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Panel on Urbanisation

Rethinking the Estimation and Projection of Urban and City Populations

See the Agenda of the Seminar

New York City, 9-10 January 2006. Faculty Room, Low Library, Columbia University

This one-and-a-half day seminar will gather junior and senior researchers interested in urban population growth and growth forecasting in poor countries, to consider how new sources of data (from demographic surveys and from remotely-sensed or other geographically-coded datasets) may be used to improve the estimation and projection of urban growth. Current UN projections indicate that in the coming decades, the world’s population is to grow by some 2 billion persons, the great majority of whom will be found in the cities and towns of developing countries. The seminar is a direct outgrowth of the work undertaken by the previous IUSSP working group on urbanisation, headed by Anthony Champion and Graeme Hugo.

Yet while there is little doubt about the broad trends, there is considerable doubt about the scientific basis for the estimation and forecasting of urban and city growth rates. Recent reviews of UN urban projections indicate a tendency for urban growth rates to be over-projected. Moreover, current methods, which were devised in the late 1970s and have undergone little change in the decades since then, do not exploit the availability of survey data on urban fertility, mortality, and migration, and do not take advantage of the remarkable outpouring of remotely-sensed and geo-coded data on urban form and spatial extent. In addition, there is growing interest in using probabilistic methods in demographic forecasts of all types; and given the errors and imprecision of urban population counts, these methods are of particular interest. The UN Population Division is considering a reformulation of its estimation and forecasting methods so as to take full advantage of these new data sources and analytic techniques.

Objectives of the seminar:
1. To present and critically assess new methods for estimating and projecting urban and city populations in poor countries

2. To further research contacts and dialogue between urban researchers based in poor countries and those based in high-income countries.To further research dialogue between the demographic research community and the community of researchers using techniques based remote-sensing and other geographic information systems.

3. To engage key statistical agencies of the United Nations in data-gathering and monitoring efforts.

Scientific Panel on Urbanisation

Mark Montgomery (Chair). mmontgomery@popcouncil.org. 1982 Ph.D. in Economics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Professor of Economics, State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Senior Associate, Population Council. From 1999 to 2003, he served as co-chair of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Panel on Urban Population Dynamics, and was lead editor of its 2003 report, Cities Transformed, a comprehensive analysis of urbanization in the developing world. With Paul Hewett, he has published several recent papers on urban poverty, health, and children's schooling (Montgomery and Hewett, 2005a, 2005b) and, with Alex Ezeh, contributed two chapters to the Handbook of Urban Health (2005).

Deborah Balk.balk@ciesin.columbia.edu. 1991 Ph.D. in Demography, University of California at Berkeley, USA. Citizen and resident of United States of America. Lead Project Scientist, Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center, CIESIN, Columbia University, and Associate Research Scientist at CIESIN. Over the past five years Balk has led several major initiatives to spatially render demographic data, including the Gridded Population of the World (GPW) database and the Global Rural Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP), both of these being large-scale, multi-year, multi-institutional projects that integrate demographic and geographic information. Recently, she was also lead author on a study of West African mortality (Balk et al., 2004) that made novel use of the geo-referenced cluster data from the Demographic Health Surveys (DHS), and currently co-leads the efforts at CIESIN to map, and conduct spatial analysis on, the representative sampling units from the DHS and MICS surveys in support of the UN Millennium Project. In these activities, Dr. Balk used units of analysis that are both common in demography (individual, families, cities) and uncommon (grid cells), and for which state-of-the-art methods for data integration and analysis were needed. She not only oversees a large staff who develop datasets, but also insures and facilitates the public dissemination of these data. In 2001, Balk co-authored two papers on global population projections (O’Neill et al., 2001; O’Neill and Balk, 2001).

Eduardo Lopez-Moreno Romero. E-mail: Eduardo.Moreno@unhabitat.org. 1995 Ph.D. in Urban Geography, University of Paris III, IHEAL-Sorbonne, France. Citizen of Mexico. Chief, Global Urban Observatory, Monitoring System Branch, UN-Habitat, Nairobi. Dr. Moreno is a specialist in urban development, housing, and land policy, having written five books and published a number of articles in the international journals. Dr. Moreno brings a wealth of expertise to the Panel by virtue of his background and role as coordinator of UN-Habitat’s wide network of Local Urban Observatories (LUOs). He has been working on the development of the Urban Indicators and Urban Inequities Programme and coordinates support for local policy formulation activities (based on these urban indicators) in a range of developing countries. He and his colleagues organized a UN Expert Group Meeting on the Operational Definitions of Urban, Rural and Urban Agglomeration for Monitoring Urban Settlements, in support of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in November 2004.

Thomas Buettner buettner@un.org. 1979 Ph.D. in Demography, College of Economics, Berlin, and 1986 DSc in Demography, Academy of Sciences, Berlin. Citizen of Germany. Chief, Estimates and Projection Section, Population Division, United Nations, New York. Dr. Buettner leads the Population Division’s efforts to estimate and project urban populations at the national and global level, and also leads the estimation and projection activities concerned with the populations of individual cities. These efforts of the Division culminate in its influential biennial publication, World Urbanization Prospects. Buettner plays a central role in a number of related Population Division estimation and projection activities, and has published on sex differences in old-age mortality, population ageing, and the projection of mortality patterns among the oldest old.