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Ninety-five percent of this final buildout of humanity will occur in the urban areas of developing countries, whose populations will double to nearly 4 billion over the next generation.⁶ Indeed, the combined urban population of China, India, and Brazil already roughly equals that of Europe and North America. The scale and velocity of Third World urbanization, moreover, utterly dwarfs that of Victorian Europe. London in 1910 was seven times larger than it had been in 1800, but Dhaka, Kinshasa, and Lagos today are each approximately forty times larger than they were in 1950. China – urbanizing “at a speed unprecedented in human history” – added more city-dwellers in the 1980s than did all of Europe (including Russia) in the entire nineteenth century!⁷

Figure 1. World Population Growth

Figure 2.⁸ Third World Megacities

(population in millions)

The most celebrated phenomenon, of course, is the burgeoning of new megacities with populations in excess of 8 million and, even more spectacularly, hypercities with more than 20 million inhabitants – the estimated urban population of the world at the time of the French Revolution. In 2000, according to the UN Population Division, only metropolitan Tokyo had incontestably passed that threshold (although Mexico City, New York and Seoul-Injon made other lists).⁹ The Far Eastern Economic Review estimates that by 2025 Asia alone might have ten or eleven conurbations that large, including Jakarta (24.9 million), Dhaka (25 million), and Karachi (26.5 million). Shanghai, whose growth was frozen for decades by Maoist policies of deliberate underurbanization, could have as many as 27 million residents in its huge estuarial metro-region. Bombay, meanwhile, is projected to attain a population of 33 million, although no one knows whether such gigantic concentrations of poverty are biologically or ecologically sustainable.¹⁰

The exploding cities of the developing world are also weaving extraordinary new urban networks, corridors, and hierarchies. In the Americas, geographers already talk about a leviathan known as the Rio/São Paulo Extended Metropolitan Region (RSPER) which includes the medium-sized cities on the 500-kilometer-long transport axis between Brazil’s two largest metropolises, as well as the important industrial area dominated by Campinas; with a current population of 37 million, this embryonic megalopolis is already larger than Tokyo– Yokohama.¹¹ Likewise, the giant amoeba of Mexico City, already having consumed Toluca, is extending pseudopods that will eventually incorporate much of central Mexico, including the cities of Cuernavaca, Puebla, Cuautla, Pachuca, and Queretaro, into a single megalopolis with a mid-twenty-first-century population of approximately 50 million – about 40 percent of the national total.¹²

Even more surprising is the vast West African conurbation rapidly coalescing along the Gulf of Guinea with Lagos (23 million people by 2015 according to one estimate) as its fulcrum. By 2020, according to an OECD study, this network of 300 cities larger than 100,000 will “have a population comparable to the U.S. east coast, with five cities of over one million … [and] a total of more than 60 million inhabitants along a strip of land 600 kilometers long, running east to west between Benin City and Accra.”¹³ Tragically, it probably will also be the biggest single footprint of urban poverty on earth.

Figure 3.¹⁴ Urbanization of the Gulf of Guinea

The largest-scale posturban structures, however, are emerging in East Asia. The Pearl River (Hong Kong–Guangzhou)¹⁵ and the Yangze River (Shanghai) deltas, along with the Beijing-Tianjin corridor, are well on their way to becoming urban-indusrial megapolises comparable to Tokyo–Osaka, the lower Rhine, or New York–Philadelphia. Indeed, China, unique amongst developing countries, is aggressively planning urban development at a super-regional scale using Tokyo–Yokohama and the US eastern seaboard as its templates. Created in 1983, the Shanghai Economic Zone is the biggest subnational planning entity in the world, encompassing the metropolis and five adjoining provinces with an aggregate population almost as large as that of the United States.¹⁶

These new Chinese megalopolises, according to two leading researchers, may be only the first stage in the emergence of “a continuous urban corridor stretching from Japan/North Korea to West Java.”¹⁷ As it takes shape over the next century, this great dragon-like sprawl of cities will constitute the physical and demographic culmination of millennia of urban evolution. The ascendency of coastal East Asia, in turn, will surely promote a Tokyo–Shanghai “world city” dipole to equality with the New York–London axis in the control of global flows of capital and information.

The price of this new urban order, however, will be increasing inequality within and between cities of different sizes and economic specializations. Chinese experts, indeed, are currently debating whether the ancient income-and-development chasm between city and countryside is now being replaced by an equally fundamental gap between small, particularly inland cities and the giant coastal metropolises.¹⁸ However, the smaller cities are precisely where most of Asia will soon live. If megacities are the brightest stars in the urban firmament, three-quarters of the burden of future world population growth will be borne by faintly visible second-tier cities and smaller urban areas: places where, as UN researchers emphasize, “there is little or no planning to accommodate these people or provide them with services.”¹⁹ In China – officially, 43 percent urban in 1993 – the number of official “cities” has soared from 193 to 640 since 1978, but the great metropolises, despite extraordinary growth, have actually declined in relative share of urban population. It is, instead, the small- to medium-sized cities and recently “city-ized” towns that have absorbed the majority of the rural labor-power made redundant by post-1979 market reforms.²⁰ In part, this is the result of conscious planning: since the 1970s the Chinese state has embraced policies designed to promote a more balanced urban hierarchy of industrial investment and population.²¹

In India, by contrast, small cities and towns have lost economic traction and demographic share in the recent neoliberal transition – there is little evidence of Chinese-style “dual-track” urbanization. But as the urban ratio soared in the 1990s from one quarter to one third of total population, medium-sized cities, such as Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, Ludhiana in the Punjab, and, most famously, Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, have burgeoned. Hyderabad, growing almost 5 percent per annum over the last quarter century, is predicted to become a megacity of 10.5 million by 2015. According to the most recent census, 35 Indian cities are now above the one million threshold, accounting for a total population of nearly 110 million.²²

In Africa, the supernova growth of a few cities like Lagos (from 300,000 in 1950 to 13.5 million today) has been matched by the transformation of several dozen small towns and oases like Ouagadougou, Nouakchott, Douala, Kampala, Tanta, Conakry, Ndjamena, Lumumbashi, Mogadishu, Antananarivo and Bamako into sprawling cities larger than San Francisco or Manchester. (Most spectacular, perhaps, has been the transformation of the bleak Congolese diamond-trading center of Mbuji-Mayi from a small town of 25,000 in 1960 into a contemporary metropolis of 2 million, with growth occurring mostly in the last decade.²³) In Latin America, where primary cities long monopolized growth, secondary cities such as Santa Cruz, Valencia, Tijuana, Curitiba, Temuco, Maracay, Bucaramanga, Salvador, and Belem are now booming, with the most rapid increase in cities of fewer than 500,000 people.²⁴

Moreover, as anthropologist Gregory Guldin has emphasized, urbanization must be conceptualized as structural transformation along, and intensified interaction between, every point of an urban–rural continuum. In Guldin’s case study of southern China, he found that the countryside is urbanizing in situ as well as generating epochal migrations. “Villages become more like market and xiang towns, and county towns and small cities become more like large cities.” Indeed, in many cases, rural people no longer have to migrate to the city: it migrates to them.²⁵

This is also true in Malaysia, where journalist Jeremy Seabrook describes the fate of Penang fishermen “engulfed by urbanization without migrating, their lives overturned, even while remaining on the spot where they were born.” After the fishermen’s homes were cut off from the sea by a new highway, their fishing grounds polluted by urban waste, and neighboring hillsides deforested to build apartment blocks, they had little choice but to send their daughters into nearby Japanese-owned sweatshop factories. “It was the destruction,” Seabrook emphasizes, “not only of the livelihood of people who had always lived symbiotically with the sea, but also of the psyche and spirit of the fishing people.”²⁶

The result of this collision between the rural and the urban in China, much of Southeast Asia, India, Egypt, and perhaps West Africa is a hermaphroditic landscape, a partially urbanized countryside that Guldin argues may be “a significant new path of human settlement and development … a form neither rural nor urban but a blending of the two wherein a dense web of transactions ties large urban cores to their surrounding regions.”²⁷ German architect and urban theorist Thomas Sieverts proposes that this diffuse urbanism, which he calls Zwischenstadt (“in-between city”), is rapidly becoming the defining landscape of the twenty-first century in rich as well as poor countries, regardless of earlier urban histories. Unlike Guldin, however, Sieverts conceptualizes these new conurbations as polycentric webs with neither traditional cores nor recognizable peripheries.

Across all cultures of the entire world, they share specific common characteristics: a structure of completely different urban environments which at first sight is diffuse and disorganized with individual islands of geometrically structured patterns, a structure without a clear centre, but therefore with many more or less sharply functionally specialized areas, networks and nodes.²⁸

Such “extended metropolitan regions,” writes geographer David Drakakis-Smith, referring specifically to Delhi, “represent a fusion of urban and regional development in which the distinction between what is urban and rural has become blurred as cities expand along corridors of communication, by-passing or surrounding small towns and villages which subsequently experience in situ changes in function and occupation.”²⁹ In Indonesia, where a similar process of rural/urban hybridization is far advanced in Jabotabek (the greater Jakarta region), researchers call these novel landuse patterns desokotas (“city villages”) and argue whether they are transitional landscapes or a dramatic new species of urbanism.³⁰

An analogous debate is taking place amongst Latin American urbanists as they confront the emergence of polycentric urban systems without clear rural/urban boundaries. Geographers Adrian Aguilar and Peter Ward advance the concept of “region-based urbanization” to characterize contemporary peri-urban development around Mexico City, São Paulo, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. “Lower rates of metropolitan growth have coincided with a more intense circulation of commodities, people and capital between the city center and its hinterland, with ever more diffuse frontiers between the urban and the rural, and a manufacturing deconcentration towards the metropolitan periphery, and in particular beyond into the peri-urban spaces or penumbra that surround mega-cities.” Aguilar and Ward believe that “it is in this peri-urban space that the reproduction of labor is most likely to be concentrated in the world’s largest cities in the 21st century.”³¹

In any case, the new and old don’t easily mix, and on the desokota outskirts of Colombo “communities are divided, with the outsiders and insiders unable to build relationships and coherent communities.”³² But the process, as anthropologist Magdalena Nock points out in regard to Mexico, is irreversible: “globalization has increased the movement of people, goods, services, information, news, products, and money, and thereby the presence of urban characteristics in rural areas and of rural traits in urban centers.”³³