Several demographic and economic analysts agree that unemployment and poverty are, in part, consequences of urbanization in the developing world. They assert, however, that the link between urbanization and poor living conditions is neither as straightforward nor as simple as the question, “Is urbanization the cause of Third World unemployment and poverty?” implies. The effects of urbanization upon Third World living conditions varies from region to region. This variation is the result of different population growth rates and different modes of industrialization and modernization among regions of the developing world. Additionally, the relationship between urbanization and poor living conditions appears to be cyclical rather than linear. For example, in some regions urbanization has created poor rural living conditions which, in turn, increases the rate of migration from rural areas to cities. Then, as a result of this migration, urbanization rates rise even further and people within the city begin to experience a scarcity of food, jobs, and resources. The one thing that can be said of the developing world, in general, is that it has experienced the downside of urbanization more so than the First World did in previous decades. Analysts Lester Brown and Jodi Jacobson, Martin Brockerhoff and Ellen Brennan, and Bryan Roberts agree that the dependent economic development, poor urban management, and high population growth rates of developing countries have made these countries more susceptible to urbanization-induced unemployment and poverty than the developed world.
Bryan Roberts compares urbanization in the developed world to urbanization in the developing world as the difference between urbanization in conjunction with independent economic development and urbanization in conjunction with dependent economic development.[1] He argues that urbanization was only a “secondary issue” in the creation of poor living conditions in the developed world because independent economic development, which contributed to the pace of urbanization, promised to provide future technologies and affluence that would uplift society. In contrast, urbanization, in the developing world, was not influenced or “insured” by independent economic development; therefore, urbanization became a primary issue in the creation of Third World unemployment and poverty. According to Roberts,
Various studies have shown that many countries of the developing world are over-urbanized in the sense that their level of agricultural productivity cannot feed the urban population... while their level of industrialization does not generate enough employment to provide an adequate standard of living for the urban population.[2]
Third World “over-urbanization,” in Roberts terms, has occurred primarily because most developing countries have been modernized and brought into the world market by the colonization patterns of advanced First World countries. As a result, developing countries are dependent upon the capital and technology of First World countries for their own economic development and they are given little incentive or income to develop beyond a dependent state. Additionally, in the process of producing export goods for a colonizing nation, developing countries have exhausted their own land and resources for the production of food and goods that can be consumed domestically. The consequence of this sort of urbanization and development is poor living conditions in many developing countries.
The sort of Third World “over-urbanization” that Roberts describes is aggravated by the fact that population growth rates in the developing world are much higher than they were in the developed world upon modernization and the rise of cities. For example, in Mexico, the rate of population growth during the country’s period of rapid urbanization (1940-1980) was 3.0.[3] This rate is significantly higher than the rates of population growth in the U.S., Britain, and France during the period of rapid urbanization in these countries (1860-1900) . In the U.S., the population growth rate between 1860 and 1900 was 2.2. In Britain, it was 1.2, and, in France, it was only 0.1.[4] Roberts argues that when Mexico’s high rate of natural increase is added to the country’s urban migration rate for the period between 1940 and 1980, the result is very high city growth rates.[5] During Mexico’s period of rapid urbanization, the growth rate of the largest city was 4.9 percent. In the U.S., Britain, and France, the combined effect of population growth and urban migration only resulted in largest city growth rates equal to 2.7 percent, 1.8 percent, and 1.2 percent.[6] Thus, Mexico, like other countries of the developing world, faces the difficult task of absorbing many more people into urban jobs, schools, housing facilities, and health care facilities than the developed countries absorbed during their period of rapid urbanization.
Over-urbanization has become a deep-seated problem for developing countries because these countries lack effective urban management and government. Analysts Martin Brockerhoff and Ellen Brennan comment that the “commitment and capabilities” of municipal governments in the Third World are so limited that it is nearly impossible for them to sustain policies that provide “improved population welfare, infrastructural maintenance, increased productivity of the labor force, and poverty alleviation.”[7] The municipal governments of the developing world are essentially powerless because, often, they govern cities that are dependent upon national markets or advanced First World economies for development. Thus, a Third World city that fills some “specialized niche” in the national or international market is going to be more subject to the policies and whims of national and international powers than municipal powers.[8] Another contribution to the lack of urban governance and management in the developing world is, again, the high population growth rates of Third World cities.[9] Migrants and members of their rapidly growing families crowd Third World cities so quickly that food and jobs become scarce, per capita income falls, and municipal governments cannot generate enough revenue to provide the proper relief to the poor and unemployed.
Brockerhoff and Brennan investigate just how devastating the Third World’s unique sort of over-urbanization is in cities of the developing world. They compare urban and rural infant mortality rates and urban and rural measures of children’s living conditions to determine the relative urban impact of over-urbanization. Their comparison of these measures reveal that, in most regions of the developing world, over-urbanization has depressed living conditions in cities more than it has depressed living conditions in small towns and rural areas. For example, aggregate infant mortality rates since the late 1970s have declined very little in the largest cities of Latin America and the Caribbean while aggregate infant mortality rates have declined significantly (by 37.8 percent) in the small towns and rural areas of this same region.[10] The same can be said of big cities and rural areas in sub-Saharan Africa and the North Africa/Near East region. With regard to children’s living conditions, Brockerhoff and Brennan found that, in general, children in the developing world are more susceptible to incomplete preventative health care and inadequate housing facilities if they lived in cities of one million people or more than if they lived in cities of 50 thousand to one million people.[11] They also found that in Latin America and the North Africa/Near East region, children in the largest cities were much less likely to be enrolled in school than those children in small cities and towns. Brockerhoff and Brennan conclude,
Insofar as generalization from our sample of countries is possible, mortality, health, and social indicators clearly uphold the thesis of declining advantages of big-city residents, as compared with other urbanites and in some cases even rural residents, in countries of Latin American and the Caribbean and North Africa and the Near East.[12]
In terms of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, Brockerhoff and Brennan report that “no substantial big-city advantage is detectable.”[13]
Bryan Roberts and the analyst team of Lester Brown and Jodi Jacobson both raise points which contest Brockerhoff and Brennan’s conclusion that cities are more devastated by over-urbanization than rural areas. Brown and Jacobson site the “urban bias” of Third World governments and investors as reason for rural areas comparative disadvantage. A few very large cities have absorbed most of the national wealth and resources of developing countries during their periods of rapid urbanization. Brown and Jacobson comment, “It is not uncommon for developing countries to allocate only 20 percent of their budgets to the rural sector, even with 70 percent of their populations in rural areas.”[14] The other 80 percent of developing countries’ budgets are allocated to one or two very large cities that, because of their industrial development and economic power, demand large supplies of food, water, energy, and materials for the maintenance and construction of buildings, bridges, and transportation systems. One way in which the governments of developing countries operate under an urban bias is by heavily subsidizing food staples and other goods to urban residents. This sort of policy has been enacted by many Third World governments because they want to maintain urban development even though growing urban populations and businesses are depleting domestic stores of agricultural products and tapping into the world market for food and other necessities.[15] Brown and Jacobson argue that such food-price policies “directly affect rural-urban relationships” because they provide “unrealistically cheap” food for urban residents and “discourage” private investment in domestic food production and rural employment.[16]
According to Brown and Jacobson, an urban bias is operant in the Third World with regard to water and energy resources as well. Because the success of businesses and industries in the principal cities of developing countries are so critical to the health and stability of the national economy, these cities will often obtain water and energy rights at the expense of rural towns. For example, in Mexico City, a city which is elevated above the surrounding landscape, water is transported from rural regions 200 kilometers away and 2,000 meters below by using some 125 trillion kilojoules of electrical energy annually, the output of six 1,000 megawatt power plants.[17] Because of Mexico City’s widespread consumption of water and energy, rural towns in the surrounding area are without adequate water supplies for agricultural production, and they face high energy prices. According to Brown and Jacobson, the urban bias of developing countries has done very little to solidify urban development. What it has done, instead, is encourage more rural residents to seek better jobs and better lives in the city. This migration, in turn, aggravates the problems of over-urbanization and makes the realities of poor Third World urban management more apparent.[18]
Bryan Roberts finds a similar urban bias among developing countries in his own analysis. He claims that urbanization has negatively impacted rural populations because it has “diversified peasant economies with off-farm earnings.”[19] According to Roberts, with urbanization, labor migration has become an increasingly normal part of household economies in many developing countries. Thus, peasants increasingly maintain small landholdings for small-scale farming and depend upon urban employment for a sizable share of their earnings. The increased frequency of this trend has caused agricultural productivity in the developing world to decline, and it has made urban employment scarce. In places such as Botswana and the Transeki (South Africa), diversification of peasant economies has removed needed labor from rural areas and prevented the production of enough food supplies to guarantee basic subsistence.[20] Roberts believes that this sort of diversification has been problematic for most rural households; however, it has been especially devastating for those households headed by women or without any able-bodied laborers. Roberts writes, “The communal, but shared, insecurity of subsistence farmers is now replaced by a more divisive urban insecurity based on class differentiation.”[21] With this statement, Roberts comments on how the original hardships of rural residents in the developing world have been magnified by the addition of urban biases.
Roberts, Brown and Jacobson, and Brockerhoff and Brennan all agree that urbanization has had a negative impact upon the living conditions of developing countries in one way or another. Brockerhoff and Brennan stress the harm done to cities as a result of urbanization and over-urbanization. Roberts and the team of Brown and Jacobson believe that rural areas have faced the most devastating consequences of big-city development. Regardless of what regions they believe have suffered the most from urbanization, all analysts would seem to agree that a break in the cycle of big-city development would be beneficial to the populations of most developing countries. Brown and Jacobson assert that a “rural-urban balance” needs to be met and the Third World should forsake the development of mega-cities. In the place of mega-cities, the developing world should foster the growth of more manageable and productive small cities that have populations fewer than one million.
Brockerhoff, Martin and Ellen Brennan. “The Poverty of Cities in Developing Regions.” Population and Development Review. Vol. 24, Issue 1. Mar 1998, 75-114.
Brown, Lester and Jodi Jacobson. “The Future of Urbanization: Facing the Ecological and Economic Constraints.” Population and the Environment. D. Heddy (editor), 1995. Chapter 10, 132-149.
Roberts, Bryan. “Urbanization and the Environment in Developing Countries: Latin American in Comparative Perspective.” Population and the Environment, D. Heddy (editor), 1995. Chapter 10, 303-336.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 307.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 316.
[6] Ibid., 307.
[7] Brockerhoff, Martin and Ellen Brennan. “The Poverty of Cities in Developing Regions.” Population and Development Review. Vol. 24, Issue 1. Mar 1998, 83.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 84.
[10] Ibid., 91
[11] Ibid., 94.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Brown, Lester and Jodi Jacobson. “The Future of Urbanization: Facing the Ecological and Economic Constraints.” Population and the Environment. D. Heddy (editor), 1995. Chapter 10, 135.
[15] Ibid., 137.
[16] Ibid., 138.
[17] Ibid., 140.
[18] Ibid., 146.
[19] Roberts, Bryan. “Urbanization and the Environment in Developing Countries: Latin America in Comparative Perspective,” 319.
[20] Ibid., 321.
[21] Ibid.