Dili’s population to double every 16 years

As mentioned in a previous post, Dili is growing pretty quickly. The Timorese are coming here for many reasons, but above all, jobs. It is arguable that jobs are not being created fast enough in the districts, so more and more people are flocking to town to seek their fortune. And flocking they are: the population was 120,000 in 2000, but it’s 200,000 according to the 2010 census. That’s a growth rate of 4.8% a year, meaning a doubling of the population every 16 years. I recommend reading the summary of the preliminary census results (available from here) - they're pretty interesting.

Given Dili’s relatively small size, you would expect an influx of 80,000 people in a short space of time to create a huge slum, but this doesn’t seem to have happened (a lot of IDPs moved out recently, which complicates the issue). I’ve cycled around pretty much every part of town, and whilst many people are clearly very poor, and much housing hardly deserves to be called such, there’s nothing approaching the crowded living-on-top-of-each-other slum conditions that characterise many developing country cities.

This is mostly because Dili is on a large plain (see google maps link here, and click the “terrain” tab). There was plenty of room to expand outwards into agricultural land so Dili, so far, seems to have absorbed the additional people fairly well. As you can see if you click on the “satellite” tab on google maps, there still is quite a lot more space. Most buildings are bungalows, and are unlikely to acquire second stories for some time.

I’ve cycled around a lot of the periphery and once you get more than 3km from the centre it feels more like an extended village rather than urban or even “peri-urban” as such areas are normally characterised. Slight digression – people argue about where urban starts and rural ends until the cows come home (should you define it by economic structure? land use? population density? etc.). Often it boils down to administrative boundaries, which can have a large bearing on the management of water infrastructure.

So, enjoy Dili’s “rural” outskirts while you can. With the population doubling every 16 years, they may not last that much longer… Of course, all of this urbanisation has scary prospects for water and sanitation infrastructure, which already leaves a lot to be desired (post to follow).