FIGURE 11.1 A Brazilian favela (shantytown) in Rio de Janeiro. SOURCE: Shutterstock/Elena Mirage.
In 2015, the world’s urban population is estimated to be more than 3 billion persons. That number is expected to increase to 5 billion persons by 2030, representing an annual growth rate of about 1.8 percent (nearly double the increase of the world population as a whole). At this rate of growth, the number of persons living in urban areas will double in three decades. These figures are overwhelming, and not simply because it is difficult to think of 1 million people at anything more than a conceptual level, much less 1 billion people. The figures are overwhelming because almost all of the growth in the world’s urban population in the future will take place in the cities and metropolitan regions of the less developed nations.
In Chapter 1 we looked at some of the dramatic changes that have taken place in the world’s urban population over the last half-century. In 1950 there were just two metropolitan areas with a population of 8 million or more persons—New York and London—reflecting the concentration effects of urban growth under industrial capitalism in the developed nations. By 1970, there were nine metropolitan areas with more than 8 million persons, including four in the developed nations (New York, London, Tokyo, and Los Angeles) and five in the developing nations (Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Beijing, and São Paulo). In 2000 two new metropolitan areas in the developed nations were added to this list, but an astonishing eighteen new metropolitan areas in the developing nations crossed the threshold. Of the twenty-two metropolitan areas with populations of 8 million or more persons in less developed regions, five (Mexico City, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Lima) are located in South America, one (Lagos) is in sub-Saharan Africa, and three (Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran) are in the Middle East. The remaining fifteen metropolitan areas with 8 million or more persons are located in Asia, including six on the Indian subcontinent. Population estimates by the United Nations for 2030 show further growth—overwhelming growth—in metropolitan regions across the developing nations, particularly in Asia.
One way to think of the significance of the increase of large urban agglomerations in the developing world is that most of us would recognize the names of the cities shown in 1970—Mexico City, Buenos Aires (capital of Argentina), São Paulo (capital of Brazil). And many would recognize the cities in 1990—Manila (capital of the Philippines), Seoul (capital of South Korea). But few of us would recognize the cities from many other regions of the globe that by 2030 will take their place alongside these familiar names. The emergence of these megacities, which are defined by their large size (in excess of 10 million persons), spread over adjacent towns, and the economic, social, cultural, and political dominance that they exert on the regional hinterlands, is one of the important characteristics of urbanization across the developing world. Megacities are the centers of innovation and generators of social change that influence the development of the nation state. Central governments have created regional administrative structures to implement planning and development needs of the new mega-urban regions. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, they appear to have developed a distinctive pattern of organizing economic and social space, with both a densely developed core and extended metropolitan region. Jones and Douglass (2008) note that because the most dramatic changes often are found in areas beyond official metropolitan boundaries, the significance of the mega-urban region has not been fully recognized.
The mega-urban regions found across the developing world represent a complex mix of varied settlement types, with important differences due to history, economic, cultural, and technological factors that have influenced their development. Aprodicio Laquian (2005) categorized the new mega-urban regions in Asia into four types:
Technologically advanced East Asian cities: Osaka, Tokyo, and Seoul. These urban regions are characterized by low rates of population growth, homogeneous populations, and planning and governance structures that meet demands for basic services.
Megacities of China: Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Tanjin. The newly developed urban regions of China are characterized by low growth rates (resulting from migration and population control policies), high economic growth, with strong pressures on basic services.
Primate cities of Southeast Asia: Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila. These urban regions have moderate rates of growth. Because they are important political centers, there has been regional planning and administrative coordination, but they confront serious problems in housing, water, traffic, and environmental pollution.
South Asian cities: Dhaka, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Karachi. The megaurban regions of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan are characterized by high rates of growth and are plagued with problems of slums and squatting, inadequate transport, high unemployment, and environmental pollution.
The very different histories and characteristics of the mega-urban regions require more in-depth analysis. Laquian notes that because of this complexity, strategies used in countries in transition from centrally planned economics (such as China and Vietnam) may not prove successful in market-dominated countries (India and the Philippines). Interestingly, it is the mega-urban regions that have emerged from the centrally planned economies that seem better poised for economic growth at the beginning of the twenty-first century than the mega-urban regions that have emerged from market-dominated economies of former colonial regimes, although there are important social costs in both cases, as described later in this chapter.
In Chapter 10 we studied metropolitan regions in Europe and Japan. In many ways the growth of cities in the more developed nations is similar to the postwar development of cities in the United States. There has been extensive growth in the suburban areas, resulting in urban sprawl. Infrastructure development has kept pace with the expansion of the metropolitan area. While there are troubling social inequalities that often are compounded by spatial segregation, most people have adequate housing, with access to basic utilities including electricity, clean water, and sanitary facilities. In the past this pattern of development was sometimes described as urbanization with industrialization, emphasizing the importance of economic development to provide for the needs of a growing urban population.
Despite problems of uneven development and the recent global economic crisis, most people living in cities in the developed nations are well housed and well fed. The majority can find work and pursue careers that offer opportunities for advancement as their communities respond to changes in the new global economy. But in many other parts of the world, cities have a different relationship to society, and people’s individual fortunes are plagued by dangers and disparities unheard of in more affluent societies. In this chapter, we examine the urban condition in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These regions contain three-fourths of the world’s population and most of its landmass. The societies range from democracies to totalitarian dictatorships. What they have in common is an inability to sustain economic development and, with some notable exceptions, a declining quality of life for most of their urban residents. In the past, this pattern of development was described as urbanization without industrialization, emphasizing the problems in providing basic needs for an ever-increasing population in cities in the developing world.
In approaching the issue of urbanization in developing countries, a number of misconceptions must be dispelled. First, persons living in the developed nations, and especially persons in the United States, commonly think of these regions as being primitive compared to the United States. But in fact countries such as India, Mexico, and Korea are highly industrialized, with factory workers numbering in the millions. Some of the largest cities in the world, such as Shanghai, São Paulo, and Bangkok, not only are located in developing countries but also are dynamic urban centers. But many of these countries share a pattern of uneven development that is more extreme than that found in the older, developed nations. The prospects for persons living in these cities are very different from those of urban residents in New York, London, or Tokyo.
Second, the ecological theory that continues to dominate mainstream urban sociology argues that developing countries are much like the developed societies, only at an earlier stage of development, and they will “modernize” in time (Kasarda and Crenshaw, 1991). The sociospatial perspective counters this view and considers factors such as the roles of the state, socioeconomic class, global capital investment, and economic changes in the global economy—all of which are neglected by the ecological approach—as critical for an understanding of urbanization in developing countries. Thus the sociospatial perspective suggests that countries having different economic structures will develop in different ways. Close observers of growth patterns in areas such as Latin America (Roberts, 1978) and Asia (Berry, 1989) seem to agree that the explanatory variables stressed by the sociospatial approach are most important, while not necessarily subscribing to the perspective itself. Contrary to what the human ecology and modernization theory would predict, the process of urbanization in the developing nations is different in significant ways from what we have observed in the more developed nations. The key differences involve factors such as elite power, state policies, integration into the global economy, and the effects of class structure (Smith and Timberlake, 1993).
A third change in perspective concerns the increasing relevance of the global economy to understand urban development in both the developed and less developed nations. Prior to the 1970s, there seemed to be a sharp distinction between the economies of these regions. Less developed countries were sources for agricultural goods such as coffee or winter fruits but were otherwise thought to be disconnected from Western society, except perhaps as places for tourists to visit and strategic locations for military bases. Countries such as the United States were still operating under Fordist arrangements of production during this time, meaning that most manufacturing was carried out domestically, and foreign countries were viewed principally as a source of raw materials and as markets for US goods.
Developmental theories of the time proposed the concept of “peripheral urbanization,” which emphasized the marginal nature of the developing world (Harvey, 1973; Castells, 1977; Walton, 1982). In other words, countries were either seen to be part of the core of the world system (the developed nations) or were relegated to the periphery (the developing world).
In recent decades, however, vast changes have occurred in the developed nations as Fordist arrangements of production have been replaced by post-Fordist production and the country underwent deindustrialization. During the 1970s and 1980s, much US manufacturing employment was shipped overseas, and countries such as Mexico, Malaysia, Singapore, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic were used as effective sites for labor. By the 1990s, it had become commonplace for consumers in the United States to find that the products they purchased, whether articles of clothing, sports equipment, or cars, were assembled in foreign places. Thus, a pattern of manufacturing for world markets was established in many areas of the developing world, and people’s lives in the United States were connected by multinational corporations to formerly peripheral societies (Peet, 1987). Also in the 1990s, the Chinese government began a series of economic reforms that would lead to the country’s emergence as a new industrial nation built on a manufacturing export economy (Yusuf and Saich, 2009).
Studies of urbanization in the developing nations now reject previous approaches that emphasized world system marginality or dependency (Datta, 1990). Instead, it is argued that these countries are increasingly linked to the global economy. The cycle of investment, manufacturing, consumption, and profit making that leads to greater investment integrates consumers and producers in the developed nations with manufacturing, banking, and consumption activities in other countries, including the developing nations. This effect is often called the “internationalization of capital.” The once meaningful “comparative” study of urbanization in developing countries and urbanization in the United States and other developed nations has been replaced by the study of globalization—of the growing interconnections and interdependence between the core and periphery because of government policy, international trade agreements, and other recent developments.
The sociospatial perspective acknowledges the influence of the global system of capital on locality. The case of the Philippines is of some interest in this regard. As one of the capital cities in the Spanish colonial empire, Manila has been part of the capitalist world system since the 1500s. Its position as a regional city within the global system of capital was increased when it became an American colony following the Spanish American War and again in the post–World War II years. Over the past two decades, however, Manila’s importance and influence in the Southeast Asian economy has declined. Capital flows and investments in the new system of global capitalism have bypassed Manila in favor of Hong Kong and Singapore and, more recently, Shanghai. While many countries in Southeast Asia have prospered during the past decade, the economy of the Philippines has registered a negative growth rate, and urban development in Manila lags behind that of other cities that have emerged as more important in the global system of capital.
Urbanization processes in both developed and developing nations often involve combinations of global, national, and local factors that may operate independently of the global economy. The form of government at the national level has played a key role in the success—or failure—of development schemes in many developing countries. China, South Korea, and Singapore, for example, have aggressive national
Box 11.1 The Impact of Globalization on Third World Cities
Globalization at the national level leads to economic restructuring and global linkages of select regions in the nation, select cities in these regions, and select geographical segments within these cities. Thus various levels of dichotomy permeate society. Unfortunately, the globalized population and geographical regions sponge on the population/regions bereft of global links. In developing countries, government policies play an integral role in bridging inequality. But in their excitement to push rapid global economic integration, governments strengthen the processes of exclusion through fragmentation of employment, housing, and social services.
As nations compete, cities too begin to compete with each other under the neoliberal agenda. These cities differ from those of an earlier era in terms of the way urban space is utilized, governed, contested, and represented. Capital mobility, leading to competition for investment, has forced city governments to adopt innovative and entrepreneurial approaches to local growth. Local governments take up selective projects to improve the urban environment, which end up either displacing or excluding segments of population or, through privatization, leads to fragmentation of housing, infrastructure, and services as well as institutional structures. City plans give priority to business, and scarce city resources are diverted to cater to the needs of business. Many local economies providing employment to the poor are delegitimized and face eviction from productive locations sought after by elite groups.
Infrastructure projects based on the principle of public-private partnership or privatization, including those for water supply and sanitation, increase the cost of living for the poor and may altogether exclude the poorest. Land development becomes an intensely contested area. The new environmental agenda, under the concept of sustainable cities, also ends up expelling the poor from the city space and economy. Low-skilled workers in industries or industrial zones, services, and the informal sector congregate at the fringes where systems are inadequately developed, or in areas of the megacity that are environmentally stressed or hazardous. The development processes that unwind are exclusionary. Large sections are expelled from the economic space and then excluded from various city-level social systems. Women in poor communities suffer the most.
The influence of multilateral international development agencies such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank has increased. Most of these agencies promote privatization in urban areas. The conditions for lending for urban development often include clauses such as allowing transnational or multinational utilities to enter the city. Such policies lead to exclusion in the city through the process of privatization and also increase debt liability, reducing the city’s capability to address the issue of sustainable poverty reduction.
SOURCE: D. Mahadevia, “Inclusive Mega-Cities in Globalising Asia,” Info Change Urban India (http://infochangeindia.org/urban-india/backgrounder/inclusive-mega-cities-in-globalising-asia.html).
policies in pursuit of growth and governments that actively aid capital investment (Barone, 1983). Other countries, such as many Latin American societies, are plagued by “crony capitalism,” government corruption, and dictatorships that squander national wealth.
At the most local level, there are also independent effects that are related to but not determined by the global level. Cities in the developing world are moving rapidly from the stage of developing economies to postindustrial relations—skipping many of the features of industrialization that informed the experience of Western developed nations (Roberts, 1991). Large cities in the developing nations, like their counterparts in the West, are experiencing shifts to a service-oriented employment base due to their increasing role as command-and-control centers of capital investment. As a result of new employment opportunities created for professional workers, there is a growing wage differential between well-paid and working-poor residents. How this increasingly diverse class structure manifests itself politically varies from country to country and involves new patterns of local political activity that are independent of, and in some cases oppositional to, global system needs (see the section on social movements later in this chapter).
The sociospatial perspective on urbanization in developing countries emphasizes global linkages, differences in class structure, the effects of national state arrangements, and differences in local politics as key factors for an understanding of current trends. Urbanization processes in these countries also have many features in common that contrast with the experiences of developed nations. These can be identified by considering the nature of population growth and change, or demography, which we discuss next.
When dealing with rapid population changes such as those that affected the United States in the 1800s and affect developing countries today, the science of demography can offer important insights. Demographers track the dynamics of population growth, concentrating on rates of change, such as the frequency of births and deaths and the average number of children per mother. Demographers are also interested in rates of migration, especially changes in the rural and urban populations. For any given population, the rate of increase that depends on the number of births minus deaths is known as the natural increase. Population changes within any given settlement space can arise from natural increase or from migration.
For most of human history, the high birthrate was offset by an equally high death rate, and populations grew very slowly. Following World War II, the introduction of modern medical techniques and preventive measures in developing nations resulted in a population explosion that is called the demographic transition. When new techniques of medical intervention lowered the death rates in these countries, the societies experienced a permanent rise in the rate of natural increase because they maintained a high birthrate. In the developed world, the demographic transition was eventually adjusted by means of a declining birthrate, as the rising standard of living associated with industrialization led to smaller family size. Many European countries now have low or even negative growth rates. That stage has yet to occur in developing nations, although some countries, such as Brazil, have drastically lowered their growth rates in recent years. But for most of the developing world, birthrates still outstrip death rates, and overpopulation is a serious social and environmental problem.
The demographic problems of developing nations are compounded by limited economic development in recent decades. Faced with a population explosion, rural areas have been hard-pressed to grow enough food for domestic consumption, and the standard of living in rural areas has declined drastically since the 1950s in many developing countries. There are simply too many mouths to feed. The dilemma facing families was poignantly depicted in a Mexican film by Luis Buñuel, Los Olvidados. A farmer comes to the city with his young son. They move toward a crowd in the center of the city. When the father is satisfied that his son is distracted, he seizes his chance and runs away. Many cities are teeming with such abandoned children, many of whom are exploited by a growing sex industry catering to foreign tourists. As might be expected, many of the abandoned children have a short life span.
Box 11.2 Rapid Urbanization and Slum Formation
Rapid urban population growth has outpaced the ability of city authorities to provide for housing and environmental health and infrastructure. Cities such as Dhaka in Bangladesh or Mumbai in India are, realistically speaking, metropolitan or urban regions, spanning large territorial areas. Others like Metro Manila in the Philippines or Jakarta in Indonesia are really mega-urban regions. The nature of the governments differs considerably. Jakarta’s urban government has the status of a provincial government equal to that of other provinces in Indonesia. The metropolitan government in Manila coordinates among some seventeen local authorities, the majority of which are municipalities with a few town councils.
Squatter and slum settlements have formed mainly because of the inability of city governments to plan and provide affordable housing for the low-income segments of the urban population. Hence, squatter and slum housing is the housing solution for this low-income urban population. In the mega-urban regions or metropolitan areas, part of the problem would lie in the coordination among different authorities that are in charge of economic development, urban planning, and land allocation.
The economically more dynamic regions such as Asia have experienced strong growth because the state sector drives development agendas. National and city governments have generally adopted the position that economic development will take care of basic needs such as housing and environmental and health infrastructure. In cities of higher-income countries such as Malaysia, private sector developers are more interested in building homes for the middle-income market. The proliferation of slum and squatter settlements, however, shows that planned economic growth has to be aligned with the planned development of health services, environmental infrastructure, and housing.
In Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, neither the government nor the private developers are able to provide the housing needed for 50,000 migrants per year. An additional 20,000 young urban households are formed annually that enter the real estate market. The resulting growth in squatter and slum settlements now comprises 15 percent of the housing in the city. This kind of housing is associated with lack of sanitation and air pollution. In other low-income cities like Dhaka, only one-quarter of the population in the city is connected to the piped sewerage system with two in three households served with a potable water supply.
In many cities such as Metro Manila in the Philippines and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, rapid development of new real estate comprising condominiums and shopping malls has led to gridlocked traffic, severe environmental pollution, and unstable squatter settlements sandwiched between prime commercial complexes and high-class condominiums. With the intensely competitive demand for land in cities, the urban poor will increasingly be marginalized. Many are now settling at the fringe of the most rapidly growing cities. Rapid growth of the larger cities and mega-urban regions in the developing countries is reflected in their being surrounded by dense and generally impoverished shantytowns and numerous other forms of so-called informal or irregular housing. These are characterized by inadequate infrastructure, service provision, and security of shelter and land tenure.
Rapid Urbanization and Slum Formation. SOURCE: G. Ooi and K. Phua, “Urbanization and Slum Formation,” Journal of Urban Health, May 2007, Volume 84, Issue 1 Supplement, pp. 27–34.
The failure of rural agricultural efforts to produce enough to sustain the quality of life has led excess population to migrate to the cities. Despite the hardships of life found there, the move holds out the promise of improvement, and this encourages others to come. As a result, cities in developing nations suffer from a double population explosion: a high rate of natural increase and a high rate of in-migration. In the city, there is little room for poor people’s housing. In many cities, urban migrants find space on the outskirts and put up makeshift shelters that lack the basic necessities of homes, such as running water, sanitation facilities, and even adequate ventilation for heating. These shantytowns, or squatter settlements, have many names all over the world—favellas (Brazil), bustees (India), barriadas (Mexico), poblaciones (Chile), villas miserias (Argentina), bidonvilles (Africa), and kampongs (Southeast Asia). But they have many features in common, including frequent public health crises, crime, crushing poverty, and no future for the next generation since few countries provide them with schools. We will discuss shantytowns in more detail later.
A third effect of demographic change in developing countries involves their common experience of social, economic, and political exploitation under European and American colonialism. Western powers took control of underdeveloped countries in Africa, Asia, and South America beginning in the sixteenth century. In 1898 the United States gained control of the former Spanish colonies: the Philippines, Hawaii, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. The principal goal was to acquire natural resources, such as gold and spices, and later, cheaply produced manufactured goods. Because colonialism or imperialism depended on trade with the conquering country, effective links to the global world system were established early. A result of colonialism was the construction of large cities that were usually located near the coast, such as Hong Kong, Manila, Lagos, Singapore, Bombay, and Bangkok. Over the years these cities grew immensely, but few other cities were founded because the colonial powers did not deem them necessary.
Over the years, many developing countries have launched development programs that have overcome the legacy of colonial control. However, the success of these programs has been limited due to changes in geopolitics and the world economy, as well as to national issues such as crony capitalism and civil conflict. These factors hinder the balanced growth of cities in these countries. As a result, many countries today possess a single, gigantic primate city that is overurbanized, or excessively populated, and remains the center for most investment and economic growth, while retaining a relatively underurbanized interior with no large cities. Primate cities are characteristic of an unbalanced pattern of urbanization that remains quite different from that found in the developed countries of the world. Let us examine this unique feature in more detail, as well as other characteristics of urbanization in the developing world, including shantytown development, household coping strategies and the informal economy, and new urban social movements.
In developed countries such as the United States, there is an even distribution in the number of cities according to size (see Chapter 5). Some, such as New York City with more than 8 million people, are quite large; others fill in the ranks with smaller populations of between 500,000 and 1 million, such as San Francisco, and between 100,000 and 500,000, such as Minneapolis, and so on down the hierarchy. Such a profile constitutes “balanced” urbanization, and it provides a range of urban environments and locational options for both businesses and people.
Primate cities dominate and distort development within their countries. Overurbanization, or the presence of primate cities, is measured by comparing the size of the largest city with other large cities within a given country. In the developing world, the disparities among urban centers may be very great. In Thailand, for example, the population of the capital city of Bangkok was 6,685,000 in 2000, more than thirty times larger than that of the next largest city (the population figure applies to the total urbanized area of the capital city). Countries with primate cities lack locational flexibility. If one is looking for investment opportunities within the country, there typically is only one area that has the population and infrastructure to support development. If one is looking for employment, there is only one area where new jobs are being created. As a consequence, countries that have primate cities are locked in a migratory cycle. Like a magnet, primate cities pull mobile populations from the countryside at the expense of other locations.
The pattern of primate city development not only is inconsistent with models of urban growth based on location theory but also calls into question the legitimacy of ecological theory. You may recall from Chapter 4 that urban ecologists sought to apply the model of factorial ecology to cities in developing nations with the belief that a single model could explain urbanization in all countries around the world. Another part of this perspective holds that developed nations should be the model for poorer countries, asserting that developing nations should industrialize and urbanize as rapidly as possible. Ecological theory suggests that when they do, those living in industrialized cities will increase their incomes and acquire a better quality of life. By encouraging urban growth, the entire society benefits.
The sociospatial perspective disagrees with this view. Developing countries may grow through industrial development and as part of the new postindustrial economy, but economic growth is likely only when it occurs in conjunction with world system priorities and investment flows. Consequently, rapid urbanization may have negative effects because its principal cause is the needs of global capital and not the quality of life for local populations, as described in Box 11.2. As a result, countries in the developing world can suffer from extremely uneven development despite impressive modernization efforts, and primate cities are often the consequence (Smith, 1985). While the average income of primate city residents may be greater than that of rural counterparts, the inequality of income and of quality of life is so severe in primate cities that the standard of living is lower than in rural areas (Bradshaw and Fraser, 1989). Thus, the growth of primate city economies does not help the majority of citizens who are victims of uneven and inequitable development.
The world’s urban population increases by nearly 1 million persons each month. Mexico City, the largest megacity in the developing world, draws more than 20,000 people from impoverished rural states looking for employment each month. The sheer number of urban migrants is too great for either the private or public sector to provide adequate housing or shelter, and thus many families end up in barriadas, or squatter settlements. The common conception is that life in these places is totally peripheral to the urban economy of the city. But many shantytowns support robust economies within their informal boundaries—including areas of commercial development and even real estate investment—and many have developed into large residential districts where the working class often lives. There is much discussion about the meaning of the peripheral urbanization in these Fourth World regions; Mike Davis makes this clear in the title of this recent book, Planet of Slums (2007). But others have argued that the marginality of shantytown inhabitants is largely a myth (Perlman, 1976), and Howard Husack (2009) has recently referred to them as “slums of hope.”
FIGURE 11.1 A Brazilian favela (shantytown) in Rio de Janeiro. SOURCE: Shutterstock/Elena Mirage.
The status of shantytowns varies from city to city and country to country. In many places, they are simply illegal settlements built on the outskirts of cities, and they exist under the threat of annihilation by state authorities. In other places, however, shantytowns have acquired legitimate status through political activism, and they constitute working-class suburbs that have many services, including electrical power, running water, and schools. Shantytowns differ not only in location, building materials, and physical appearance but also in the types of groups that live in them. Some settlements suffer from social disorganization and crime, while others provide opportunities for entrepreneurial activity. The range of squatter settlements and shantytown development can be seen in Charles Abrams work, highlighted in Box 11.3.
Box 11.3 Types of Shantytowns and Urban Development
Charles Abrams was a housing expert who was instrumental in establishing the New York Housing Authority and served as an adviser to the United Nations on housing matters. In his very important work Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World (1966) he describes how persons in developing nations create housing for themselves when the private market (and government programs) fails to provide it. The shantytown (or favela in Latin America) is a residential area that develops without legal claim to the land or permission from authorities to build. Because occupying the site is illegal, there are no public services (water, electricity, sanitation), and residents must find some way to procure those services (e.g., by tapping into electrical lines from other neighborhoods).
Abrams identified five different types of squatter settlements during his research in cities in South America:
Owner squatters. This group conforms to our common idea of the urban squatter. The individual or household owns the building but not the land on which it was built.
Squatter tenants. This group is composed of new in-migrants to urban centers who do not live in their own buildings but rent from other squatters. Because the “landlord” does not pay taxes or for the upkeep of the structure, substantial profit may be realized from this business enterprise.
Speculator squatters. Like regular landowners, this group understands that occupying land and gaining property rights is a way to make a profit. Squatting is viewed as a business venture in the hope of obtaining title to the land.
Store or business squatters. This group consists of individuals who operate businesses and often live within the squatter settlement. Because they pay no rent or taxes, they may be able to make substantial profits.
Semisquatters. Individuals or households in this group construct a building on private land but later come to terms with the owner on the rental or even purchase price for the space. The boundary between the legal tenant and the semisquatter may be blurred, particularly in developing economies.
Some shantytowns possess a robust social order (Aina, 1990; Cooper, 1987; Neuwirth, 2006). They often are the location for small-business enterprises started by urban migrants. Shantytowns may also be the location for small and medium-size factories employing residents from the surrounding area. The penetration of multinational corporations into metropolitan areas in the developing nations as part of the restructuring of the global economy has created new manufacturing jobs and support for local entrepreneurs. In these and other ways, shantytowns may be integrated into the world economy.
In many developing nations, shantytowns may be the only places where the working class can find affordable housing. According to one estimate, a majority of shantytown dwellers actually live in rental housing (Datta, 1990). Individuals who construct housing in these settlements become real estate entrepreneurs and form an important real estate submarket within the larger metropolitan economy. Real estate investment brings in needed income for individuals and households living in the shantytown. However, as in the developed nations, there may be problems with this privatized housing market. The increased cost of construction materials means that shantytown housing has become excessively expensive, and new pressures have been placed on the local government to address the issue of affordable housing.
Some observers have suggested that shantytowns should be viewed as workers’ suburbs that require greater attention and services from local government, not as slum areas. But the recent projections of population growth in urban areas of the developing nations raise new concerns and may eclipse the earlier discussions of working-class suburbs. The United Nations reports that more than a third of all urban residents—1 billion persons—now live in slums, most of them in cities in the developing world. By 2030 that figure is expected to increase to more than half—or some 2.5 billion persons living in urban slums (UN Habitat, 2005). This is likely to be accompanied by increased poverty in urban areas. Of the 14.5 million people living in Metro Manila in 2000, for example, it is estimated that 60 percent had incomes below the poverty line and that 40 percent lived in slums and shantytowns in areas outside of the urban core.
In previous chapters we noted that many urban sociologists follow the ecological approach, focusing on individual behavior and the aggregation of separate interests in the public and private sectors. The sociospatial perspective, in contrast, recognizes that while society is composed of individuals, a focus on groups, such as classes and networks, is a preferred way of understanding metropolitan dynamics. Homeowner politics and the struggle to control territory and its quality of life are also important political considerations. When studying the cities in the developing world, the nature of class structure and especially the control by select elites through the government and military are important factors. Urban researchers also assert that urban dynamics is not exclusively a class phenomenon and suggest that the appropriate unit of analysis for the study of urban populations in developing nations is the household.
The household and its coping strategies are basic to an understanding of urban life everywhere, that is, in the developed nations as well as the developing nations. Households are collective units that share housing and food, trade clothing and other consumer durables, and are composed of individuals who pool monetary resources. According to Mingione (1988), not all the members of a given household are immediate family. Households may contain distant relatives and even friends. The collective pooling of resources does not preclude differences among household members, such as conflicts between men and women. What counts most with this emphasis is that it conforms better to the reality of urban life in many countries than the focus of mainstream sociology on individual decision making or of Marxists on class alone.
The study of household survival strategies shows that the poor do not accept their adversity in a passive manner. They innovate and find ways to support themselves and others. This dynamism makes shantytown life quite complex and leads to both positive and negative outcomes, such as the reproduction of generations despite poverty and the existence of criminal activity. Households cope with adversity by making collective decisions rather than allowing the burden of poverty to fall on each individual’s shoulders alone. To reduce expenses they may engage in self-provisioning, which “includes domestic processing or production of food, making clothes, undertaking repairs, self-construction of housing” (Roberts, 1991:142). Other household coping strategies include reducing the number of members (often children, as in the earlier example of the Buñuel film) and connecting with the informal economy.
The issue of the informal economy is an important focus of urbanization research in developing countries and is increasingly an equally relevant topic for the developed countries (Safa, 1987). In the informal sector, whose activities are considered “off the books” or illegal, people sell everything from drugs, cigarettes, and convenience store items (such as soda) to produce (such as fruits and vegetables)—and even their own bodies for sex. As global restructuring expands in developing cities, bringing with it highly paid professional services, poor people find informal or casual employment as shoe shiners, messengers, delivery persons, and domestic helpers, in addition to the burgeoning demand for restaurant and other commercial laborers. Many laborers, especially domestic servants and babysitters, are hired off the record.
The informal sector is dominated by a market economy, although this is not the same as capitalism because barter or trade as well as monetary exchange prevail, and no formal structures dominate pricing (Korff, 1990). Work is precarious and does not bring the kinds of benefits that people in developed nations identify with full-time employment, such as health insurance or social security. Researchers of this phenomenon note that the numbers of people and activities in the informal sector are growing in all countries, a fact we have noted in connection with the illegal drug industry’s role in poor ghetto areas of the United States.
The study of household coping strategies and the informal economy paints a multidimensional picture of shantytown life and illustrates how individuals may take advantage of opportunities in cities that are not usually noted when attention is given only to formal economies and our own limited, culture-bound conceptions of everyday life.
Another important topic that is often neglected in discussing urbanization in the developing world is the significance of political struggles within the city (Castells, 1983; Walton, 1987; Cooper, 1987). According to one observer, urban movements in developing countries have transitioned from local movements with limited sociopolitical goals to more conscious movements making much greater demands on the state and with social and political effects that are no longer limited to the local arena (Datta, 1990:44).
An example of this change concerns the broadening movement for affordable housing (Castells, 1983; Ramirez, 1990) and the drive to make squatter and shantytown settlements legal. Organized efforts of poor people have pitted them against the government with demands for better health, education, and neighborhood services—a phenomenon that is also characteristic of communities in developed nations and that transcends class distinctions. Another recent development is the growing number of class-based union activities that take place in cities. Deindustrialization has meant the decline of manufacturing jobs in the developing nations and with it the drastic decline in the power of unions. But as manufacturing jobs have been shunted to the developing world, an associated rise in union activity and class struggle has resulted. Countries such as Brazil and India, for example, have formidable industrial labor forces, and with them have come active trade union movements and class-based political action.
Special attention must be given to the role of women in political movements in developing nations. When women migrate to the city, they acquire new opportunities for marriage and male-female relations, “even if social conservatism may also be exacerbated by the novelty and difficulties of urban life” (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 1990:77). African and Latin American studies show that women take advantage both of the informal economy and of shantytown dwellings to earn a living, although some fall victim to male domination and criminal exploitation such as prostitution (Schlyter, 1990). One important measure of the freer status of city women is their important role in urban social movements. Coquery-Vidrovitch suggests that this important representation may be the result of the active involvement of women in voluntary associations connected with urban shantytown life.
Urban social movements are connected to the global economy. Workers in developing countries constitute a complex social order with many different class statuses (Portes and Walton, 1981). Changes in the activities linked to global investment have differential effects on the working class in the developing world. These differences are reflected in different political positions and complex ideological issues among trade union parties, some of whom are active socialist or communist organizations, although there are conservative and reactionary political elements as well. In other words, national and urban politics in the developing nations involves a variety of organized political positions despite the greater presence in many countries of worker-oriented or left-wing movements than in developed nations.
The global economy also affects urban social movements directly through its agents of international control. In the 1970s, for example, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which controls most of the debt and national financing in the developing nations, called for austerity measures and reductions in state expenditures among all its client countries. In turn, national governments responded by eliminating subsidies on food and other consumer goods. This placed a severe burden on households. In response to the threat of hunger or increased misery, residents of cities began rioting in protest of food subsidy cutbacks. The “IMF riots” (Walton, 1987; Cleaver, 1989), as they came to be called, were powerful political events that affected the stability of state regimes in diverse places around the globe, including Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
Urban social movements are important in the developing world and take many forms. In Chile, for example, between 1968 and 1972, 400,000 people converged on the city of Santiago and established free squatter settlements, or campamentos (Schneier, 1990:349). Similar self-governing squatter communities can be found in Mexico, where they are a powerful political force in urban areas (Castells, 1983). In Nigeria, shantytowns have been organized into neighborhoods that have demanded greater political representation. According to one African study, “The mobilization of people at such a level within a city should at least encourage improved information flows and increase the prospect of greater participation by all in the governance (as distinct from the government) of the city” (Mabogunje, 1990:364). Urban social movements are common among city dwellers in both the developed and undeveloped countries of the world.
We have been discussing phenomena that countries in the developing world have in common. These include the presence of primate cities, the complex social order of shantytowns, household coping strategies and the informal economy, and the changing complexion of urban social movements and politics. Much of the research on these topics has been published only since the 1970s, when they were brought into sharper focus for those in developed, westernized countries.
Above all, studies show that the “comparative” perspective on global urbanization that conceptualized a break between the industrialized West and developing nations must give way to the sociospatial perspective, which acknowledges the growing commonalities and links between metropolitan restructuring patterns in both regions. Along with increasing acknowledgment of global links is the recognition of certain differences that exist among countries. Not everything is determined by global processes alone. National and local differences also add to the complexity of urbanization in the developing world. In the final section of this chapter, we survey briefly these local sources of variation in a region-by-region analysis.
Latin America contains one of the world’s largest cities, Mexico City, with a population of more than 23 million persons, and several of the world’s most rapidly growing metropolises: Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in Brazil, Buenos Aires in Argentina, Caracas in Venezuela, and Bogotá in Colombia. The continent of South America, along with Central America and Mexico, was urbanized hundreds of years ago during the period of the Aztec, Mayan, and Inca civilizations, which founded great cities at the time of the European Middle Ages. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Spanish and Portuguese conquests founded new towns and administration centers. Uneven spatial development engendered by colonialism created primate cities in most countries. Many of the cities were located on the coast because of the dominance of trade with the colonial power, although Mexico City, the capital of the ancient Aztec empire, remains an inland magnet for migration.
Cities in Latin America share a common form because of their legacy as Spanish colonial history. The Leyes de Indias (Laws of the Indies), signed by Charles II in 1573, included 148 ordinances concerning the location and construction of settlements in the Spanish colonies (including the Philippines). These are among the first comprehensive guidelines for the design and development of cities. The ordinances specify how public, religious, commercial, and residential spaces were to be designed, including the symbolic placement of the cathedral on a raised area facing the main piazza so that it can be seen from all sides and “acquire greater authority.” As a result of the Laws of the Indies, all Spanish cities in Latin America contain a large central plaza, with the main cathedral, city hall, and commercial buildings on the streets facing the plaza. Residential areas spread out from the main plaza, and often these are focused around the many secondary plazas, giving a strong sense of order to the entire city. In addition to the regular patterns established by the ordinances, housing and public buildings are built around open courtyards, following a generic Mediterranean design with houses directly fronting the street, making a sharp divide between the public world of the street and the private space of the house (Leontidou, 2009). In recent decades, some suburban housing has been built with a form more similar to that of the suburbs in the American Southwest, where there is not the same boundary between public and private space.
The development of cities in Brazil is of course different from other countries in Latin America because they were not part of the Spanish empire. But they do share characteristics common to Mediterranean cities more generally, including extensive plazas and housing and government buildings built around open courtyards. The coastal city of Recife in northern Brazil is built along canals and is called the Venice of South America, with much of the older area of the city, built in the 1700s, resembling other European cities. Both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have extensive favelas (shantytowns) that house millions of persons in the two megacities.
Recent urbanization for Central and South America is shown in Table 11.1. Although Latin America is one of the most urbanized areas in the world, there is substantial variation within the region. Countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Venezuela have between 80 and 90 percent of their populations living in urban areas, whereas the figures for El Salvador and Guatemala are less than 60 percent. South America includes several countries with urban populations concentrated in large cities; 40 percent of the urban population of Argentina lives in cities with populations of 1 million or more, and more than a third of the urban populations of both Brazil and Chile lives in these larger metropolitan areas. In Chile and Uruguay, 40 percent of the urban population lives in the capital city, and in Argentina, El Salvador, and Peru, the figure is more than 30 percent of the population.
Countries such as Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico have benefited from the global search for cheap labor. Mexico, for example, is host to the successful maquilladoras program, which locates primary manufacturing in a band of space along the US border for shipment back to the United States as finished products. The maquilladoras system is similar to enterprise zones in the United States and is becoming increasingly popular with developing nations as deindustrialization continues in the United States and Europe. The enterprise zones allow multinationals in developed nations to retain control of production and marketing while still benefiting from the exploitation of cheap labor in foreign countries with the active support of their governments. The maquilladoras program relies heavily on the use of female labor, which has been made compliant by the culture of paternalism (Fernandez-Kelly, 1991), and enjoys active subsidies from both the Mexican and US governments.
Some Latin American countries, such as Argentina and Brazil, have a long history of industrialization. But to be successful and compete with foreign competition, they must use the most sophisticated techniques to make products that will sell on the global market. In the last decade they have confronted the same competition for manufactured goods imported from China as have American companies. To succeed in the changed economic market, capital-intensive methods, such as automation, are used that require little labor. Consequently, even in countries that have achieved some industrialization, factories are run without significant labor forces. New employment opportunities are not created at a pace that could absorb the excess rural population. The result is the perpetuation of shantytown growth despite industrial development.
Brazil is a prime example of the dilemma presented by world system competition. Historically, Brazil has had a successful indigenous steel industry. It can compete on the world market principally because it is capital intensive and uses the latest
TABLE 11.1 Urbanization in Selected Latin American Countries, 1990-2010
techniques of production. But this also means that it employs comparatively few people. Hence it is not a major source of employment, something Brazil desperately needs. In the 1870s England was the world’s leader in steel production, reaching the million-ton mark. At that time, England’s steel industry employed 400,000 workers. In the 1980s Brazil routinely produced four times that amount of steel but did so using only around 28,000 workers (Cochrane, 1982:16). Modern technology and production techniques make a difference that is surely a mixed blessing to developing countries, and the need to compete in the world system constrains the types of development policies those countries can pursue.
Latin America has seen some of the most explosive population growth in the world. For example, São Paulo, Brazil, had a population of less than 3 million in 1950, but its population is approaching 22 million today. Brazil is the most populated country in South America, with a census count of 190.7 million in 2000. The Brazilian government estimates that the population will increase to 204 million by 2030, before beginning a slow decline due to an aging population, declining birthrates, and high levels of early mortality due to AIDS (Brazil, Economic Research Institute, 2008). This total is substantially different from estimates made in the 1980s, when the United Nations predicted that the population would increase to 246 million by the year 2025 (United Nations, 1985). But even so, it is estimated that over 90 percent of the population will reside in urban areas. Brazil will become a country of giant cities. To feed these people, Brazil can exploit its arable landmass—but many of these new lands are part of the rain forest. As noted in Chapter 1, the growth of the megacity has been accompanied by serious problems of political and unsustainable pressures on the environment. A potential ecological disaster of global magnitude is in the making.
Unlike Brazil, Mexico is semiarid and lacks appreciable agricultural resources, and it has not been successful in reducing its rate of population growth. It has already cultivated virtually all available land. Population pressures will force people into the cities or to El Norte (as the United States is called). At the end of the 1980s, Dogan and Kasarda wrote:
The urban population is expected to increase from 55 million in 1985 to 131 million in 2025, the equivalent of 13 cities of 10 million each. Is there a limit to Mexico City’s growth, this bowl constrained by a circle of pollutant-trapping mountains? Guadalajara and Veracruz might become enormous metropolises. How many new cities of over a million will spring up in the Mexican “desert”? How many Mexicans will head for California, either legally or clandestinely? (1988, 24–25)
In addition to immense population pressures, Latin American countries have shared a history of political instability. They have been controlled for over a century by the dictates of US foreign policy and by the demands of American corporations. Over the years, developmental strategies have been hemmed in by such global constraints. There is a great need to nurture domestic industrial development. In the past, political problems and periodic military coups seem to hamstring such efforts, and while there have been significant advances in democratic rule through much of the region, instability is also fostered by inequalities in the class system, which is one of the most skewed in the world. Class structure, government control, and global power are prominent factors in understanding development in Latin America.
The global region of Asia represents great diversity and contains at least half of the world’s population. Often overlooked beneath the generic labels such as Asian history or Asian culture, the separate countries have very different histories, as well as very different cultures, so that generalizations as to urban trends are very difficult.
In many Asian countries, primate cities—Seoul, Jakarta, Manila, and Bangkok—represent the centers of economic growth and development (Yeung, 1988:162). For example, in the 1980s, Seoul contained 78 percent of South Korean business headquarters and 90 percent of all large enterprises, while accounting for 27.9 percent of South Korea’s GNP; and Bangkok housed one-third of Thailand’s manufacturing and almost 80 percent of its banking, and it contributed 26.8 percent toward the country’s GNP (Yeung, 1988:162). China’s coastal development program, which situates manufacturing activity in planned urban agglomerations, has been different from that of any other country in the region (Newman and Thornley, 2005).
In all of these countries, urban development programs are often given a high profile. Among the issues that must be confronted is the lack of an adequate infrastructure to meet the demands of the growing urban population. The case of urban redevelopment in Manila is instructive. The Philippines suffered from the crony capitalism of the Marcos dictatorship for two decades before electing Corazon Aquino (wife of the political opposition leader assassinated by Marcos’s security forces) president of the country in 1986. Millions of dollars from the World Bank and other international agencies lined the pockets of the military leaders, while underdevelopment continued to plague the country; more than 80 percent of its export crops are owned by the Dole pineapple conglomerate, and many Filipinos in rural areas work in a plantation system characterized by Ligaya McGovern (1997) as a “militarized zone.” With perhaps the highest birthrate in all of Asia, overpopulation has led many Filipinos to leave rural communities for the capital city of Manila. The result has been uneven development within the metropolitan Manila region, where neighborhoods not much different from those in any modern city exist alongside squatter settlements. For those unable to find employment in rural areas or the cities, overseas labor has become an important safety valve, as the Philippines have one of the highest labor-exporting countries in the world, with substantial communities of Filipino workers, both male and female, in the developed nations (Tyner, 2008).
In recent decades several Asian nations, beginning with Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, exploded the myth of “third world dependency” and the notion of “peripheral” development by growing rapidly as industrialized countries. They were helped along by the influx of capital investment from Japan and the search for cheap labor by multinational corporations from across the globe. Many of the resulting enterprises are joint domestic and foreign operations. In the 1980s, the “Asian tigers” (Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore) led the world in percentage growth of gross domestic product at 7 percent a year (Berry, 1989:176), helped by the continuing demand for consumer goods—especially electronics, textiles, and clothing. This pattern of “export-led” development has also been tried successfully in Spain and Italy (see Chapter 10) among other countries. The economies of the Asian countries suffered in the Asian economic crisis beginning in 1997, but they have since rebounded—although their success has since been overshadowed by the emergence of China as a major industrial power.
An important characteristic of the economic development in Asia has been the dominant role played by the national government in promoting growth. This intervention is not restricted to subsidization of capital investment and development but also includes strong control of unions and, often, harsh methods of regulating the working-class population; unions are not allowed and child labor, low wages, and sweatshop conditions are common (Lee, 1982; Palen, 1990).
While some countries have urban systems dominated by one large primate city, China has embarked on an ambitious program to control urban growth by creating new cities and industrial areas (it is said that China creates twenty new cities each year). The development of the Asian tigers changed the dynamics of global capital investment in the 1980s; more recently China has become as competitive in manufacturing as established economies among the developed nations. While some countries have explosive growth rates that will produce increasing urban populations and environmental pressures in the decades to come, Japan has an aging population and smaller towns are disappearing as the population moves to urban areas. The Asian Pacific Rim, which is linked to Japan (see Chapter 10) as well as the United States, contains economic forces that likely will be the major sphere of power and development in the twenty-first century. We will review information concerning urbanization trends in selected Asian countries, and we will look in more detail at urban development in India and China, the two largest Asian countries.
Table 11.2 gives an overview of urbanization in selected Asian countries. Most of these countries do not show the same high levels of urbanization that we saw in the previous table for Latin America. In 2010, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines all had more than 50 percent of their population living in urban areas, but the level of urbanization in other countries, including India, Thailand, and Vietnam, was less than 30 percent. A relatively small proportion of the population lived in large cities of 1 million persons—but in these cases the apparent high level of urbanization is the result of primacy (the case of Manila in the Philippines, Bangkok in Thailand, and
TABLE 11.2 Urbanization in Selected Asian Countries, 1990-2010
the like). Interesting facts not apparent in the table include the following. In 2000, 56 percent of the population of Thailand lived in the capital city (Bangkok), and in three other countries (South Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam) one-quarter or more of the population lived in the largest city.
India and China exhibit differences in their patterns of urbanization for many reasons, including India’s colonial past and China’s long history of empire and state bureaucracy. More recently, different national policies have produced rapid change in China’s urban system, while India has seen a continuation of earlier urban growth; as in Latin America, the factors of state control and local class structure explain a great deal about development. Until the 1980s, China’s Communist government restricted the size of China’s largest cities, and this effectively controlled the growth of the largest cities. In the last decade, more than 200 million Chinese moved from rural areas into the cities, but this growth took place in many different urban centers and did not result in huge megacities or urban slums as are found in India. The current population figures for the largest cities and metropolitan areas in India and China are shown in Table 11.3 and 11.4.
Of all the rapidly growing population areas of the globe, only China seems to have controlled the rate of urbanization to match its development potential. China’s government pursues a balanced growth process of rural and urban development. Under the hukou system, the rural population is prevented by law from moving to cities (Kim, 1988). This prevents the kind of in-migration to the cities from rural areas that is common in the rest of the developing world.
Such balanced growth has had positive effects, and living in one of China’s large cities is associated with increased income, access to public services, and an improved quality of life (Bradshaw and Fraser, 1989). Beginning in the 1980s, China launched an extensive drive to integrate into the world economy, particularly by manufacturing textiles and other household and consumer goods. The government adopted rapid modernization policies that included the location of new cities and coastal development zones that have resulted in an even greater balance to urban growth, in contrast to the uneven development that has plagued other countries in the developing world (Yusuf and Saich, 2009).
China and India can also be contrasted with regard to the quality of life in their cities. Just the mention of India’s cities (Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi) conjures up images of extreme poverty that became even more familiar following the recent success of the film Slumdog Millionaire. To an extent, these images are accurate. The first two cities have large homeless populations, and all possess a declining quality of life. India’s cities are surrounded by shantytowns known as bustees that grow each day. Their presence has not prevented the city center from experiencing terrible overcrowding. The population density of Calcutta, for example, has been estimated at 45,000 residents per square kilometer, with the overwhelming majority living below the poverty line. Misery, disease, squalor, and malnutrition afflict the hordes of urban street people. The urban implosion of India is the consequence of rural
TABLE 11.3. Largest Cities and Metropolitan Regions in India, 2001–2011
| 2001 |
2011 |
|||
| City | Metro | City | Metro | |
| Mumbai | 11,978,450 | 16,434,386 | 12,478,447 | 20,748,395 |
| Delhi | 9,879,172 | 12,877,470 | 11,007,835 | 21,753,486 |
| Bangalore | 5,438,065 | 5,701,446 | 8,425,970 | 8,728,906 |
| Kolkata | 4,572,876 | 13,205,697 | 4,486,679 | 14,617,882 |
| Chennai | 4,343,645 | 6,560,242 | 4,681,087 | 8,917,749 |
| Hyderbad | 3,637,483 | 5,742,036 | 6,809,970 | 7,749,334 |
| Ahmedabad | 3,520,085 | 4,525,013 | 5,570,585 | 6,352,254 |
SOURCE: India stats: Million plus cities in India as per Census 2011. http://pibmumbai.gov.in/scripts/detail.asp?releaseId=E2011IS3.
push factors as well as urban pull. The “green revolution” that modernized India’s agriculture has been relatively successful and has led to a decline in the number of people needed to grow food in rural areas. As a result, in recent years more Indians are looking toward the cities for their livelihood.
The uncontrolled migration of people from rural areas to India’s cities, on the other hand, only makes a bad situation worse. In the 1980s, one observer noted:
The most serious problems are related directly or indirectly to the extreme shortage of housing, and to inadequacy of physical and social infrastructures to meet the needs of the urban low-and middle-income groups . . . The shortages are the principal cause of the progressive deterioration of the urban environment during the past 20–25 years. Proliferation of slums is the most visible symptom of the environmental deterioration. The other major symptom is the rapid increase in the levels of air and water pollution in or near the cities, far above the internationally accepted levels for maintaining human health and safety. (Nath, 1989:264)
From 2000 to 2007, the population of India’s five largest cities increased by 7.4 million persons, most of whom moved into the shantytowns of these megacities. The population of India’s largest urban agglomerations from 2001 to 2011 is shown in Table 11.3.
Some of India’s cities, such as Delhi, have large areas that are middle-class and quite prosperous. Bombay was planned by the British as a colonial center and retains its planned streets and residential districts that allow services to be delivered with some efficiency. It is a major center of industrial and service employment. In short, despite their declining quality of life, India’s cities are not all mired in extreme poverty and deprivation (Misra, 1978). However, the construction of new middle-class housing estates and efforts to redevelop and improve the appearance of neighborhood areas has had negative effects on many of the urban poor, as described in Box 11.4.
Box 11.4 Urban Poor Made Homeless in India’s Drive for More “Beautiful” Cities
Large areas of habitation of India’s urban poor have been forcefully taken over by city government. The groups of people affected are often the ones who have been employed in the informal sectors or are self-employed in the tertiary services sector. Their displacement has as much to do with the space they live in as with the work they perform. The areas that they occupied are being transferred into larger private corporate entities such as commercial complexes and residential developments. These units are often coupled with labor-replacing devices ranging from automatic tellers and computer-aided machines to vacuum cleaners and home delivery services, thus eliminating the work earlier done by the lower rungs of the urban population. While the driving force behind these changes is manifestly the new globalized economy, it is offered on an environmental platter of “cleanliness” and “beautification.”
In Chennai City, 40 percent of the population live in slums—69,000 families have been identified as living on government land—and they are to be relocated to areas far removed from the city. The areas vacated will be taken over by hotel resorts, commercial and residential complexes, and modern businesses. Much of the “clearance” is being undertaken in the name of “beautification” and tourism.
In Kolkata (Calcutta), Operation Sunshine evicted over 50,000 hawkers from the city’s main streets, and over 7,000 hutments were forcibly demolished along the sides of storm water drains and the metro and circular rail tracks.
In Delhi, where substandard settlements house as much as 70 percent of the city’s population, vendors, cycle rickshaws, beggars, and shanties have been “evicted,” as well as 75,000 families living on the banks of the Yamuna River. The resettlement colonies and industrial areas that were once supposed to be at the fringe of the city are now contiguous urban sprawls. Increasing numbers of poor inhabitants continue to live in shantytowns without services. Rapidly shrinking employment opportunities and crusading environmental activism have made the situation significantly worse for them. While the city gets the Clean City Award from far-off California, its own citizens grimly face critical inadequacies of work, shelter, civic amenities, and governance.
In vicious combination, these three trends are changing the urban landscape from “homes” to “estate ownerships” in the name of liberalization, privatization, and globalization. Evicting poor urban dwellers from their homes to make room for commercial and up-market developments raises several questions about the nature of planning itself. Who makes these plans? Who are they made for?
SOURCE: Adapted from Dunu Roy, “Urban Poor Increasingly Made Homeless in India’s Drive for More ‘Beautiful’ Cities,” http://www.citymayors.com/sections/development.html.
Chinese cities fared comparatively better under Communist rule. One of the first acts of the Maoist regime in the 1950s was to eradicate the poverty and prostitution endemic to the streets of Shanghai, the focal point of global colonial interests. City services throughout China are regulated by the state and function to maintain the quality of life. The Chinese government has also implemented strict measures of birth control, and most families are not permitted to have more than one child. This state policy of restricting population growth in a country of more than 1 billion people has had some success among urban households but has been less successful in the countryside.
There is a visible contrast between cities in India and cities in China, as noted in one of the first books about urbanization in China: “Slums and squatter settlements seemed absent, conspicuous consumption and foreign oriented life styles were not visible, a high degree of economic equality and security seemed to prevail, unemployment seemed absent, close-knit neighborhoods and families seemed to persist, and crime, drug addiction, prostitution, and other forms of deviance seemed minor or nonexistent” (Whyte and Parish, 1984:2–3). Twenty-five years later, despite adding more than 280 million persons to the urban areas in China, there are still low levels of unemployment, and there are no slums (World Bank, 2009).
For many decades, a household registration system (hukou) kept urban growth in check. Each person in China was assigned a residential location that defines accessibility to state-provided benefits. This policy effectively regulated rural to urban migration—one could move to the city but would not be eligible for health, education, or other services. This policy began to change in 1985 when the Ministry of Public Security authorized new regulations for the “Management of Population Living Temporarily in the Cities,” and in 1988 the Ministry of Labor recommended that impoverished provinces in the center of the country export labor to the growing industrial centers of the coastal region (Guthrie, 2010). China’s urban strategies, including the important role of the hukou are summarized in Box 11.5.
The urban system in China dates back many centuries, and the current clustering of large cities follows from a pattern of development that was evident during the imperial period (Xeh and Xu, 1984). But it has been strongly influenced by the coastal development strategy—designed in part to decentralize political power away from the more conservative voices in Beijing (Guthrie, 2010). During the 1980s and 1990s, there were a number of important policy shifts that would open China to the global economy, including the development of new industrial strategies, the creation of new economic zones that allowed firms to take advantage of tax incentives targeted to specific types of investment, aggressive export strategies, and (less obvious to the outside) the implementation of regionally specific development strategies within China itself. The 1979 Joint Venture Law was the first series of regulations that allowed foreign capital into China. This was followed in 1980 with development policies that created four special economic zones (SEZs) in Fujian province (Xiamen) and Guangdong province (Shantou, Shenzen, and Zhuhai). The special economic
Box 11.5 China's Urbanization Strategies
In the rapidly urbanizing world of the twenty-first century, China is expected to play an important role, chiefly because of its size and its speed of change. In 1980, China’s urban population was 191 million. By 2007, it was 594 million, excluding migrants. About half of China’s population now lives in cities. China’s phenomenal urbanization has become a focus of policy makers around the world, both in terms of coping strategies and the benefits and challenges the country has experienced. What are some of the strategies that have helped manage the explosive urbanization in China?
A cornerstone of China’s urbanization strategy has been the hukou, or household registration system, to control migration and channel migrants to small or mediumsize cities. There are crowded conditions but not slums in the cities. Increasingly, however, larger cities are relaxing the hukou rules, and there is an ongoing debate about the future role of this system and what it portends for migrants’ access to urban services.
There is low urban poverty and unemployment. With the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, urban poverty has been contained and is estimated at between 4 and 6 percent of the population. Despite the rapidly increasing urban population, unemployment is also low, in the 3–4 percent range.
Another key element of China’s successful urbanization is the devolution of public services and many administrative functions to city governments. In 2005, Chinese citizens’ degree of satisfaction with local governments rose to 72 percent—considerably higher than in many other countries, including the United States. China has also been frugal about its use of land space for urban development: Cities now occupy about 4.4 percent of the total land area. But urbanization has increased the income gap between villages and cities, and problems of rural poverty persist. And there are not as yet adequate services for migrants or safety nets for the poor and elderly.
While China has coped more effectively than many countries with the demands of urbanization, a number of urgent issues need to be tackled. Between now and 2025, another 200–250 million people will migrate to China’s cities. Providing jobs and infrastructure for this anticipated inflow of people poses major challenges. Rapid economic growth will remain critical. Urban residents use 3.6 times as much energy as rural residents, suggesting that energy use is far from its peak. China suffers from water scarcity, with just over 2,100 cubic meters of water available per person—one-third of the world average. The situation is more precarious in the northern part of the country, where climate change may worsen arid conditions.
SOURCE: Adapted from China’s Rapid Urbanization: Benefits, Challenges, and Strategies (World Bank, 2009).
TABLE 11.4. Largest Cities and Metropolitan Areas in China, 2000–2011
| 2000 |
2011 |
|||
| City | Metro | City | Metro | |
| Shanghai | 8,214,000 | 12,800,000 | 14,900,000 | 19,200,000 |
| Beijing | 7,362,000 | 10.800,000 | 12,460,000 | 17,550,000 |
| Tianjin | 5,855,000 | 9,300,000 | 7,500,000 | 11,750,000 |
| Hong Kong | 6,843,000 | Not available | 7,055,000 | Not available |
| Guangzhou | 3,935,000 | 3,900,000 | 6,458,000 | 10,182,000 |
| Dongguan | Not available | Not available | 6,446,000 | 7,650,000 |
| Shengyang | 4,669,000 | 4,900,000 | 5,090,000 | 7,760,000 |
| Chongging | 3,127,000 | 4,800,000 | 5,087,000 | 9,700,000 |
| Wuhan | 4,040,000 | 5,700,000 | 4,500,000 | 6,200,000 |
| Chengdu | 2,954,000 | 3,400,000 | 4,334,000 | 11,000,000 |
| Shenzhen | Not available | Not available | 4,320,000 | 8,616,000 |
| Nanjing | 2,678,000 | 2,800,000 | 4,150,000 | 7,600,000 |
| Changchun | 2,192,000 | 3,000,000 | 3,581,000 | 7,460,000 |
| Hangzhou | Not available | Not available | 3,408,000 | 6,776,000 |
SOURCE: Adapted from United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, Urban Agglomerations 2003; and City Mayors, The World's Largest Cities 2011, http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-mayors-1.html.
zones were designed to increase investment and foreign trade in the eastern and southern provinces, granting the coastal regions greater autonomy for export trade.
The economic reforms and industrial policies have produced four main urban agglomerations:
Liaodong Peninsula (Shenyang-Dalian): Shenyang in the north and Dalian in the south are the dominant cities in this region; Shenyang is the major industrial town and Dalian is the major port. Other cities include Anshan, Fushun, Benxi, and Liaoyang.
Beijing-Tianjin: Beijing (the capital city) and Tianjin are the dominant cities of this cluster located in the Yellow River valley. Other important cities of the region include Tanggu and Tangshan.
Yangtze River Delta (Nanjing-Shanghai-Hangzhou): Shanghai (the largest city in China) is the dominant city of this cluster, which also includes the industrial centers of Nanjing and Hangzhou.
Pearl River Delta: The former British colony of Hong Kong and the older Chinese city of Guangzhou are the dominant cities in this region.
Cities located within these clusters are connected by railway, expressway, and canals and are dominated by heavy industry. The Beijing-Tianjin and Liaodong Peninsula regions contain China’s metal, machinery, petrochemical, and industrial centers. Newer cities have emerged within these clusters, including Dongguan, Shenzhen, and Zhuhai in the Pearl River Delta, and Changzhou in the Yangtze River Delta.
FIGURE 11.2 The Shanghai Tower. The three tallest buildings in the world are located in cities in the developing nations. SOURCE: Rensler Architects.
The cluster city development promoted by the Chinese government has allowed Chinese cities to link with other Asian countries on the Pacific Rim and form urban corridors that are expected to be the major centers of urban growth in the Pacific Rim in the coming decades (Choe, 1998; Yusuf and Nabeshim, 2009). One example of this is the Beijing-Seoul-Tokyo (BESETO) Urban Corridor that links important manufacturing areas across three countries (China, Korea, and Japan) with emerging world markets across Asia, the United States, and Europe; interestingly, the corridor also links countries with older established manufacturing (Japan), one of the Asian Tigers (Korea), and the new manufacturing giant (China).
As a result of these development policies, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, foreign investment in China dwarfed that of Japan in comparable development periods. While many in the West would complain that Chinese markets were closed to foreign producers, the foreign investment regime was more liberal than that of either Japan or South Korea, and manufacturers in other Asian countries moved their production to China to take advantage of even cheaper labor (Guthrie, 2010:121). As the film documentary China Rising (2006) demonstrates, even older Chinese workers who found stable employment in the factory system of the Communist era have been displaced by low-wage labor in the emerging industrial centers.
Of all the continents, Africa presents the clearest case of the overurbanization/underurbanization dilemma. For the most part, the poverty, overurbanizationization, and political instability endemic to this region reflect a legacy of years of colonial rule (Simon, 1989) and the Cold War policies of the United States and the Soviet Union in the period that followed. South of the Sahara Desert, the primate cities were all founded as trading centers and located near the coasts or with easy access by water to the coast. Some countries, such as Nigeria, have a moderately developed urban hierarchy containing several cities: Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, and Oshogbo. However, most countries, such as Kenya, are classic cases of primate city development. Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, with a population of 3.1 million persons accounts for some 40 percent of the country’s urban population. Here, as in most of Africa, the intermediate level of the urban hierarchy (i.e., cities with populations greater than 100,000 but less than 1 million) is notably absent.
Africa contains fifty-four separate countries, and it is difficult to generalize about the scale of development or urbanization. The north, which contains Arab countries, is highly urbanized. In 2010, 85 percent of the Libyan population and 59 percent of Morocco’s population were living in cities. Egypt contains one of the world’s most populated cities, Cairo, with an urban area of nearly 11.9 million people. Other sub-Saharan countries have rates of urbanization of between 40 and 50 percent, although countries in eastern and central Africa generally have lower levels of urbanization, and in several cases urban growth for the last decade or more has been slowed or even declined due to political instability and conflict in countries such as Ethiopia and Sudan. Table 11.5 provides information on urbanization for selected African countries from 1990 to 2010.
Years of dominance and economic exploitation by colonial powers, coupled with political conflict and poor local leadership, have left many African countries in an undeveloped state. Most are dominated by a large primate city modeled after their European contemporaries. The center consists of wide boulevards loaded with traffic and passing in between high skyscrapers built in the common “international style” of the developed West at the end of the twentieth century. Affluent natives and the foreign community make their home there. Beyond the glitter domes of development, the core is surrounded by mile upon mile of shantytowns—the most
TABLE 11.5 Urbanization in Selected African Countries, 1990-2010
depressing agglomeration of ersatz housing imaginable—where entire families follow a precarious existence and involve themselves in the formal and informal economy in an effort to acquire some meager portion of the wealth circulating through the center (Simone, 2011).
Many African countries continue to rely on natural resources and tourism for economic growth, but ongoing political conflicts have discouraged travel to many countries. With the discovery and exploitation of oil resources in the 1970s, Nigeria acquired considerable capital, as did Libya. However, most countries remain locked in the grip of poverty, with limited industrial schemes and weak rural economies. Without agricultural development in the rural areas, migration to the cities is an inevitable result. Extensive squatter settlements, or bidonvilles, have been characteristic of urban development for decades (Aina, 1990; Schlyter, 1990).
Arab cities are also scenes of uneven development. Cairo is known for its cosmopolitan population but also for its squatter settlements, such as the inhabitants of the immense cemetery, the City of the Dead, or the people known as the zebaleen, who live off of other people’s garbage at the massive city dump (Abu-Lughod, 1969). Most Arab countries have medium-size cities and have not experienced a large rural exodus because their hinterlands have always been sparsely settled. The oil kingdoms of the Middle East have utilized their great wealth to create cities with modern architecture, such as Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. These cities have been designed to showcase the wealth of the Arab states and to attract wealthy tourists from Europe; built with a workforce recruited from other Middle Eastern countries and from southern Asia, they are dependent on the oil industry monoculture.
Many countries in the developing world have been mired in a vicious cycle of overurbanization/underurbanization for many decades. The failure of agricultural development in rural areas means future populations face starvation or migration. The limited success of urban economic growth and the toxic effects of the World Bank and other institutions’ efforts to install free market trade policies means that cities in the developing nations, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, will continue to play a marginal role in the global economy. Without balanced policies of development, these countries will face a bleak future. The issue is not simply growth and industrial development financed by developed nations. Rather, there is a need for linked policies that improve agricultural production on the one hand and urban economies on the other. Especially in places such as Asia and Africa, it is essential that rural populations be stabilized so that the migration pressures on cities can be relieved. Yet development that is led simply by global capital investment will not head countries in that much-needed direction.
For example, in the 1980s the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund encouraged developing countries to build enterprise zones of manufacturing that would capture global investment. However, this development has come at a price because much of the labor force in developing countries consists of young women between sixteen and twenty-five. The movement of young women from their home villages to secure employment in the city disrupts traditional family structures. These women once constituted the backbone of traditional agriculture. With the young female population working in factories, rural agriculture in many countries is on the verge of collapse. The decline of rural economies pushes more and more people into the cities or, in the case of Mexico, to move across national borders.
Shantytowns are growing rapidly in response to continued population expansion. São Paulo, Brazil, and Calcutta, India, have millions of residents in their favellas and bustees, while Mexico City’s colonias populares (irregular settlements) are said to contain as much as 60 percent of the city’s population (estimated at 18 million in 2000). The pattern of shantytown/central core uneven development is the exact opposite of what is found in developed nations, where there are maturing and relatively affluent suburbs surrounding a declining urban core. But more important, the gap between the wealthy and the majority of the population is quite enormous.
For the most part, governments in developing nations have failed to achieve a better quality of life for their citizens. The passion of the people in developing nations manifests itself as a political clash between the fortunate few backed by the government and the afflicted and disadvantaged. As the urban population in these countries grows to some 5 billion persons in the next twenty years, with a majority having incomes below the poverty line and living in massive urban slums, the demands for social reform are likely to increase. While China has charted a separate course for economic development and managed urban growth, it is unlikely that the expansion of global capitalism will be able to meet the needs of persons in developing nations. For the immediate future, the response of people and governments in the developed world will likely focus on repairing the economic turmoil that began with the housing crisis in the United States and that has left national, state, and local governments around the globe with few resources for programs in their own communities, much less in the developing world.
uneven development
megacity
colonialism
internationalization of capital
demographic transition
primate city
informal economy
crony capitalism
overurbanization / underurbanization
1. The global economic system is increasingly important to the developing nations. Discuss the relationship between the two. In what ways has modernization theory changed because of the influence of the global system?
2. Discuss the importance of demographic change in studying urbanization in the developing world. How is urbanization in these countries different from that found in developed nations?
3. Urbanization in developing countries is often characterized by the dominance of a primate city, overurbanization, shantytown development, and the important role of the informal economy. Define and discuss these concepts and give an example of each.
4. Discuss how urban social movements in developing countries have addressed poverty, uneven development, women’s rights, and other social issues.
5. What are some of the important differences in urban development in Latin America, Asia, and Africa? What factors might account for these differences? Which theoretical model (dependency theory, modernization theory, world systems theory, or the sociospatial model) might best explain these differences?
6. China has charted a new course for economic growth and management of urban growth. How was this accomplished? What are the consequences for the development of the urban system?