The Mega Urban Human Agglomerations (MUHA) as an Expression of Regional Imbalance: Another Facet of the Modern Underdevelopment

One of the new features of the underdeveloped countries, is the existence in them of enormous human settlements inhabited by millions of people in very precarious conditions, with lack of the minimum municipal services and urban infrastructure, so these places are cities just for its size. These are human agglomerations result of the lag of their countries and that, paradoxically, will make even more difficult its development. To these settlements, I have given the name of Mega Urban Human Agglomerations (MUHA), being evidence of the unbalanced regional development in poor countries (whose economic activities are concentrated in a few places) and ruin of the domestic agriculture and small-scale. Enormous contingents unable to find possibilities for survival in the rural areas of poor countries move to these cities. This is not a process of attraction of the cities, but of expulsion of the people from fields, farms and fisheries toward urban areas that offer very little chance of formal and well paid employment. Of the one hundred largest cities in the world, 69 are located in underdeveloped countries and there are eleven poor countries with cities with more than 20 million inhabitants; in contrast, in almost 60% of developed countries its largest city is less than 3 million inhabitants; and has reached the absurd that the region least industrialized in the world, sub-Saharan Africa, shows the highest rates of urban growth in the world (around 5 per cent per annum). As the trend is headed for the growth of the MUHA the challenge is huge for governments to guarantee people's minimum levels of income, food, health, housing and urban satisfiers (infrastructure and services) as part of citizens’ rights, it raises the conception of a new human right: the right to the city. The growth of the population in many MUHA stances great challenges to meet the needs of its inhabitants in housing, as in transportation, infrastructure and the provision of basic services. Which leads to think that it will be almost impossible to the governments of poor countries to cope with, because of the enormous costs involved.