Over half of the world's population is living in 3% of the earth's land mass. This trend towards urbanization is divided unequally with 17 out of the 20 largest cities in the world being located in developing countries. Many of these countries face phenomenal growth of small and medium-sized municipalities.

Under present conditions and levels of technology, the continued expansion of large urban centres creates risks of physical, economic and social breakdowns with the most serious political consequences. In both developing and developed countries, urban growth has been accompanied by severe social and economic problems, some of which appear likely to worsen as overall population growth is accompanied by the trend toward greater urban growth.

In developed countries, problems of environmental deterioration (especially air and water pollution), traffic congestion, and other disamenities are encountered. In the developing countries, it is difficult to provide the minimum social services such as housing, water supply, sanitation, education, and medical facilities in the rapidly growing urban areas, or to absorb an ever expanding labour force into struggling urban economies. This results in a deterioration of environmental quality. In some countries, the growth of the cities is reducing land available for food production. In an average city there is no clearly recognisable structure or satisfactory layout. Most cities are built haphazardly resulting in a random character that confuses the identity of city communities, creates chaos in the pattern of land use, wastes resources and prohibits coherent patterns of any kind. Cities are not capable of providing neither intense activity in high density areas, nor intense quiet in low density areas.

The problems of the large cities of the developing countries are due largely to the fact that they have materialized ahead of any systematic movement towards modernization. Many of these cities formed transmission points from which raw materials and food were sent to the metropolises of Europe and North America, and to which manufactured goods returned. Lacking is the human and technical resources necessary to deal with the full range of urban development needs, also hampered by the dense "forest" of vertical and horizontal separations within often unmanageable national bureaucracies. Rapid population growth has increased the tendency of cities in developing countries to outgrow the resources of the economies they are supposed to nourish and support. The traditional range of public services, utilities and welfare services taken for granted in the cities of developed countries are not generally available to the inhabitants of most of the cities of developing countries; even less so in the rural areas. Lack of finance, infrastructure and skills at all levels contribute to this situation.

One of the overriding influences is at the policy-making level, where the application of priorities, based on the experiences of developed countries, has led to a misunderstanding of the urbanization process. Indeed, neither the historically conventional European city, nor the colonial city, which has been the main focus of large-scale urbanization in the rest of the world, is really well-adapted to developing countries at the present time. Nor can the largest industrial cities, for all their success in other spheres, be accepted as socially or culturally desirable models, most having conspicuously failed to adapt to modern conditions and frequently having become sprawling industrial centres of dreary anonymity. The city throughout the developing world is in one sense the sign and symbol of a development process that could break down completely in the near future. Life in the city is failing to make good deficiencies in literacy and job skills or to provide work which the illiterate and unskilled can do.

Infringement of privacy is a complex and difficult issue involving diverse meanings in different cultures. At the simplest level, unwanted intrusions on one's immediate situation of being alone or with family is a violation of privacy. The intrusion may be the physical presence of others or the noises one does not wish to hear. Degrees of privacy depend on the proximity of the intruder which is largely culturally defined. In some activities an important aspect of privacy is the freedom from observation, such as when praying, defecating or having sexual relations. In this vain privacy may be violated by being compelled to observe things which are offensive. While not every intrusion is a violation of privacy where the line is difficult to determine at any given moment because of shifting social expectations and the increasing interaction between people of different cultures.

A second dimension of infringements of privacy is the dispersion of private information about persons. Observations and physical intrusions may also be means of obtaining information that the individual want to keep secret. When information about a person is obtained against his will either by coercion or by force their right to privacy has been violated. When another person divulges information to a broader audience or it has been taken privacy has been violated. The right to privacy in some societies has been extended to include the freedom from inaccurate or misleading information being spread about an individual.

A third dimension of the infringement of privacy is lack of autonomy in making private decisions. While this is perhaps the most debatable dimension, it is, for example, acceptable by many legal and social systems for a married couple to choose whether to use contraceptives if it wishes. The right for a woman to choose to terminate a pregnancy is argued as a right to the autonomous making of private choices.

Different legal systems emphasize different aspects of the right to privacy; many claims to privacy are hard to distinguish from claims to respect for personal integrity, to personality, and to freedom from interference from government and other external agents. Litigations concerning violated rights of privacy may arise between celebrities or public figures and the media, particularly sensationalist tabloids. Under some countries' laws, public figures such as heads of state or royal families appear to have less rights to privacy than other people, as everything concerning them may be deemed legitimate news.

Defining unemployment is not simple, and becomes extremely problematic when it comes to developing countries. Three types of unemployment, which overlap to some degree, have been recognized: (1) those actively seeking employment; (2) those without work but available for and actively seeking it; (3) those available for work but who have become so discouraged that they have given up looking.

Stress denotes a broad range of biological and psychological reactions to environmental influences; as such, it is an essential component of the equipment that enables man to survive in an hostile environment. However, stress as a traditional method of adaptation has become inadequate in the psychological, social, and economic circumstances of modern society; it is this inadequate adaptation to change that increases the risk of disease. Certain psychosocial situations are potentially pathogenic because they induce in some individuals inadequate adaptational reactions. Stress is induced when a situation is interpreted by the individual, consciously or not, as a threat to his goals, integrity or well-being. Thus noise, dirt, bad air-conditioning, quarrelsome colleagues, lack of personal contact, new responsibility may be stressful to one individual but not to another.

Too much stress is associated with numerous physical and mental disturbances, for example of appetite, sleep, energy level, self esteem, memory, decision-making, concentration, as well as clinical mental and physical conditions. Neurosis, depression and anxiety disorders are aggravated by stress.

Theft is the unjust taking of what belongs to another. There is a pervasive trend in modern criminal codes to consolidate most property acquisition offences, including stealing, larceny, embezzlement, cheating in buying and selling (such as obtaining property under false pretenses and falsifying of weights and measures), and receipt of stolen property under theft as a single offence, previously unknown as such under common law; robbery is often treated as an exception.