The City in the Developing World

Robert B. Potter, Sally Lloyd-Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317879671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The City in the Developing World is a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to urbanisation in developing countries. The goal of this text is to place an understanding of the developing world city in its wider global context. First, this is done by developing the concept of social surplus product as a key to understanding the character of the contemporary Third World city. Second, throughout this text, the city in developing areas is centrally placed in the context of global, social, economic, political and cultural change. Thus, the important themes of globalisation, modernity and postmodernity are examined both in relation to the structure of sets of towns and cities which make up the national or regional urban system, and in respect of ideas and concepts dealing with the morphology, structure and social patterning of individual urban areas. The City in the Developing World is a core text for second and third year undergraduates in the fields of geography, development studies, planning, economics and the social sciences, taking options which deal with development issues, development theory, gender and development and Third World development.

Chapter 1

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The nature and scale of urbanisation in the developing world

Introduction

One of the most frequently cited statistics summarising the process of urbanisation which is currently being experienced in the so-called developing world is that the towns and cities of these poorer countries are receiving a staggering 45 million new urban inhabitants each and every year. This vast number of new city dwellers in the poorer countries of the world – amounting to somewhere in the region of 125,000 new urban citizens a day worldwide – is the outcome of high levels of rural-to-urban migration in combination with high rates of natural increase of the population. By comparison, approximately 7 million urban residents are added on an annual basis to the towns and cities in the countries of the more developed world.

The scale of this process of urbanisation is difficult to comprehend in respect of the numbers of houses, water connections, schools, clinics, hospital beds and jobs that will be required over the coming decades in the more impoverished countries of the world. Quite simply, we are living through what can only be described as a record-breaking era: one during which the world has experienced its fastest ever rate of urbanisation. The level of urbanisation pertaining to a region, nation or any other territory is measured as the proportion of the total population that is to be found living in towns and cities, however these are defined, but normally following local definitions. Between 1950 and 2025, a period of some 75 years, the overall level of world urbanisation will have increased from 29 to 61 per cent. The half-way point at which 50 per cent of the world’s population is to be found living in urban places is set to be passed shortly after the year 2000. Between 1960 and 1970, the world’s urban population grew by 16.8 per cent. From 1970 to 1980, it increased again by 16.9 per cent. If the same rate were to have continued from 1980 onward, the world would have been totally urbanised by the year 2031, a period of just over 50 years. Such is the magnitude of the urban processes which is to be faced as we enter the twenty-first century.

These few illustrative statistics demonstrate that urbanisation and urban growth are occurring much more rapidly in the developing world than they did in the more developed world regions during the heyday of the Industrial Revolution. Later in this introductory chapter, statistics showing the rate of urbanisation in the various continental regions making up both the more developed and less developed world between now and the first quarter of the twenty-first century will be considered in detail. But before that, the changing history of world urbanisation which has just been sketched out in the broadest of terms, will be amplified more fully.

The magnitude of the developmental pressures presented by the current global urban process is perhaps put in more accessible terms by a hypothetical scenario which was presented in the news magazine Newsweek, under the admittedly very alarmist title ‘An age of nightmare cities: flood tides of humanity will create mammoth urban problems for the Third World’:

It is a sweltering afternoon in the year 2000, in the biggest city ever seen on earth. Twenty-eight million people swarm about an 8-mile-wide mass of smoky slums, surrounding walled-in, high-rise islands of power and wealth. Half the city’s work force is unemployed, most of the rich have fled and many of the poor have never even seen downtown. In a nameless, open-sewer shanty-town, the victims of yet another cholera epidemic are dying slowly, without any medical attention. Across the town, the water truck fails to arrive for the third straight day; police move in with tear gas to quell one more desultory riot. And at a score of gritty plazas around the city, groaning buses from the parched countryside empty a thousand more hungry peasants into what they think is their city of hope. (Newsweek, 31 October 1993, p. 26)

Historical perspectives on world urbanization

As noted by the Brandt Report (1980) North–South: a Programme for Survival, together with poverty and overpopulation, urbanisation is one of the most significant processes affecting human societies in the twentieth century. Until recent times, urbanisation was almost universally seen as a direct indication of modernisation, development and economic growth. Throughout history, industrialisation and urbanisation have tended to occur together. But this simple monotonie relationship which has held for more than 6000 years, since the emergence of the very first cities, has changed quite fundamentally over the past four decades.

The world is currently experiencing an entirely new era of urbanisation. Today, it is the nations which make up the developing world which are experiencing the highest rates of urbanisation. How and why has this come about? In order to address this question, we need to look briefly at the whole history of world urbanisation.

The first settlements that can be referred to as urban date from the so-called Urban Revolution. This followed the Neolithic Revolution, which occurred in the Middle East some 10,000–8000 BC. It is important to understand the precise processes involved in this transition to urban living, for they are essentially the same forces that serve to shape the overall pattern of urbanisation in the contemporary global context. Accordingly, these processes are examined in detail at the beginning of Chapter 2.

For many centuries after the development of the first cities, the overall level of world urbanisation increased only very slowly and the urban areas which existed were small and effectively local in scope (Figure 1.1a and b). After the Urban Revolution, the subsequent history of urbanisation in the Middle East and Europe was complex and probably involved elements of both independent invention and spatial diffusion. However, it was with the rise of the great empires of the Greeks and the Romans, and to a lesser extent the Muslims, that urban life spread widely across Europe. The primary diffusion of the city that occurred under the Greeks was intensified under the Roman Empire in the first three centuries AD (Pounds, 1969). However, city life declined with the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD. In fact, it was not until the tenth and eleventh centuries that city development became important once more, and it was the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that saw the rise of the medieval city, based on increasing local and long-distance trade. By the end of the Middle Ages, most of the major European cities of today were already in existence.

Figure 1.1 A summary of global urbanisation, 10,000 BC to 2000 AD (source: Potter, 1985).

Table 1.1 Stages in the evolution of human societies

Stage no.	Stage	Approximate time period
1	Reciprocal societies	Up to 10,000 BC
2	Rank redistribution	10,000 to 3500 BC
3	Money-exchange systems	Up to 1400 AD
4	Mercantile societies	1492–1800
5	Capitalism: industrial and late	1850–2000+

Source: after Johnston, 1980; Polanyi, 1968; Harvey, 1973

Understanding these and subsequent developments requires a brief overview of the development of human societies and the rise of the world economy. In his book City and Society: An Outline for Urban Geography, Ron Johnston (1980) recognised five broad epochs in the evolution of society: reciprocity, rank redistribution, money-exchange, mercantilism, and capitalism (both industrial and late), as summarised in Table 1.1.

The initial stage of the Reciprocal Society, the details of which will be fully explained in the next chapter, was synonymous with the first small societies that were of limited territorial extent. These settlement groupings were fully egalitarian and were based on consensus and democratic forms of decisionmaking. In them, exchange was based on reciprocal principles and no power or elite group existed. Such societies were pre-urban in all respects. Where productivity increased and a surplus product was first stored, the egalitarian structure of society broke down, being replaced by a rank-ordering of the members of society. At the same time, goods and labour were redistributed among members, so that the stage is referred to as that of ‘Rank Redistribution’. This is synonymous with the Urban Revolution, and the first emergence of military and religious power. Precisely why and how this should have occurred is considered in depth in Chapter 2.

Subsequently, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of plates
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The nature and scale of urbanisation in the developing world
• Chapter 2 Third World urbanisation and development: theoretical perspectives
• Chapter 3 National urban systems and global development
• Chapter 4 National urban development strategies
• Chapter 5 Urbanisation and basic needs: education, health and food
• Chapter 6 The structure and morphology of cities in developing areas: can we generalise?
• Chapter 7 Housing and shelter in Third World cities: rags and riches
• Chapter 8 Employment and work in the developing world city
• Chapter 9 Cities and environmental sustainability in the developing world
• Chapter 10 The future of the city in the developing world: the policy agenda
• References
• Index