Slums of the future

Images of candy-coloured buildings fill the screen. Set against a cerulean blue sky, the audience is treated to a vision of an enormous community centre taking shape in China's third largest city, Tianjin.

'This is an example of a Chinese housing project,' says Meisheng Nie, president of the China Housing Industry Association, without emotion.

The irony wasn't lost on the slack-jawed audience who had just finished discussing a South African housing project on the site of a former shantytown filled with corrugated metal shacks and built on a rubbish heap.

The delegates - 3,000-plus representatives of government, academia, and non-governmental organisations - were taking part in the second round of the World Urban Forum, held in Barcelona over several days last week. The forum - sponsored by the United Nations Program on Human Settlements (Habitat) - was attended by more than 600 mayors and world leaders, who discussed the strains rapid urbanisation is putting on the environment, transportation and urban housing.

But to watch Dr Nie flash slides of sparkling housing developments in her well-honed Power Point presentation, one might think that urban poverty in China was a misnomer.

To ensure there was no mistaking the message she was in town to convey, Dr Nie, a former director general of China's Ministry of Construction, reported: 'In a word, the Chinese government has always devoted itself to solving the housing problems of low-income households.'