40% of urban population in developing countries lives in slums. (UN-HABITAT, 2003b).

In Latin America and the Caribbean, “At the beginning of the twenty-first century, three out of every four inhabitants were living in settlements of more than 2,000 inhabitants and more than half of the population was living in settlements with more than 5,000 inhabitants”.

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84% of the world’s population will be urban by 2030. (UN 2008b).

“… in 2006 almost 130 million of the more than 400 million urban dwellers of Latin America and the Caribbean lived in poverty and 35 million of them were destitute.” (ECLAC, 2007).

Approximately 40% of the region’s total population live below the poverty line. (Inaugural speech of the technical workshop “Settlement Upgrading Programmes: Comparative Analysis and Lessons Learned and New Approaches,” Montevideo, Uruguay, October 14, 2008).

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3.3 billion people lived in urban areas in 2007. (UNFPA, 2007).

In Latin America and the Caribbean, 4.21% was the average annual rate of growth of the urban population between 1950 and 1975; it decreased to 2.55 percent between 1975 and 2007. (UN 2008b).