Brent D. Ryan first visited Detroit in 1993. Describing this experience, he says: ‘‘The sense of emptiness was overpowering. ... I felt as if I was walking into the ruin of America.’’ In his book ‘‘Design after decline—how America rebuilds shrinking cities,’’ Ryan tries to understand why so many American cities have been losing population, what was and is done to change the fortune of these cit...

Several countries of Asia, including Malaysia, have in recent years experienced spectacular economic growth and social change. This, together with declining fertility rates and mortality rates, and accompanying increased expectation of life at birth have resulted in rapid population ageing of these countries. However, relative to the developed countries, where fertility and mortality declines, ...

1% in 2000. Although the objective was far from being reached (the current rate being close to 2%), in 2000 Mexico had 53 million inhabitants fewer than it would have had if fertility had remained at its 1970 level. The population pyramids of 1930, 1970 and 2000 clearly illustrate this dynamics (Figure 2). In 1930 the population was beginning to recover from the aftereffects of the Revolution a...

This paper examines levels and trends of urban-rural differentials in child malnutrition, and investigates whether residual differences exist between urban and rural areas, given comparable measures of socioeconomic status (SES) of households and communities. Using data from Demographic and Health Surveys of 15 sub-Saharan African countries, and multilevel modelling, it shows that urban-rural d...

In 2014, Khoo and Knorr (1) identified the global shift in population demographics as one of the twenty-first century grand challenges, which warrants research prioritization by the food and nutrition communities. A persistent global growth trend toward urbanization can be attributed to this demographic shift. Satterthwaite et al. (2) characterized urbanization as “the increasing share of a nat...

more than 50% of the global population already lives in urban settlements which are projected to absorb almost all the global population growth to 2050, amounting to some additional three billion people. over the next decades the increase in rural population in many developing countries will be overshadowed by population flows to cities. rural populations globally are expected to peak at a leve...