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social assets and agricultural production. It makes cameras, cassette recorders and electric fans,
refrigerators, washing machines and colour TV sets (Lin and Ma, 1994, p. 82; Maruya, 1994, p.65; Sit
and Yang,1997, p. 651; Yeung,1994, p.7).
The key was foreign investment, above all from Hong Kong, to some extent from Taiwan. By the end
of the 1980s, the Pearl River Delta had become a major production base for Hong Kong
manufacturing enterprises, employing 3 million, five times the number in Hong Kong itself, and all in
labour-intensive, light manufacturing branches in which Hong Kong had originally specialized. There
is thus an internal division of labour, in which Guangdong specializes in heavy industry and R&D,
Hong Kong-Shenzhen acts as a ‘window’ to the outside world for the latest developments in
technology, design and world market trends, Hong Kong is the hub for finance, insurance and
shipping, and the intervening areas become a manufacturing base. The model is ‘front shop, back
factory’ (Guldin, 1995, pp. 113-114; Sit and Yang, 1997, pp. 651-656). By the mid-1990s no less than
5 million people in the Pearl River Delta were employed in factories controlled by Hong Kong
interests; manufacturing accounted for only 18 per cent of the Hong Kong workforce, services
accounted for 60 per cent (So and Kwok, 1995b, p. 259). As So and Kwok put it:
The colony has upgraded itself to be the financier, investor, supplier, designer, promoter,
exporter, middleman and technical consultant of the Peal River Delta economy.
(So and Kwok, 1995a, p. 2)
Likewise, Shanghai is changing its economic base very rapidly: industries are relocating not only to
suburban Shanghai but also beyond the city boundaries, to the wider Yangtze delta region. About half
the delta’s industrial output is now created outside the city, mainly in smaller townships and village
enterprises; and an industrial corridor is emerging, almost 200 kilometres long, from Shanghai to
Suizhou, Wuxi and Changzhou, in an area of villages and hamlets with little or no land use controls or
supporting municipal infrastructure. Migration could take the population of the delta to 22 million by
2005. Unplanned development threatens not only to deplete cultivated land, but to affect air and water
quality in Shanghai (Leman, 1995, p.10).
The Contradictions of Latin America
Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s has shown a series of urban contradictions. With rare
exceptions, its economies have grown more slowly than in the boom years of the 1960s, though hyper-
inflation has been largely brought under some degree of control. The main problem remains that of
highly unequal distribution of urban income, resulting in a dual urban economy and a highly
segregated urban social structure: luxury apartments and elegant high-rise office and hotel towers in
the city centres, huge shanty-towns on the outskirts. Since the continent returned universally to
democracy in the 1980s, popular social movements have been much in evidence, and have achieved
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some results in slum improvement programmes. Car ownership is relatively high, partly because of
low petrol taxes and generous highway-building. Since this region has a number of the world’s largest
metropolitan areas, the resulting patterns are highly unsustainable.
The Dilemma of Sub-Saharan Africa
In the period 1965 to 1990, Sub-Saharan Africa showed negligible average annual economic growth,
completely out of line with other world regions (Hoogvelt, 1997, p. 202). In many parts of Africa,
imposition of neo-liberal orthodoxy has actually contributed to the descent into anarchy and civil war
(Hoogvelt, 1997, pp. 175-176). Thus, since 1980, Sub-Saharan Africa ‘has effectively become sunk in
a pervasive crisis of stagnation and decline’ (Jamal and Weeks, 1993, p. 18).
Yet migration to the cities in absolute terms increased, even though in some cases the rate declined
(Jamal and Weeks, 1993, p. 20). Official figures suggest that in the 1980s Africa had the lowest rates
of urbanization but the highest urban growth rates (Potts, 1995, p. 245). However, Potts’ work
suggests that these figures are wrong: in Ghana and Zambia, and to a lesser extent in Tanzania, urban
growth slackened (Potts, 1995, p. 252). ‘A form of counter-urbanization, which in this African context
refers to a situation where the number of urban residents opting to leave the city and move to rural
areas has exceeded the number of rural-urban migrants, has definitely occurred in some countries,
although the incidence of this has been quite variable for the different centres in this urban system’
(Potts, 1995, p. 259).
Even so, it was a mark of the economic crisis that migration continued into the cities. Redundant wage
earners from the collapsing formal sector joined impoverished rural migrants to flood into the cities,
where they entered the informal sector, struggling at the very margin of existence (Jamal and Weeks,
1993, p. 131). The extraordinary fact was that in many countries, urban populations suffered savage
declines in living standards: in Uganda, the real wage fell 90 per cent between 1972 and 1990, and a
rough calculation suggests that the 1990 wage would buy only one quarter of a family’s food needs;
similar declines occurred in Tanzania, Kenya and Ghana (Jamal and Weeks, 1993, p. 43).
During this time the crisis was exacerbated by IMF policies to reduce urban economic growth, based
on the remarkable notion that urban incomes were too high in relation to rural ones, and also by war
in Angola, Mozambique, Sudan and Liberia which caused migration into the cities (though in Rwanda
and Somalia war has had the reverse effect), by prolonged drought in Sahelian countries such as
Mauritania, and by the end of apartheid in South Africa which was followed by a flood of in-
migration from all over Africa (Potts, 1995, pp. 246-247). Jamal and Weeks calculate that during the
1970s and 1980s, the urban/rural gap either vanished or reversed (Potts, 1995, p. 248).
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The evidence is thus overwhelming – it is not only that urban poor have become much
poorer in many countries, but that their lives have become an almost incredible struggle.
The huge gap between wages and minimum necessary expenditure has been termed the
‘wages puzzle’ by Jamal and Weeks (1993): how are people surviving?
(Potts, 1995, p. 250)
They are surviving through a great increase in informal sector activity, with previously non-earning
household members entering the petty commodity sector, and wage-earners taking on supplementary
activities; and the development of food-growing on any available patch of ground. Remarkably, there
seems to have been no notable increase in malnutrition, because family members went into food
production. ‘One witnesses in Uganda a regression to a primordial state of society in which the
division of labour begins to break down. Along with that regression disappeared notions of class and
explanations of income distribution based on distinct classes’ (Jamal and Weeks, 1993, p. 42). This
throws extra burdens on women (Potts, 1995, p. 250). In the 1990s, since the end of apartheid, there
has been a remarkable growth of long-distance migration from many parts of eastern and central
Africa into Johannesburg; most of these migrants are engaged in petty trading activities, which
provide almost the sole economic opportunity for many of them.
We can call such a form of urban growth informalized urbanization: a form whereby cities grow
without a formal economic base. According to the United Nations Population Fund, many big cities in
the developing world are experiencing a rising proportion of poor and unemployed people. In some
countries, migration and immigration have resulted in high unemployment among urban youth. This is
related to rising rates of crime and violence. In urban areas experiencing high population growth,
infrastructure and services may have reached capacity limits. There are increased needs for housing,
sanitation, water supply, waste treatment facilities, and transportation. Stress is placed on public
facilities, such as sanitation and sewage treatment that can lead to environmental problems (Sadik,
1995).
A very similar phenomenon seems to be occurring in some cities of the developed world, which in
effect are invaded by the developing world. In Los Angeles, a city which has seen massive
immigration – both legal and illegal – from Latin America and Pacific Asia, Ed Soja refers to a
‘carceral’ city: one that has become ungovernable, with walled-in estates and protected shopping
centres, gangs protecting their turf, and high-technology police (Soja, 1995, pp. 133-134). He
describes ‘the new topography of race, class, gender, age, income, and ethnicity has produced an
incendiary urban geography in Los Angeles, a landscape filled with violent edges, colliding turfs,
unstable boundaries, peculiarly juxtaposed lifespaces, and enclaves of outrageous wealth and despair’
(Soja, 1995, p. 134). There may be an element of exaggeration here; but also an element of truth.
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6.5 The Smaller Cities: A Neglected Problem
Cities range in size from all the way from mega-cities with 20 or 30 million people, down to small
provincial places acting as central places for agrarian hinterlands. In spite of their differences, they
share common economic functions, and common problems of housing markets or infrastructure. And,
though the big cities steal the limelight, most city dwellers actually live in these smaller places. (In
Vietnam, though two big cities have 30 per cent of the population, nineteen other cities have between
100,000 and 500,000, and there are 450 cities in all.) Small cities, acting as service centres where
people earn their living by retailing, trading, or transporting goods and people, can act as
administrative centres or as local growth poles, thus attracting part of the rural-to-urban migration and
reducing the pressure on the big cities. Like the big cities, these small places are experiencing high
population growth through high birth rates plus migration. Indeed, there is clear evidence that in Latin
America, for instance, they are growing far faster than the very large cities, where growth has slowed
down. Like them, they grow through industrial and agricultural processing activities; they have
increasing numbers of cars, with accompanying pollution and congestion, and intensive building
activities which tend to threaten their attractive appearance.
Usually, they suffer even more than big cities from the lack of financial autonomy. Professional and
technical manpower is very often non-existent, partly as a consequence of a weak financial resource
base, but partly also because labour markets operate to attract high-quality professionals to the large
employment magnets of the better known prestige cities. Their political influence on the central
government is small, for they lack the power of big numbers or national prestige. Thus deficits in
infrastructure and lack of services in informal housing areas may be even more intense than in big
cities. Capacity bottlenecks in the municipal administration can result in mounting problems for the
public sector, which is preoccupied with firefighting and has too little time or energy to promote
democratic decision making. This means that the challenge to develop more decentralized
responsibilities and stronger local democracy may be even more acute in these small secondary cities.
6.6 Urban Form and Urban Transport
Dispersion of homes and jobs in the largest cities, more rapid growth in the smaller cities, have a
similar effect: they work to increase reliance on the private car, which is one of the main challenges to
urban policy in the developing world. Developing cities, with GNP per capita of less than US$ 5,000,
show the fastest rate of car ownership growth (Kidokoro, 1992, p. 74). At present, about 70 per cent
of all vehicles are in OECD countries, but over the next twenty-five years, from 1995 to 2020, the
distribution will change: in the developing countries, the number of vehicles will increase by a further
75 per cent, and by 2020 43 per cent of the world’s vehicle fleet will be in the developing countries
(table II.9). In the year 2005, the global numbers of vehicles will exceed 1000 million for the first
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time, and before 2030 the number of vehicles in non-OECD countries will exceed that of the OECD
countries. Cars account for about 60 per cent of all vehicles in both 1995 and 2020, but they are more
important in the OECD countries; in the developing countries, light trucks (15 per cent) and
motorcycles (32 per cent) form important elements in the vehicle fleet). The scale of the problem is
vast and increasing.
Notes: All Vehicles includes cars, light trucks, motorcycles and heavy trucks.
OECD North America – USA, Canada;
OECD Europe – Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg,
The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK, Finland;
OECD Pacific – Japan, Australia, New Zealand.
Mexico is a member of OECD (since 1994) but is excluded from these OECD figures.
Source: OECD/ECMT (1995).
As seen in Chapter I, these cities have already seen dramatic traffic growth in a short time.
Developing cities are thus coping with an extraordinary combination of rapid motorization (10-15 per
cent per annum) and an urban population that is growing by 6 per cent per annum (World Bank,
1996). This is further compounded by the fact that at comparable levels of income, car ownership
rates in developing countries are much higher.
But in virtually all these cities, in addition, there is less road space available. In European cities 20-25
per cent and in Manhattan over 30 per cent of urban space is devoted to transport activities, but in
Bangkok and Calcutta only 7-11 per cent (World Bank, 1996). Large Asian cities have to cope with
much higher volumes of traffic per unit of road space, exacerbated by their incomplete networks,
vehicle mixture, the use of street space for trading functions (an historic legacy, which brings benefits
to those who must shop locally), poor traffic management and – most critically – the absence or
inadequacy of a segregated mass transit system. This is exacerbated further by the concentration of
functions in the CBD and the development of residential districts at ever-greater distances from the
centre (Kidokoro 1992, pp. 75-76).
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This means that even at lower levels of car ownership, city roads in developing countries are more
congested. In Mexico City peak speeds are 16 km/hour; in Metro Manila, less than 15 km/hour on the
most congested one quarter of the network and 10 km/hour in the CBD; in Bangkok, probably the
world’s worst, an average of 13 km/hour (Brennan, 1994, p. 246). Most of these cities have recently
experienced extraordinarily rapid growth in vehicle numbers – Cairo 17 per cent per annum, for
instance – and this is typical. Fuel is cheap and often subsidized, and there are few attempts to limit
the growth of traffic.
And the environmental effects are proportionately much worse: slow-moving traffic and ill-
maintained vehicles cause greater levels of pollution than those emanating from more efficient
modern vehicles operating in less congested conditions. Land costs and high housing rents in central
areas contribute towards huge, sprawling, land-consuming cities with increasingly long and slow
journeys to and from work, which in extreme cases may take over five hours a day or even more. This
is the classic ‘Bangkok Effect’, where congestion and pollution are so bad that it is quicker to walk,
and vehicles are ‘abandoned’ on roads. In Bangkok, businesses are already decentralizing out of the
most congested zone: from 1978 to 1987 twelve companies, or 21 per cent, shifted their offices out of
the CBD to fringe areas; seven of ten new offices located outside, between 5 and 10 km distant
(Kidokoro, 1992, p. 80); in 1978 seven out of ten shopping centres were in the CBD, but two-thirds of
new shopping centres built subsequently were outside it (Kidokoro, 1992, p. 84). But this will almost
certainly cause the congestion to spread over an even wider area. Because of this, there is an urgent
need to develop forms of urban growth that will support adequate public transport. This is not
necessarily metro construction, which is very expensive and not very efficient in relieving congestion;
efficient bus systems and segregated bicycle lanes may be far more cost-effective.
6.7 Micro-Patterns of Urban Growth: The Problem of Mega-Scale Development
Both in the developed and the developing world, it is evident that two important processes are
occurring in parallel at two quite different spatial scales: deconcentration and reconcentration at the
macro-scale are accompanied by a huge increase in scale and separation at the micro-scale. This is
evident both in large-scale commercial developments in Western cities like Canary Wharf or La
Défense, in new edge city shopping centres like Bluewater in England, or in the equivalent mega-
developments in Malaysia, China or Japan. No better illustrative contrast can be found than that
between the retail pattern of the Asian city, dominated by small shophouses along main streets, and
the huge scale of new developments in Yokohama, Kuala Lumpur or Shanghai. These latter are
characterized both by their vast size and complexity, and their tendency to segregate monofunctional
land uses. The irony is that such scale and segregation are completely contradictory to the principle of
sustainable development, which demands the very reverse: small scale and mixed use.
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7.
Conclusion: Markets and Planning
The above account might suggest that processes of urban growth and change are and will be in some
sense natural and universal, following general technology-driven and market-driven forces. To some
extent, of course, this is true: urban mass transit, and then the diffusion of car ownership, have
massively diffused metropolitan areas, but also – at least initially – have helped to concentrate
activities in their downtown cores. But beginning in Los Angeles in the mid-1920s, and spreading
almost throughout the developed world, the private car has also helped powerfully to spread
employment, creating polycentric urban areas with criss-cross commuting patterns. This is a universal
pattern in both developed and developing city regions, as true of London as of Los Angeles, of
Sydney as of Buenos Aires, of Tokyo as of New York.
However, planning processes powerfully work to affect the outcome. It is simply untrue, at least in the
year 2000, to say that all major metropolitan areas in developed countries, still less developing
countries, exhibit identical trends and features. The contrast between the spread-out polycentric
London region, and the relatively compact Ile-de-France region, will make that point. Even more
striking is the difference between almost any large European city and its North American equivalent.
Broadly, European cities are very much denser and more compact, and for that reason they support a
much higher level of public transport than their North American equivalents; though even there,
Canadian cities are denser than American ones. And Asian cities tend to be denser still, as the
splendid public transport systems of Tokyo and Osaka, Hong Kong and Singapore, will testify
(Newman and Kenworthy, 1989).
Planning, and in particular its main tool, zoning, have thus had a profound effect on cities. But they
work best if they bend and shape market trends, not if they work against them. Rigid zoning codes
give landowners huge powers, and in growing cities these powers represent huge potential profits, yet
the city has little ability either to change established zoning or to profit from the system it has itself
created. At the same time, in many middle-income cities, such rigid zoning merely results in the
multiplication of informal housing, outside any system of control whatsoever.
This illustrates a central point: planning is only one of the public actions that shapes growth and
change in cities; taxation is another, equally important. Yet taxation and land use planning are almost
everywhere developed separately, by different bureaucracies, with different goals. Some few cities
have sought to effect a reconciliation, developing a land-use planning system that bends and shapes
the market, and using taxation in parallel. But they are a small and fortunate minority. The others have
found it all too difficult, buffeted as they are by rapid growth and fast-changing macro-economic
constraints.
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Urban form and urban density are profoundly influenced by the costs of mobility. It is important to
realize that at present, all types of mobility are subsidized, or at least do not cover their full economic
and ecological costs. Mobility systems based on full economic and ecological cost recovery would
reduce the spatial division of labour, increase residential densities and create more incentives for
mixed-use development. Planners would experience less resistance if they developed guidelines
enforcing higher densities, faster recycling or less functional specialization of land uses.
In other words, the account ignores the complex relationships between market forces, intellectual
concepts and ideologies, and regional/local policies. In many parts of Europe and some parts of North
America, a well-organized and militant movement campaigns for sustainable urban solutions; it just
so happens that these concur with NIMBY movements in these areas, and with the slogans that are
used whenever such a proposal for development is rejected. The central problem, in all such cases, is
to distinguish self-interested rhetoric, from sound arguments about real sustainability issues. The
striking fact is that in the 1990s, governments across the world have begun to make major shifts in
national policy in accordance with the agreements of the Rio (1992) and Kyoto (1997) summits;
sustainability is on the agenda in a serious way, and this represents a major shift.
In particular, it represents a recognition of the economic externalities of transport. The movement of
people and goods is an essential basis for economic life. But it uses natural resources which, given
present technology, are non-renewable, it creates pollution, and it contributes to global environmental
impacts such as global warming. At present, these are not properly represented in systems of national
accounting or in decision making; in effect, all national governments have subsidized mobility in
ways that fail to take regard of externalities. There is a consensus in nearly every country that
locational decisions, whether about new commercial developments or new residential developments,
should embody these considerations; but agreement as to how this should be done is developing only
slowly. The need is to develop a new framework, a new set of policy parameters, that would make it
easier to do so.
In doing this, we need to be constantly aware that cities are different, in at least two ways. First,
mayors and councils in poorer cities will inevitably have different priorities and constraints as
compared with middle-income cities, and they in turn will have different priorities and constraints as
compared with very rich cities. It is inappropriate, and certainly unhelpful, to apply lessons from one
to another, without considering whether they are appropriate. It is not, however, inappropriate or
unhelpful to ask how richer cities went about tackling their problems thirty or more years ago, when
they were as poor as the poor cities are now. But here enters a second kind of difference: even at any
given level of development, there are huge social and cultural contrasts. The high-density East Asian
city cannot simply be exported as a solution to the sprawling low-density metropolitan areas of Latin
America, though it is almost certainly a more sustainable kind of city environmentally.
Documents you may be interested
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