www.newleftreview.net/NLR26001.shtml
New Left Review 26, March-April 2004 Future history of the Third Worlds post-industrial megacities. A billion -strong global proletariat ejected from the formal economy, with Islam a nd Pentecostalism as songs of the dispossessed. MIKE DAVIS PLANET OF SLUMS Sometime in the next year, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of A jegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright l ights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Limas innumerable pueblos jovenes. The exact event is unimportant a nd it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a wat ershed in human history. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural. Indeed, given the imprecisions of Third World censuses, this epochal transition may already have occurred. The earth has urbanized even faster than originally predicted by the Club of Rome in its notoriously Malthusian 1972 report, Limits of Growth. In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population over one milli on; today there are 400, and by 2015, there will be at least 550.
Cities, indeed, have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global populati on explosion since 1950 and are currently growing by a million babies an d migrants each week.
Brecht, Diary entry, 1921 Ninety-five per cent of this final buildout of humanity will occur in the urban areas of developing countries, whose population will double to ne arly 4 billion over the next generation.
In 1995 only Tokyo had incontestably reached that threshold. Shanghai , whose growth was frozen for decades by Maoist policies of deliberate u nder-urbanization, could have as many as 27 million residents in its hug e estuarial metro-region.
Mumbai (Bombay) meanwhile is projected to attain a population of 33 million, although no one knows whether suc h gigantic concentrations of poverty are biologically or ecologically su stainable.
But if megacities are the brightest stars in the urban firmament, three-q uarters of the burden of population growth will be borne by faintly visi ble second-tier cities and smaller urban areas: places where, as un rese archers emphasize, there is little or no planning to accommodate these people or provide them with services.
In China (officially 43 p er cent urban in 1997), the number of official cities has soared from 19 3 to 640 since 1978. But the great metropolises, despite extraordinary g rowth, have actually declined in relative share of urban population. It is, rather, the small cities and recently citized towns that have abso rbed the majority of the rural labour-power made redundant by post-1979 market reforms.
In Africa, likewise, the supernova-like growth o f a few giant cities like Lagos (from 300,000 in 1950 to 10 million toda y) has been matched by the transformation of several dozen small towns a nd oases like Ouagadougou, Nouakchott, Douala, Antananarivo and Bamako i nto cities larger than San Francisco or Manchester. In Latin America, wh ere primary cities long monopolized growth, secondary cities like Tijuan a, Curitiba, Temuco, Salvador and Belm are now booming, with the faste st growth of all occurring in cities with between 100,000 and 500,000 in habitants.
Moreover, as Gregory Guldin has urged, urbanization must be conceptualize d as structural transformation along, and intensified interaction betwee n, every point of an urbanrural continuum. In his case-study of souther n China, the countryside is urbanizing in situ as well as generating epo chal migrations. Villages become more like market and xiang towns, and county towns and small cities become more like large cities. The result in China and much of Southeast Asia is a hermaphroditic landscape, a pa rtially urbanized countryside that Guldin and others argue may be a sig nificant new path of human settlement and development . a form neith er rural nor urban but a blending of the two wherein a dense web of tran sactions ties large urban cores to their surrounding regions.
In Indonesia, where a similar process of rural/urban hybridization is fa r advanced in Jabotabek (the greater Jakarta region), researchers call t hese novel land-use patterns desokotas and debate whether they are trans itional landscapes or a dramatic new species of urbanism.
Urbanists also speculate about the processes weaving together Third World cities into extraordinary new networks, corridors and hierarchies. For example, the Pearl River (Hong KongGuangzhou) and the Yangtze River (Sh anghai) deltas, along with the BeijingTianjin corridor, are rapidly dev eloping into urban-industrial megalopolises comparable to TokyoOsaka, t he lower Rhine, or New YorkPhiladelphia. But this may only be the first stage in the emergence of an even larger structure: a continuous urban corridor stretching from Japan/North Korea to West Java.
Shan ghai, almost certainly, will then join Tokyo, New York and London as one of the world cities controlling the global web of capital and informa tion flows. The price of this new urban order will be increasing inequal ity within and between cities of different sizes and specializations. Gu ldin, for example, cites intriguing Chinese discussions over whether the ancient income-and-development chasm between city and countryside is no w being replaced by an equally fundamental gap between small cities and the coastal giants.
Dickens, A December Vision, 1850 The dynamics of Third World urbanization both recapitulate and confound t he 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 Europes from rural villages to smog-choked sky-climbing cities.
Indeed, the great oculus of the Shanghai World Financial Centre may soon look out upon a vast urban world little imagined by Mao or, fo r that matter, Le Corbusier. But in most of the developing world, city g rowth lacks Chinas powerful manufacturing-export engine as well as its vast inflow of foreign capital (currently equal to half of total foreign investment in the developing world). Urbanization elsewhere, as a result, has been radically decoupled from in dustrialization, even from development perse. Some would argue that this is an expression of an inexorable trend: the inherent tendency of silic on capitalism to delink the growth of production from that of employment . But in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and parts of Asia, urbanization-without-growth is more obviously the legacy of a glo bal political conjuncturethe debt crisis of the late 1970s and subseque nt imf-led restructuring of Third World economies in the 1980sthan an i ron law of advancing technology.
This perverse urban boom contradicted orthodox economic models which pr edicted that the negative feedback of urban recession should slow or eve n reverse migration from the countryside. How could cities in Cte dIvoire, Tanzania, Gabon and elsewherewhose economies were contracting by 2 to 5 per cent per years till sustain population growth of 5 to 8 per cent per annum?
Pa rt of the secret, of course, was that imf- (and now wto-) enforced polic ies of agricultural deregulation and de-peasantization were accelerati ng the exodus of surplus rural labour to urban slums even as cities ceas ed to be job machines. Urban population growth in spite of stagnant or n egative urban economic growth is the extreme face of what some researche rs have labelled over-urbanization.
It is just one of the sev eral unexpected tracks down which a neoliberal world order has shunted m illennial urbanization. Classical social theory from Marx to Weber, of course, believed that the great cities of the future would follow in the industrializing footsteps of Manchester, Berlin and Chicago. Indeed, Los Angeles, So Paulo, Pusa n and, today, Ciudad Jurez, Bangalore and Guangzhou, have roughly appro ximated this classical trajectory. But most cities of the South are more like Victorian Dublin which, as Emmet Larkin has emphasized, was unique amongst all the slumdoms produced in the western world in the nineteen th century .
its slums were no...
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