Geographers, urban planners, architects, and other contributors draw from concepts and methods of the seminal works “Limits to Growth” (1972) and “The Population Bomb” (1980) as well as issues raised by their critics to look at opportunities and challenges of population growth and rapid urbanization, strategies for dealing with opportunities and challenges, and the impact of population growth and rapid urbanization. Their topics include achieving sustainable cities in Saudi Arabia: juggling the competing urbanization challenges, China's population aging and new urbanization, effective urban infrastructure governance in Africa: resolving the wealth-poverty paradox, coping with erratic water supply in small towns, and ecological influences on the evolving planning system in Turkey.
– ProtoView Reviews
[...]. In other chapters of this interesting volume, one finds an evocative study of the
difficulties of maintaining the identity of historical city neighborhoods in Gulf-state
cities (Djamel Boussaa, chapter 9), where once-vibrant communities appear likely
to survive only in artificial, almost theme-park form, and an analysis of sustainable
urbanization in the hyper-arid environments of Saudi Arabia (Abubakar and Aina,
chapter 3). The most ambitious chapter in its demographic reach is that of Chen,
Zhang, and Gong for China (chapter 6), who attempt to link population aging to
urbanization in a country undergoing astonishingly rapid change in both of these
demographic dimensions. If not wholly convincing on the empirical connections,
the investigations of Chen and colleagues are nevertheless valuable in highlighting
previously unexplored points of connection between two of today’s major demographic
trends.
– Population and Development Review