Présentation
In 2007, humanity changed its nature: for the first time in its history, half of its population is urban. The city itself has changed scale. Whereas in 1950 New York was the only city with more than ten million inhabitants, by 2015 the world will have twenty-three, five of which will be over twenty million. In fact, the city is an outdated phenomenon, an ancient history. The 21st century is the century of megacities and their inhabitants, the megapolites. Based on perpetual growth, the dynamics of gigacities are hungry for space and natural resources, capital and low-cost labour. As a result, new populations are often kept in extreme precariousness. The area of mega-urbanisation is also that of the shantytowns. Who occupies the margins and the interstices of the giant cities? Where do they come from? Why did they come? How do they live? Why do they stay? What is their contribution to the ongoing process? What can they expect from a world radically polarised between hypernantis and ultra-poor?