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It is often claimed that small and intermediate urban centres are growing faster than large cities. While it is true that the average annual population growth rates of small towns and secondary cities are higher than those of large cities, many of them stagnate or even lose population. These large variations masked by aggregate statistics are directly linked to the huge diversity of small towns, and to the importance of local factors in driving urban change in different countries and regions (Satterthwaite and Tacoli, 2003). The settlements described in the chapters in this section rely primarily on agricultural production, as is often the case for small towns and large villages in low-and middle-income countries where agriculture is an important component of GDP. A key difference between dynamic growing settlements and settlements that appear to be declining in both economic and demographic terms is the relative …