Megacities

The Politics of Urban Exclusion and Violence in the Global South

Kees Koonings, Dirk Kruijt, Kees Koonings, Dirk Kruijt

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781848132962
• eBook ISBN: 9781848137318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

For the first time in history, the majority of the world's population lives in cities, the result of a rapid process of urbanization that started in the second half of the twentieth century. 'Megacities' around the world are rapidly becoming the scene for deprivation, especially in the global South, and the urban excluded face the brunt of what in many cases seems like low-intensity warfare. Featuring case studies from across the globe, including Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, Megacities examines recent worldwide trends in poverty and social exclusion, urban violence and politics, and links these to the challenges faced by policy-makers and practitioners.

1 | The rise of megacities and the urbanization of informality, exclusion and violence

DIRK KRUIJT AND KEES KOONINGS

In 2008, for the first time in history, the world population became urban, the result of a rapid process of urbanization that started in the second half of the twentieth century. In 2008, 75 per cent of the population in the developed countries and 44 per cent of the population in Third World countries were living in cities. UN estimates for 2050 predict that 86 per cent of the population in the more developed countries and 67 per cent of the population in the less developed countries will be urban. Moreover, 10 per cent of the entire urban world population will be living in megacities of 10 million inhabitants or more. Those living in metropolitan areas of one million or more city dwellers will constitute 40 per cent of the urban world population (UN 2008b: 220, Table A17). Population growth will be decisively an urban phenomenon (Kruijt 2008a).

This staggering pattern of urban explosion, the expansion of megacities and of secondary metropolitan areas, will largely materialize in developing countries. Between 2010 and 2050, cities and not the rural areas will absorb most of the population growth. Moreover, in this period the rural population is expected to decrease, in absolute numbers as well as proportionately. In 2050 the number of rural inhabitants of the world is expected to be 600 million less than that of today (UN 2008a: 1). In 2050 the world population is expected to be 9.2 billion. By then the population of urban areas will probably be around 6.4 billion, or 70 per cent of the world population (ibid.: 4).

The second consequence of this urbanization process is that the global pattern of world poverty, informality and exclusion will definitively acquire an urban face. The concentration of large segments of urban poor and excluded in capital cities and metropolitan areas but also in so-called ‘secondary cities’ (many of which will grow considerably in size) will have fundamental socio-economic and political consequences and will involve the possibility of destabilization of the economic, social and political order.

In this opening chapter we will first analyse the consequences of the process of urbanization, informalization, exclusion and violence that has taken place, especially in Latin America, where urbanization has been well documented over the last few decades. Subsequently we will turn to an overview of key issues in research and scholarly debate on urban poverty and exclusion from the 1970s to the present. Our analytical framework is that urban exclusion and social, political and violent responses to it are embedded in an overlapping set of grey zones in which commonly held distinctions between legal and illegal, formal and informal, peaceful and violent, legitimate and illegitimate are disappearing. Finally, we will assess the current patterns of exclusion in three urban fields within these grey zones: livelihood, mobilization and participation, and violence and insecurity. The expansion of informality, the potential but also the limitations for empowerment of the urban poor through social movements and political participation, and, most of all, the apparent proliferation of urban violence and insecurity, can be understood from the perspective of this blurring of societal domains. This is posing serious challenges to political and policy approaches towards urban poverty and exclusion. We will take up this theme in the conclusion of the book. But first we’ll take a brief look at the emergence of so-called megacities.

Megacities

Among the less developed regions there are remarkable differences between Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. In Latin America, and to a lesser degree the Caribbean, a spectacular process of sustained urbanization has taken place between the 1950s and the present: Latin America’s urban population in 2008 was 78 per cent, comparable to or even higher than that of western and eastern Europe. In its early concentration of large poor, informal and excluded population segments in urban areas, and its parallel process of increasing urban violence, the region is a forerunner of both Asia and Africa. In fact, Africa and Asia are experiencing a similar urbanization process to that of Latin America in previous decades. It is expected that in 2050 most of the urban world population will live in Asia (54 per cent) and in Africa (19 per cent). Between 2010 and 2050 the African urban population is likely to treble and in Asia it will more than double. Moreover, the growth of the urban world population will be concentrated in a few countries. China and India will account for about a third of the total increase. They will be followed by Congo and Nigeria in Africa, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and the Philippines in Asia, and Brazil and Mexico in Latin America, surpassing a population increase of 2–3 per cent per year (UN 2008a: 6, 7).

Explosive urbanization and, consequently, an enormous process of rural– urban migration and of informalization of the urban labour markets are at present characteristics of Africa and Asia. The process started later there than it did in Latin America but the same phenomenon of slum rings around the former city centres, the eroding formal order and the volatile pattern of informalization of the economy, society and the political system are evocatively expressed in the title of a recent study by Mike Davis (2006): Planet of Slums. (We will come back to Davis’s argument below.) As we will also suggest, patterns of informalization, exclusion and violence that we are familiar with from the Latin American experience are currently being reproduced in many of the megacities in Africa and Asia.

As part of this process the pattern of configuration of the world’s megacities is to be transformed. In 2025, of the fifteen largest cities in the world, thirteen will be located in Asia, Africa and Latin America: Bombay (26 million), Delhi (23 million), Dhaka (22 million), São Paulo (21 million), Mexico City (21 million), Calcutta (21 million), Shanghai (19 million), Karachi (19 million), Kinshasa (17 million), Lagos (16 million), Cairo (16 million), Manila (15 million), and Beijing (14 million) (UN 2008b: 167, Table A11). These projections should not distract us, however, from the expectation that the boosting of the urbanization and informalization process will take place in the ‘secondary’ metropolitan areas, the cities of between 1 million and 10 million inhabitants (those, indeed, attaining the size of the megacities of the previous generation).

At this point, it will be useful to take a brief look at the concept of ‘megacities’. As a rule, megacities are defined on the basis of their population size, with 5 million inhabitants as the most commonly used lower threshold.¹ In addition, megacities are depicted as the most extreme variety of ‘over-urbanization’ (D. Davis 2005; M. Davis 2006). They are ‘big but not powerful […] attract[ing] other forms of theoretical fascination: with the dark and disturbing side of urbanization’ (Robinson 2002: 540). Yet many of the manifest characteristics of this type of urbanization are visible in all cities in the developing world (or the ‘global South’), irrespective of their size. Therefore, we need to choose a qualitative definition of the urban phenomenon of the megacity. Megacities, then, are large cities (in absolute terms or in relation to the country in which they are situated) in which geographic and demographic size are just one out of many factors that shape a certain kind of urban pathology: a systematic disjuncture between opportunity structures for livelihood, service provision, security and overall urban planning and regulation, on the one hand, and the size and composition of the urban population on the other. Inequality, exclusion, segregation, violence and insecurity are apparently endemic features of megacities. The fault lines of urban exclusion are drawn by class, caste, race, ethnicity and religion. To the extent that these fault lines contribute to the disarticulation of urban systems, megacities can be considered ‘fragile’. Yet, as we will argue below and as will be shown in the other chapters in this book, they are also the stage for important and sometimes innovative spaces for social mobilization, urban politics and policy-making.

Patterns of urbanization: the forerunner case of Latin America²

Latin America’s urban growth process was a sustained development over more than fifty years. In addition, the peak period of massive urbanization (from the late 1970s to the 1990s) coincided with a severe transformation of the economic and political order. The most substantial political change of the decade of the 1980s was, without doubt, the replacement of military dictatorships by democratic governments in the majority of the Latin American countries. Tragically, the democratic transition process coincided with a severe economic crisis with long-term consequences. The mainstream model of economic adjustment programmes in the 1980s and 1990s induced impoverishment and instability in the economy and society. The evident failure of governments to expand the urban labour markets and to provide basic public services such as education, health and security produced a rather restricted integration of the incessant migration stream from the rural hinterland. This precarious integration is related to a transgenerational process of informalization and social exclusion in the urban, and particularly the metropolitan, environments. This development is reflected in high and persistent inequality in the distribution of urban income and wealth, in the expansion of slums and the deterioration of popular neighbourhoods over the past two or three decades. Latin America has, according to the yearly World Bank and UNDP reports, the most skewed income distribution in the world, more out of line than that of China, India or Russia.

No Latin American country can pride itself on having won the struggle against poverty. No national government could reincorporate the masses of population that had previously slipped away into informality, or reinsert the vulnerable categories (including the indigenous and Afro-Latin populations) that have suffered the stigma of being second-class citizens. The development of Latin America’s informality is astounding. The informal economy and society are composed not only of owners of micro-enterprises and their employees; the vast majority is formed by the self-employed, whose economic activity is a vehicle for day-to-day survival. Latin America’s informality has an ethnic face as well, with ethnicity a stratifying factor. Mechanisms for survival predominate: ties of ethnicity, religion, real or symbolic family relationships, closeness to the place of birth, local neighbourhood relations. In another publication, on the dynamics of urban poverty, informality and social exclusion in Latin America (Kruijt et al. 2002), we introduced the notion of ‘informal citizenship’, or the precarious implantation of (urban) second-class citizenship. An important UNDP (2004) report coined the terms ‘low-intensity citizenship’ and ‘low-intensity democracy’, typifying the post-dictatorship democracy in the region. Latin America has thus become a continent where, in most of its countries, a significant segment of the population is, simultaneously, poor, informal and excluded.

This river of poverty and exclusion bursting its banks and generating a new basin of informality and second-class citizenship has been described in terms of the decline of the institutional pillars of traditional Latin American society, overwhelmed by the mushrooming of the slum cities, and its consequences in terms of the emergence of a qualitatively new urban society. A characteristic of this new class structure is the implicit duality of the formal and informal economy and society (Portes 1985; Portes and Hoffman 2003). Recent ILO data emphasize a consolidation of the informality in Latin America and the Caribbean: 55 per cent of the region’s employment is informal and in some smaller economies (Bolivia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru) the informal labour market surpasses 70 per cent. Originally interpreted as a short-term under- and unemployment phenomenon, employment in the informal economy is at present clearly consolidated. The informal economy in turn shapes a kind of informal society, partially inserted in the formal order and partially forming a parallel social structure with its own internal social hierarchies.

There are some marked changes within the Latin American urban class structures. The chronically poor are now joined by the ‘new poor’, descending from the former strata of the middle and industrial working classes. Old and new poor converge as informal entrepreneurs and self-employed in search of survival and livelihood strategies. The decomposition of the formerly substantive working classes has led not only to the formation of a new edifice of social stratification but also to changes in the size and composition of poor households’ family structures. The traditional role of men as heads of families is ebbing away with the enlarged number of female-headed households in the popular neighbourhoods and slum cities. Furthermore, the informal economy and society even generate hidden migration cycles, demographic breakdowns and cleavages within the family structure.

Urban second-class citizenship is also citizenship with a violent face. In the 1970s and 1980s, the ‘divided’, ‘fragmented’ or ‘fractured’ cities were mostly typified in terms of urban misery or social exclusion. Mostly they were described in terms of the dichotomy between elites and well-to-do middle classes in the affluent urban centres and high-income neighbourhoods versus the ‘forgotten’ slum dwellers in the ever vaster expanses of the urban periphery. More recently, the dynamics of social exclusion and the proliferation of violence have acquired different social, cultural and spatial dimensions. Exclusion has increasingly become ‘segregation’, in which geographical distance as such is less important than the boundaries drawn by social, political and symbolic attributions. Urban segregation refers not only to the geographical distribution of poverty but also to the territorial and social division of cities in ‘go’ and ‘no-go’ areas, from the perspective of the local public administration, even the police. The slums and shanty towns come to be seen as genuine enclaves that obey a different set of rules and codes of conduct.

The case of Brazil, whose poverty-stricken and crime-ridden favelas are synonymous with ‘no-go areas’ within the metropolitan boundaries, acquired a depressing reputation among researchers and authors dealing with urban violence. A similar relation between the increase of poverty and violence can be found in Argentina (Greater Buenos Aires) and Colombia, where urban social exclusion, crime and violence became part of the amalgam of drug-based organized crime and political violence. In particular it ignited in the capital cities of post-war Central America (Guatemala City, San Salvador, Tegucigalpa) and of Jamaica (Kingston), Mexico and Venezuela (Caracas). Moser and McIlwaine (2004) published the results of a systematic and comparative study on urban violence as perceived by the urban poor. It is remarkable to observe the strong coincidence between perceptions of the poor and the factual analysis of researchers and government reports about violence and the perpetrators of violence.

It is interesting to note that, in the context of permeating violence and fluctuating mini-wars in specific urban territories, the armed forces usually do not play a significant role. Since the 1990s, the armed forces have been leaving direct confrontation with non-state violent actors to the police and the special police forces, more adapted to urban aggression and explicitly trained in counter-aggression. In Rio de Janeiro in the early 1990s and in Medellín in the early 2000s the military engaged in brief incursions into the shanty towns dominated by heavily armed drug gangs or gang-based leftist militias. These campaigns proved either ineffective (in Rio de Janeiro) or paved the way for the takeover of the shanty towns of Medellín (the comunas) by paramilitary units that adapted the local gang structure to their strategy of territorial control (Rozema 2008). Alongside an increasingly militarized and repressive police in many Latin American cities we can observe the proliferation of ‘private vigilantism’: the array of private police, privately paid street guardians in the middle-class and even popular metropolitan districts, citizens’ private police, private protection squads, extralegal task forces, paramilitary commandos, death squads, etc.

In the shanty towns and low-income neighbourhoods themselves there are the new armed actors as the local boss or trafficker is invested with de facto authority with regard to law and order, at the same time being the benefa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the editors
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• About the authors
• Introduction
• 1 The rise of megacities and the urbanization of informality, exclusion and violence
• ONE | The social dynamics of exclusion and violence in megacities
• TWO | Political and policy dimensions of urban exclusion and violence
• Conclusions: governing exclusion and violence in megacities
• Bibliography
• Index
• Notes