Economic Growth and Urbanization in Developing Areas

David Drakakis-Smith

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780815378808
• eBook ISBN: 9781351227803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Originally published in 1990, Economic Growth and Urbanization in Developing Areas is a wide-ranging collection of research studies focused on urban economic growth at various levels of urban and national development. The contributions range from studies of peripheral Third World states, such as Fiji and Malaysia, to countries of the so-called semi-periphery, such as Spain, South Africa, and Northern Australia. In addition the authors cover a variety of thematic topics within the framework of urban economic development, from the provision of basic services such as housing and food, to the functional preservation of historic cores, and the impact of economic change on family structure.

Chapter One

Dependent urbanization in the contemporary
semi-periphery: deepening the analogy

David A. Smith and Roger J. Nemeth

INTRODUCTION

Urbanization is a dynamic process that is irrevocably intertwined with other aspects of economic, social, and political development. Classical social theorists such as Marx and Weber emphasized the profound social transformations that accompany the growth of cities. Twentieth-century urbanologists have also stressed the role of the city as both locus for, and product of, broader socio-economic changes. Hawley (1971: 3) argues that ‘cities stand at the vortices of the currents and cross-currents of broad scale change that alters and re-constitutes societies’. Castells (1977: ix) sees cities as foci for epochal forces and conflict which generate ‘increasingly explosive urban contradictions’. It is in the study of ‘the urban question’ that researchers confront ‘the problematic of the development of societies’ (Castells 1977: 7).

This view of cities and urbanization suggests two important themes. One is that research on urban structures and processes can potentially reveal a great deal about more general patterns of change in a society. Understanding the growth, form, and function of a society’s cities is a critical component of efforts to unravel the complexity of its overall development trajectory. Conversely, an appreciation of the inherent interpenetration of urbanization and development highlights the importance of conceptualizing the growth of cities as eddies in wider currents of social transformation. Conceptualizations of city growth need to be grounded in broad-based theories of development. Models of urban structure and spatial dynamics frequently fail to explicitly do this, even though they rely on implicit assumptions about the generic nature and causes of social change. This becomes particularly problematic when these unexamined assumptions are of dubious value and are called into question by other social scientists. Clearly, a theoretical perspective that systematically explains the relationship between the dynamics of urbanization and wider processes of macro-structural change is analytically desirable.

The recent rise of an international political economy perspective on the ‘dependent city’ appears to offer this type of comprehensive, theoretically grounded approach to urbanization. The emphasis on locating cities and urban systems in circuits of global capitalism and the webs of the international commerce and geo-politics provides an exciting new framework for urban research (Walton 1981). Several authors have attempted to present schematically a world-system theory of comparative urban development (Walton 1982; Chase-Dunn 1984; Timberlake 1985). However, many of the implications of this perspective for particular types of cities, urban systems, and regions need further specification.

The idea of ‘semi-peripheral urbanization’ is one concept that has not been extensively explored. While the notion of a distinct urban dynamic in the intermediate stratum of the world system seems consistent with Wallersteinian theory, to our knowledge, no one has yet attempted to systematically discuss cities and urban growth in the semi-periphery. This is the goal of this paper; one which is fraught with pitfalls and perils. We hope, however, the theoretical pay-off justifies the particularly problematic nature of our effort.

We begin by summarizing the theoretical orientation which world-system analysts apply to urbanization. The next section grapples with the slippery, elusive concept of the semi-periphery. There follows a summary of patterns and processes of semi-peripheral urbanization, drawing on three historical case studies of colonial North America and three case studies of the contemporary Third World. This leads to a concluding discussion on the limits of the analogy of dependent urbanization and the generalizability and practical implications of a pattern of semi-peripheral urbanization.

THEORETICAL ORIENTATION

While it would be possible to delve deeper into the history of dependency theory, a key intellectual forebear of the world-system approach to the ‘dependent city’ and ‘peripheral urbanization’ was A.G. Frank. His 1969 description of world capitalist exploitation operating through ‘a chain of constellations of metropolises and satellites’ was polemical, but proved to be theoretically pregnant. Systematic explication of a theory of dependent urbanization was left to Castells (1977: 3). Arguing that cities can only be fully understood as products of the expansion of the capitalist world economy, he claims that

the process of urbanization becomes, therefore, the expression of this social dynamic at the level of space, that is to say, of the penetration by the capitalist mode of production, historically formed in the western countries, of the remainder of the social formations at different technological, economic, and social levels.

(Castells 1977: 44)

These pioneering formulations have been followed by a number of empirical studies applying the logic of the international political economy approach to comparative research on cities and urban systems (Walton 1977; Roberts 1978; Slater 1978; Friedmann and Wolff 1982; Gilbert and Gugler 1982; Timberlake 1985; Armstrong and McGee 1985; Meyer 1986; Smith and Nemeth 1986). Timberlake succinctly summarizes the main premise of this approach:

Urbanization must be studied holistically - part of the logic of alarger process of socio-economic development that encompasses it, and entails systematic unevenness across regions of the world. The dependence relation is an important theoretical concept to pry into the ways in which the processes embodied in the world system produce various manifestations of this unevenness, including divergent patterns of urbanization.

(Timberlake 1985: 10)

The penetration of the world economy into peripheral areas leads to a development dynamic which gives rise to a few relatively large cities which act as trade centres in the web of colonial or neo-colonial exploitation. The result is a process of urbanization which leads to urban primacy, regional inequalities, centralization of political and economic power within cities, and intra-urban ecological segregation and inequality (for theoretical summaries, see Walton 1982; Timberlake 1985: ch. 1). Chase-Dunn explains the role of the dependent city in the world system: ‘Peripheral primate cities are nodes on a conduit which transmit surplus value to the core and domination to the periphery, while primate cities in the core receive surplus value and transmit domination’ (Chase-Dunn 1984: 115).

The important point is that dependent urbanism conceived in this way not only leads to ‘uneven’ urban hierarchies and high levels of intra-urban inequality, but (using terminology from Hoselitz 1954) creates cities that are more likely to be economically ‘parasitic’ on the surrounding region than ‘generative’.

The highly skewed class structures and large numbers of poor in dependent cities, in this view, are more than the result of ‘too many’ people or a sectoral ‘misallocation’ of labour.

High rates of inequality and poverty in large primate Third World cities may be very undesirable for the masses of people who live in them and an obstacle to genuine national development. But when the role of the ‘informal sector’ in surplus extraction in the capitalist world economy is considered, it becomes clear that the poverty and inequality may be functional for the wider system.

(D. Smith 1985: 211)

The large pool of under-renumerated, semi-proletarianized labour is a structural element of the peripheral city; one which allows goods and services to be produced cheaply (see Portes 1985a for a discussion of mechanisms). This, in turn, reduces the cost of high consumption by elites and directly and indirectly subsidizes wage costs for local formal sector firms. The paradox of ‘peasants in cities’ is resolved - the urban economy of the dependent city is a mechanism of ‘unequal exchange’ (McGee 1973, 1978). Portes claims that:

The informal sector - a vast network of activities articulated with, but not limited to, remaining subsistence enclaves - has implications that go beyond the peripheral countries. Direct subsidies to consumption provided by informal to formal sector workers within a particular peripheral country are also indirect subsidies to core-nation workers, and, hence, means to maintain the rate of profit. Thus, through a series of mechanisms well hidden from public view, the apparently isolated labour of shanty-town workers can be registered in the financial houses of New York and London.

(Portes 1985a: 61–2)

Obviously a critical question for the present analysis is, to what extent does the image of unevenness, parasitism, and inequality apply to urban centres in the semi-periphery? In what sense are they also ‘dependent cities’? What differentiates them from peripheral cities?

To begin even tentatively to answer these questions, we need to be clear about what the semi-periphery is, what its salient characteristics are, and what role it purportedly plays in the world economy. That is the object of the next section.

But before delineating what constitutes the semi-periphery and attempting to conceptualize how it fits into a theory of dependent urbanization, it is useful to highlight some differences between the world-system formulation and more conventional views of urbanization and development. Many of the images of this process in the regional science and urban geography/sociology literature rely on modernization theory assumptions about social change at a time when this old approach has become discredited in the sociology of development.

One key problem with the orthodox perspective is its emphasis on a bipolar conception of progress manifested in ‘the urban-rural duality thesis’ (Slater 1986: 9–10). The international political economy view emphasizes the complex interpenetration of city and countryside. Developmentalist perspectives have emphasized cities’ potentials as centres for innovation, opportunity, and political transformation (Friedmann 1978: 82). World-system analysts are much less sanguine about the potential for autonomous change in dependent cities, emphasizing instead the structure of domination emanating downward from the global level (Walton 1982). When Third World cities are plagued by poverty and economic stagnation, orthodox explanations focus on ‘excessive migration’ and ‘population maldistribution’ (World Bank 1985: 96 cited by Slater 1986: 10; see also Gugler 1982), whereas those who emphasize the dependent nature of these cities conceptualize the problems not as ‘spatio-demographic’ (Slater 1978), but as embedded in, and perhaps even functional for, the capitalist world economy (C. Smith 1985).

A final difference concerns the conventional approach’s use of stages and phases to describe models of urban development. The widely accepted regional science theory of urban concentration as ‘polarization-polarization reversal’ (Richardson 1977, 1980) is a blatant example of an uncritical adoption of the modernization theory assumption that societies pass through universal sequences. This implicit developmentalism is so pervasive that it occasionally creeps into analyses which are sensitive to the key role that links to the global economy play in urbanization in the less-developed world (see Meyer 1986). World-system researchers are extremely sceptical about all models of national development which suggest universal phases, particularly when these schemes imply that the ultimate stage is some sort of modern prosperous, balanced, core-like pattern.

The strongest argument against models incorporating a stage theory of cities in development is empirical. Put simply, the pattern of macro-structural change in Third World societies in recent years does not square with the assumptions of developmentalist approaches. Clearly, the urbanization process in regions like Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America belies the image of cities as dynamic generators of economic and social development (McGee 1967; Portes and Walton 1976; Gugler and Flanagen 1978). The urban dynamic in these places is very different from the growth of cities in the west. This realization led to the formulation of such concepts as ‘pseudo-urbanization’ (McGee 1967) or ‘dependent urbanization’ (Castells 1977) to indicate the basic divergence in trajectories. Now, as more detailed regional and national studies of urban processes are available, and social scientists become more sensitive to the nuances of particular histories, it is equally obvious that these dichotomous categories do not begin to do justice to the diverse experiences of city growth in these societies either.

Armstrong and McGee highlight the variations in processes such as capital accumulation and urbanization and point out that: the interaction with the global expansion of capitalism of particular elements of historical experience, political institutions, physical resources, economic structures, and socio-cultural relationships within each society will result in highly specific chemistries of development for each society.

(Armstrong and McGee 1985: 32)

We agree with this conjunctural view of development and would argue that a complete understanding of the details and mechanisms of urban processes is only attainable through in-depth case studies. However, in this chapter we have followed the traditional social science urge to generalize about urbanization (see Gilbert and Gugler 1982, for a discussion of this predilection). This prompts us to seek a pattern of semi-peripheral urbanization in the hope that it may help to explain some of the diversity.

THE SEMI-PERIPHERY:
WHAT IT IS AND WHY IT IS IMPORTANT

While eschewing ‘stage theory’, world-system analysts are not ‘historical particularists’ (Lenski 1976). The structure of the international system as a whole remains fairly stable over time, despite changing roles for its regional and national sub-units. Within the long spans of time defined by various periodization schemes (see Wallerstein and Hopkins 1977; Frank 1978), historically bounded generalizations can be made about matters such as the mechanisms of unequal exchange, the forms of labour control, or the structure of political domination. Most important for present purposes, however, is the idea that while the development processes follow different laws of motion in the core, periphery, and semi-periphery, within the world-system strata similar dynamics of social change are discernible (Chirot 1977; Wallerstein and Hopkins 1977; Evans 1979b).

During the past two decades, an enormous amount has been written on peripheral urbanization. The meaning of antonymous terms such as dependent/autonomous, metropolis/satellite, and core/periphery has been debated, researched, and continually refined. From this literature, a consensus has begun to emerge regarding the character, structure, and consequences of urban systems within countries occupying these polar structural positions in the world economy. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the semi-periphery. Few concepts in dependency/world-system theory have remained as elusive and misunderstood as this one, and even fewer have (until recently) received such scant attention from urban researchers. But this paucity of research does not necessarily mean that the concept of the semi-periphery is irrelevant to our understanding of the interplay between the world economy and processes of urbanization (see also chapter six).

Beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing up to the present day, the semi-periphery has played a unique and vital role in shaping the modern world economy (Wallerstein 1974a, 1976, 1980). In this section, we will indicate how an understanding of the semi-periphery can contribute to the study of Third World urbanization. We begin by delineating some of the essential characteristics of the semi-periphery and discussing how they are likely to affect urbanization. Next, we propose some hypotheses on how urbanization in the semi-periphery and periphery differ. In the next section, we examine some case studies to evaluate the usefulness of our ideas.

In his seminal work on the origins of the modern world economy, Wallerstein (1974a: 349) locates the semi-periphery ‘between core and periphery on a series of dimensions’. Although this definition lacks sufficient operational criteria to identify specific semi-peripheral states (Arrighi 1985), it does provide a starting point for discerning the essential nature of the concept.Being located between core and periphery does not mean that the semi-periphery is simply a middle point on some continuum between core and periphery. Nor does it mean that the semi-periphery is just a residual category which includes any country that does not conveniently fit into either of the other positions. The value of Wallerstein’s conceptualization is that the semi-periphery is seen as a unique and ‘necessary structural element in the world economy’ (1974a: 349). The semi-periphery comprises a distinct structural position in the international division of labour and the particular role it plays is essential to the maintenance of the world capitalist system as a whole.

The semi-periphery differs politically and economically from the core or periphery. Because they play the dual role of both core and periphery in the international economy, the internal productive activities of semi-peripheral countries are more evenly divided than those of nations in either of the other structural positions (Chase-Dunn 1978). The nature of foreign investments and the possibility for ‘dependent development’ in the semi-periphery is also different. Transnational corporations are more willing to invest in manufacturing industries, and to transfer technology designed to promote domestic industrialization, in countries where there is an industrial base able to absorb the new technology and adequate internal markets to consume the products of the new industries. Thus, it is in the semi-periphery that economic growth and the transformation of a more diversified industrial structure is most likely to occur. Empirically, studies of non-core countries find that foreign investments of transnational corporations help to diversify domestic industry and advance technologies in semi-peripheral countries (Gereffi and Evans 1981; Yang and Stone 1985).

These economic functions, however, must be viewed within a political framework which recognizes the particular state structures of semi-peripheral nations. In the world economy, the semi-periphery acts as a buffer between core and periphery; a role that reduces the likelihood of social revolution in the latter (Wallerstein 1974a). The more evenly mixed core-periphery economic functions of semi-peripheral nations mean that state policies can more directly influence the accumulation of capital within them. Indeed, Wallerstein argues that ‘semi-periph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: urbanization, economic development, and space
• 1. Dependent urbanization in the contemporary semi-periphery: deepening the analogy: David A. Smith and Roger J. Nemeth
• 2. ‘Anteroom to a madhouse’: economic growth and urban development in Barcelona in the Franco era: John Naylon
• 3. Urbanization at the periphery: reflections on the changing dynamics of housing and employment in Latin American cities: Alan Gilbert
• 4. Industrialization and household response: a case study of Penang: Mei Ling Young and Kamal Salih
• 5. The acceptable face of self-help housing: subletting in Fiji squatter settlements – exploitation or survival strategy?: Jenny J. Bryant
• 6. The built environment and social movements in the semi-periphery: urban housing provision in the Northern Territory of Australia: David Drakakis-Smith
• 7. Upgrading the ‘matchboxes’: urban renewal in Soweto, 1976-86: Charles Mather and Susan Parnell
• 8. Economic considerations on the renovation of the historic centre of Salvador (Bahia), Brazil: Johannes Augel
• 9. Temporary trading for temporary people: the making of hawking in Soweto: Keith Beavon and Chris Rogerson
• 10. Consumerism, the state, and the informal sector: shebeens in South Africa’s Black townships: Chris Rogerson
• 11. The last frontier: the emergence of the industrial palate in Hong Kong: Scott MacLeod and Terry McGee
• Bibliography
• Index