Starting in the mid-19th century, the Russian authorities promoted rapid economic modernisation while trying to maintain the traditional social order and political absolutism. State-led industrialisation, however, created new social groups, such as urban workers; enlarged the intelligentsia; and facilitated contact between villages and urban centres. These changes also increased the burden of t...

Health care delivery is vastly diverse worldwide. This is more unequal in low and middle-income countries like Nepal. Hospitals equipped with advanced diagnostic means and qualified medical doctors are abundantly available in urban areas whereas remote peripheral villages are suffering from dearth of infrastructure and medical doctors. Although the system has always tried to distribute infrastr...

Study of Two Villages in Dalian, Liaoning Province, China by Li Li B.S. Urban and Regional Planning Peking University, 2004 Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master in City Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology September 2006 Copyright 2006 Li Li. All rights reserved. MASSACHUM8 INS11TUE! OF TEC...

To determine the prevalence of drug abuse in city neighborhoods in a developing country undergoing rapid urbanization, we performed a household survey on the spread of drug abuse in Vientiane, Lao People's Democratic Republic. A total of 1497 households from 17 villages were selected by the stratified random sampling method from urban districts in the city of Vientiane. Participatory style rese...

Urbanization is defined by the United Nations as the movement of people from rural to urban areas, whose population is projected to amount to half of the world’s population in 2008, rising to about 60% in 2030. As an increasingly higher number of people leave farms and villages to live in cities particularly in the developing countries, urban centres will grow at a rate previously unseen in man...

The majority of the world’s population now lives in cities (United Nations, 2008) resulting in an urban densification requiring people to live in closer proximity and share urban infrastructure such as streets, public transport, and parks within cities. However, “physical closeness does not mean social closeness” (Wellman, 2001, p. 234). Whereas it is a common practice to greet and chat with pe...