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The dynamics of Third World urbanization both recapitulate and confound the precedents of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe and North America. In China the greatest industrial revolution in history is the Archimedean lever shifting a population the size of Europe’s from rural villages to smog-choked, sky-climbing cities: since the market reforms of the late 1970s it is estimated that more than 200 million Chinese have moved from rural areas to cities. Another 250 or 300 million people – the next “peasant flood” – are expected to follow in coming decades.³⁴ As a result of this staggering influx, 166 Chinese cities in 2005 (as compared to only 9 US cities) had populations of more than 1 million.³⁵ Industrial boomtowns such as Dongguan, Shenzhen, Fushan City and Chengchow are the postmodern Sheffields and Pittsburghs. As the Financial Times recently pointed out, within a decade “China [will] cease to be the predominantly rural country it has been for millennia.”³⁶ Indeed, the great oculus of the Shanghai World Financial Centre may soon look out upon a vast urban world little imagined by Mao or, for that matter, Le Corbusier.

Figure 4.³⁷ China’s Industrial Urbanization

(percent urban)

It is also unlikely that anyone fifty years ago could have envisioned that the squatter camps and war ruins of Seoul would metamorphose at breakneck speed (a staggering 11.4 percent per annum during the 1960s) into a megalopolis as large as greater New York – but, then again, what Victorian could have envisioned a city like Los Angeles in 1920? However, as unpredictable as its specific local histories and urban miracles, contemporary East Asian urbanization, accompanied by a tripling of per capita GDP since 1965, preserves a quasi-classical relationship between manufacturing growth and urban migration. Eighty percent of Marx’s industrial proletariat now lives in China or somewhere outside of Western Europe and the United States.³⁸

In most of the developing world, however, city growth lacks the powerful manufacturing export engines of China, Korea, and Taiwan, as well as China’s vast inflow of foreign capital (currently equal to half of total foreign investment in the entire developing world). Since the mid-1980s, the great industrial cities of the South – Bombay, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, Belo Horizonte and São Paulo – have all suffered massive plant closures and tendential deindustrialization. Elsewhere, urbanization has been more radically decoupled from industrialization, even from development per se and, in sub-Saharan Africa, from that supposed sine qua non of urbanization, rising agricultural productivity. The size of a city’s economy, as a result, often bears surprisingly little relationship to its population size, and vice versa. Figure 5 illustrates this disparity between population and GDP rankings for the largest metropolitan areas.

Figure 5.³⁹ Population versus GDP: Ten Largest Cities

Some would argue that urbanization without industrialization is an expression of an inexorable trend: the inherent tendency of silicon capitalism to delink the growth of production from that of employment. But in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and much of South Asia, urbanization without growth, as we shall see later, is more obviously the legacy of a global political conjuncture – the worldwide debt crisis of the late 1970s and the subsequent IMF-led restructuring of Third World economies in the 1980s – than any iron law of advancing technology.

Third World urbanization, moreover, continued its breakneck pace (3.8 percent per annum from 1960 to 1993) throughout the locust years of the 1980s and early 1990s, in spite of falling real wages, soaring prices and skyrocketing urban unemployment.⁴⁰ This perverse urban boom surprised most experts and contradicted orthodox economic models that predicted that the negative feedback of urban recession would slow or even reverse migration from the countryside.⁴¹ “It appears,” marveled developmental economist Nigel Harris in 1990, “that for low-income countries, a significant fall in urban incomes may not necessarily produce in the short term a decline in rural–urban migration.”⁴²

The situation in Africa was particularly paradoxical: How could cities in Côte d’Ivoire, Tanzania, Congo-Kinshasa, Gabon, Angola, and elsewhere – where economies were contracting by 2 to 5 percent per year – still support annual population growth of 4 to 8 percent?⁴³ How could Lagos in the 1980s grow twice as fast as the Nigerian population, while its urban economy was in deep recession?⁴⁴ Indeed, how has Africa as a whole, currently in a dark age of stagnant urban employment and stalled agricultural productivity, been able to sustain an annual urbanization rate (3.5 to 4.0 percent) considerably higher than the average of most European cities (2.1 percent) during peak Victorian growth years?⁴⁵

Part of the secret, of course, was that policies of agricultural deregulation and financial discipline enforced by the IMF and World Bank continued to generate an exodus of surplus rural labor to urban slums even as cities ceased to be job machines. As Deborah Bryceson, a leading European Africanist, emphasizes in her summary of recent agrarian research, the 1980s and 1990s were a generation of unprecedented upheaval in the global countryside:

One by one national governments, gripped in debt, became subject to structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionality. Subsidized, improved agricultural input packages and rural infrastructural building were drastically reduced. As the peasant “modernization” effort in Latin American and African nations was abandoned, peasant farmers were subjected to the international financial institutions’ “sink-or-swim” economic strategy. National market deregulation pushed agricultural producers into global commodity markets where middle as well as poor peasants found it hard to compete. SAPs and economic liberalization policies represented the convergence of the worldwide forces of de-agrarianization and national policies promoting de-peasantization.⁴⁶

As local safety-nets disappeared, poor farmers became increasingly vulnerable to any exogenous shock: drought, inflation, rising interest rates, or falling commodity prices. (Or illness: an estimated 60 percent of Cambodian small peasants who sell their land and move to the city are forced to do so by medical debts.⁴⁷)

At the same time, rapacious warlords and chronic civil wars, often spurred by the economic dislocations of debt-imposed structural adjustment or foreign economic predators (as in the Congo and Angola), were uprooting whole countrysides. Cities – in spite of their stagnant or negative economic growth, and without necessary investment in new infrastructure, educational facilities or public-health systems – have simply harvested this world agrarian crisis. Rather than the classical stereotype of the labor-intensive countryside and the capital-intensive industrial metropolis, the Third World now contains many examples of capital-intensive countrysides and labor-intensive deindustrialized cities. “Overurbanization,” in other words, is driven by the reproduction of poverty, not by the supply of jobs. This is one of the unexpected tracks down which a neoliberal world order is shunting the future.⁴⁸

From Karl Marx to Max Weber, classical social theory believed that the great cities of the future would follow in the industrializing footsteps of Manchester, Berlin, and Chicago – and indeed Los Angeles, São Paulo, Pusan, and today, Ciudad Juarez, Bangalore and Guangzhou have roughly approximated this canonical trajectory. Most cities of the South, however, more closely resemble Victorian Dublin, which, as historian Emmet Larkin has stressed, was unique amongst “all the slumdoms produced in the western world in the nineteenth century … [because] its slums were not a product of the industrial revolution. Dublin, in fact, suffered more from the problems of de-industrialization than industrialization between 1800 and 1850.”⁴⁹

Likewise, Kinshasa, Luanda, Khartoum, Dar es Salaam, Guayaquil and Lima continue to grow prodigiously despite ruined import-substitution industries, shrunken public sectors, and downwardly mobile middle classes. The global forces “pushing” people from the countryside – mechanization of agriculture in Java and India, food imports in Mexico, Haiti and Kenya, civil war and drought throughout Africa, and everywhere the consolidation of small holdings into large ones and the competition of industrial-scale agribusiness – seem to sustain urbanization even when the “pull” of the city is drastically weakened by debt and economic depression. As a result, rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluation and state retrenchment has been an inevitable recipe for the mass production of slums. An International Labor Organization (ILO) researcher has estimated that the formal housing markets in the Third World rarely supply more than 20 percent of new housing stock, so out of necessity, people turn to self-built shanties, informal rentals, pirate subdivisions, or the sidewalks.⁵⁰ “Illegal or informal land markets,” says the UN, “have provided the land sites for most additions to the housing stock in most cities of the South over the last 30 or 40 years.”⁵¹

Since 1970, slum growth everywhere in the South has outpaced urbanization per se. Thus, looking back at late-twentieth-century Mexico City, urban planner Priscilla Connolly observes that “as much as 60% of the city’s growth is the result of people, especially women, heroically building their own dwellings on unserviced peripheral land, while informal subsistence work has always accounted for a large proportion of total employment.”⁵² São Paulo’s favelas – a mere 1.2 percent of total population in 1973, but 19.8 percent in 1993 – grew throughout the 1990s at the explosive rate of 16.4 percent per year.⁵³ In the Amazon, one of the world’s fastest-growing urban frontiers, 80 percent of city growth has been in shantytowns largely unserved by established utilities and municipal transport, thus making “urbanization” and “favelization” synonymous.⁵⁴

The same trends are visible everywhere in Asia. Beijing police authorities estimate that 200,000 “floaters” (unregistered rural migrants) arrive each year, many of them crowded into illegal slums on the southern edge of the capital.⁵⁵ In South Asia, meanwhile, a study of the late 1980s showed that up to 90 percent of urban household growth took place in slums.⁵⁶ Karachi’s sprawling katchi abadi (squatter) population doubles every decade, and Indian slums continue to grow 250 percent faster than overall population.⁵⁷ Mumbai’s estimated annual housing deficit of 45,000 formal-sector units translates into a corresponding increase in informal slum dwellings.⁵⁸ Of the 500,000 people who migrate to Delhi each year, it is estimated that fully 400,000 end up in slums; by 2015 India’s capital will have a slum population of more than 10 million. “If such a trend continues unabated,” warns planning expert Gautam Chatterjee, “we will have only slums and no cities.”⁵⁹

The African situation, of course, is even more extreme. Africa’s slums are growing at twice the speed of the continent’s exploding cities. Indeed, an incredible 85 percent of Kenya’s population growth between 1989 and 1999 was absorbed in the fetid, densely packed slums of Nairobi and Mombasa.⁶⁰ Meanwhile any realistic hope for the mitigation of Africa’s urban poverty has faded from the official horizon. At the annual joint meeting of the IMF and World Bank in October 2004, Gordon Brown, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and heir apparent to Tony Blair, observed that the UN’s Millennium Development Goals for Africa, originally projected to be achieved by 2015, would not be attained for generations: “sub-Saharan Africa will not achieve universal primary education until 2130, a 50 percent reduction in poverty in 2150 and the elimination of avoidable infant deaths until 2165.”⁶¹ By 2015 Black Africa will have 332 million slum-dwellers, a number that will continue to double every fifteen years.⁶²

Thus, the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay. Indeed, the one billion city-dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums might well look back with envy at the ruins of the sturdy mud homes of Catal Hayuk in Anatolia, erected at the very dawn of city life nine thousand years ago.

1 Onookome Okome, “Writing the Anxious City: Images of Lagos in Nigerian Home Video Films,” in Okwui Enwezor et al. (eds), Under Siege: Four African Cities, Kassel 2002, p. 316.

2 UN Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects, the 2001 Revision, New York 2002.

3 Population Information Program, Population Reports: Meeting the Urban Challenge 30:4 (Fall 2002), p. 1.

4 Dennis Rondinelli and John Kasarda, “Job Creation Needs in Third World Cities,” in John Kasarda and Allen Parnell (eds), Third World Cities: Problems, Policies and Prospects, Newbury Park 1993, p. 101.

5 Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sandeson and Sergei Scherbov, “Doubling of world population unlikely,”Nature 387 (19 June 1997), pp. 803–4. However, the populations of sub-Saharan Africa will triple and of India, double.

6 Although the velocity of global urbanization is not in doubt, the growth rates of specific cities may brake abruptly as they encounter the frictions of size and congestion. A famous instance of such a “polarization reversal” is Mexico City, widely predicted to achieve a population of 25 million during the 1990s (the current population is between 19 and 22 million). See Yue-man Yeung, “Geography in an age of mega-cities,”International Social Sciences Journal 151 (1997), p. 93.

7 Financial Times, 27 July 2004; David Drakakis-Smith, Third World Cities (second edition), London 2000.

8 Composite of UN Urban Indicators Database (2002); Thomas Brinkhoff (The Principal Agglomerations of the World – www.citypopulation.de/World.html) – May 2004).

9 UN Population Division, ibid.

10 Far Eastern Economic Review, Asia 1998 Yearbook, p. 63.

11 Hamilton Tolosa, “The Rio/São Paulo Extended Metropolitan Region: A Quest for Global Integration,”The Annals of Regional Science 37:2 (September 2003), pp. 48, 485.

12 Gustavo Garza,“Global economy, metropolitan dynamics and urban policies in Mexico,”Cities 16:3 (1999), p. 154.

13 Jean-Marie Cour and Serge Snrech (eds), Preparing for the Future: A Vision of West Africa in the Year 2020, OECD, Paris 1998, p. 94.

14 Ibid., p. 48.

15 See Yue-Man Yeung, “Viewpoint: Integration of the Pearl River Delta,” International Development Planning Review 25:3 (2003).

16 Aprodicio Laquian, “The Effects of National Urban Strategy and Regional Development Policy on Patterns of Urban Growth in China,” in Gavin Jones and Pravin Visaria (eds), Urbanization in Large Developing Countries, Oxford 1997, pp. 62–63.

17 Yue-man Yueng and Fu-chen Lo, “Global restructuring and emerging urban corridors in Pacific Asia,” in Lo and Yeung (eds), Emerging World Cities in Pacific Asia, Tokyo 1996, p. 41.

18 Gregory Guldin, What’s a Peasant to Do? Village Becoming Town in Southern China, Boulder 2001, p. 13.

19 UN-Habitat, The Challenge of the Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, [henceforth: Challenge], London 2003, p. 3.

20 Guldin, ibid.

21 Sidney Goldstein, “Levels of Urbanization in China,” in Mattei Dogon and John Kasarda (eds), The Metropolis Era: Volume One – A World of Giant Cities, Newbury Park 1988, pp. 210–21.

22 Census 2001, Office of the Registrar General India; and Alain Durand-Lasserve and Lauren Royston, “International Trends and Country Contexts,” in Durand-Lasserve and Royston (eds), Holding Their Ground: Secure Land Tenure for the Urban Poor in Developing Countries, London 2002, p. 20.

23 Mbuji-Mayi is the center of the “ultimate company state” in the Kaasai region run by the Société Minière de Bakwanga. See Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, London 2000, pp. 121–23.

24 Miguel Villa and Jorge Rodriguez, “Demographic trends in Latin America’s metropolises, 1950–1990,” in Alan Gilbert (ed.), The Mega-City in Latin America, Tokyo 1996, pp. 33–34.

25 Guldin, pp. 14–17.

26 Jeremy Seabrook, In the Cities of the South: Scenes from a Developing World, London 1996, pp. 16–17.

27 Guldin, ibid. See also Jing Neng Li, “Structural and Spatial Economic Changes and Their Effects on Recent Urbanization in China,” in Gavin Jones and Pravin Visaria (eds), Urbanization in Large Developing Countries, Oxford 1997, p. 44. Ian Yeboah finds a desakota-like pattern around Accra, whose sprawling form (188 percent increase in surface area in 1990s) and recent automobilization he attributes to the impact of structural adjustment policies. (“Demographic and Housing Aspects of Structural Adjustment and Emerging Urban Form in Accra,”Africa Today, pp. 108, 116–17.)

28 Thomas Sieverts, Cities Without Cities: An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt, London 2003, p. 3.

29 Drakakis-Smith, p. 21.

30 See overview in T. McGhee, “The Emergence of Desakota Regions in Asia: Expanding a Hypothesis,” in Northon Ginsburg, Bruce Koppell and T. McGhee (eds), The Extended Metropolis: Settlement Transition in Asia, Honolulu 1991. Philip Kelly, in his book on Manila, agrees with McGhee about the specificity of the Southeast Asian path of urbanization, but argues that desakota landscapes are unstable, with agriculture slowly being squeezed out. (Everyday Urbanization: The Social Dynamics of Development in Manila’s Extended Metropolitan Region, London 1999, pp. 284–86.)

31 Adrian Aguilar and Peter Ward, “Globalization, regional development, and mega-city expansion in Latin America: Analyzing Mexico City’s peri-urban hinterland,”Cities 20:1 (2003), pp. 4, 18. The authors claim that desakota-like development does not occur in Africa: “Instead city growth tends to be firmly urban and large-city based, and is contained within clearly defined boundaries. There is not meta-urban or peri-urban development that is tied to, and driven by, processes, in the urban core.” (P. 5) But certainly Gautang (Witwatersrand) must be accounted as an example of “regional urbanization” fully analogous to Latin American examples.

32 Ranjith Dayaratne and Raja Samarawickrama, “Empowering Communities: The Peri-Urban Areas of Colombo,”Environment and Urbanization 15:1 (April 2003),p. 102. (See also, in the same issue, L. van den Berg, M. van Wijk and Pham Van Hoi, “The Transformation of Agricultural and Rural Life Downsteam of Hanoi”.)

33 Magdalena Nock, “The Mexican Peasantry and the Ejido in the Neo-liberal Period,” in Deborah Bryceson, Cristobal Kay and Jos Mooij (eds), Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour in Africa, Asia and Latin America, London 2000, p. 173.

34 Financial Times, 16 December 2003, 27 July 2004.

35 New York Times, 28 July 2004.

36 Wang Mengkui, advisor to the State Council, quoted in the Financial Times, 26 November 2003.

37 Goldstein, table 7.1, p. 201; 1978 figure from Guilhem Fabre, “La Chine,” in Thierry Paquot, Les Monde des Villes: Panorama Urbain de la Planète, Paris 1996, p. 187. It is important to note that the World Bank’s time series differs from Fabre’s, with a 1978 urbanization rate of 18 percent, not 13 percent. (See World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2001, CD-Rom version.)

38 World Bank, World Development Report 1995: Workers in an Integrating World, New York 1995, p. 170.

39 Population rank from Thomas Brinkhoff (www.citypopulation.de); GDP rank from Denise Pumain, “Scaling Laws and Urban Systems,”Santa Fe Institute Working Paper 04-02-002, Santa Fe 2002, p. 4.

40 Josef Gugler, “Introduction – II. Rural–Urban Migration,” in Gugler (ed.), Cities in the Developing World: Issues, Theory and Policy, Oxford 1997, p. 43.

41 Sally Findley emphasizes that everyone in the 1980s underestimated levels of continuing rural–urban migration and resulting rates of urbanization. (“The Third World City,” in John Kasarda and Allen Parnell (eds), Third World Cities: Problems, Policies and Prospects, Newbury Park 1993, p. 14.)

42 Nigel Harris, “Urbanization, Economic Development and Policy in Developing Countries,”Habitat International 14:4 (1990), pp. 21–22.

43 David Simon, “Urbanization, globalization and economic crisis in Africa,” in Rakodi, Urban Challenge, p. 95. For growth rates of English industrial cities 1800–50, see Edna Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century, New York 1899, pp. 44, 52–53.

44 A. Oberai, Population Growth, Employment and Poverty in Third World Mega-Cities (ILO Studies), London 1993, p. 165.

45 UNEP, African Environment Outlook: Past, Present and Future Perspectives, quoted in Al Ahram Weekly, 2–8 October 2003 (Africa); Alain Jacquemin, Urban Development and New Towns in the Third World, Aldershot 1999, p. 28 (nineteenth-century Europe).

46 Deborah Bryceson, “Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour Redundancy in the Neo-Liberal Era and Beyond,” in Bryceson, Kay and Mooij, pp. 304–05.

47 Sébastien de Dianous, “Les Damnés de la terre du Cambodge,”Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2004, p. 20.

48 See Josef Gugler, “Overurbanization reconsidered,” in Gugler, Cities in the Developing World, pp. 114–23.

49 Foreword to Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925: A Study in Urban Geography, Dublin 1998, p. ix. Larkin, of course, forgets Dublin’s Mediterranean counterpart: Naples.

50 Oberai, p. 13.

51 UNCHS, An Urbanising World: Global Report on Human Settlements, Oxford 1996,p. 239.

52 Priscilla Connolly, “Mexico City: our common future?”Environment and Urbanization 11:1 (April 1999), p. 56.

53 Ivo Imparato and Jeff Ruster, Slum Upgrading and Participation: Lessons from Latin America, World Bank, Washington D.C. 2003, p. 333.

54 John Browder and Brian Godfrey, Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon, New York 1997, p. 130.

55 Yang Wenzhong and Wang Gongfan, “Peasant Movement: A Police Perspective,” in Michael Dutton (ed.), Streetlife China, Cambridge 1998, p. 89.

56 Dileni Gunewardena, Urban Poverty in South Asia, working paper, Conference on Poverty Reduction and Social Progress, Rajendrapur, Bangladesh, April 1999, p. 1.

57 Arif Hasan, “Introduction” to Akhtar Khan, Orangi Pilot Project: Reminiscences and Reflections, Karachi 1996, p. xxxiv.

58 Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, New York 2004, p. 117.

59 Gautam Chatterjee, “Consensus versus Confrontation,”Habitat Debate 8:2 (June 2002), p. 11. Statistic for Delhi from Rakesh Simha, “New Delhi: The World’s Shanty Capital in the Making,”OneWorld South Asia, 26 August 2003.

60 Harvey Herr and Guenter Karl, Estimating Global Slum Dwellers, UN-Habitat working paper, Nairobi 2003, p. 19.

61 Gordon Brown quoted in the Los Angeles Times, 4 October 2004.

62 UN statistics quoted in John Vidal, “Cities are now the frontline of poverty,” The Guardian, 2 February 2005.