structured patterns, a structure without a clear centre, but therefore with many more or less sharply functionally specialized areas, networks and nodes.28
Such “extended metropolitan regions,” writes geographer David Drakakis-Smith, referring specifically to Delhi, “represent a fusion of urban and regional development in which the distinction between what is urban and rural has become blurred as cities expand along corridors of communication, by-passing or surrounding small towns and villages which subsequently experience in situ changes in function and occupation.”29 In Indonesia, where a similar process of rural/urban hybridization is far advanced in Jabotabek (the greater Jakarta region), researchers call these novel landuse patterns desokotas (“city villages”) and argue whether they are transitional landscapes or a dramatic new species of urbanism.30
An analogous debate is taking place amongst Latin American urbanists as they confront the emergence of polycentric urban systems without clear rural/urban boundaries. Geographers Adrian Aguilar and Peter Ward advance the concept of “region-based urbanization” to characterize contemporary peri-urban development around Mexico City, São Paulo, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. “Lower rates of metropolitan growth have coincided with a more intense circulation of commodities, people and capital between the city center and its hinterland, with ever more diffuse frontiers between the urban and the rural, and a manufacturing deconcentration towards the metropolitan periphery, and in particular beyond into the peri-urban spaces or penumbra that surround mega-cities.” Aguilar and Ward believe that “it is in this peri-urban space that the reproduction of labor is most likely to be concentrated in the world’s largest cities in the 21st century.”31
In any case, the new and old don’t easily mix, and on the desokota outskirts of Colombo “communities are divided, with the outsiders and insiders unable to build relationships and coherent communities.”32 But the process, as anthropologist Magdalena Nock points out in regard to Mexico, is irreversible: “globalization has increased the movement of people, goods, services, information, news, products, and money, and thereby the presence of urban characteristics in rural areas and of rural traits in urban centers.”33
Back to Dickens
The dynamics of Third World urbanization both recapitulate and confound the precedents of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe and North America. In China the greatest industrial revolution in history is the Archimedean lever shifting a population the size of Europe’s from rural villages to smog-choked, sky-climbing cities: since the market reforms of the late 1970s it is estimated that more than 200 million Chinese have moved from rural areas to cities. Another 250 or 300 million people – the next “peasant flood” – are expected to follow in coming decades.34 As a result of this staggering influx, 166 Chinese cities in 2005 (as compared to only 9 US cities) had populations of more than 1 million.35 Industrial boomtowns such as Dongguan, Shenzhen, Fushan City and Chengchow are the postmodern Sheffields and Pittsburghs. As the Financial Times recently pointed out, within a decade “China [will] cease to be the predominantly rural country it has been for millennia.”36 Indeed, the great oculus of the Shanghai World Financial Centre may soon look out upon a vast urban world little imagined by Mao or, for that matter, Le Corbusier.
Figure 4.37 China’s Industrial Urbanization
(percent urban)
It is also unlikely that anyone fifty years ago could have envisioned that the squatter camps and war ruins of Seoul would metamorphose at breakneck speed (a staggering 11.4 percent per annum during the 1960s) into a megalopolis as large as greater New York – but, then again, what Victorian could have envisioned a city like Los Angeles in 1920? However, as unpredictable as its specific local histories and urban miracles, contemporary East Asian urbanization, accompanied by a tripling of per capita GDP since 1965, preserves a quasi-classical relationship between manufacturing growth and urban migration. Eighty percent of Marx’s industrial proletariat now lives in China or somewhere outside of Western Europe and the United States.38
In most of the developing world, however, city growth lacks the powerful manufacturing export engines of China, Korea, and Taiwan, as well as China’s vast inflow of foreign capital (currently equal to half of total foreign investment in the entire developing world). Since the mid-1980s, the great industrial cities of the South – Bombay, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, Belo Horizonte and São Paulo – have all suffered massive plant closures and tendential deindustrialization. Elsewhere, urbanization has been more radically decoupled from industrialization, even from development per se and, in sub-Saharan Africa, from that supposed sine qua non of urbanization, rising agricultural productivity. The size of a city’s economy, as a result, often bears surprisingly little relationship to its population size, and vice versa. Figure 5 illustrates this disparity between population and GDP rankings for the largest metropolitan areas.
Figure 5.39 Population versus GDP: Ten Largest Cities
Some would argue that urbanization without industrialization is an expression of an inexorable trend: the inherent tendency of silicon capitalism to delink the growth of production from that of employment. But in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and much of South Asia, urbanization without growth, as we shall see later, is more obviously the legacy of a global political conjuncture – the worldwide debt crisis of the late 1970s and the subsequent IMF-led restructuring of Third World economies in the 1980s – than any iron law of advancing technology.
Third World urbanization, moreover, continued its breakneck pace (3.8 percent per annum from 1960 to 1993) throughout the locust years of the 1980s and early 1990s, in spite of falling real wages, soaring prices and skyrocketing urban unemployment.40 This perverse urban boom surprised most experts and contradicted orthodox economic models that predicted that the negative feedback of urban recession would slow or even reverse migration from the countryside.41 “It appears,” marveled developmental economist Nigel Harris in 1990, “that for low-income countries, a significant fall in urban incomes may not necessarily produce in the short term a decline in rural–urban migration.”42
The situation in Africa was particularly paradoxical: How could cities in Côte d’Ivoire, Tanzania, Congo-Kinshasa, Gabon, Angola, and elsewhere – where economies were contracting by 2 to 5 percent per year – still support annual population growth of 4 to 8 percent?43 How could Lagos in the 1980s grow twice as fast as the Nigerian population, while its urban economy was in deep recession?44 Indeed, how has Africa as a whole, currently in a dark age of stagnant urban employment and stalled agricultural productivity, been able to sustain an annual urbanization rate (3.5 to 4.0 percent) considerably higher than the average of most European cities (2.1 percent) during peak Victorian growth years?45
Part of the secret, of course, was that policies of agricultural deregulation and financial discipline enforced by the IMF and World Bank continued to generate an exodus of surplus rural labor to urban slums even as cities ceased to be job machines. As Deborah Bryceson, a leading European Africanist, emphasizes in her summary of recent agrarian research, the 1980s and 1990s were a generation of unprecedented upheaval in the global countryside:
One by one national governments, gripped in debt, became subject to structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionality. Subsidized, improved agricultural input packages and rural infrastructural building were drastically reduced. As the peasant “modernization” effort in Latin American and African nations was abandoned, peasant farmers
