and expansion since the late 1970s, accompanied by rapid and widespread urbanization. During the early 1980s, 18% of China’s population lived in cities, but this rose to 39% by 2003, while the number of cities increased from 190 to 660 (including about 170 cities with a population greater than 1 million) over the same time period. From 1980 to 2003, the contribution of Chinese cities to gross n...

Like other developing countries, Iranian cities are growing and expanding physically at a high speed. For about five decades, the only policy of the urban development plans in the field of urban growth management has been definition of the Urban Growth Boundary (U.G.B.) which is still used without any major modifications.Despite the slight evidences indicating the ineffectiveness of the current...

A preliminary foray into recent research on physical environmental conditions in Kota Ambon, reveals disturbing trends of ecosystem degradation and decline in quality of life for urban residents. Rapid population growth and urbanization activities have taken a massive toll on Ambon’s coastal environment, and in turn, environmental degradation is progressively undermining the quality of life of ...

BACKGROUND In recent decades, China has experienced tremendous economic growth and also witnessed growing socioeconomic-related health inequality. The study aims to explore the potential causes of socioeconomic-related health inequality in urban and rural areas of China over the past two decades. METHODS This study used six waves of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) from 1991 to 20...

In the past two centuries, many American urban areas have experienced significant expansion in both populating and depopulating cities. The pursuit of bigger, faster, and more growth-oriented planning parallels a situation where municipal decline has also been recognized as a global epidemic. In recent decades many older industrial cities have experienced significant depopulation, job loss, eco...

Asia and Middle East represent one of the most dynamic regions in the world which has experienced fast economic and technological growth. Access to clean and affordable water is essential for building resilience and maintaining human’s well-being and livelihood development in this region. Likewise, various energy resources are fundamental to support stable economic and social progress for bette...

Demographically, cities throughout the world seem to be expanding rather than shrinking. However a closer look at recent urban population change among the world’s largest urban agglomerations of one million people or more reveals that between 2000 and 2005, 30 out of 414 cities experienced zero to negative average annual growth (U.N. 2005). Recently, this internationalized pattern of city contr...