An urbanising world

No one really knows at which point a majority of the world's population will become urban. Has it already occurred? Will it happen in the next decade? In 1950, only 18 per cent of the people in developing countries lived in cities. By 2000, this exceeded 40 per cent, and the numbers continue to rise.

In any case, the distinction between urban and rural is hard to sustain. Few areas of the world have remained closed to the influence of industrial society. Not only is agriculture more and more dominated by industrial inputs, but contemporary communications systems ensure that the imagery of the metropolis penetrates more and more deeply into the consciousness and imagination of country people everywhere.

In Asia, the spread of cities has been phenomenal, and is still accelerating. China, in particular, whose celebrated economic success has been paid for by spectacular environmental destruction and a dramatic increase in inequality, is a country where it is widely estimateed that well over 100 million people are in a state of more or less perpetual migration between country and city. In the poor world, the urban growth rate is 2.35 per cent a year, whereas in the rich world it is a modest 0.4 per cent.

Few cities are prepared for this expansion. Neither national nor local governments have planned to provide the necessary extra land, housing, water, sanitation, work and waste disposal. Legal frameworks are inadequate and defective, especially in relation to land markets, including land registry, valuation and legal instruments to make the acquisition of land easier.

UN estimates of urban growth have repeatedly exaggerated the rate of development. 'Urban' is in any case a confusing definition, for it refers not only to cities but to big towns, market towns and even industrial villages. Projections of population growth in developing countries also serve as a diversion from the consumption and waste-generation rates of the rich world. In 1979 the United Nations predicted that by 2000 the population of Mexico City would be 31.6 million, of Sao Paulo 26 million and of Kolkata 20 million. Extrapolations from the recent past ignore social and economic change: the deindustrialisation of both Sao Paulo and Kolkata was not foreseen. In China, rapid urbanisation took place from 1949-60, but the cultural revolution deurbanised the country, as people were forced into new settlements. After 1977, urbanisation rose rapidly, and it has accelerated since, so that established urban settlements are being swept away to accommodate infrastructural developments and newcomers. The urban poor suffer disproportionately, especially in prestigious and capital cities: Beijing has been expanded in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, pushing migrants further from the centre.

It also became taken for granted in the 1950s and 1960s that 'urban bias' attracted people to cities: subsidised food, the availability of services and the infrastructure were seen as inducements to people to leave the countryside. It is true that average income of cities remains higher than that of rural areas, but conditions and the quality of life for some groups of urban poor are now worse than those of many rural people. It may be that a promise of wealth and the possibility of improvement draw people to urban areas, but the actual experience is often of declining health and new kinds of impoverishment.

Jorge E. Hardoy and David Satterthwaite insist each city must be looked at according to its specific history and circumstances. Some cities in Africa are now growing a large proportion of their own food, and rather than the city invading the rural hinterland, the countryside is imposing itself upon the city. Lusaka and Dar es Salaam, for example, have become more, not less, self-provisioning.

Cities also die: Delhi is the site of eight former cities. Mahasthangarh, now in Bangladesh, is a ruin of a major conurbation from the first millennium before the Christian era. More than four millennia ago, the southern portion of Mesopotamia had already become 80 per cent urban in the cities of Sumeria. In 1600 Salvador/Bahia was the largest city in Brazil, when Sao Paulo was a small frontier town. Potosi, with its silver mines, was the biggest city in South America: in 1640 it had an estimated 140,000 people. The fate of cities is far from uniform – dramatic growth awaits some, and rapid collapse perhaps lies in store for others.

Towns and cities may also be destroyed. The South Asian earthquake of 2005 destroyed large parts of Muzaffarbad in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Brigitte Overtop, an Oxfam worker, describes what she saw:

In many streets nothing is left. Every school has collapsed. Hotels, hospitals, banks and homes have been razed to the ground. About 70 per cent of the people are homeless. There is no water and no electricity. We have to wear masks over our noses and mouths because the stench of rotting human flesh is almost too much to bear. People roam the streets dazed. Many of them are women and children. Many people came from surrounding areas to seek help.

Apart from the scene of desolation, the destruction of a city of some 600,000 people illuminated how far the surrounding rural area was dependent upon the city: the life of the whole region was disrupted.

Agricultural 'improvement' is inseparable from the growth of cities: patterns of land ownership, the dominant crop or livestock, the role of intermediaries in marketing cash-crops, diversion of land to other purposes by developmental imperatives, all undermine a self-reliance which has, in any case, already been much reduced. The Green Revolution, with its intensifying industrialisation of agriculture, increased productivity but impoverished many small farmers over the long term. Landholdings become more concentrated, as small-scale farmers sell their land, unable to keep up with the cost of agricultural inputs.

The need to increase agricultural exports to earn foreign exchange sets poor countries in competition with one another to produce the same products, and prices decline continuously. The dumping of subsidised agricultural goods from the North – rice, wheat, cotton – makes many local growers uncompetitive, and they quit cultivation. The compulsory purchase of land for plantations, cattle-ranches and agribusiness often leads to the employment of former subsistence farmers as wage labourers. Land reform, good agricultural productivity and agro-processing opportunities may reduce rural-urban migration, but so far the only significant reverse in the one-way traffic towards the city has been the flight of the rich from the cities, as they reclaim the peace and tranquillity of partially abandoned rural areas.

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