Urbanization in the Global South

Perspectives and Challenges

Kala S Sridhar, George Mavrotas, Kala S Sridhar, George Mavrotas

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000426366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the challenges of urbanization in the global south and the linkages between urbanization, economic development and urban poverty from the perspectives of cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

It focuses on various aspects of urbanization ranging from food security and public services like sanitation, water and electricity to the finances of cities and externalities associated with the urbanization process. The volume also highlights the importance of participatory urban governance for cities in India with comparative perspectives from other countries. It further focuses on the urbanization of poverty, livelihood in urban areas, overconsumption and nutrition and ecology. Based on primary data, the chapters in the volume review trends, opportunities, challenges, governance and strategies of several countries at different levels of urbanization, with several case studies from India.

This multidisciplinary volume will be of great interest to researchers and students of development studies, sociology, economics and urban planning and policy. It will also be useful for policymakers, think tanks and practitioners in the area of urbanization.

1 Challenges of urbanization in the global south

Introduction and overview

Kala S. Sridhar and George Mavrotas

DOI: 10.4324/9781003093282-1

The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city.

(Khanna, Foreign Policy, September 2010: 122, emphasis added)

As Nobel Laureate Michael Spence has rightly argued, “urbanization is never a pretty process – it was not in the Industrial Revolution in England, and it is not now – but it is certainly important” (Spence, 2011). But what is really a “city” and how can it be defined? To quote Alan Beattie in his book False Economy (2009),

a successful city is a hard thing to build, and a world-class one even harder. But incompetent or wrong-headed governments have stunted and even destroyed so many in the past that complacency and fatalism in the face of urbanization are profoundly misplaced.

Edward Glaeser, in his celebrated and thought-provoking book The Triumph of the City (2011), argues that “at their heart, cities are the absence of physical space between people and firms; they enable connections and that makes them more productive.” Saskia Sassen has also rightly argued that

cities are complex systems. But they are incomplete systems. In this incompleteness lies the possibility of making – making the urban, the political, the civic, a history, an economy. To what extent do we need to see the complex city as a sort of new frontier zone for the circulation of development processes and for the making of new types of economies? In other words, can cities and their growing presence add something specific to the larger question of development? Can the city function as a sort of algorithm where information, knowledge, policies, experience, many coming from rural experiences, all flow in and then exit strengthened by redistributive and civic logics, both key features of cities?

(Sassen, 2012)

The focus of this volume is the global south, given these countries account for a majority of the world’s population, but significantly less proportion of world income, consisting of Africa, rapidly emerging Asia and Latin America. This is quite in contrast to the high-income countries of the global north such as the United States, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.

Indeed, despite the fine work of a small cadre of pioneers in the economics of the developing world on cities, the overwhelming bulk of urban economics research has focused on the developed world in general and the United States in particular. At the same time, the urbanization experience (and the policy challenges faced by policymakers) of the various regions in the developing world vary substantially. In South Asia, one of the central questions in recent years is whether the urban model of East Asia can be replicated, i.e. cities investing not only in traditional infrastructure but also in social infrastructure. Violence and conflict have also been associated in recent work with the engine of growth thesis regarding urbanization, a distinct feature of the urbanization process in many cities in Latin America. Furthermore, globalization has resulted in growing competition amongst cities in South Asia as compared to nation-states, i.e. Mumbai and Bengaluru are possibly more relevant to business than India as a country. Finally, for Africa, although urbanization is a rather recent phenomenon, the prospect of this continent’s urban population doubling over the next two decades presents various challenges but also opportunities for the region (Glaeser, 2011; Glaeser and Mavrotas, 2011).

Of course, urban concentration has historically enabled the flows of knowledge, the division of labor, the movement of goods and the combination of labor and capital that help transform poor places into rich ones. There is undoubtedly evidence that urbanization leads to a number of positive externalities such as sharing and learning which cities encourage and entail, due to the density contained in them (Glaeser, 1999; Duranton and Puga, 2004); Carlino et al., 2007). Sridhar (2019) found that urbanization in India led to increased earnings for employees at various managerial levels, due to their higher productivity. Accounting for the two-way relationship between urbanization and the rural–urban income ratio, Sridhar (2019) reported that urbanization increased urban–rural inequalities initially in the country, but at higher levels reduced them. Further, it was found that urbanization benefited rural development given remittances are continuously made from the urban to the rural economy by migrants. Finally, urbanization did not lead to reduced agricultural output, although the land devoted to agriculture was the same. In this sense, urbanization may be just viewed as the process by which mechanization increases agricultural output, by removing excess labor who presumably migrate to the urban areas. Chen et al. (2019) reported a very similar and symmetric finding for China.

In addition to its positive externalities, urbanization also creates enormous challenges and negative externalities, including contagious disease, congestion and crime that often seem to be far beyond the capacities of many governments in the developing world. Urban poverty is also emerging as a central challenge in this important research and policy area. Is the urbanization process per se the one that produces unavoidable poverty traps or is it that the continuous migration to cities of very poor people for which states and municipalities fail to timely endow them with a minimum stock of public goods, the overwhelming dominant phenomenon for the stickiness and resilience of poverty enclaves? Obviously, reducing the costs of these externalities will improve the quality of life in poor cities and also enable those cities to expand and live up to their full economic potential (Glaeser, 2011).

With continued urbanization, the numbers of the urban poor are predicted to rise and poverty will increasingly be an urban phenomenon. Urban poverty can be defined with different facets: income poverty (urban poor live on less than a dollar per day), urban hunger (the rate of malnutrition in emerging and largely in developing countries) and the issue of food security, which is more serious among the urban poor than the rural. Furthermore, informal sector employment and underemployment, informal settlements with inadequate facilities and absence of land entitlement, quality of services below desired standards and at relatively high cost along with exclusionary provisioning of services have aggravated urban poverty.¹

In this context, “urbanization without development” (Arimah, 2010) is common in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia. It is also characterized by rapid urban growth in the face of economic stagnation, poor agricultural performance (implying push migration to urban areas), rising unemployment, financially weak municipalities, poor governance and the absence of coherent urban planning policy.² Having said that, it is equally important to remember that Rio de Janeiro has plenty of poverty but this is not comparable to the poverty levels of Brazil’s rural northeast.³ Similarly, Lagos, Nigeria, is often depicted as a place of profound deprivation, but in fact, the extreme poverty rate in Lagos, when corrected for higher prices in the city, is less than half the extreme poverty rate in rural Nigeria (Glaeser, 2011).

Ravallion, Chen and Sangraula (2007) estimated that one-third of all urban residents are poor, while Baker (2008) stressed that many of these urban poor are in small cities and towns where the incidence of poverty tends to be higher than in big cities (Baker, 2008). Having said that, it is equally important to remind ourselves what Plato said 2,500 years ago, namely that “any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich.” In this context, almost every city in every developing country has its concentrations of poverty, its shantytowns (Glaeser, 2011). It has also been rightly argued that despite the negative impacts of urbanization on the prevalence of slums, urbanization needs to be perceived as a positive phenomenon and a precondition for improving access to services as well as economic and social opportunities (Arimah, 2010). Yet, this presents a major challenge for forward-looking urban planning policies in the global south, since the absence of adequate planning has led to increased poverty, the proliferation of slums and informal settlements, inadequate and unequal distribution of water and power supply as well as degrading environmental conditions (UN-Habitat, 2009).

The overall nexus between social capital and urbanization is equally important. Glaeser and Redlick (2009) and Whiteley (2000) discuss the links between social capital and growth. In the developing world, urban social capital may be particularly important in determining the quality of life. The poor neighborhoods of many Indian cities are fairly safe, not because of excellent policing, but because the neighborhood is connected and looks after its own.⁴

In this volume, we focus on India, China and Nepal in emerging Asia, Nigeria in Africa, and Latin American cities in general. This group of countries, while populous and demographically young, is characterized by certain unique features, which have accompanied their rapid growth in the recent decades. The first and foremost characteristic that is unique to countries of the global south is an empirical truth which has been observed by Annez and Buckley (2009) that few countries of the world have reached a per capita income of $10,000 without becoming at least 60 percent urban. Given these countries such as India, China, Nigeria and those in Latin America have rapidly grown recently, it must be the case that urbanization had an important role to play, given the mutually reinforcing effects between the two.

Although this volume originated from an international conference on megacities organized in Bengaluru, India in October 2018, we subsequently invited a rather substantial number of chapters from people outside of the conference, as there is a major gap in the literature on understanding the challenges from the perspective of the global south, taking into account those at different levels of urbanization. This volume focuses not just on issues of poverty, governance and climate change but also on food and nutrition and intra-urban spatial inequalities in the provision of basic services.

While the urbanization challenges presented in the volume are primarily from India, there are perspectives from other countries and regions of the global south – Nepal, Nigeria, China and Latin America. While Latin America represents one of the world’s most urbanized regions, Nepal is one of the world’s least urbanized regions. While China’s urbanization has had a chequered history, urbanization in India, although it is continuously occurring and presenting major challenges along with opportunities, is low, primarily due to its conservative definition (see Sridhar, 2020). With a population of over 180 million, Nigeria has the largest population in Africa with a high population of youth and an increasing rate of youth unemployment and underemployment, which are expected to have a strong influence on the urbanization process (Adesugba and Mavrotas, 2016; Moriconi-Ebrand et al., 2016). This volume has chapters from each of these countries, even though the volume is focused on India and there are a number of chapters whose focus is on Bengaluru.

The aims and objectives of this volume are as follows:

1. Review the challenges of urbanization from the perspective of the global south and understand if the challenges for countries at different levels of urbanization are the same.
2. Delve deeper into the relationship between urbanization, economic development, poverty and food and nutrition security and externalities.
3. Examine the status and impact of finances and basic urban services such as water supply and transport, with continuing sprawl of cities in India and Latin America.
4. Understand the status of sanitation, hygiene behavior and their implications for the urban poor.
5. Attempt to understand the challenges of urban governance and what they mean for policy interventions in countries of the global south.

In particular, we would like to highlight peculiar characteristics of urbanization in the countries we have studied here. China has had a very chequered history of urbanization, which has been rapid only recently, and now stands at 56 percent. Sridhar and Jingfeng (2020) provide a comparison of urbanization, along with their social and environmental effects, across India and China. With a population of over 180 million, an annual population growth rate of 2.6 percent and a projected population of 264 million by 2030, Nigeria has the largest population in Africa with a high population of youth and an increasing rate of youth unemployment and underemployment. These demographic trends are expected to have a very strong influence on the urbanization process in Nigeria (Mavrotas, 2018; Adesugba and Mavrotas, 2016).⁵ While Nepal is one of the world’s least urbanized regions, Latin America is one of the most urbanized. Against this background, we summarize the challenges of urbanization from this perspective, across the most urbanized and least urbanized countries of the global south.

At 31 percent urbanization, India is perceived to be largely a country of villages, but this is an artifact of its conservative definition which bases it on population size and population density, in addition to non-agricultural employment. Sridhar (2020) finds that if India were to be more liberal in its definition of urbanization, it would be more than half urban even as of 2011. These results are consistent with those from the Government of India’s midterm Economic Survey released in 2017, which is more than double the urbanization rate estimated by the 2011 Census of India.

Another challenge of urbanization in the global south is related to urban sprawl. As the World Bank (2017) points out, cities have a strong tendency to sprawl beyond their administrative boundari...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword: Urbanization in the Global South: Perspectives and Challenges
• Preface
• 1 Challenges of urbanization in the global south: Introduction and overview
• 2 Linkage between urbanization, economic development and urban poverty
• 3 Urbanization, livestock ownership, food security and child nutritional outcomes in Nigeria: Linkages and pathways
• 4 Impact of tanks and canals on livelihood security and implications for migration into cities: Study of the Bengaluru metropolis
• 5 Financial status of megacities in India: Emerging issues and challenges
• 6 Suburbanization and spatial inequality in the distribution of urban services in Indian cities
• 7 Urban civic service delivery and norms: A pilot study of two Indian cities
• 8 Water resource management by using system dynamics in Ahmedabad City
• 9 Reducing the water footprint of megacities in Asia: Addressing water reuse and groundwater recharge (case study of Delhi, India)
• 10 Sanitation, hygiene behavior and health implications: A situation analysis of slums in Bengaluru
• 11 Rapid urbanization in Nepal: What does it mean for public open space?
• 12 The air pollution conundrum in Delhi: Agenda setting in environmental policy and the politics of solution-making
• 13 The peri-urban poor and ecology in the megacity of Kolkata
• 14 State of local governance and urban development problems: A study of Bengaluru
• 15 Citizen participation in Shanghai’s urban redevelopment under state-led neoliberal urbanism
• 16 Immunization for megacities: Issues and strategies to reach urban poor in Bangalore
• 17 Enhancing the benefits of agglomeration in Latin American megacities: The role of urban policies and a framework for policy action
• Index