U.N. Summit Taking On World Urban Problems

Can more than 20,000 government officials, lobbyists, businessmen and scientists come up with a formula in less than two weeks for making cities more livable?

That’s the challenge at the last major U.N. conference of this century, which is bringing together enough people to populate a small city to tackle the problems of the world’s bursting urban areas.

The June 3-14 conference, the second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, also will inaugurate a data bank of “best practices” on everything from combating urban crime to collecting garbage. Any town or city in the world will be able to tap into that computer information.