The uneven globality of children.

  Overnight, more than a million additional children showed up for
  school last year when Kenya's newly elected government abolished fees
  that had been prohibitively high for many parents, about $16 a year.
  The New York Times, October 24, 2004, p.1

Historians like to call for an exploration of the past because the past is the "foreign country" (L. P. Hartley) they know best. Global historians call for an exploration of the past and the present. (1) Consider what a difference sixteen dollars made in Kenya and what that says about the contemporary global history of children. The global landscape of children today is extremely uneven and the unevenness of that terrain is the topic of this article.

In January 2003, the victorious National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) brought free primary education to Kenya, and word "spread swiftly from child to child." (2) Glimpsing a chance to escape from poverty, 1.2 million children stormed the schools. Overwhelmed schools and poor, education-hungry children are but one symptom of the present world. A wealth of global data is available free online (as it should be), mostly provided by agencies of the United Nations. (3) Their numerous reports, a largely untapped source for contemporary global history, allow us to take a wide-angled view. Here, I will use UN data about children to link global demographic information with historical trends in urbanization and poverty. I will not focus on the deterritorialized entity of "the" child but speak of children in different parts of the world. A song from one of the classic attractions at Disney's EPCOT Center will best illustrate the critical difference between the generalizing singular and individualizing plural.

EPCOT, the "Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow," was Walter Elias Disney's dream of reason: a corporate-controlled urban community "where parents and children could have fun together." (4) EPCOT opened in 1982 at Walt Disney World in Florida with the "Spaceship Earth" attraction in the first completely spherical geodesic structure. (5) Handsomely sponsored by AT & T, the building fulfilled the specification to be "global in scope and futuristic in design." The inside displayed the work of Disney "imagineers" (6) who, aided by numerous academic advisors and consultants, including the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, created a time machine that jostled the masses from "the dawn of civilization to the beginning of our tomorrow." The big romp through world history ended with the approach of "tomorrow's world" and the solemn exhortation to "discover the wisdom to guide great Spaceship Earth through the uncharted seas of the future." (7)

After its original run, the "Spaceship Earth" attraction was "re-imagineered" in 1986 with Walter Cronkite as narrator (and in 1994 with Jeremy Irons). The Cronkite version ended with a finale song, "Tomorrow's Child," followed by Cronkite affirming the song's message: "Yes, tomorrow's child, embodying our hopes and dreams for the future, a future made possible by the information age;" and finally a female voice that said, "the people of AT & T thank you for traveling through Spaceship Earth and look forward to serving you in the Information Age." (8) The lyrics of "Tomorrow's Child" bear witness to the homogenizing vision of a human being that is neither Nigerian nor Brazilian or French, not Inuit or Maori, male or female, has no skin color, religion, or culture, knows no harm and does no harm, is classless and without any particular attribute or desire besides the amazing competence to propel Disney and AT & T towards the "Future World."

  Tomorrow's child / Gathering gifts from our past / Shaping a world
  that will last / Holding the spark / As we embark / On a great journey
  / Together we're learning to / Reach for hope and desire / Building a
  world to inspire / Tomorrow's child / Charting a brand new way / For
  the Future World is / Born today! / Tomorrow's child / Lighting the
  path as we're going / Seeing that knowledge keeps growing / Searching
  through time / Longing to find / Answers to guide us / And dreams to
  unite us / Helping us unlock the door / Showing us ways to explore /
  Helping convey / Ideas of today. (9)

Devouring the raw material of history, nature and culture, the historical circus of "Future World" succeeded gloriously and turned millions of parents and children into consumers of "Spaceship Earth." As planned, the grand "attraction" brought "the technical know-how of American industry and the creative imagination of the Disney organization" together. EPCOT became what it was designed to be, "a showcase to the world of the American free enterprise system." (10) Disney's solution to the "problems of our cities"--a "prototype community" of 20,000 people--never materialized as envisioned, (11) but Disney's imagineered techno-child was born to deliver the future to its corporate parents.

The singular creature of "Tomorrow's Child" needs no protection against special interests because this child is charting the brand-name way. Real children are in a different position. The commercialization of their culture has followed the rise of television since the 1950s. In the United States, they have come under unchecked commercial assault in homes and schools after Congress revoked the power of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1980 to issue restrictions on marketing to children. Not surprisingly, public interest coalitions like the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood are fighting an uphill battle against the lobbyists of "Tomorrow's Child." (12) But let me leave Disney's homogeneous child for today's global children to ask now, what are their prospects?

Many children will not even exist officially, that is, will go unregistered. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has calculated that the number of these "invisible" children was about 41 percent of births worldwide in 2000, or over 50 million babies in that year alone. In a recent report, UNICEF summarized the global data by regions (see Chart 1 below). Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia topped the list of unregistered births with 71 and 63 percent, followed by the Middle East and North Africa with ca. one third of the children born in 2000. (13)

In sheer numbers, these percentages represent 17 million children in sub-Saharan Africa, 22.5 million in South Asia, and 3 million in the Middle East and North Africa. In terms of countries, the UNICEF has found, "in 39 countries, at least 30 percent of all children under the age of five were not registered at birth, and in 19 cases, the figure was at least 60 percent." (14) Article 7.1 of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) says, "The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and, as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents." (15) The possibility that an unregistered child could actually be more protected by invisibility under certain conditions cannot be denied, but is likely to be so low that it does not excuse the human rights violation of some 50 million unregistered children (41 of every 100 out of ca. 132 million annually).

Today's world can be rather unwelcoming and dangerous for children in many other crucial respects. Take, for example, the under-5 mortality rate (U5MR). In ranking the probability per 1,000 live births of dying before the age of five, the statistics for 2002 placed the following countries at the top of the list: Sierra Leone with 28.4 percent (rank 1), Niger with 26.5 percent (rank 2), and Angola with 26.0 percent (rank 3). If children could choose their place of entry into this world, they would avoid the top-ranked U5MR countries and pick Sweden (rank 193) as their country of birth where only 3 out of every 1,000 children die prematurely (0.3%). Singapore (rank 189), Germany (rank 177), France (rank 164), the UK (rank 161), and the United States (rank 158) with under- five values of 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, and 0.8 percent respectively would be somewhat riskier but nevertheless much better choices than Afghanistan (rank 4) with 25.7 percent or Pakistan (rank 44) with 10.7 percent. Chart 2 shows the uneven global picture. (16)

It is encouraging to see that the state of the world's children regarding under- 5 mortality has improved everywhere in the last four decades. But geography (which globalization has supposedly overcome, according to some theorists) is still destiny for millions. A stubborn difference between the industrialized countries and the rest of the world keeps playing unfairly with children's lives. The developing countries have made significant progress, but so have the industrialized ones. The U5MR figures for 1960 and 2002 indicate that the values per 1,000 live births have come down from 222 to 90 children for the developing countries (from 278 to 158 for the least developed ones in that group) and from 39 to 7 for the industrialized part of the world. For 2002, the toll of under-5 deaths in absolute terms amounted to over 10 million children in the developing countries and ca. 76,000 in the industrialized world. (17) This picture of global unevenness gets worse if one takes the information from Chart 1 into account and assumes that quite a few of the "invisible" children may as well have perished before age five without leaving any trace or record. The ill-fated children counted in Chart 2 are thus surrounded by the shadows of their unregistered peers.

The figures for life expectancy at birth reflect the same disparity. Children born in one of the industrialized countries have a fair chance of reaching an average 78 years of age. However, this number falls to 62 for developing countries and to 49 for the least developed ones. The best bets in the life-expectancy category are Japan and Iceland with 81 and 80 years respectively. Rwanda with 39, Mozambique with 38, Lesotho with 36, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe with 34, and Zambia with 33 years do not provide long-term perspectives. At the beginning of the 21st century, global life expectancy thus ranges from 33 to 81 years and we must say: it matters profoundly where today's children are born. (18)

Focusing on the existential differences between rich and poor countries, or, in the diplomatic language of the UN, "More Developed Countries" (MDCs) and "Less Developed Countries" (LDCs), we also have to consider what Joel E. Cohen of the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller University has called the "increasingly uneven distribution of people in space." (19) The rapidly advancing urbanization of the planet concentrates children in cities, especially third world cities. Observed and documented for years, this important trend has yet to be fully incorporated and scrutinized in such fiercely local disciplines as social history and cultural anthropology. So let me quote from a textbook, The Urban World, in which the sociologist John Palen has pointed out that the unprecedented population growth since 1950 "is in reality an urban explosion." (20)

  While city growth in developed countries is virtually stagnant, large
  cities in less-developed countries (LDCs) are growing by a million
  people a week. As the century turns, there will be twice as many
  people in LDC cities as in the cities of developed nations. Each year
  the world's population increases by 86 million persons, and 90 percent
  of these newcomers to the globe are born in LDCs. Three-quarters of
  this growth is concentrated in cities in LDCs. Within a decade over
  half the world's population will be living in urban places. (21)

The data of the 2003 revision of World Urbanization Prospects from the Population Division of the United Nations confirm the continuation of this trend. Humankind is leaving the countryside and concentrating in cities. (22) Having determined that 48.3 percent of the entire world population lived in urban areas in mid-2003, the UN flagship publication expects the crossing of the global 50 percent mark in 2007 and projects for the period from 2003 to 2030:

  * a near doubling of the urban population in the less developed world
  (from 2.15 to 3.93 billion), (23)
  * the slow growth of the cities of the developed regions (from 0.90 to
  1.01 billion), (24)
  * a decrease of the rural population in MDCs (from 0.31 to 0.23
  billion), and a
  * nearly zero percent increase of the rural population in LDCs (from
  2.95 to 2.96 billion). (25)

It seems reasonable to expect at least three things from these points. First, LDC cities will have to accommodate four times as many people by 2030 as the cities of the well-to-do countries. Second, almost all the world's total population growth in the next twenty-five years must be absorbed by the urban areas of LDCs. And third, the bulk of today's and tomorrow's children will have to grow up in poor city environments, which are anything but well-prepared for them. Considering the historical transition from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban world, it may be appropriate to underline two more things. First, the urban shift started in an industrialized country with great economic and political power, England, around 1850, whereas almost all urban explosions are now going off in countries that are neither industrialized nor powerful. (26) And second, not too long ago, all but a few children were born into a world that was mainly rural. Around 1800, for example, 97 percent of the global socionatural environment was rural and only 3 percent urban. One hundred years later, around 1900, the global situation was still mostly rural with only 14 percent of the world's population living in cities and 86 percent in the countryside.

Rural populations began to decline after the Second World War. For MDCs, rural population growth has been consistently negative since the 1950s (between minus one and minus four percent); it has been shrinking for LDCs since 1975 (from 43 to 20 percent) and is expected to turn negative in the less developed regions in 2015, according to the latest projections. (27) Between now and 2015, rural-born children in these regions will continue to migrate into urban agglomerations; large settlements will explode with new people; and small rural towns will expand into cities with up to 500,000 inhabitants. What is still largely veiled, however, is not the trend towards worldwide urbanization but the new urban geography of poverty. (28)

Rapid urbanization exacerbates poverty and inequality, the negative consequences of globalization. A recent United Nations report on Water and Sanitation in the World's Cities (29) estimated that more than 2.2 million people die annually from water and sanitation-related diseases, "many of them children." Arguing that the urban situation in the developing world is much worse than imagined and pointing to the rural bias of most national development statistics, Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, Under-Secretary-General of the UN and Executive Director of UN-HABITAT, assailed the traditional assumption "that all city dwellers are better served than the rural poor." (33) Not true, she said, citing the relevant data for Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. To focus on children, and the problems that are hitting ever larger numbers of children in third-world cities, we have to realize that the "urbanization of poverty" (Kofi Annan) has created a "new paradigm of human settlements" (31)--urban slums in which almost 1 billion people are now living.

The urban slum is a rapidly growing structure of the urban landscape. Not a new thing but an area that has been persistently plagued by official silence and neglect, the slum is only now beginning to appear as a distinct category on the cognitive map of human habitation. To the undifferentiated rural-urban classification, we thus have to add the urban slum or, since a new term may be in order, the "slurban" zone. (32)

The first attempt to estimate the numbers of slum dwellers at country level was published in October 2003 by the Global Urban Observatory (GUO) of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT): The Challenge of Slums--Global Report on Human Settlements 2003. (33) Despite the data limitations of its slum estimation methodology, which were duly noted, this pioneering report provided key baseline information on slurban zones based on more than one million household records and data from over 316 sub-national, national, and international sources. The statistical bottom line was that ca. 924 million people, nearly one-third of the global urban population (31.6%), were living in urban slums in mid-2001, the vast majority of these city slums located in the developing world (see Chart 3 below). Slums of the World, another recent UN-HABITAT publication, projected for 2020 that "the current 30 per cent level of urban poverty in the world could reach 45 to 50 per cent of the total population living in cities. Within this scenario, urban slums will double, accounting for almost two billion people on the planet." (34)

Ameliorating the urban slums in the developing world has become a target of the United Nations. The UN Millennium Development Goals call for a "significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020." (35) Now that the entire slurban population of the globe is probably close to 1 billion, a ten percent reduction would be reasonable. But it is far from clear how much of the surplus of globalization will actually mend the slums and better the lives of millions of children arriving and living in urban slums. For the developed regions, massive slurbanization appears to be a rather distant problem. Jeffrey Sachs, Director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and Special Advisor to Kofi Annan on the Millennium Goals, has already said that stemming the growth of slum households (37) in third-world countries must go beyond the pilot-level of slum-upgrading projects and work at scale. (38)

The prospects for urban slum children are unhealthy and unfair but not uncertain. Infant mortality rates in the expanding slums of third-world cities are twice as high as the corresponding national rural average; mortality rates in slurban zones are up to twenty times higher than in areas with basic sanitation; urban slum children under five die more often from diarrhea and acute respiratory infection than rural children, they are also more under-nourished and up to ten times more stunted than children from wealthier urban households. (39) Although one should hope that the present global geography of poverty and power might not endure forever, one cannot assume that the entrenched fault lines between rich and poor regions will disappear in a generation or two. The life worlds of deprived and affluent urban neighborhoods will rift further apart, even if development support would quickly shift from the rural to the slurban poor. The state of the world's children is therefore bound to remain disastrously uneven for some time to come.

A small glimmer of hope can be found in the presently mixed global demographic transition, specifically in the basic asymmetry indicated by substantially different mortality and fertility rates. The developed regions of the world are growing very slowly, if at all, thanks to their low mortality and fertility rates, whereas the developing countries are still stuck in the middle. Their mortality has declined dramatically since World War II but so far without a corresponding fertility drop. This is a known historical pattern. The period of explosive population growth in 19th century England was also triggered by a time lag between a significant fall in mortality first and fertility second. But England at the time was developing with the Industrial Revolution, which eventually provided the means for an important decline in the country's fertility rate. The question is how to reach low mortality and fertility rates in the developing countries. The English analogy would suggest that LDCs would have to keep their death rate down and find ways to generate growing socioeconomic wealth--not an easy proposition, to be sure. (40) Otherwise, the present situation of stark global inequalities will probably continue. Rich societies will have few children and poor societies many more. The wealth of rich societies will flow from parents to a carefully controlled number of children, two at most, but the "wealth" of poor societies will pass from their numerous children, including street children, to impoverished parents. Large numbers of children who can be employed, sold, or otherwise exploited will still be the capital of the poor.

Ironically, global lifestyle envy could spark another glimmer of hope. Television and video, film and tape, radio and e-mail, telephone and travel, newspapers and journals permeate the cities of the world. Poor people without a television set, parents in Thailand and elsewhere, have sold their daughters into sex slavery in order to buy a TV in the first place. Transgressive communication globalizes the spectacular lifestyles of the countries of high consumption; a mind-altering force, it affects migration flows and shows everybody what the "good" life looks like. Billions could call for worldwide homogeneity, or parity, and the specter of global homogenization could turn into a battle cry.

In the developed world, the globalization discourse has always included inconclusive ping-pong debates about homogenization. On one side, players have argued since the early 1990s that globalization increases homogenization, Americanization, and similar ills, and on the other that it actually animates the juices of cultural and multicultural diversity. A third group has fought both sides with the position that globalization spurs global "McDonaldization" as well as local cultural rejuvenation and plurality. All sides have summoned anecdotal evidence but neither has yet advanced the issue beyond first-world-centric cultural concerns and opinions. To go forward with this global topic, we must venture beyond our local realm and consider homogenization in the context of global social history. What could global homogenization possibly mean for the children in Rio de Janeiro who live in squatter settlements (favelas) and illegal subdivisions (loteamentos irregulares or clandestinos)? Rather than decry the corrosive effects of Western cultural hegemony, they might dream about a world without urban slums, or "envy" a regular meal, clean water and riding in a school bus.

The Children's Statement, a manifesto delivered to a Special United Nations Session on Children, May 8, 2002, offered the constituency's answer to this question. Gabriela Azurduy Arrieta, a 13-year-old from Bolivia, and Audrey Cheynut, a 17-year-old from Monaco, the first teens ever to address the General Assembly of the UN, opened the Special Session with a message that had been prepared in a Children's Forum May 5-7 by some 400 child delegates from around the world.

  We are the world's children. / We are the victims of exploitation and
  abuse. / We are street children. / ... / We are children whose voices
  are not being heard: it is time we are taken into account. / We want a
  world fit for children, because a world fit for us is a world fit for
  everyone. / ... / We are the children of the world, and despite our
  different backgrounds, we share a common reality. / We are united by
  our struggle to make the world a better place for all. / You call us
  the future, but we are also the present. (41)

Global equality for everybody was the children's message to the UN in 2002. These young delegates understood that greater global homogeneity is not necessarily negative and that a world, which is only "fit" for some children, must be transformed. Speaking out against the "vicious cycle of poverty" and demanding "environments that are healthy and favourable to our development," they called for an end to the use of child soldiers and the provision of educational defenses against HIV/AIDS. They envisioned active participation on all levels of local and global decision-making and declared, "We are not expenses; we are investments." Ready to concur, the UN called on "all members of society to join us in a global movement that will help build a world fit for children." (42) But the movement, which could make a global difference, has yet to roar. And so the UN keeps piling up its global reports and millions of children die waiting for them to be put into action.

According to The State of the World's Children 2004, global gender parity in primary and secondary education is still an elusive target with 121 million children not in school worldwide, the majority of them girls (65 million), and a much wider gender gap in some regions. (43) In 2000, the net primary school enrollment for girls had reached a world average of 79 percent (85% for boys); yet regional differences were still significant: South Asia's enrollment of girls was 65 percent (boys 80%) and sub-Saharan Africa lagged behind with 58 percent for girls and 63 percent for boys. (44) With many countries still reporting averages only and thereby concealing local differences among areas, ethnic groups, classes and genders, a fair amount of uncertainty keeps clouding the global view. Low levels of international funding for all development goals do not help the world's children either. Overcoming the uneven globality of children without turning global homogenization into a battle cry as indicated may thus be futile. But let me conclude with a theoretical note on homogenization in the context of globalization.

There is widespread agreement that globalization implies two things above all: increasing global connectivity and consciousness. The systemic interconnections between everything and everybody on the planet, below its crust and in near-earth orbit, are multiplying, and humans are consciously tracking particular changes and the growing complexity of the whole. The consequences of globally rising connectivity cum consciousness are less clear but I would venture that the degree of homogeneity in our socionatural system must increase.

The natural laboratories of bygone history tell us that remote islands and insurmountable mountain borders have always produced biological and cultural diversity, from the beaks of Charles Darwin's finches to Jared Diamond's 1,000 New-Guinean languages. (45) But when the barriers break down, the chances to intermix and dilute the differences begin to amplify. The general rule would state that homogeneity increases with defragmentation. But this rule does not apply to the socionatural global system in a uniform manner: the homogenizing pressure does not have to lead to the unfettered cultural homogeneity of Disney's child.

The difference between now and then is the collective genius of humankind--the novel element of global consciousness. This genius can assess the homogenizing pressure by wrapping its global brain around all gains and losses linked to impending change; it can defend the diversity of cultures as progressive and rich. Therefore, as long as our socionatural system combines the sphere of a single technoscientific civilization with an ensemble of local cultures and nations, (46) the homogenizing trend unleashed by globalization will be a strong force in the technoscientific realm and a weaker one in the spheres of national and regional cultures. This differential thrust of globalization is good news for the champions of cultural pluralism but also the reason why global social norms are hard to universalize effectively and why we are not moving faster into a world of even globality for children.

Chart 1: Percentage of annual births not registered

Sub-Saharan Africa        71
South Asia                63
Middle East/North Africa  31
East Asia/Pacific         22
Latin America/Caribbean   14
CEE/CIS & Baltic States   10
Industrialized Countries   2
World                     41

Note: Table made from bar graph.

Chart 2: Number of children to die before age five (per 1,000 live
births)

                          1960  2002

Sub-Saharan Africa         262   174
Middle East/North Africa   250    58
South Asia                 244    97
East Asia/Pacific          207    43
Latin America/Caribbean    153    34
CEE/CIS & Baltic States    112    41
Industrialized Countries    39     7
World                      196    82

Note: Table made from bar graph.

Chart 3: Population Distribution in mid-2001, total, urban, and slurban
(millions)

         Developed Regions  Developing Regions  World

Total    1,194               4,940              6,134
Urban      902               2,022              2,924
Slurban     54                 870                924

All previous data sets divided population simply into "rural" and
"urban" but not further. Consequently, slurban households, if counted at
all, were statistically averaged out with wealthier households.
Challenge of Slums and Slums of the World, however, which disaggregate
the urban category according to location and wealth, unveiled the
relative size of slurban populations: 54 million in the developed
regions (6% of their total urban population); 870 million in the
developing regions (43% of their urban total); and 924 million (31.6%)
of the world's urban total. (36)

Note: Table made from bar graph.

ENDNOTES

I would like to thank Dianne Creagh and Anahi Walton for suggestions and critique.

1. For a historico-theoretical exploration of time in global history, see Wolf Schafer, "Global History and the Present Time," in Wiring Prometheus: Globalisation, History and Technology, edited by Peter Lyth and Helmuth Trischler (Aarhus, 2004); an online version is available at www.stonybrook.edu/cgh/publications.shtml.

2. See Celia W. Dugger, "In Africa, Free Schools Feed a Different Hunger," The New York Times, October 24, 2004, p.1 and 10-11. For enrollment figures and other data including what "free" means (school uniforms and examinations, for example, are not free in Kenya), see also "Free primary education in five African countries" at portal.unesco.org/education/en/file_download.php/7c9e3401c322f67193a1c4166822a616table5.10.pdf.

3. Unfortunately, not all UN publications are available free online. Large parts of the emerging global society are much too poor to purchase books from abroad but would have a better chance to get to these sources of global information if they were online; see also notes 29 and 33 below.

4. See "Walt's Last Film" at www.waltopia.com/florida_film.html.

5. Peter Floyd, a former student of Buckminster Fuller, designed the 180 feet tall geosphere. See Martin Pawley, Design Heroes: Buckminster Fuller (Hammersmith, 1992), p. 165. First published in 1990 by Trefoil.

6. "Imagineering" was defined as "a blending of creative imaginations with technical know-how" and executed by "WED Enterprises," Walt Disney's design organization. See www.waltopia.com/florida_film.html.

7. See transcript of the original version of the Spaceship Earth attraction (1982-1986) at www.intercot.com/edc/SpaceshipEarth/spscript82.html.

8. See transcript of the second version of the Spaceship Earth attraction (1986-1994) at www.intercot.com/edc/SpaceshipEarth/spscriptwc.html.

9. The song by Ron Ovadia and Peter Stougaard alternated between a female voice and a children's choir. See transcript at www.intercot.com/edc/SpaceshipEarth/sptomschild.html.

10. See www.waltopia.com/florida_film.html.

11. Disney presented the EPCOT plan and sales pitch to the Florida legislature in 1967 as follows: "In other parts of the country, a community the size of this prototype could become part of an entire city complex composed of many such communities, planned and built a few miles apart. In Disney World, about 20,000 people will actually live in EPCOT. Their homes will be built in ways that permit ease of change so that new products may continuously be demonstrated. Their schools will welcome new ideas so that everyone who grows up in EPCOT will have skills in pace with today's world" (www.waltopia.com/florida_film.html). See also Joshua Wolf Shenk, "Hidden Kingdom: Disney's Political Blueprint," in The American Prospect, vol. 6, no. 21, March 21, 1995 (online at www.prospect.org/print/V6/21/shenk-j.html). After the failure of the trailer park "city" of Lake Buena Vista, Disney has made a new city-building effort in Florida with "Celebration," founded in 1994; see www.celebrationfl.com.

12. See the CCFC home page of at www.commercialexploitation.org.

13. See Birth Registration--Right From the Start, Innocenti Digest, no. 9, March 2002, at www.unicef-icdc.org/publications/pdf/digest9e.pdf. Chart 1 was redrawn from this report. CEE stands for "Central Eastern Europe" and CIS for "Commonwealth of Independent States" (created 1991).

14. Birth Registration--Right From the Start, p. 7f. Countries without a birth registration system (Bahamas, Belize, Cape Verde, Cyprus, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Qatar, Samoa, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga, and Vanuatu) or without published data (Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Eritrea) are not included. Some countries (Tajikistan, Dominican Republic, and Honduras) show a falling trend of birth registration, others (Niger, Chad, Myanmar, and Senegal) register more children in urban than in rural areas.

15. See the Convention at www.un.org/documents/ga/res/44/a44r025.htm and www.unicef.org/crc/crc.htm.

16. See UNICEF's The State of the World's Children 2004 at www.unicef.org/files/SOWC_O4_eng.pdf. The U5MR ranking list is on p.101 and the regional summaries are on p. 105. Chart 2, original figure, is based on the data of the regional summaries.

17. Data from The State of the World's Children 2004, Table 1 (Basic Indicators), p. 102-105.

18. For further information about the uneven global prospects for children's well-being, see the Statistical Tables on Nutrition, Health, HIV/AIDS, Education, Demographic and Economic indicators, Women, Child Protection, and The rate of progress, in The State of the World's Children 2004, p. 99-141.

19. Joel E. Cohen, How Many People Can the Earth Support? (New York and London, 1995), p. 100.

20. J. John Palen, The Urban World (New York, 1997), p. 6. Fifth edition.

21. Ibid, p. 373.

22. See World Urbanization Prospects: The 2003 Revision (2004) at www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wup2003/2003WUPHighlights.pdf; twenty "Key Findings" are listed on p. 1-3.

23. The LDCs are located in Africa, Asia (without Japan), Latin America, the Caribbean, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.

24. The MDCs comprise Europe, Northern America, Australia with New Zealand, and Japan.

25. See World Urbanization Prospects: The 2003 Revision, Table 1, p. 4.

26. Some of the "newly industrialized countries" (NICs), Singapore and Taiwan, for example, are the exceptions from this rule.

27. See World Urbanization Prospects: The 2003 Revision, Figure 2, p. 10 (Contributions of urban and rural population growth to total population growth, 1950-2030). For further reading, see also Urban-Rural Linkages: An Annotated Bibliography 1994-2004 at www.unhabitat.org/whd/2004/documents/urban-rural_biblio.pdf. This bibliography treats five sub-themes: socio-economic, regional planning, rural-urban migration, environment, food and agriculture.

28. All data are a matter of critical concern, take "urban" population for instance. The United Nations uses local definitions of "urban," which vary widely among members. Global data in particular present numerous problems of cross-national comparability. A good amount of methodological skepticism is thus warranted but a successful case has yet to be made that the best available data completely hide or distort significant global trends.

29. Water and Sanitation in the World's Cities: Local Action for Global Goals (London, 2003); see publication details at www.earthscan.co.uk/asp/bookdetails.asp?key=3902. It is very unfortunate that this publication is not available free online.

30. See www.unhabitat.org/mediacentre/documents/wwf18.pdf.

31. See Slums of the World: The Face of Urban Poverty in the New Millennium? (2003), p. 6; available at www.unhabitat.org/publication/slumreport.pdf.

32. Professor Gert Schmidt, Erlangen, coined the term "slurban" October 20, 2004, in a conversation with the author.

33. See The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003 (London and Sterling, VA, 2003). This publication should be available free online.

34. Slums of the World, p. 54. The future lining up smoothly with its predictions is of course rare, but even the predictions themselves do not always line up: UN-HABITAT is quoted elsewhere with an estimate of 1.5 billion slum dwellers by 2020; see www.developmentgoals.org/Environment.htm#target11.

35. See target 11 of the eight "Millennium Development Goals" of the UN at www.un.org/millenniumgoals and www.developmentgoals.org.

36. All data from Slums of the World, Annex 3, p. 76. Chart 3, original figure, is based on p. 76.

37. UN-HABITAT defines a "slum household" as "a group of individuals living under the same roof lacking one or more of the following conditions: access to improved water; access to improved sanitation facilities; sufficient living area, not overcrowded; structural quality/durability of dwellings; and security of tenure;" see Slums of the World, p. 18.

38. See www.unhabitat.org/sachs.asp.

39. See Slums of the World, p. 48.

40. Wealthy and 100 percent urbanized Singapore, one of the NICs, is now already battling the other side of the problem, a fertility rate of 1.4 children, which is well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.

41. See www.unicef.org/specialsession/documentation/childrens-statement.htm and A World Fit for Children (2002), p. 9-12, available at www.unicef.org/publications/files/pub_wffc_en.pdf.

42. A World Fit for Children, p. 15.

43. Official Summary of the State of the World's Children 2004, p. 5 at www.unicef.org/publications/files/2004_OfficialSumm_ENG.pdf.

44. Ibid, p. 39 (the figures quoted on page 9 for 2002 are slightly higher than those on p. 39).

45. See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York and London, 1999), p. 302, 306 and 346 f. First published 1997.

46. See Wolf Schafer, "Global Civilization and Local Cultures," in Rethinking Civilizational Analysis, edited by Said Amir Arjomand and Edward A. Tiryakian, Sage Studies in International Sociology (London, 2004), p. 71-86. An online version is available at www.stonybrook.edu/cgh/Civ.htm.

By Wolf Schafer

Stony Brook University

Center for Global History

Department of History

Stony Brook, NY 11794-4348