Urbanization is defined by the United Nations
as the movement of people from rural to
urban areas, whose population is projected to
amount to half of the world’s population in
2008, rising to about 60% in 20301
. As an
increasingly higher number of people leave
farms and villages to live in cities particularly in
the developing countries, urban centres will
grow at a rate previously unseen in mankind’s
history. According to the UN State of the
World Population 2007 report, 93% of urban
growth will occur in developing nations, with
80% of it occurring in Asia and Africa2
.
Rates of urbanization vary between
countries, and urbanization is normally
determined by individual initiatives in search
for better economic opportunities. For
example, in developed countries, people find it
difficult to improve their standard of living
beyond basic sustenance in the rural areas,
because farm life is dependent on
unpredictable environmental conditions, and
in times of drought, flood or pestilence,
survival becomes extremely problematic.
Cities, in contrast, are places where money,
services and wealth are centralized on one
hand, and on the other, better basic services
such as education, health care, water and
sanitation, as well as better opportunities and
variation of jobs are provided3
. In developing
countries, however, despite similarities in the
motivation for rural dwellers to migrate to
urban centres, unlike their peers in the
developed world, they normally find
themselves living in suburbs, without much
access to better basic services, and often times
ending up as unemployed and the most
marginalized ones of their society. In addition
to that, available data indicate a range of
urban health hazards and associated health
risks such as substandard housing; crowding;
air pollution; insufficient or contaminated
drinking water; inadequate sanitaztion and
solid waste disposal services; vector-borne
diseases; industrial waste; increased motor
vehicle traffic injuries; stress associated with
poverty; and unemployment4
.
In Timor-Leste, recorded information
about the dynamics of urbanization dates back
to the mid-1800s when, the capital city of Dili,
founded on 10 October 1769, by 1860 had
up to 2% of the total population of TimorLeste5
. The percentage of urban Dili’s
population during the Portuguese colonial
period, however, remained almost unchanged
throughout the early and mid-Tenth century,
(1.8% of the total population by 1927 and
1.5% by 1970), but increased to about 18%
by 1996, during the Indonesian military
occupation, and by 2004, when the first
population census of an Independent TimorLeste
was conducted, it was 19%5, 6, 7.
The initial agglomeration of population in
the capital city of Dili since the mid-19th
century was mainly driven by colonial policy,and there were no indications of rural
indigenous people migrating to seek better
economic advancement5
. The rapid increase
in population movement from outlying districts
to the capital city of Dili, during the late 1900s
and the first decade of this century, however,
appear to have been caused by political,
social and economic instability experienced by
the rural population in Timor-Leste, firstly due
to 24 years of military occupation, and
secondly because of post-independence
development initiatives8
. This increasing trend
of urbanization in Timor-Leste, apart from
carrying obvious political, social, economic
and environmental effects for the country in
general, is also producing effects on the health
of population and individuals, particularly in
the aspects of risk-taking and health-seeking
behaviours. This paper seeks to explore and
discuss some of these effects of urbanization
by examining practices related to alcohol and
tobacco use, and to unsafe sex among young
people in Timor-Leste.