The growth and nature of urban areas in developing countries.

I 57 during the week, in Booth’s words: ‘a good deal of bread is eaten and tea drunk especially by the women and children’. Without detailed knowledge of distribution of food within the family or of workloads in industry, the adequacy of the diet is difficult to assess. However, the concern exhibited in the late nineteenth century for social problems involving the standard of living requires some comment. The improvement in wages, the reduction in hours of work in those industries in which labour was well-organized, and the fall in the price of foodstuffs from the 1880’s, all point to an improvement in the standard of living. On the other hand, there is some evidence of greater intensity of work per hour being introduced (Merttens, I 893-4), and of the health of urban populations being still unsatisfactory, despite marked changes in public health administration. I t must be remembered that infant mortality rates were still as high in 1900 as they were when civil registration began in 1837, while tuberculosis, rickets, dental caries and anaemia were all endemic diseases in urban areas of Britain at the outbreak of war in 1914.