earth Summit in Rio (1992), moved on to the Human Rights Conference in Vienna (1993), the Population Summit in Cairo (1994), the Social Development Conference in Copenhagen (1995), and the Conference on Women in Beijing (1995). This year, Istanbul - the ancient Turkish city where East meets West - joins the list as host of the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) in June.

Skeptics fear that Habitat II might turn out to be just another big conference where the North and the South disagree over fundamental issues, and too little is achieved in terms of concrete results - except, perhaps, for a lengthy official document full of bold plans and promises, which politicians then fail to match with actions. Such skepticism is not surprising, since the world has yet to see significant progress on the actions agreed to in Cairo, Copenhagen, or Beijing. But given the overarching nature of the "urbanization" problem Habitat II attempts to deal with, and the speed with which this problem is beginning to overwhelm governments, some observers hold high hopes for what this last major global conference of the millennium could achieve.

In 1950, only 30 percent of the world's people lived in cities, which had a global total of 734 million inhabitants. Only two cities, London and New York, had a population of more than 8 million. By 1995, the world's urban population had more than tripled, to 2.5 billion - about 45 percent of humanity. The number of mega-cities containing more than 8 million people apiece has leaped from two to 20. In 1950, there were no cities of this magnitude in the developing world. Today, there are 16. Developing countries had less than 40 percent of the world's urban population in 1950, but that had swelled to more than 60 percent by 1990 - and by now is higher.

Urban areas owe much of their growth to immigration and migration driven by political and economic disruptions and endemic poverty. Every year, 60...