Many villages gradually get included in cities and urban people also migrate to villages transforming them into towns. Both phenomena require intensive study, including an examination of the defi ning criteria of a "town", and the estimates of urban population.

Urban land-cover change threatens biodiversity and affects ecosystem productivity through loss of habitat, biomass, and carbon storage. However, despite projections that world urban populations will increase to nearly 5 billion by 2030, little is known about future locations, magnitudes, and rates of urban expansion. Here we develop spatially explicit probabilistic forecasts of global urban land-cover change and explore the direct impacts on biodiversity hotspots and tropical carbon biomass.

The bazaar or intermediate classes have remained outside the predominant research imagination on urban change. Delhi's wholesale and retail traders, the primary subjects of this paper, are a subset of this bazaar world. This paper uses a case study of the Supreme court ordered sealing drives of 2006-07 to investigate how these traders were threatened by eviction dynamics earlier experienced by slum-dwellers and small-scale industrialists.

The fragmentation of urban landscapes – or the inter-penetration of the built-up areas of cities and the open spaces in and around them – is a key attribute of their spatial structure. Analyzing satellite images for 1990 and 2000 for a global sample of 120 cities, we find that cities typically contain or disturb vast quantities of open spaces equal in area, on average, to their built-up areas. We also find that fragmentation, defined as the relative share of open space in the urban landscape, is now in decline.