countries are seldom able to control their own destiny in the way that it is hopefully expressed in their aspirations for urban renewal. To build a city, to expand an existing metropolitan area, or merely to create a new urban district takes money, time, and skills – attributes often denied the poorest of countries through no fault of their own. Indeed, a report by the Centre for Economic Business Research forecasts Malawi rising up the World Economic League Table, “from 148th place in 2019 to 140th place in 2034”.20 This is not the economic dynamism required to create a metropolitan masterpiece, and so it seems that Malawi will remain in thrall to outside forces – foreign aid or weather patterns – and will find it difficult to escape. One example of this catch-22 will suffice.
A corruption scandal around the time of the election of Mrs Banda (no relation to Hastings Banda) for her second term in office led to a substantial drop in foreign aid donors as they feared for the legitimacy of their aid and investment. The Economist magazine claims that an Australian mining giant invested US$500 million in a uranium mine as a “rare example” of foreign capital investment in the country. Investors are driven by returns, and Malawi, like many other parts of Africa, is simply buffeted by the vicissitudes of the world market. The collapse in uranium prices closed the mine, with the loss of jobs, wealth, and prospects.21
As this example shows, very often it is the stabilization of sociopolitical relations that is more important for investors than the actual material conditions on the ground. As the Chinese one-party state is fond of announcing to its own people, social stability remains the central party’s foremost concern: its one-party authority rests on the maintenance of a harmonious society. Similarly, the authority of World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Union (EU), or other loan guarantees relies on creating satisfactorily stable conditions for payback. As a commercial body, it claims reasonably that: “the institution cannot help unless it preserves its assets as a revolving stock of lendable resources”.22 For example, while Malawi’s national debt is US$5 billion (equal to 65% of Malawi’s GDP),23 such a degraded credit rating will bring its own threat to the country’s finances. Investors will not be lining up unless there are other inducements. Coincidentally, there have been no restrictions on the controversial rights of foreign nationals to purchase land in Malawi.
Malawi’s reliance on its agricultural sector is a millstone around its neck. As China has shown, overcoming natural barriers is essential to the development of a thriving economy. To treat nature as sacrosanct, farming as indigenous, and the soil as sacred is a recipe for the maintenance of its impoverished status quo. It is no surprise to find that development is often measured by the percentage urban to rural population. Malawi’s urban population is just 17%; China’s current urban population is 62%, but it was 17% in 1976 at the beginning of its upward trajectory towards modernization. China fully embraced urbanization as an engine of growth, creating 465 new cities in a 40-year timeframe.
That said, a number of researchers have pointed to the poor status, the insubstantial public space, and the crowded, noisy, or polluted feel of China’s cities. Researchers Xiao et al. say that “the government pays too much attention to the increase of the proportion of urban population, but ignores the quality of urbanization”,24 which is a charge that might have been levelled on Engels’ treatise on Victorian Manchester, or Chicago before the City Beautiful masterplan was presented. China’s race to urbanize was no different to other developing countries. Rapid masterplanning of an emerging urban economy often resulted in beauty and aesthetic subtlety being down-played. They became values that were hankered after in retrospect.
The need for rapid development often precludes the desire for quality and nuance. China had to urbanize fast, and it therefore had to build millions of homes and high-rise apartments rapidly, together with new services and infrastructure. Typically – especially in the early years – these were inadequately designed and badly detailed, using low-grade materials precisely because they were constructed by people without the necessary skills and training in order to fulfil an urgent need. Planning legislation and building codes were virtually non-existent. Build fast, repent at leisure was, for China, a completely understandable maxim. Once the urban population had been settled, once economic dynamism had been established, China had the breathing space to rectify problems and provide decent replacement housing and urban upgrades.
China’s rapid rise was done in extraordinary circumstances and at a speed unknown in history, but the ambition to build a new world – to lift millions out of poverty with the promise of economic growth, employment prospects, and material wealth – trumped the social or environmental issues. Indeed, those were considered to be necessary casualties. The Kuznets curve hypothesis of urbanization25 suggests that a rapid process of development is required in order to yield social benefit in the longer term, from which the authorities are better placed to repair the harms along the way. It is only after China had created sufficient wealth to improve the living conditions of its citizens that it was able to turn its attention to the quality of those living conditions – unlike Malawi which is stuck in the vicious circle of maintaining rather than transcending its relationship with nature.
Admittedly, in many instances, China’s urbanization has a long way to go to repair some of the damage to communities, heritage, and the environment caused by its drive for social and economic improvement. Coronavirus and an authoritarian one-party state aside, as the Chinese economy has continued to grow, the country now seems to be in a position to make local, rural, and environmental reparations. If the hype is to be believed, it is constructing 283 eco-cities, it is making contextual improvements in the countryside, and it is investing in parks, gardens, clean-air corridors, public transport, etc. This can only be done from a position of economic confidence.
Plus ça Change
The infamous structural adjustment programmes of the IMF and World Bank are essentially loans with conditionalities that benefit the lendee institution and place onerous controls on the debtor nations. Fundamentally, the IMF offers financial inducements with strings attached, most commonly in the form of political interference. Countries are pressured to restructure their economy to suit the needs of the loan payers. In its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, the conditionalities imposed on indebted countries were financially and socially oppressive – described as “economic circumcision”26 by one writer.
Just after her first election victory, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher applauded Malawi for having “the courage to take difficult decisions on your economy when they have been required by the World Bank and the IMF because you knew that in the long-term it was the best thing for your people”.27 The measures insisted, inter alia, that Malawi liberalize its import processes, remove credit controls, and reform the Post Office, etc.28 Interference in the governance of an erstwhile independent country was de rigueur. As public health academics Thomson et al. point out, even today, “recipient countries are required to reform various macroeconomic and fiscal policies according to a neoliberal rubric, typically cohering around economic stabilisation, trade and financial liberalisation, deregulation, and privatisation … critics argue such adjustment comes at a high social cost, while the recidivist nature of program participation also suggests that gains to macroeconomic stability are underwhelming.”29 Once again, Malawi’s hopes of urban renewal are reliant on outside forces.
At least, in the 1970s and 1980s, there was mounting consternation among left-wing, anti-capitalist groups and other concerned citizens in the West at the structural adjustment programmes being imposed on the Third World (as it was known). These loans came with demands for social reforms and were (rightly) seen as authoritarian. Countries would have their payments revoked, for example, if they didn’t change certain domestic policies that the IMF and World Bank considered to be a hindrance to market liberalization. But a shift occurred at the turn of the twentieth century when intervention in the affairs of developing nations was re-posed in a more morally legitimate way. Now aid would be given in order to protect the environment,
