Urbanisation has been described as one of the greatest threats facing the developing world and this phenomenon has special import for Nigeria where urbanisation tempo is both dramatic and overwhelming.

This statement was made by the Minister of State for Works, Housing and Urban Development Mrs. Grace Ekpiwhre in her keynote address during the 2009 World Habitat Day commemoration held on Monday in Abuja.

The Minister noted that Nigeria's past is essentially rural and its future will of a certainty be urban, adding that this trend is expected to prevail in the World over especially in Africa and Asia.

She said that the theme of this year's World Habitat Day commemoration "Planning Our Urban Future" is more appropriate and timely because we should earnestly begin to plan for the rapid approaching situation.

"At present, more than 50 percent of total world population lives in urban areas and about 32 percent of these, nearly one billion people , live in slums where there is debilitating poverty, communicable diseases and hopelessness as a result of poor access to land, jobs, clean water and sanitation," she said. She opined that the cities of the developed world have harnessed their urbanisation as a force of positive development and could in the future carry forward their historical roles as engines of economic, social and environmental progress, saying by contrast the cities of the developing countries have under the throes of rapid urbanisation grown into monstrous, poor, informal and dysfunctional settlements which are most likely to become sources of social marginalisation and greater worries in the future.