News In Brief

UN habitat center sees half the world as urban by 2000

More than half the world's population will live in towns by the year 2000, many of them in cities of more than 1 million, the Center for Human Settlements reported Wednesday. The Nairobi-based UN body, which is holding a conference here on urban problems, said that of an estimated global population of 6.2 billion by the end of the century, 3.2 billion, or 52 percent, will be living in towns. Some 41 percent of the world's total urban population, or 1.3 billion people, will be concentrated in 430 cities of over a million.