Making Sense of Cities

A geographical survey

Blair Badcock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134633432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography

In 2000, for the first time, a majority of the world's population was living in cities. The trend towards increasing urbanization shows no sign of slowing and the third millennium looks set to be an unprecedentedly urban one.'Making Sense of Cities' provides an up-to-date, vibrant and accessible introduction to urban geography. It offers students a sense of the patterns and processess of urbanization and the spatial organisation of cities, recognizing the significance of globalization, economics, politics and culture from a range of perspectives. Above all, it seeks to provide a relevant approach, inviting students to engage with competing theories of the urban and to assess them against the background of their own opinions and personal experience.Examples and case studies are drawn from a range of international settings, from San Francisco to Shanghai, Sydney to Singapore, giving a genuinely global coverage. The book is written in a fresh and engaging stlye, and is fully illustrated throughout. It is designed to appeal to any student of the urban and will be essential to students of geography, urban studies, town planning and land economy.

1

URBANISATION PROCESSES AND PATTERNS IN AN ERA OF GLOBALISATION

INTRODUCTION

Definitions

Urbanisation is defined as an increase in the proportion of a country’s population living in urban centres. When it comes to comparing country-by-country trends, measuring urbanisation presents some difficulties because there is no international agreement about the size a settlement needs to reach to count as ‘urban’. Currently, the best estimate places the proportion of the world’s population living in urban centres at between 40 and 55 per cent depending upon the criteria used to define an ‘urban centre’ (United Nations 1996, 14). Just a small adjustment in the census definitions used by populous countries like India and China could make a considerable difference to this estimate of urbanisation.

The other source of variation in statistical estimates of urbanisation arises from the different administrative boundaries that city governments adopt, and what parts of the built-up and adjacent areas of a metropolis are then counted. Table 1.1 shows how estimates of city size can vary depending upon which administrative areas are counted in or out. For example, the Shanghai Autonomous Region, with a population approaching 19 million, covers over 6000 square kilometres of some of the most fertile land in China. As well as feeding Shanghai’s population, this hinterland supports a dense network of villages. The delimited boundary for ‘urban’ Shanghai spills over into densely populated countryside (Fig. 1.1).

The continuing sprawl of urban regions in the United States also led to an updating of boundaries in the 1980s. The so-called functional urban region takes in all those daily commuters linked by their journey to work into the greater metropolitan labour market. By comparison, statistical definitions in European countries do not yet encompass this ‘functional urban region’ and as a consequence understate city size. In the United Kingdom by 1990, Glasgow, Liverpool and Newcastle would all have qualified as ‘million’ cities if the population within their functional urban regions had counted. This means that any league table of the world’s largest cities, such as Table 1.2, is always open to conjecture.

The other definitions that cause problems raise quite a different set of issues of usage. These are the bipolar categorisations ‘First World/Third World’ and ‘North/South’. It is difficult to avoid such usage in a text like this, so we should be clear about how this is intended. Globalisation is concentrating technology, market power and wealth within a group of countries roughly corresponding to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). These are often described as the First World bloc of countries and many of them were colonial powers that left colonies in a state of economic dependency. Former communist countries – or the Comecon bloc, an economic association of the Soviet Union’s east European satellites – made up a loosely described ‘Second World’ grouping. Before the fracturing of Euro-communism, that left a group of variously underdeveloped or less developed Third World countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. United Nations publications now use the term ‘less developed countries’ (LDCs) because, as well as these geopolitical changes, uneven economic growth in the Third World is making for a more and more differentiated ‘South’.

TABLE 1.1 Examples of how city size varies with boundary definitions

City or metropolitan area	Date	Population	Area(km^2)	Notes
Beijing	1990	2,336,544	87	Four inner city districts including the historic old city
(China)		c.5,400,000	158	‘Core city’
		6,325,722	1369	Inner city and inner suburban districts
		10,819,407	16,808	Inner city, inner and outer suburban districts and eight counties
Dhaka	1991		6	Historic city
(Bangladesh)		c.4,000,000	363	Dhaka Metropolitan Area (Dhaka City Corporation and Dhaka Cantonment)
		6,400,000	780	Dhaka Statistical Metropolitan Area
		< 8,000,000	1530	Rajdhani Unnayan Kartipakhya (RAJUK) – the jurisdiction of Dhaka’s planning authority
Katowice	1991	367,000		The city
(Poland)		2,250,000		The metropolitan area (Upper Silesian Industrial Region)
		c.4,000,000		Katowice governorate
Mexico City	1990	1,935,708	139	The central city
(Mexico)		8,261,951	1489	The Federal District
		14,991,281	4636	Mexico City Metropolitan Area
		c.18,000,000	8163	Mexico City megalopolis
Tokyo	1990	8,164,000	598	The central city (23 wards)
(Japan)		11,856,000	2162	Tokyo prefecture (Tokyo-to)
		31,559,000	13,508	Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area (including Yokohama)
		39,158,000	36,834	National Capital Region
Toronto	1991	620,000	97	City of Toronto
(Canada)		2,200,000	630	Metropolitan Toronto
		3,893,000	5583	Census Metropolitan Area
		4,100,000	7061	Greater Toronto Area
		4,840,000	7550	Toronto CMSA equivalent
London	1991	4230	3	The original ‘city’ of London
(UK)		2,343,133	321	Inner London
		6,353,568	1579	Greater London (32 boroughs and the city of London)
			12,530,000	London ‘metropolitan region’
Los Angeles	1990	3,485,398	1211	Los Angeles City
(USA)		9,053,645	10,480	Los Angeles County
		8,863,000	2038	Los Angeles-Long Beach Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area
		14,532,000	87,652	Los Angeles Consolidated Metropolitan Area

Source: United Nations (1996, 15). For notes on primary data, see original reference in text. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

FIGURE 1.1 The administrative areas of Shanghai for which urban statistics are calculated, c. 1980

Source: Map of Shanghai Municipality

Notwithstanding the economic setback in Asia in 1987, a number of newly industrialising economies (NIEs) like Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand recorded impressive rates of growth during the 1980s. China was admitted to membership of the World Trade Organization in 2001 and is now cautiously opening up its huge market to foreign investors and goods. While South Asia and much of Africa have yet to be integrated into the new global economy in any meaningful way, most Latin American countries remain peripheral economies with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) dictating their economic policy.

One consequence of this is that the prospects of cities and regions around the world are subject to these differences in the degree of economic development and integration of countries into the new global economy. At the same time globalisation processes are breaking down such clear-cut distinctions in many cities. In In the Cities of the South, Jeremy Seabrook (1996) reminds us that political and business elites in Third World countries generally enjoy a ‘First World’ lifestyle and are insulated from the conditions that confront the residents of big cities like Bangkok, Calcutta or Dacca on a daily basis. Similarly ‘Third World’ conditions can now be found in global cities like New York, Los Angeles, London and even Sydney, where there is a thriving informal economic sector. To some extent the ‘hidden’ part of this informal economy exploits the ‘sweated labour’ of newly arrived immigrants.

TABLE 1.2 Actual (1950, 1994) and projected (2015) populations of the 15 largest cities in the world

URBANISATION AND MIGRATION

By the late 1990s, the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimated that, worldwide, there were about 120 million people on the move annually (Stalker 2000). The move into and between cities is the single most important factor behind the population shifts taking place globally. Each year, between 20 and 30 million people leave the land or small villages in the countryside to move into medium-sized towns and cities. Nevertheless, there has been some slight slowing in the overall rate of urbanisation on a worldwide basis in each of the decades since the 1950s (United Nations 1996). Importantly, how different cultures view the economic participation of women has a major bearing on the gender make-up of the migration streams and, ultimately, on the sex ratio of urban populations. In South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, more men move to the cities and head urban households because of customary prohibitions on the right of women to work outside the home. By contrast, in the towns and cities of East and Southeast Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, women outnumber men and head up more urban households simply because they leave the countryside in greater numbers (United Nations 1996, 12). In an era of globalisation, many of these rural to urban migrants originate in other countries and are contracted to work in cities where there is a domestic shortage of labour (see Chapter 5).

Apart from natural increase, rural to urban migration is only one set of flows that contributes to the changing level of urbanisation. Rural to rural moves take place in the countryside and in total may exceed cityward migration. In some countries, as migrants move up the urban hierarchy in pursuit of better prospects, people moving between cities outnumber those migrating from the countryside. Yet in the United States and Australia, where about one in five people changes location each year, there is little change to the degree of urbanisation because these are inter-or intra-city moves. Urban to rural migration, which takes a number of forms, is another source of change in the size of cities. This can be temporary, when city workers return to the rural area to visit or help with the harvest. Or it can be permanent if labour conditions deteriorate in the city, or when city workers decide to live in the countryside and commute to jobs in town. There are always people returning to the countryside,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Urbanisation Processes and Patterns in an Era of Globalisation
• 2 Urban Systems and the Growth of Cities
• 3 Geography of Wealth Creation in Cities
• 4 Location of Economic Activities in Cities
• 5 Work Performed in Cities
• 6 Housing Markets and Residential Location in Cities
• 7 Social and Cultural Mosaic of Cities
• 8 City Environments and Living Conditions
• 9 Urban Politics and the Management of Cities
• 10 Outlook for the Urban Millennium
• References
• Index