Population-Built Environment

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Population possibly, has had the greatest influence on how both society and the built environment have evolved. As our population grew, so expanded the built environment and so increased our impact on the natural environment.
In the late eighteen century, the population of the world was in the vicinity of 1 billion people. In the 1800s, London was one of a few cities with one million inhabitants. By 1930, the world’s population had doubled and by the year 2000 it had increased to about 6 billion people. This rapid population growth was accompanied with an equally dramatic rise in the percentage of the population who lived in cities, in 1900, barely 10% of the world’s population lived in cities, by 1950, this increased to almost one-third and …show more content…

From these, there are 21 megacities or cities with populations greater than 10 million inhabitants. These megacities are located in Asia (11), Latin America (4), Africa (2), Europe (2) and Northern America (2), and together these house 9.4 per cent of the world urban population, or 4.7 percent of the overall population.
There exists no precedence for the feeding, sheltering, transporting, treating waste products, providing clean drinking water or dealing with the pollution of so many people in so many megacities.
By 2025, the number of these megacities is estimated to increase to 29 and account for 10.3 per cent of the world urban population (with Asia gaining another five, Latin America two, and Africa one). And by this time, it is also estimated that 70 per cent of the world’s population of 10 billion inhabitants will be urban dwellers. And, with ever larger numbers of urban dwellers, we will need to rethink where we live, what we build, what we eat, what we drink, how we are educated and employed.
What are the limits to population growth?
There exist a mathematical relationship between population, environmental impact, and growth, described by the following formulae:
I = PAT where; I is Environmental

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