Introduction
For the first time in human history more people now live in towns and cities than in rural areas, and over the next few decades this trend towards an increasingly urban world is set to continue. However, the process of world urbanisation has been geographically uneven. All economically advanced nations are predominantly urban societies, having undergone this spatial-demographic transition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By contrast, most low- and middle-income countries remained predominantly rural societies until the mid-twentieth century when a global population boom set in motion a historically unprecedented expansion of urban populations in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Today cities of unprecedented size are emerging; slums, shanty towns, and squatter settlements are growing; urban poverty is rising; violence and armed conflict threaten the security of urban dwellers in rich and poor countries alike; and the stability of the global environment is under threat, with particular implications for urban centres. At the same time, cities have historically played an important role as drivers of social, political and economic transformations; they are social melting pots, nodes of regional and international communication and transportation, engines of economic growth, seats of political power and iconic cultural spaces. As such, the relationship between cities and development is complex and intimately tied to both the history of human development and contemporary efforts to improve the human condition through development policy and practice.
In this book we provide a global and interdisciplinary perspective on the relationship between cities and development. Drawing on a wide range of literature from the broader social sciences, we aim in particular to synthesise insights from the fields of Urban Studies and Development Studies – both interdisciplinary subject areas that emerged in the twentieth century as social scientists sought to grapple with the causes and consequences of industrialisation, urbanisation and globalisation. Through this approach we address the contributions that cities have made to development processes, as well as the unique economic, political and social development challenges posed by complex urban environments. We begin by defining some key terms and concepts and providing a rough outline of broad trends in the history of development research and practice.
Defining ‘cities’ and ‘urbanisation’
What is a city? Most people recognise a city when they see one, and implicitly or explicitly recognise a difference between rural and urban ways of living, but under closer scrutiny these categories can be problematic. What is the fundamental difference between a large village and a small town, or a large town and a small city? Social scientists have been pondering these questions for more than a century. While there is no consensus in theory or in practice, the perspectives of two eminent urban scholars writing in the early twentieth century remain influential among urban scholars and policymakers alike.
The first comes from Chicago School sociologist Louis Wirth, whose essay ‘Urbanism as a way of life’ is a classic in the field of urban studies. Wirth defined a city as a ‘relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals’ (1938: 8). This remains the most concise and enduring definition of an urban settlement. Importantly, Wirth argued that these conditions – size, density and heterogeneity – create a distinctly ‘urban way of life’ and an identifiable ‘urban personality’. It is the unique nature of the social, political, economic and cultural life of cities – or urbanism – that lies at the heart of urban scholarship.
Wirth’s contemporary, Lewis Mumford, went further by defining the urban condition not only in relation to demographic and physical characteristics, but also the socioeconomic relationships typical of human settlements with these characteristics:
The essential physical means of a city’s existence are the fixed site, the durable shelter, the permanent facilities for assembly, interchange, and storage; the essential social means are the social division of labour, which serves not merely the economic life but the cultural processes.
(Mumford 1937: 93–94)
This definition highlights an important aspect of urban: the social division of labour. For many social scientists this is a defining aspect of urban life and forms an essential component of the definition of what is ‘urban’. However, Mumford recognises the fundamental role of population size and density in creating this dynamic:
[W]ithout the social drama that comes into existence through the focusing and intensification of group activity there is not a single function performed in the city that cannot be performed – and has not in fact been performed – in the open country’.
(ibid.)
In other words, it is ultimately the concentration of human energies and activities that brings a place to life and gives it a distinctly urban character. Many authors before and since have sought to define or redefine the city, but the definitions offered by Wirth and Mumford remain fundamental to our conceptualisation of cities.
However, translating these definitions into practice for the purposes of research and policymaking highlights the ambiguities inherent in all efforts to create categories for the purposes of quantification and analysis. What is the appropriate size or population density threshold for classifying a settlement as distinctly ‘urban’? What degree of labour specialisation characterises an ‘urban’ way of life in a community? In practice, human settlements are classified very differently across countries, generally with reference to factors such as administrative status, population size, ‘urban characteristics’ or economic function (see Table 1.1). Of the 233 countries and territories tracked by the United Nations, 30 per cent use strictly administrative criteria for classifying cities, 21 per cent use only population size, and 4 per cent have no definitive criteria (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division 2014).
Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2014). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, CD-ROM Edition.
These differences in settlement classification make direct comparisons between countries somewhat tricky. Throughout this book we rely primarily on population statistics from the United Nations, which are generally considered to be the most reliable and comparable. But given national-level variation in settlement classification, even these are considered problematic and should be used with caution (Cohen 2004; Satterthwaite 2007).
Further confusion arises when discussing and analysing the process of urbanisation more broadly. The word ‘urbanisation’ is used in the English language in at least three ways: a) to refer to the process of rural–urban migration, b) to refer to the expansion of built-up areas, and c) to refer to an increase in proportion of a nation’s population living in settlements classified as urban (see Parnell and Walawege 2011). In other languages the word is sometimes used to denote the development of physical infrastructure in a town or city, such as paved roads, water mains or public buildings. For the purposes of conceptual and analytical clarity, we employ three distinct terms to describe the kinds of changes that occur as countries transition from predominantly rural to predominantly urban societies: urbanisation, urban growth and urban expansion.
Within this framework the word urbanisation is defined specifically in relation to the proportion of a country or region’s population living in urban (as opposed to rural) areas. Thus a country can be said to be ‘urbanising’ if the proportion of its population living in urban areas is increasing (e.g. from 35 per cent to 40 per cent). The speed of this change is known as the ‘rate’ of urbanisation (e.g. 2 per cent per annum), while the ‘level’ of urbanisation refers to the percentage of the population living in urban areas at any given time (e.g. as in ‘China’s level of urbanisation increased from 36% to 56% between 2000 and 2015’). This is a far more narrow use of the word than that found in general public discourse, in which the word urbanisation is used in a much broader manner.
We contrast urbanisation with urban growth, which refers specifically to an increase in the absolute number of people living in urban settlements rather than the proportion of people living in urban settlements. For example, if a country’s urban population increased from 1 million to 1.1 million people in a single year, we might say that it has an urban growth rate of 10 per cent per annum. Importantly, this is distinct from the rate of urbanisation: while urbanisation and urban growth often go...
