15062009
Urbanization and Its Consequences
Xizhe Peng
Population Research Institute, Fudan University, China
Xiangming Chen
Center for Urban and Global Studies, Trinity College, US
Yuan Cheng
Population Research Institute, Fudan University, China
Keywords: urbanization, population size, megacities, rural population, urban population, self-generated or endogenous urbanization, industrialization, modernization theory, dependency/world-system theory, rural-urban imbalance, the global urban hierarchy, global cities, urban localities, percentage the labor force in industry, urban hierarchy, sectoral inequality, rural to urban migration, urban primacy, growth and wealth distribution, overurbanization, underurbanization, demographic natural increase, urbanization-environment relationship, job creation, informal sector, housing, spatial form, education, health.
Contents
1. Definition and Background
2. Urbanization Theory
3. Importance Dimensions of Urbanization
1. Urban Place and Hierarchy
2. Urban Primacy
3. Overurbanization vs. Underurbanization
4. Natural Increase and Migration
4. Consequences of Urbanization
1. Urbanization and the Environment
2. Urbanization, Job Creation, and the Informal Sector
3. Urbanization, Housing, and Spatial Form
4. Urbanization, Education, and Health
5. Conclusions
Bibliography
Summary
To show a general picture about urbanization and its consequences, we introduce the most common concept of urbanization and review the urbanization history briefly. Dedicated to the development of the urbanization, four mainstreams of urbanization theories and their respective pros and cons have been discussed.
While urbanization is a powerful “master” process of long historical duration, current vibrancy, and even stronger future impact, it is not monolithic or unidimentional. On the contrary, urbanization carries several important dimensions that collectively and individually produce macro and micro impacts on the society and everyday life. We introduce and explore a number of these dimensions with a heavy demographic emphasis through illustrative research findings and empirical examples, which also help pave the way for us to examine the socioeconomic consequences of urbanization.
While it is not always possible to fully disentangle the mutual causation between urbanization and the other major processes such as rapid population growth, industrialization/deindustrialization, social transformation, and so on, it is forever important and necessary to identify a range of significant consequences of urbanization. Among thousands of consequences, we select the aspects of environments, job creation, housing, education and health as the spotlight for our discussion. How these consequences may play out in rapidly urbanizing countries that remain less developed and thus less equipped to deal with them are also emphasized.
1. Definition and Background
By definition, urbanization refers to the process by which rural areas become urbanized as a result of economic development and industrialization. Demographically, the term urbanization denotes the redistribution of populations from rural to urban settlements over time. However, it is important to acknowledge that the criteria for defining what is urban may vary from country to country, which cautions us against a strict comparison of urbanization cross-nationally. The fundamental difference between urban and rural is that urban populations live in larger, denser, and more heterogeneous cities as opposed to small, more sparse, and less differentiated rural places.
To locate the origin of urbanization today, we go back in time to identity the earliest form of urban life as beginning in the Middle and Near East—near what is today Iraq--around 3,500 BC. In other words, the oldest urban communities known in history began approximately 6,000 years ago and later emerged with the Maya culture in Mexico and in the river basins of China and India. By as early as the thirteenth century, the largest cities in the world were the Chinese cities of Chang’an (Xi’an today) and Hangzhou, which had over one million people. And London didn’t reach one million people until the 1700s. However, until the nineteenth century, constrained by the limits of food supply and the nature of transportation, both the size and share of the world’s urban population remained very low, with less than three percent of the world’s population living in urban places around 1800 (Clark, 1998).
Sparse and often ambiguous archeological and historical record (Grauman, 1976) indicates that the urban population fluctuated between four and seven percent of total population from the beginning of the Christian era until about 1850. In that year, out of a world population of between 1.2 and 1.3 billion persons, about 80 million or 6.5 percent lived in urban places. While 80 million was a large number then, they were dispersed over hundreds of urban places worldwide. In 1850, only three cities, London, Beijing, and Paris, and more than a million inhabitants; perhaps 110 cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants (Golden, 1981). Of the 25 largest cities then, 11 were in Europe, eight in East Asia, four in South Asia, and only two in North America.
During the century 1850-1950, there was, for the first time in human history, a major shift in the urban/rural balance. In his classic work The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (1899), A. Weber provided a historical account for the limited level of urbanization at the global scale. Only three regions in Great Britain, North-West Europe, and the USA were more than 20 percent urban in 1890. Urbanization in the first half of the twentieth century occurred most rapidly and extensively in Europe, the Americas, and Australasia. The number of large cities (city has more than 100,000 inhabitants ) in the world increased to 946, and the largest city – New York—had a population of 2.3 million in 1950, while urbanization proceeded very slowly in much of the rest of the world. Although only a quarter of the world’s total population lived in urban places in 1950, urbanization in the developed countries had largely reached its peak (Davis, 1965).
The acceleration of world urbanization since 1850 partly reflects a corresponding acceleration of world population growth; but urbanization is not merely an increase in the average density of human settlement (Lowry, 1990). For example, in 1960, nearly all less urbanized regions of the world had low rates of rural outmigration – under 1 percent annually – and high rates of urban immigration – 1.5 to 3.2 percent annually (Lowry, 1990). With a few exceptions, urban and rural rates of natural increases were about the same, yet urban growth rates were two to five time above rural growth rates, reflecting the strong effect of rural-to-urban migration in regions with relatively small urban sectors.
The urbanization of the developing world began to accelerate in late twentieth century (Timberlake, 1987), although there was no clear trend in overall urban growth in less developed countries due to inconsistent definition of urban and the lack of quality in their census data. According to the United Nations, the levels of urbanization in 1995 were high across the Americas, most of Europe, parts of western Asia and Australia. South America was the most urban continent with the population in all but one of its countries (Guyana) being more urban than rural. More than 80 percent of the population lived in towns and cities in Venezuela, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina. Levels of urban development were low throughout most of Africa, South and East Asia. Less than one person in three in sub-Saharan Africa was an urban dweller. The figure was below 20 percent in Ethiopia, Malawi, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Rwanda and Burundi. An estimated 40 percent of China’s 1.2 billion people and 29 percent of India’s 0.96 billion lived in cities and towns. The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan was reckoned to be the world’s most rural sovereign state, with only six percent of its population living in urban places.
The transition from the twentieth to the present century marked a new and more striking era of global urbanization. In 2008 the world crossed that long-awaited demographic watershed of half of the people on earth living in urban areas. Further acceleration of urbanization going forward is likely to raise the share of the world’s urban population to 75 percent by 2050, significantly higher than the mere 10 percent in 1900. While the USA, Britain, and Germany have already surpassed 75 percent urban and won’t exceed 90 percent by 2050, newly industrializing countries like South Korea and Mexico, which were half-way urbanized at 50 percent in 1950, are likely to pass 75 percent by 2030. Moving along a steeper upward trajectory, China will urbanize from 20 percent in 1980 to over 60 percent around 2030. China’s urbanization from the 1980s on reflects the global shift of the world’s urban population from developed to developing countries, which will account for about 80 percent of the world’s urbanites by 2030 doubling from 40 percent in 1950 (Soja and Kanai, 2007).
Another salient aspect of this intensified urbanization is the accelerated growth of million-plus cities, which grew from only two (London and Beijing) around 1800 to 16 around 1900 to roughly 70 in 1950, to approximately 180 by 1975, and then soared to over 450 in 2005. Of this number, China claimed almost 100, India about 40, while the USA and Europe had 40 respectively, and so did the African continent, with 57 million-plus cities in Latin America and the Caribbean. While London was the first and only megacity of 10 million people around 1900, the list expanded to over 20 in 2005. In addition, while only three of the world’s largest cities with five million or more people were in developing countries, eight of the 10 largest cities and 15 of the 20 megacities of 10 million people in 2005 were in developing countries (Soja and Kanai, 2007). The trend of mega-urbanization will become stronger in developing countries, especially like India and China, which is expected to have more than 220 million-plus cities and 25 cities with five million people by 2025 (blog, April 6, 2008).
While urbanization has intensified in terms of the growing megacities, the overall rate of urban growth has consistently declined in most world regions in the past half century and probably in the coming several decades (see Figure 1). Therefore, the rapid rates of urban population growth are no longer the most pressing concern but the absolute population size of the huge urban centers, especially those in Asia and Africa.
Figure 1. Average Annual Rate of Change of the Urban Population, by Region, 1950-2030
[pic]
2. Urbanization Theories
Theories on urbanization have been around for such a long time that they have blended into and intersect with theories that also pertain to cities, industrialization, and more recently, globalization. At the risk of being subjective and circumvent, we introduce and discuss four such theories, which provide both earlier and recent explanations for why and how urbanization occurs. First, there is what may be labeled the theory on self-generated or endogenous urbanization. This theory suggests that urbanization requires two separate prerequisites--the generation of surplus products that sustain people in non-agricultural actives (Childe, 1950; Harvey, 1973) and the achievement of a level of social development that allows large communities to be socially viable and stable (Lampard, 1965). From a long temporal perspective, these changes took place simultaneously in the Neolithic period when the first cities emerged in the Middle East (Wheatley, 1971) as mentioned earlier. A much later period in which these two preconditions interacted strongly was the late eighteenth century when the rise of industrial capitalism led to the emergence of urban societies in Great Britain, North-West Europe and North America (Pred, 1977).
In a demographic sense, this theory focuses on the rural-urban population shift as the foundation of urbanization but it identifies industrialization as the basic driver behind the movement of rural population to urban areas for factory jobs. The historical evidence undoubtedly bears this out. Before the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, no society could be described as urban or urbanized. And all countries, primarily in the West, that began to industrialize rapidly after Great Britain became highly urbanized by the mid-twentieth century, which was followed by the accelerated industrialization and then urbanization in the rest of the world through the last century and into the present. If we focus on cities instead of urbanization, this theory accounts for the endogenous conditions that facilitate the transition from pre-industrial to industrial cities, first in the West and then in the rest of the world, in an uneven manner. Perhaps the first theoretical perspective that remains relevant today in light of the close relationship between industrialization and urbanization, it suffers from the drawback of focusing narrowly on the rural-urban shift within countries as the key to urbanization. Besides the authors cited above, this theoretical tradition was enriched by scholars like Kinsley Davis in the 1950s through the 1970s (Davis, 1951, 1965, 1969, 1972).
The second theory on urbanization actually emerged from a broader theoretical school known as the modernization theory that became prevalent and influential from the 1950s through the 1970s. While overlapping with the first theory in the timing of development, modernization theory had a wider set of assumptions and scope of influence (see So, 1990 for a comprehensive critique of modernization theory). Looking at urbanization through the lens of modernization, first, the present state of urbanization in any given society is set by its initial state at the onset of modernization. Secondly, technology is fundamentally more important than a society’s social organization in shaping urbanization. Finally, the path and pattern of urbanization within and between developed and developing countries are most likely to converge through cultural diffusion, despite breeding inevitable social disequilibria (Kasarda and Crenshaw, 1991).
We could trace the intellectual underpinning of the modernization view on urbanization in developing countries to an even earlier theoretical paradigm, namely, human ecology. While developed to describe the structure and evolution of the American city, primarily Chicago in the 1920s-1930s by Robert Park and others, human ecology is based on strong assumptions about the interactive role of population dynamics, market competition, material technology (e.g., transport infrastructure), and the built environment in making and remaking urban life (Hawley, 1981; Orum and Chen, 2003). These assumptions became the predictive elements in how modernization theory would view subsequent developing-country urbanization as being driven by industrialization, technological progress, information penetration, and cultural diffusion. This optimistic prospective view was very developmentalist in heralding the more positive outcomes of accelerated urbanization in the developing world, but only to be challenged by the more depressing reality of economic and spatial inequalities, as well as other social problems from urbanization in poor countries (Smith, 1996).
As modernization theory failed to account for both the conditions and consequences of urbanization in developing countries, it opened the door to a compelling theoretical alternative—the dependency/world-system perspective on urbanization. Advanced by Frank (1969) and Wallerstein (1979), as well as others like Goldfrank (1979), dependency/world-system theory links recent changes in the roles and organizations of the economies of developing countries to the growth and extension of capitalism in the capitalism world system. From this world-systemic perspective, urbanization can be seen as an internal locational response to global economy. First, dependency theorists assume that a uniquely capitalist development pattern exists, asserting that capitalism is a unique form of social organization. Second, capitalism requires a certain social structure, which is characterized by unequal exchange, uneven development, individual social inequality, core-periphery hierarchies, and dominance structure. Finally, dependency theory models social organization, technology and population dynamics as endogenous factors in development and urbanization that are constrained by exogenous forces (Timberlake, 1987). The spread of capitalism to and its entrenchment in the developing world is the most recent stage in the development of capitalism as a world economic system (Chase-Dunn, 1989). It is a result of changes in the ways in which wealth is accumulated, and the evolution of the world-system of nations (see Table 2). Dependency theory also suggests that underdevelopment is a result of the plunder and exploitation of peripheral economies by economic and political groups in core areas (Hette, 1990).
View from the dependency/world-system perspective, urbanization in developing countries, to the extent it occurs and at what speed, is a major spatial outcome of global capitalism and its own spatial organization. This is an inherently uneven process leading to geographic disparities between urban and rural areas and between cities, particularly so if taking into account the unequal conditions at the start of urbanization. Empirical studies, whether explicitly from this theoretical perspective or not, have borne out the serious undesirable consequences of rapid urbanization in developing countries such as rural-urban imbalance, lopsided city hierarchy, housing segregation, and income inequality both within and across nations (Chen and Parish, 1996; Findley, 1993; Linn, 1982; Smith and London, 1990; Todaro, 1981). Besides challenging directly the basic assumptions and predictions of modernization theory for urbanization, the dependency/world-system theory goes a long way in accentuating the external, and often negative, impact of the capitalist global economy on domestic urbanization in developing countries. This powerful insight from the 1970s laid the ground work for a more systematic global perspective on urbanization, especially on the rise of networked world or global cities in the 1990s and beyond.
As the debate between modernization and dependency/world-system theories on urbanization continued from the 1970s into the 1980s, world-wide urbanization itself began to take on the striking feature of a growing number of megacities becoming more functionally influential and structurally linked. This prompted geographer John Friedmann to advance a research agenda for world cities in the early-mid 1980s (Friedmann, 1986; Friedmann and Wolff, 1982), suggesting that world cities are a small number of massive urban regions at the apex of the global urban hierarchy that exercise worldwide control over production and market expansion. With their global control functions directly reflected in the structure of their production sectors and employment, world cities also are major sites for the concentration and accumulation of international capital. This new focus on world cities marked a theoretical extension from the world-system perspective by highlighting the study of individual or a network of cities for understanding broader urbanization trends and tendencies.
The globalization of urbanization theories didn’t stop there. Sociologist Saskia Sassen, with the publication of the book The Global City: New York, London, and Tokyo in 1991, brought a definitive touch to the study of the global city through a sharp conceptualization and a systematic comparison of three such cities. According to Sassen, global cities function as 1) highly concentrated command points in the organization of the world economy; 2) key locations for finance and specialized services, which have replaced manufacturing as the leading industries; 3) innovative sites of production in these leading industries; and 4) markets for the products and innovations of these industries. From Sassen’s perspective, the hallmark of a global city is the growth and extent of its producer services, which include accounting, banking, financial services, legal services, insurance, real estate, computer and information processing, etc. While not a theory on urbanization in the same sense as the other theories, the global city perspective has moved the theorizing of urbanization both backward and forward to explicating the historical and contemporary relationship between industrialization (and now deindustrialization in the West), urbanization, and globalization. In sharpening this relationship further, Soja and Kanai (2007) contend that globalization leads to a different round of urban-industrialization and thus to a new global geography of economic development. Testing this line of argument is a growing stream of rigorous empirical studies that use network analysis to uncover the complex structure of both hierarchical and horizontal ties among world cities (see Carroll, 2007).
Individually, each of the four theories reviewed here, selective as it is, offers a distinctive perspective on urbanization during different times that were conducive to the gestation and evolution of each theory. To a large extent, each theory has transcended these times in either sustaining or losing its applicability to countries (cases) that have experienced urbanization differently. While the so-called theory on self-generated or endogenous urbanization uncovered its important general conditions, it does little to account for the recent urbanization of developing countries. Besides failing on the same score, modernization theory does not stress class relations or capitalism per se, but rather the inevitable tensions created by the shifts in social organization encouraged by industrialism (Kasarda and Crenshaw, 1991). Dependency/world-system theory is stronger in suggesting the association rather than proving a causal relationship between urbanization and capitalist development. It may also fall short in explaining the large scope and powerful ways of the state in creating and sustaining rapid urbanization in the context of China and the rise of Shanghai as a new global city (see Chen, 2009). Scholars like John Friedmann and Saskia Sassen have alerted students of the city to see and appreciate the real impact of global forces on the city. Armed with this global perspective, we should be in a stronger position to examine and understand how the global forces play out in the specific context of a city. One major weakness of the global city perspective may be that its theorizing and analysis are based primarily on a few dominant and heavily studied cities in Western industrialized countries (Orum and Chen, 2003).
Table 2. Principle Stages in Global Urban Development
| |1780-1880 |1880-1950 |1950- |
|Mode of Accumulation | | | |
|Economic formation |Industrial capitalism |Monopoly capitalism |Corporate capitalism |
|Source of wealth |Manufacturing |Manufacturing |Manufacturing and services |
|Representative unit of production |Factory |Multi-national corporation |Transnational corporation, Global factory |
|World-System Characteristics | | | |
|Space relations |Atlantic basin |International |Global |
|System of supply |Colonialism/Imperialism |State imperialism |Corporate imperialism |
|Hegemonic powers |Britain |Britain, USA |USA |
|Urban Consequences | | | |
|Level of urbanization at start of period (%) |3 |5 |27 |
|Areas of urbanization during period | | | |
|Dominant cities |Britain |North-western Europe, the Americas, coasts of |Africa and Asia |
| |London |Empires |New York, London, Tokyo |
| | |London, New York | |
Source: Clark, 1998
3. Important Dimensions of Urbanization
While urbanization is a powerful “master” process of long historical duration, current vibrancy, and even stronger future impact as discussed earlier, it is a not monolithic or unidimentional. On the contrary, urbanization carries several important dimensions that collectively and individually produce macro and micro impacts on the society and everyday life. In this section we introduce and explore a number of these dimensions with a heavy demographic emphasis through illustrative research findings and empirical examples. This exercise will help pave the way for us to examine the socioeconomic consequences of urbanization in the last section.
3.1 Urban Place and Hierarchy
Because national definitions of urban areas vary greatly, many countries use an earlier United Nations’ (UNECA, 1968) definition of urban localities (20,000+) and cities (100,000+) to standardize comparisons of urban development across nations. The total number of urban places of differing sizes in a country is arrayed onto the various layers or ladders of a hierarchy shaped like a pyramid. At the top and higher levels of the hierarchy are cities of larger demographic sizes, while the size of urban places decreases with the descent toward the bottom of the pyramid. The height and shape of a national urban hierarchy at any given time, which is dependent on the number of urban places at each rung and their sizes, reflect the progress of urbanization through that time point. And further urbanization modifies the shape of the urban hierarchy as the proportion of rural population increases and the existing urban population moves in and out of urban places of different sizes, or up or down the pyramid.
What then drives or reshape this basic dimension of urbanization? Empirical research has repeatedly shown that generally speaking, higher level of economic development as measured by the percentage the labor force in industry or gross national product per capita translates into a higher level of urbanization (Bairoch, 1988; London, 1987; Preston, 1979). Different economic factors and changes have varying effects on urbanization. While the contribution of sectoral inequality to urbanization is ambiguous, wage differentials between manufacturing and agriculture are prime determinants of urbanization (Kelly and Williamson, 1984), while others note that rural adversity tends to depress rural-to-urban migration (Becker and Morrison, 1988). Some have suggested that the wage structures induced by modern capital-intensive manufacturing are not the principal inducement to migration, but rather government employment, informal sector employment, education, and rural push forces (Becker and Morrison, 1988; Connell, et al, 1976; Henderson, 1986).
As industrialization and rural-urban migration pulls and pushes more people into cities or urban places respectively, the urban hierarchy swells from the bottom to the top. On balance, the hierarchy widens from the middle sections to the top faster than at the lower levels because more jobs, in either manufacturing or services, and more job-seekers gravitate to larger cities or urban places. While this urbanization process may alter the overall height (perhaps more layers of different-sized urban places) and shape of the hierarchy (e.g., more larger cities than smaller cities), a hierarchy or system of urban places remains a most salient and dynamic dimension of urbanization in any country over time. This somewhat familiar argument, however, has already been updated and enriched by the world or global city literature, which presses us to see the national hierarchical composition of urban places as being shaped by more distant international conditions. The global view also reveals the stronger tendencies toward more economic disparities among the urban places of a hierarchy that are induced and sustained by the penetration of outside forces. This conceptual advance allows us to question and critique urban places and hierarchy as a classic and taken-for-granted aspect of urbanization.
3.2 Urban Primacy
Closely related to the above dimension is urban primacy, which characterizes a problematic demographic and functional syndrome of urbanization in certain developing countries. Urban primacy refers to the largest city of a country or urban system being disproportionately large and thus dominating all the other cities. It is assumed to have undesirable effects on national development as the primate city sucks away a disproportionately large share of resources to cause uneven growth and wealth distribution. Hauser (1957) labeled the primate city as “parasitic” rather than “generative” as it retards the development of other cities. Since its early formulation, the concept of urban primacy has been modified to include the notions and measures of two-city primacy, regional multiple-city primacy and multi-centric urban systems (Kasarda and Crenshaw, 1991). Going beyond demographic size, Chen (1991) extended the measurement and analysis of urban primacy into the economic realm of China’s urban system.
Of the economic factors that foster urban primacy, transportation networks, the location of cities, the location of government services, and the physical characteristics of the urban hinterland exert a conjunctural influence on the relative growth of the largest city vs. that of other cities, which in turn may lead to urban primacy (see Bairoch, 1988; Dogan, 1988; DeCola, 1984; Henderson, 1982, 1986; London, 1986; Preston, 1979; Rosen and Resnick, 1980). Other scholars found that urban primacy may be produced by export dependency (Frey et al, 1986), foreign capital penetration and world-system position (London, 1987), and economic development (or lack of it), peripheral status in the world system (Smith and London, 1990). It also appears that administrative centralization, the centralization of government social services, and general government expenditures are positively related to primate development (Crenshaw, 1990; London, 1986; Mutlu, 1989; Petrakos and Brada, 1989). Some policies such as minimum wage legislation, import-substitution, and bowing to pressure from trade unions may encourage intense urban concentration (Henderson, 1982; Nemeth and Smith, 1985).
The myriad of conditions are assumed to induce urban primacy aside, what are the countervailing forces that mitigate or forestall it? Since urban primacy is often contrasted to a regular urban hierarchy or a more integrated urban system, which tends to accompany more advanced economic development, we would expect the latter to be the primary strategy for countering or eliminating urban primacy. However, there are less developing countries where urban primacy is absent. In China and India, which have a large number of very large cities for a long time, urban primacy, at least at the national level, has not occurred due to the entrenched positions and shifting fortunes of major cities across an expansive urban landscape. Even colonial rule, which contributed to urban primacy in Latin America and Africa, did not do so in India. While natural endowment and historical conditions set the constraints on urban primacy, more recent policies such as promoting small towns and secondary cities have had some ameliorating and complementary effects on urban primary. On the other hand, partial strategies such as relocating the national capital, creating countermagnets, and border regional development have rarely worked because of their high cost and minimal impact (Richardson, 1987).
3.3 Overurbanization vs. Underurbanization
The study and understanding of urbanization has benefited from the polarized reference to that extent that urbanization in developing countries, especially those rapidly urbanizing ones may be “over” (too much) or “under” (not enough). Overurbanization refers to the excessive growth of urban population relative to the amount of industrial jobs to accommodate or absorb it. The idea dates back to Hoselitz (1954) who advanced the thesis that urbanization in developing nations could be too great given the industrial mix of their economies. The cited symptoms of overurbanization include substandard living conditions for urban residents, the failure of municipal governments to provide the infrastructure and services that make urban life more efficient and comfortable, urban unemployment and low wages, and the need to import food from abroad in order to sustain the urban population, Less often cited but probably salient in the deliberations of governments are the political consequences of urbanization: population clustered on a scale that facilitates mass demonstrations and mob violence against unpopular national policies or privileged groups. Although these concerns sometimes focus on the problems of managing large cities, generally they address the question of “balance” between the numbers of urban and rural residents (Lowry, 1990).
Despite the intrigue of overurbanization and its array of assumed symptoms, scholars have lodged varied criticisms against the arbitrary nature of the concept and its inherent ethnocentrism (Breese, 1966; Kamerschen, 1969; Hawley, 1981; Smith, 1987; Sovani, 1964). While overurbanization seems to make more sense in developing countries where urban population growth tends to outpace industrial jobs, it can be misleading if applied to post-industrial societies like the United States, which have a larger share of their urban population than manufacturing jobs due to the eroded manufacturing sector and the rapid growth of the service industries (Smith and London, 1990). The same authors also found that peripheral status, which captured the position of developing countries in the world system, had only a marginal effect on overurbanization through the mid-1980s. This raises the question not only about the measure of overurbanization—the ratio of urban population to industrial jobs--but also about the changing context in which some characteristics of overurbanization may be observed without indicating the full presence of the general condition attributed to developing countries.
The flip side of overurbanization, underurbanization features a much faster expansion of industrial employment than the growth of the urban population, which characterized the Stalinist period in the former Soviet Union and the policy of urban-rural balance and thus stagnating urbanization in China in the 1960s and 1970s (Chen and Parish, 1996). Underurbanization, according to Murray and Szelényi (1984), is typical of the urbanization path in formerly socialist countries, which placed priority on industrial production in cities over their residents and the latter’s demand for commercial and social services. Taken to its extreme, underurbanization turns into de-urbanization or zero urban growth, which became the official policy of South Vietnam and Cambodia in the wake of their socialist revolutions when the Khmer Rouge government killed or expelled about two million residents in and from Phnom Penn. Taken together, overurbanization or underurbanization, as well as in their polar opposites, offer a more nuanced account for the speed and form of urbanization as it plays out with and against other important economic and political factors in different national contexts.
3.4 Natural Increase and Migration
Finally, it is time to revisit the two and coupled sources of urban growth and urbanization, that is, natural increase and migration, while boundary redefinition through annexation of surrounding areas constitutes a third and increasingly less important contributor to urbanization. As noted by Pernia (1988) and Preston (1979), demographic natural increase is positively related to urban population growth. In addition, high levels of urbanization dictate somewhat lower rates of growth in urbanization due simply to the fact that equilibrium is reached within the population, or to a ceiling effect (Brueckner, 1990; Crenshaw, 1990). This is also why Rogers and Williamson (1982) suggested earlier that urban growth is partly self-limiting as it slows down when urban proportions increase and rural populations first stabilize and then decline. The other demographic factor influencing urbanization and urban population growth is migration. Rogers (1982) points out that while natural increase explains most urban population growth, high levels of rural-to-urban migration tend to accelerate urbanization. Firebaugh (1979) and London (1986) note that the density of the rural population is related to cityward migration, as is the system of land tenure and certain types of agriculture. Constraints on land ownership and rural overpopulation tend to push surplus populations toward cities (Bairoch, 1988), and the concentration of non-farm activities in developing world cities suggests rural underdevelopment as an additional impetus to rural-to-urban migration (Firebaugh, 1984). Excessive rural out-migration is also thought to be responsive to rural adversity and the allure of modern wage structures in urban areas (Gilbert and Gugler, 1982).
Despite the considerable earlier efforts to differentiate the relative effects of natural increase and migration on urban growth and the level of urbanization, the compounding and confounding of these two demographic forces has remained an analytical challenge since Todaro (1979) pointed to the age selectivity of migrants as crucial to their differentially high fertility. While this has been true of some late developing and urbanizing countries, there are recent cases where natural increase and migration as joined sources of urbanization have become decoupled due to special policy and economic circumstances. Take China for an example. First of all, in-migration to cities has surged as fertility in cities has dropped to a very low level largely due to the one-child family policy. Second, rural migrants in Chinese cities, most of whom are relatively young and of child-producing ages, have not shown a strong desire to bear more children (than local residents) due to their limited income, marginal living conditions, and lack of access to child care, education, and health care created by restrictive government policies .
While China is an exceptional case for illustrating the separation of natural increase and migration, it is a confirmation on the more powerful impact of migration on true urbanization. If some kind of underurbanization kept the share of China’s urban population under 20 percent from 1960 to 1980, accelerated urbanization through large-scale rural-urban migration has raised that percentage to almost 45 today. In fact, if the huge number of temporary or floating rural migrants in Chinese cities and towns is counted, China may have already crossed the demographic milestone of half urbanized as the whole world has just done. Looking forward, of the slightly more than 350 million people that China will add to its urban population by 2025, more than 240 million will be migrants. With a much larger size and share of urban population down the road, China will confront great challenges in terms of labor absorption and political stability, which has sustained the impact of migration on urbanization as a central focus of the urban scholarship (Bienin, 1984).
4. Consequences of Urbanization
From the very beginning, urbanization has been intimately associated with rapid population growth, rural-to-urban migration, industrialization or deindustrialization, social transformation, and environmental change. While it is not always possible to fully disentangle the mutual causation between urbanization and these other major processes, it is forever important and necessary to identify a range of significant consequences of urbanization, especially how these consequences may play out in rapidly urbanizing countries that remain less developed and thus less equipped to deal with them.
4.1 Urbanization and the Environment
While we used to be concerned more about the pressure of rapid urbanization on employment, housing, and services, a more recent wave of urbanization in terms of megacity explosion has elevated global attention to the urbanization-environment relationship. To the extent that accelerated urbanization has sped up the depletion of natural resources, increased pollution, and contributed to climate change, the combination of the latter conditions has turned around to haunt the most obvious demographic outcome of urbanization—the growth of large cities. Natural disasters have become more frequent and more severe during the last two decades, threatening a large number of large cities (see Figure 2). The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reports that, between 1980 and 2000, 75 percent of the world’s total population lived in areas affected by a natural disaster. And over 90 per cent of losses in human life from natural disasters around the world occurred in poor countries, especially in their large and densely population urban centers.
Due to climate change and depleting groundwater, sea levels have been rising at an faster rate, which threatens coastal cities. According to recent report released by China’s State Oceanic Administration (SOA), the two key coastal cities--Shanghai and Tianjin--are among those facing the biggest threat. In the last 30 years, Shanghai has seen the sea level rise 115 mm, or the length of half a chopstick. Tianjin has seen the level rise as much as 196 mm, about the length of a new pencil. While global warming is the main reason for the rising sea levels, surface subsidence is also to blame for the threat of floods in Shanghai and Tianjin due to their indiscriminate exploitation of groundwater resources. Shanghai is also facing additional trouble in ensuring fresh water supply to its 20 million residents due to seawater. Serious deterioration in offshore water quality stems from pollution from onshore sources. In the next decade, China's coastal sea level is likely to rise by 32 mm, or 3.2 mm every year faster than the annual rise of 2.5 mm from 1975 to 2007.[i] The Chinese case illustrates the strong interdependence between urbanization and the environment.
Rapid urbanization, when unplanned and underserviced poses multiple environmental threats, especially to the exploding megacities in South Asia where five of the world’s 10 biggest cities will be found within seven years time, namely, Delhi, Dhaka, Karachi, Kolkata and Mumbai. In the Pakistani city of Lahore, an open drain is causing health problems to nearby residents. Originally planned to channel storm water, this drains is now, like the 16 odd other open drains in the city, a floating cesspool of raw and untreated sewerage. The drain easily offends and can overwhelm even the heartiest of men. Not only that, since the noxious and toxic gases emitted by decomposing waste are well known corrosives, the open drain is a constant source of attrition on any metal kept outdoors, corroding the air-conditioners that are essential in the scorching summer.[ii] Near Jakarta, a trash slide at a huge garbage dump killed three scavengers and injured five others in September 2006. The dump received 600 trucks around the clock to deliver about 6,000 tons of trash every day from the capital city of Jakarta. Reaching up to 15 meters in height, a pile of trash collapsed suddenly and buried a number of scavengers who lived and worked right by the dump everyday and whose livelihood was dependent on it.[iii]
In spite and because of its lower level of urbanization compared to Latin America, Asian cities have been growing faster than those in Latin America and Africa and therefore becoming dirtier. Sulfur dioxide (a major pollutant that damages crops and materials) is 50 percent higher in Asia than in Latin America. While Asian emissions of CO2 (a global pollutant suspected to contribute to global warming) are less than half of the per capita world average, they are growing at four times the world average. Surface waters in Asian cities are full of pathogens, organic material, and heavy metals that exceed national and WHO standards. And the overwhelming majority of the world’s most polluted cities are in Asia (Panayotou, 2001, p. 422). It remains to be seen whether Asian cities are equipped to handle this multitude of environmental challenges coming at the same time. Without mega-urbanization in the form of megacities, these environmental challenges would not have been brought into sharp relief this quickly. It has reshuffled the priority deck for understanding and confronting the list of consequences of urbanization on a global scale.
Figure 2: Large cities in Relation to Current Climate-related Hazards
[pic]
4.2 Urbanization, Job Creation, and the Informal Sector
Of all the short- and long-term consequences of urbanization, the economic one has been a constant top analytical focus and policy concern because it is directly tied to the creation of enough jobs to accommodate the population in both shrinking cities of industrialized countries and the expanding megacities of developing countries, with the latter a much larger-scale job creation. While this mismatch of the size of the cities and the number of available jobs reminds us of “overurbanization” discussed earlier in this chapter, it manifests itself in more complex and connected ways with regard to how the job-seekers fare within and between the formal and informal sectors.
Considering that the labor force in developing countries, mostly in their urban centers is expected to increase from 1.8 billion currently to 3.1 billion by year 2025, job creation has become an overriding concern (Rondinelli and Kasarda, 1990). This is daunting prospect of urban job creation that will push and stretch economic growth to be sustained at a high level. As of now, even the fastest growing economies like China are struggling to keep up with millions of new entrants into the urban labor market. Against the broad backdrop and alarming project of half of the 1.3 billion Chinese living in cities by 2010, about 13 million rural people flood into China's cities every year.[iv] Taking into millions of urban youth that need a first job every year, China needs to create approximately 20 million jobs in its cities annually to absorb both local labor market entrants and incoming rural migrants. Much of this massive pool of labor will end up in informal sector jobs that provide an alternative path to job creation and social mobility (Todaro, 1989). Early attempts by the International Labor Organization (ILO) to define informality attributed such characteristics as ease of entry, small scale, internal finance and resources, family-ownership, labor-intensive production, the use of local technologies, and unregulated competitive markets to informal sector activities (ILO, 1972). Recent research leads away from notions about benign or exploitative relationships between sectors of an urban economy and encourages the adoption of a model of urban labor markets characterized by complex interdependencies and dynamism (Kasarda and Crenshaw, 1991). The picture of the urban informal sector pained in the recent literature is more positive than was previously the case. In terms of labor absorption, subsidy-free human capital formation, low-cost provision of goods and services to the urban poor, and the retention of scarce capital, the urban informal sector is far more productive than formal sector employment (de Soto 1989; Richardson, 1984).
In Mexico City, the informal sector has become so vast that it spreads from the city center to its periphery, occupying street corners, covering sidewalks, and infiltrating the marginal zones in residential and commercial neighborhoods. Accounting for 60 percent of all jobs, the informal sector helps keep unemployment rate low and less understood. The informal sector also provide a large valve and wide channel for moving a huge amount of transaction and recycling of goods outside of the circuits of the formal market economy. In addition, it helps sustain highly complex and established social and cultural networks (Castillo, 2007). As pressure for job creation grows further with accelerated urbanization and the continued surge of megacities, the informal sector will expand wider and deeper to take in more people falling out of the shrinking formal, state-owned sector, as has been happening in China’s big cities, and more new rural migrants pushed out by the shrinking agricultural economy. However, as the informal sector becomes more bloated, it will also subject more urban poor in precarious jobs to more marginalized working and living conditions.
4.3 Urbanization, Housing, and Spatial Form
Marginal living conditions for the poor are an inevitable outcome of rapid urbanization that leads to the agglomeration and densification of those with limited means. What sharpens this unfortunate and unpleasant process is the much larger scale of the concentration of the poor in the rapidly urbanizing countries with exploding megacities. Along with Africa, the Asia-Pacific region has been experiencing the fastest rate of urbanization over the last 15 years, which has contributed to two of five urban dwellers living in slums, compared with three out of five in Africa. In India alone, urban poor account for at least a third of the urban population if not more. Given a total urban population of over 300 million, this translates into a staggering 100 million or more destitute people in India’s towns and cities, living in slums, shanties and sleeping on the streets.[v] In large Pakistani cities like Karachi, half of the urban population lives in slums.
Slums have emerged through a process of organized and unorganized invasions of urban real estate and illegal subdivision and sale of land in many developing world cities, which are dotted with non-standard, poor-quality housing units interspersed with sanctioned land uses. Not all of these informal settlements can be characterized as slums that are defeated, socially disorganized neighborhoods, as some of them are rather vital, if oftentimes poor, communities (Kasarda and Crenshaw, 1991). Early research showed that major deficiencies exist in housing quantity and quality, the security of the occupants’ tenure, the infrastructure including collection of household wastes, primary health care, education, and emergency services (Adegbola, 1987; Oya-Sawyer et al, 1987). While highly variable (Lowder, 1987), the internal spatial structure of developing country cities shows some tendencies toward a convergence with North American and European patterns as industrialization and urbanization accelerate. However, this convergence is imperfect due to social stratification systems based on ascribed status such as ethnicity and religion, government regulations such as elite housing subsidies and rent control and the existence of preindustrial physical stock.
Besides helping create the familiar landscape of slum housing in and around the megacities of developing countries, mega-urbanization of the 21st century has bred another familiar phenomenon—the onset of large-scale suburbanization—that has begun to shape both housing stratification and spatial differentiation on a metropolitan or regional level. As we have argued (Chen, Kundu, and Wang, forthcoming), the new suburban residential space around the megacities of Shanghai and Kolkata is produced by the conjuncture of powerful state planning, wealthy overseas investors, aggressive local real estate players, and a rising middle class. In Shanghai alone, urban planners believe some five million people will move to what are called "satellite cities" in the next 10 years. To varying degrees, the same thing is happening all across China. This process—China's own suburban flight—is at the core of the next phase of this country's urbanization and development. A wave of those who are newly affluent and firm in the belief that their best days, economically speaking, are ahead of them, is headed for the suburbs where they can and do buy houses that are, on average, twice the size of the downtown apartment at half the price. This is what former Time reporter Bill Powell termed “China’s Short March.”[vi] But the new suburban housing around Shanghai may still be out of reach or interest to many due to 1) the still large price-income ratio, 2) the incomplete access to long-range public transportation and limited ownership of private cars; and 3) the lack of corresponding commercial and social services like convenient shopping and good schools. This however provides new evidence that the recent impact of mega-urbanization on housing and urban form is working its way through the familiar mechanism of suburbanization, even though the latter is unfolding with some distinctive national and local features.
4.4 Urbanization, Education, and Health
Finally, we turn to revisit the long established research on the impact of urbanization on education and health and bring some new evidence to bear on what may be changing in the era of mega-urbanization and megacities. A pioneer in studying urbanization and education, Havighurst (1967) pointed out that the urbanization process in the United States had increased the average size of schools and decreased the number of school districts with small enrolments from 1930 to 1960. Until 1965, two thirds of school children and teachers were located in metropolitan area schools, which became more homogeneous in social status. On the other hand, the quality of the public schools became the greatest single factor in the decision of middle-income people to live in the central city or to live in the suburbs, and to live in one section or another of the central city or the suburbs. More recently, some scholars began to examine the effects of urbanization on efficiency of public expenditure in education (see Jayasuriya and Wodon, 2003; Kirjavainen and Loikkanen, 1998; Ruggiero, 1998). Jayasuriya and Wodon (2003) found that urbanization is a strong determinant of the efficiency of countries in improving education outcomes. The importance of urbanization may stem from the fact that it is typically cheaper to provide access to education and health services in urban than in rural areas. The cost advantage in urban areas should be especially important for public services with substantial fixed costs (Hardoy et al., 2001). Beyond the cost advantage, there could, however, also be other reasons why efficiency would be better in urban areas. First, it may be easier to monitor performance and attract quality inputs in urban areas. Second, urban living provides more an environmental reinforcement of good educational performance and student completion. Finally, competition to provide services in urban areas may be higher and thereby improves efficiency.
Earlier research documented a range of health consequences of urbanization. Before the onset of the epidemiological and demographic transitions, death rates tended to be positively associated with levels of population density. Squalid and crowded urban living conditions, and relatively high rates of social interaction, meant that pre-transitional towns were highly conducive to the maintenance and spread of infectious diseases. Furthermore, towns often served as nodal points through which new diseases were introduced. Urban death rates exceeded urban birth rates (Dyson, 2003). As one of the most serious infectious diseases, HIV gains a lot of attentions in the discussions of urbanization. In developing countries, it is agreed that levels of HIV infection are generally significantly higher in urban areas. For example, apropos sub-Saharan Africa, Caldwell et al (1997) found that “urban levels of HIV infection are typically four to ten times those of rural areas,” while Carael (1997) reported that “rural HIV and STD prevalence have generally been found to be much lower than urban prevalence.” Douglas et al (2001) suggested that “urban centers and market towns tend to have a substantially higher occurrence of HIV than rural areas.” In return, HIV also has impacts on the process of urbanization. In the most severely affected countries, HIV is found to exert a significant limiting effect on the process of urbanization by differentially affecting mortality, migration and fertility between the urban and rural sectors (Dyson, 2003).
In the age of mega-urbanization and much larger and more densely populated cities of developing countries, the impact on education and heath originates from and is transmitted by a set of more connected conditions such as environmental degradation, economic inequality, and dilapidated housing, as well as some previously unidentified circumstances. Environmental problems pose health hazards to both wealthy and low-income settlement in the urban areas in most countries. They include air pollution from motor vehicles and industrial emissions, water pollution, insufficient water supplies, inadequate solid waste management leading to the proliferation of disease vectors, contaminated food and noise (Goldstein, 1990). The amassing of poor rural migrants in Indian and Chinese megacities has magnified the glaring problem of providing basic and affordable education to the children of these migrants. This is worse in a way in the Indian cities that are hampered by poor infrastructure. According to the World Competitiveness Book 2006, India has the highest ratio of pupils to teaching staff and the second largest ratio of inhabitants to physicians and nurses, out of 61 countries analyzed. Missing infrastructure not only restricts access to educational and health facilities, which in turn lowers the levels of illiteracy and mortality, but also represents a challenge for the implementation of different development strategies, mainly in the area of social security.[vii] In the large Chinese cities, the children of migrant workers have highly limited access to public education due to unfavorable government policy. The majority of the approximately 400,000 migrant children in Beijing attend the 300 or so private schools located on the metropolitan fringes, which are organized by migrants themselves and NGOs. Yet some of these schools have been closed down by the municipal government on the basis that they are not up to the official educational standards (Chen, 2007).
The massive number of the urban poor including the majority of migrant workers does not have to lead to an inferior education and health status for them. As important contributors to wealth creation in the booming megacities, they deserve decent education and heath care. In India recently, the Ministry of Human Resource Development has set up residential schools in some of the educationally backward urban districts to provide comprehensive education to adolescent girls belonging to the lowest castes and classes. Healthcare, writing, computers, and disaster management are important elements of the curriculum. This kind of education has brought about a more positive attitude in both the students and their parents toward self-confidence, marriage outlook, and health consciousness.[viii] If this kind of government investment can make the biggest difference to the neediest urban poor, it represents a broader lesson for rethinking about the relationship between urbanization and education and health.
5. Conclusions
In this chapter we have offered a series of treatments of urbanization with the ultimate purpose of creating a broad and somewhat integrated account for this complex and multidimensional phenomenon. We intend this chapter to serve both the general reader and the special expert but in different ways. The more general reader will obtain a holistic picture weaved together from definition, theory, and a progressive unpacking of the dimensions and consequences of urbanization. While the expert on the topic may not find anything original in this chapter, the new evidence assembled here may prompt the expert to look at the definition and theories a little differently. If there is one main thread here that carries the new evidence to the next fruitful stage of analysis, it is our effort to move beyond the more conventional focus on urbanization as a rural-to-urban shift and to highlight a new stage of urbanization characterized by its accelerated pace and the resulting megacities. Although this may not be a qualitatively new transition, even a cursory look at megacities awakens us to the greater complexity of urbanization and its new and more challenging consequences such as environmental damage. Urbanization definitely not just simply create problems, people believe urbanization itself also contain the solutions. The challenge is in learning how to exploit its possibilities.
Glossary
Urbanization –is the physical growth of urban areas from rural areas as a result of population immigration to an existing urban area
Megacities - is usually defined as a metropolitan area with a total population in excess of 10 million people.
Urban hierarchy - a term that relates the structure of towns within an area
Urban primacy - indicates a city whose population is at least twice as large as that of the next largest city in a country
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Biographical Sketch
Xizhe Peng is the professor of Population and Development at Fudan University, and serves as the Dean of the School of Social Development and Public Policy, and the director of the State Innovative Institute for Public Management and Public Policy Studies at Fudan University. He graduated from the Department of Economics, Fudan University, China in 1982, and received his Msc. and Ph.D. degrees in Population Studies from London School of Economics and Political Sciences in 1984 and 1988 respectively. Dr. Peng is one of the leading population and development specialists in China. His research covers a wide range of population-related issues, including population dynamics and policy, social protection and social policy, sustainable development and gender studies etc. He is author and editor of 16 books, and more than 100 academic articles and book chapters, including, Demographic Transition in China- Fertility Trends since the 1950s (Oxford University Press, 1991) and The Changing Population of China (Blackwell, 2000).
Dr. Peng Xizhe has been a member of the Advisory Committee of China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission Since 1992. He has served as a member of the IHDP (International Human Dimension Program on Global Environment Change) Scientific Committee since 2000.
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[i] Reported by China Daily online, January 16, 2008.
[ii] Blogs by Ahmad Rafay Alam and Shreekant Gupta on , February 16, April 7, 2008.
[iii] Reported by The Jakarta Post online, September 13, 2006.
[iv] Reported by China Daily online, November 8, 2006.
[v] Blog by Achara Ashayagachat on , February 15, 2008.
[vi] “The Short March” by Bill Powell, Time, February 14, 2008.
[vii] Blog by Luis F. Ballesteros on , September 29, 2008.
[viii] Reported by OneWorld South Asia online, July 23, 2008.
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