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Urbanization and Its Consequences
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Summary
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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.
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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
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
3.1 Urban Place and Hierarchy
3.2 Urban Primacy
3.3 Overurbanization vs. Underurbanization
3.4 Natural Increase and Migration
4. Consequences of Urbanization
4.1 Urbanization and the Environment
4.2 Urbanization, Job Creation, and the Informal Sector
4.3 Urbanization, Housing, and Spatial Form
4.4 Urbanization, Education, and Health
5. Conclusions
Bibliography
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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.
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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.
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1. Definition and Background
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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.
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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).
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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.
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During the century 1850-1950, there was, for the first time in human history, a major
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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
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percent of the world’s urbanites by 2030 doubling from 40 percent in 1950 (Soja and
Kanai, 2007).
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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
(www.chinabusinessservices.com/blog, April 6, 2008).
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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.
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Figure 1. Average Annual Rate of Change of the Urban Population, by Region, 1950-2030
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2. Urbanization Theories
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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
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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).
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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).
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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).
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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
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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).
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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).
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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.
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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
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(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.
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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).
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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
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analysis are based primarily on a few dominant and heavily studied cities in Western
industrialized countries (Orum and Chen, 2003).
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Table 2. Principle Stages in Global Urban Development
1780-1880
1880-1950
1950-
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
Space relations
Atlantic basin
International
Global
System of supply
Colonialism/Imperialism
State imperialism
Corporate imperialism
Hegemonic powers
Britain
Britain, USA
USA
Level of urbanization at start of 3
period (%)
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Areas of urbanization during period
Britain
Dominant cities
London
North-western Europe, the Africa and Asia
Americas, coasts of Empires
New York, London, Tokyo
London, New York
Mode of Accumulation
World-System Characteristics
Urban Consequences
Source: Clark, 1998
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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
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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
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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
12
(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
13
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
14
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 2007.1 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.2 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.3
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.
15
Figure 2: Large cities in Relation to Current Climate-related Hazards
16
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.4 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
17
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.5 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.”6 But the new suburban housing
around Shanghai may still be out of reach or interest to many due to 1) the still large
18
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
19
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.7 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. 8 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
20
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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23
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24
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25
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26
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27
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28
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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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2
3
4
Reported by China Daily online, January 16, 2008.
Blogs by Ahmad Rafay Alam and Shreekant Gupta on WordPress.com, February 16, April 7, 2008.
Reported by The Jakarta Post online, September 13, 2006.
Reported by China Daily online, November 8, 2006.
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5
6
7
8
Blog by Achara Ashayagachat on WorldPress.com, February 15, 2008.
“The Short March” by Bill Powell, Time, February 14, 2008.
Blog by Luis F. Ballesteros on WorldPress.com, September 29, 2008.
Reported by OneWorld South Asia online, July 23, 2008.
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