The Menace of Urban Explosion from The Listener

 After millennia of growth so slow that each generation hardly noticed it, the cities are suddenly racing off in every direction. The world population goes up by two per cent a year, city population goes up by four per cent a year, but in big cities the rate may be as much as five and six per cent a year. To give only one example of almost visible acceleration, Athens today grows by three dwellings And 100 square metres of road every hour. There is no reason to believe that this pace will slacken. As technology gradually swallows up all forms of work, industrial and agricultural, the rural areas are going to shrink, just as they have shrunk in Britain, and the vast majority of their people will move into the city. In fact, in Britain now only about four or five per cent of people live in rural areas and depend upon them; all through the developing world the vanguard of the rural exodus has reached the urban fringes already, and there they huddle, migrants in the favellas and barrios of Latin America, in shanty towns in Africa, in those horrifying encampments one sees on the outskirts of Calcutta and Bombay. We are heading towards an urban world.