DPU Working Paper - No. 70

Authors: Julio D Davila 

Publication Date: 1995

For several decades now, planners and policy makers in developing countries have had to grapple with the challenges of an increasing concentration of population and productive activities in a few urban centres within their national territory. And although compared to the 1960s and 1970s, the pace of this concentration has dropped, the challenge of rapid growth and a legacy of institutional responses that all too often have seemed insufficient seems to linger on.

Like their counterparts in the richer nations that industrialised earlier, rapid expansion has confronted metropolitan planners and managers with the mammoth task of providing infrastructure, services and housing to accommodate a vast influx of migrants and the emergence of new - and for conventional planners not always desirable - activities, such as those often embodied in the "informal sector" concept (Portes et al, 1989).

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