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URBANISATION AND DEVELOPMENT: POLICY LESSONS FROM THE BRICS’ EXPERIENCE
Gordon McGranahan and George Martine
The world is in the midst of a global urban transition that, together with economic globalisation, is shifting the loci of economic power from the urbanised North towards the urbanising South. It is also shifting, somewhat more ambiguously, from national to city economies. The large and emerging economies of the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – are particularly prominent agents of this change. The BRICS’ integration into the world economy has been wellscrutinised, but the specific role urbanisation and urban growth played in these countries’ recent economic and demographic transformation is still understudied and undervalued.
This book, the product of a multi-year collaboration between the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and UNFPA (the United Nations Population Fund), reviews the individual experiences of urbanisation in each of the BRICS countries with the object of comparing the policies, trajectories and impacts of this process. It identifies key features that will help other countries in the developing world follow pathways and adopt policies that will enhance the synergies between urbanisation and development. In general terms, it asks whether a positive and opportunistic approach to urbanisation is a prerequisite for modern economic growth. More specifically, it assesses how the character of each country’s urban trajectory has influenced both past developments and future prospects.
Learning from such experiences is critical since the future of humankind will be an urban one. The vast increases in the number and proportion of urban dwellers (urban growth and urbanisation) in developing countries are among the most significant socio-economic transformations in the 21st century. In 2008, for the first time, more than half of the world’s population became urban. The population living in urban areas is projected to grow by 2.62 billion by mid-century, going from 3.63 billion in 2011 to 6.25 billion in 2050 (United Nations 2012). This scale of urban growth is without precedent in human history, and it calls for an unprecedented response. The paramount significance of this urban transition for economic, social, environmental and demographic advances in developing regions challenges the public and private sectors to adequately plan ahead for this growing number of urban dwellers.
Examining the diverse urban transitions undergone by the BRICS yields some powerful lessons for other developing countries. The manner in which countries accommodate urban growth has proven to have enormous economic, social and environmental consequences. Cities have huge potential to ensure those consequences are advantageous, but making that happen demands an appropriate policy framework. The BRICS yield some inspiring examples of how to seize the opportunities that urbanisation can provide and show how to pursue inclusive urban development. They also highlight the problems inappropriate policies bring. All these countries have gone through difficult periods during their urban transitions, and several still bear the heavy burdens of past failures to process urban growth equitably and efficiently.
Researchers linked to private investment companies were at the forefront of the calls to recognise the importance of the BRICS because of their implications for global markets. It would be misleading, however, to present these countries as sleeping giants only now beginning to emerge. For much of the 20th century, Russia and China led the Second World of communist countries, vying for global dominance with the capitalist First World. Meanwhile, India (and more intermittently, Brazil and South Africa) were among the leaders of the non-aligned Third World. In the novel world of globalised capitalist competition, however, the BRICS countries are taking up new roles and are emerging as key players, economically as well as politically. China, in particular, has burst onto the global scene, with its very urban-centric model of capitalism.
The BRICS have long had imposing geography and demographics. Together, they account for around 29 per cent of the world’s land area, and, even with a slow decline in their population share, they still account for 42 per cent of world population. Despite the enormous disparities in their past histories and future prospects, all five BRICS countries have been stirred in recent decades by the powerful winds of globalisation. Thus, their economies have begun to impose on the world stage as well. Led by China, the BRICS countries accounted for about 47 per cent of real growth in the gross world product between 2000 and 2010 (The World Bank 2011, using GDP in constant 2005 dollars at purchasing power parity). As a result, their combined share of gross world product increased from 17 to 26 per cent in the interim. Their economic importance is expected to increase further in the coming years. Four of the BRICS were listed among the planet’s ten biggest economies in 2010, and they are all predicted to raise their ranking in coming years.
History shows that as economic activity becomes more concentrated in some places, and as a country’s income rises, the share of the population living in urban localities grows, often sharply. For the most part, people migrate to urban areas because they rightly perceive they will benefit economically. As a result, an ‘urban transition’ occurs, wherein low levels of urbanisation give way to higher levels, a process that parallels the better-known ‘demographic transition’, in which mortality and fertility rates both tend to fall as countries achieve social and economic success. It is an undeniable fact that higher levels of income are generally associated with higher levels of urbanisation, and the BRICS are no exception (see Figure 1.1).
FIGURE 1.1 Levels of urbanisation plotted against gross national income per capita (purchasing power parity current $) in 2010 (logarithmic scale)
Source: The World Bank 2011.
The interdependence of urbanisation, modern economic growth and social development is well recognised, and urbanisation processes have played crucial roles in the BRICS’ ascension. Yet, their urbanisation trajectories differ vastly from one another. Figure 1.2 shows how Brazil, Russia and South Africa were comparatively early urbanisers, with roughly half of their populations living in urban areas by 1960. Since then, Brazil has shown the most rapid urbanisation; South Africa urbanised very slowly, but the rate picked up in the 1990s with the end of apartheid; and Russia urbanised steadily until the dissolution of the Soviet Union and has hardly urbanised at all since then. China and India had far lower levels of urbanisation in 1960, and they continued to urbanise slowly until the 1980s, when India’s rate of urbanisation began to increase slowly, and China’s took off at a rapid pace.
FIGURE 1.2 Urbanisation levels of the BRICS, 1950–2010
Source: United Nations 2012.
Rapid urbanisation in the BRICS has generally been associated with economic growth and a shift away from agriculture, while sudden declines in urbanisation rates have been connected to economic and social disruption. Nevertheless, BRICS governments have all been very ambivalent about urbanisation over different periods and with varying influence over the process. Some have even caused interruptions in migratory movements, as with South Africa during apartheid or China during the Cultural Revolution. In three cases – Russia, China and South Africa – explicit government measures have been used to systematically impede or retard urbanisation. Meanwhile the elites in Brazil and India have utilised mostly tacit and indirect approaches to reduce the pace of rural-urban migration by poor people.
The ambivalence and negativity towards urban growth observed in the BRICS is common throughout the developing world and has actually increased over the years. According to periodic surveys carried out by the United Nations Population Division (2013b), the proportion of all countries having policies aimed at slowing down migration to urban agglomerations increased from 47 per cent to 69 per cent between 1976 and 2009. Such sentiments reflect two things: a) the failure to objectively appraise the relative potential of rural and urban areas for fulfilling individual and collective aspirations as well as for reducing vulnerabilities; and b) a reaction to the negative externalities of spontaneous urbanisation.
Although policymakers increasingly lament urban growth, they might actually be more concerned with the continuance of large rural populations. Given issues of land scarcity and the limitations of productive labour absorption in densely populated rural areas, projected large rural populations in several countries should be a critical concern that motivates more pro-urbanisation policies. For instance, the situation in India, where a population of 816 million in rural areas is being projected for 2050 (United Nations 2013a), is particularly challenging. Urban squalor may be more visible and politically potent, but rural desolation is more widespread and impervious to alleviation. Even if there are too few jobs for everyone in urban areas, the options for increasing gainful employment and fulfilling minimal socio-economic aspirations in rural areas are even worse. People intuitively perceive the advantages of urban life: This explains why millions flock to the cities every year. Thus, investment in rural areas does not necessarily reduce rural-urban migration, although poverty does keep many from migrating.
Negative attitudes have not reduced the impetus of urban growth appreciably. They have instead served to diminish the positive consequences and to heighten the negative implications of urbanisation because they hinder adequate preparation for inevitable and necessary urban growth. Such attitudes result in the more rapid expansion of slums as well as urban disorder, preventing cities and their people from benefiting from the social and economic advantages of agglomeration while also diminishing the potential synergies between rural and urban areas created by migration. In this light, the narrative of the urban transition in each of the BRICS provides various lessons about the opportunities and risks that urbanisation and anti-urbanisation stances can bring. The following sections highlight a brief sample of these lessons.
Brazil: rapid but resisted urbanisation
Over the last 80 years, Brazil has reached an advanced stage of the urban transition in terms of the number and size of its cities and the integration of its urban system. From the 15th to the 19th century, Brazil’s Portuguese colonisers were less interested in settlement than in exploiting the occupied territories’ riches. They established an agricultural-extractive economy, in which urban areas (usually ports) were mainly ‘launch pads’ for exploiting the hinterland, as well as channels for taking New World produce back to Europe. Brazil had a mosaic of towns and cities along the coastline, but regional trade routes and economies remained undeveloped because maritime transport focused on maintaining contacts beyond Brazil’s borders.
However, the modernisation of São Paulo State’s coffee production during the last decades of the 19th century established the basic conditions for a new source of economic dynamism and urban concentration and for growth in the São Paulo-Poo de Janeiro region. Import-substituting industrialisation took off after the coffee economy crashed in 1929. It provided the trigger for Brazil’s rapid urbanisation, created a labour market and started Brazil’s concentration of population in ever-larger cities. By then, the country was experiencing rapid demographic growth, driven by falling mortality. Over the next 50 years, the demographic surplus moved to cities while also progressively occupying frontier agricultural areas.
The country urbanised quickly and massively: Brazil now has more of its total population living in towns and cities than do most European countries. At the last count (the 2010 Demographic Census), over 84 per cent of its population resided in urban areas. The number of urban localities with populations over 20,000 grew from 59 in 1940 to 878 in 2010. Yet, the urban population has increasingly concentrated into larger cities. Thus, over two-fifths of the country’s population increase between 2000 and 2010 accrued to only 16 cities having one million or more inhabitants. These large cities account for half of GNP, but much of their demographic growth is spreading to under-served peripheral and peri-urban areas where poverty, service and infrastructure deficiencies and other problems are intensifying.
Urbanisation has been instrumental in the country’s economic success and in the massive reduction of poverty. Yet, the speed and breadth of Brazil’s urban transition has contrasted sharply with public acceptance of the urbanisation process. Brazilian officialdom has perennially perceived urban growth from the standpoint of the administrative difficulties and the social and environmental problems that it purportedly causes. Political opposition to urban growth has led more often to setting up ineffectual and damaging obstacles to expansion than to forward planning. Failing to prepare for inevitable urban growth has damaged cities’ ability to increase sustainably and has been particularly damaging for the poor.
Instead of recognising urbanisation as an inevitable process that could help the country develop, increase rural-urban synergies and ultimately improve the lives of millions of poor people, the country has persisted in efforts to curb and divert it – and, failing that, to somehow organise it post hoc. Such belated efforts are much more expensive and much less effective, leaving a legacy of thorny social and environmental problems for future generations. Government efforts to resist rapid urban growth did not slow the pace of urbanisation perceptibly. They did, however, contribute to a very unequal urbanisation, with large segments of the population inhabiting poorly located and ill-served informal settlements.
Brazil’s post-1985 democratic Government has emphasised participatory processes, decentralised decision-making and reducing social inequality. Urban policy has become a crucial centrepiece in the country’s efforts to make democracy a working reality and to combat entrenched social divisions. Brazil has pioneered bold innovative practices that have created great expectations and that other countries have replicated. Though the country has recently gained recognition for pioneering innovative policies aimed at improving urban governance, as exemplified by its City Statute, the problems of the divided city remain paramount among the challenges the country faces.
Progress has been slow and irregular, due to the complexities of the issues, the social sectors’ varying capacity for participating in the affairs of the city and also due to a still-blurred institutional framework for urban policy. Moreover, many local administrations have displayed an innate tendency to try to stabilise their problems by continuing to make it difficult for migrants and poor people to settle in their localities. Brazilian urban policymakers’ failure to take a proactive approach to housing for the poor reflects more than mere apathy. In some cases at least it has been part of an explicit and systematic attempt to obstruct poor people, especially migrants, from settling in their cities or neighbourhoods. Such practices have far-reaching implications for the future of the cities and their populations and, ultimately, for the country’s development. In short, the failure to accept urbanisation, and to plan ahead for it, has brought persistent problems in transport and housing, as well as social disorganisation and environmental degradation in Brazilian cities.
China: a delayed and then frenetic urban transition
Of the five BRICS countries, China has undoubtedly had the most belated (but explosive) urban surge. China aggressively defended the merits of its agrarian society well into the second half of the 1970s. Since then, it has become one of just a few countries adopting policies to promote urban growth and whose model of development is most closely linked to urbanisation and city formation. China’s approach to urbanisation has contributed significantly to the country’s economic success and has profoundly influenced the form this success has taken. But while China has encouraged urbanisation, both national and local governments have been far keener on creating economically successful urban places than on accepting rural people as permanent urban residents. The household registration system, or hukou, still makes it difficult for rural-urban migrants to secure the benefits of their urban locations.
China’s initial economic successes, and its experiments with industrialisation in the 1980s, were remarkably rural. Reform and industrialisation in rural areas fuelled economic growth and population concentration, encouraging officialdom to explicitly foment industrialisation in those locales and enterprises considered the most likely to succeed. Special industrial zones, created in mainly rural coastal regions, spurred a self-fuelling process of urbanisation and industrialisation. Their economic success led to the opening up of more coastal locations to trade, foreign investment and capitalist enterprise. Government decentralisation followed and, by the 1990s, the coastal cities had emerged as the crucial engines of economic growth.
The underlying strategy was incremental and experimental, but the pace was frenetic. Cities, particularly those in the eastern region, became central to China’s development. They also became key arenas for institutional innovation, with the central Government enc...
