Growing numbers of rural poor are migrating to cities around the developing world, giving aid experts a new cause for anxiety - beyond just the deplorable conditions of the burgeoning slums.

The concern goes like this: living in such close quarters with the urban rich exacerbates the disparities between the "haves" and the "have-nots," fueling a global explosion in crime, street violence, and extremism. The urbanization of poverty, say development experts, could become as much a world-security issue as the hunt for Osama bin Laden or weapons of mass destruction.

"Relative deprivation has always been a flash point," says William Masters, interim executive director at Colombia University's Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development in New York. "Globalization has opened up comparisons and created expectations that make the gaps in world living standards increasingly unacceptable."

To try to close these gaps, a handful of projects around the world, including an ambitious one here in Egypt's capital, are bringing hope to some of the most squalid places on earth.

The numbers worldwide are staggering: according to a new report by the United Nations' Habitat, the number of global urban poor has now crossed the 1 billion mark, and at current rates of growth that number will double in three decades.

Slum dwellers already make up almost one-third of the world's urban population, residing mostly in the developing world, where few governments have the financial resources to cope. Cairo, for example, gets 1,000 new residents every week, even though jobs are scarce and housing supplies badly strained.

Conditions in most developing world slums are beyond deplorable: hundreds of thousands of residents crammed into small areas without sewage and running water, living over stinking garbage dumps, drinking from polluted water sources.

Here in Cairo, a vast population of squatters has moved into an ancient tomb city, turning caskets into tables and chairs in a community where the living have taken over the homes of the dead. The 300-page UN report cites a critical shortage of funding from international donors to make urban slums in places like Karachi, Pakistan; Sao Paolo, Brazil; and Jakarta, Indonesia more livable.

Though the cost of dragging 1 billion people, or even 10 percent of them, into relative prosperity may seem daunting - the report puts the figure in the billions - it also suggests that community-driven projects, which aim to revitalize poor areas by helping residents develop new trades, can improve economic conditions immediately and become self-sustaining.

And while studies show that slum dwellers are more often the victims of crime and violence than the perpetrators of it, there is equal evidence that all too many urban poor, out of desperation or simply frustration, turn to transgression or extremism. Drug and crime gangs from the slums of Bogotá, Colombia; and Mexico City have been linked to some of the world's most powerful trafficking groups. Suicide bombers who took part in the deadly May terrorist attacks in Casablanca, Morocco, came from crowded shantytowns around the city. Poverty and lack of opportunity across the Muslim world is widely blamed for the rise in Islamic extremism.

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