From Karl Marx to Max Weber, classical social theory believed that the great cities of the future would follow in the industrializing footsteps of Manchester, Berlin, and Chicago – and indeed Los Angeles, São Paulo, Pusan, and today, Ciudad Juarez, Bangalore and Guangzhou have roughly approximated this canonical trajectory. Most cities of the South, however, more closely resemble Victorian Dublin, which, as historian Emmet Larkin has stressed, was unique amongst “all the slumdoms produced in the western world in the nineteenth century … [because] its slums were not a product of the industrial revolution. Dublin, in fact, suffered more from the problems of de-industrialization than industrialization between 1800 and 1850.”49
Likewise, Kinshasa, Luanda, Khartoum, Dar es Salaam, Guayaquil and Lima continue to grow prodigiously despite ruined import-substitution industries, shrunken public sectors, and downwardly mobile middle classes. The global forces “pushing” people from the countryside – mechanization of agriculture in Java and India, food imports in Mexico, Haiti and Kenya, civil war and drought throughout Africa, and everywhere the consolidation of small holdings into large ones and the competition of industrial-scale agribusiness – seem to sustain urbanization even when the “pull” of the city is drastically weakened by debt and economic depression. As a result, rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluation and state retrenchment has been an inevitable recipe for the mass production of slums. An International Labor Organization (ILO) researcher has estimated that the formal housing markets in the Third World rarely supply more than 20 percent of new housing stock, so out of necessity, people turn to self-built shanties, informal rentals, pirate subdivisions, or the sidewalks.50 “Illegal or informal land markets,” says the UN, “have provided the land sites for most additions to the housing stock in most cities of the South over the last 30 or 40 years.”51
Since 1970, slum growth everywhere in the South has outpaced urbanization per se. Thus, looking back at late-twentieth-century Mexico City, urban planner Priscilla Connolly observes that “as much as 60% of the city’s growth is the result of people, especially women, heroically building their own dwellings on unserviced peripheral land, while informal subsistence work has always accounted for a large proportion of total employment.”52 São Paulo’s favelas – a mere 1.2 percent of total population in 1973, but 19.8 percent in 1993 – grew throughout the 1990s at the explosive rate of 16.4 percent per year.53 In the Amazon, one of the world’s fastest-growing urban frontiers, 80 percent of city growth has been in shantytowns largely unserved by established utilities and municipal transport, thus making “urbanization” and “favelization” synonymous.54
The same trends are visible everywhere in Asia. Beijing police authorities estimate that 200,000 “floaters” (unregistered rural migrants) arrive each year, many of them crowded into illegal slums on the southern edge of the capital.55 In South Asia, meanwhile, a study of the late 1980s showed that up to 90 percent of urban household growth took place in slums.56 Karachi’s sprawling katchi abadi (squatter) population doubles every decade, and Indian slums continue to grow 250 percent faster than overall population.57 Mumbai’s estimated annual housing deficit of 45,000 formal-sector units translates into a corresponding increase in informal slum dwellings.58 Of the 500,000 people who migrate to Delhi each year, it is estimated that fully 400,000 end up in slums; by 2015 India’s capital will have a slum population of more than 10 million. “If such a trend continues unabated,” warns planning expert Gautam Chatterjee, “we will have only slums and no cities.”59
The African situation, of course, is even more extreme. Africa’s slums are growing at twice the speed of the continent’s exploding cities. Indeed, an incredible 85 percent of Kenya’s population growth between 1989 and 1999 was absorbed in the fetid, densely packed slums of Nairobi and Mombasa.60 Meanwhile any realistic hope for the mitigation of Africa’s urban poverty has faded from the official horizon. At the annual joint meeting of the IMF and World Bank in October 2004, Gordon Brown, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and heir apparent to Tony Blair, observed that the UN’s Millennium Development Goals for Africa, originally projected to be achieved by 2015, would not be attained for generations: “sub-Saharan Africa will not achieve universal primary education until 2130, a 50 percent reduction in poverty in 2150 and the elimination of avoidable infant deaths until 2165.”61 By 2015 Black Africa will have 332 million slum-dwellers, a number that will continue to double every fifteen years.62
Thus, the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay. Indeed, the one billion city-dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums might well look back with envy at the ruins of the sturdy mud homes of Catal Hayuk in Anatolia, erected at the very dawn of city life nine thousand years ago.
1 Onookome Okome, “Writing the Anxious City: Images of Lagos in Nigerian Home Video Films,” in Okwui Enwezor et al. (eds), Under Siege: Four African Cities, Kassel 2002, p. 316.
2 UN Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects, the 2001 Revision, New York 2002.
3 Population Information Program, Population Reports: Meeting the Urban Challenge 30:4 (Fall 2002), p. 1.
4 Dennis Rondinelli and John Kasarda, “Job Creation Needs in Third World Cities,” in John Kasarda and Allen Parnell (eds), Third World Cities: Problems, Policies and Prospects, Newbury Park 1993, p. 101.
5 Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sandeson and Sergei Scherbov, “Doubling of world population unlikely,”Nature 387 (19 June 1997), pp. 803–4. However, the populations of sub-Saharan Africa will triple and of India, double.
6 Although the velocity of global urbanization is not in doubt, the growth rates of specific cities may brake abruptly as they encounter the frictions of size and congestion. A famous instance of such a “polarization reversal” is Mexico City, widely predicted to achieve a population of 25 million during the 1990s (the current population is between 19 and 22 million). See Yue-man Yeung, “Geography in an age of mega-cities,”International Social Sciences Journal 151 (1997), p. 93.
7 Financial Times, 27 July 2004; David Drakakis-Smith, Third World Cities (second edition), London 2000.
8 Composite of UN Urban Indicators Database (2002); Thomas Brinkhoff (The Principal Agglomerations of the World – www.citypopulation.de/World.html) – May 2004).
9 UN Population Division, ibid.
10 Far Eastern Economic Review, Asia 1998 Yearbook, p. 63.
11 Hamilton Tolosa, “The Rio/São Paulo Extended Metropolitan Region: A Quest for Global Integration,”The Annals of Regional Science 37:2 (September 2003), pp. 48, 485.
12 Gustavo Garza,“Global economy, metropolitan dynamics and urban policies in Mexico,”Cities 16:3 (1999), p. 154.
13 Jean-Marie Cour and Serge Snrech (eds), Preparing for the Future: A Vision of West Africa in the Year 2020, OECD, Paris 1998, p. 94.
14 Ibid., p. 48.
15 See Yue-Man Yeung, “Viewpoint: Integration of the Pearl River Delta,” International Development Planning Review