How often do you hear of people moving to different cities, either domestically or in another country? Even if you haven't done so yourself, you've likely heard of this happening fairly often.
This is called urbanisation, and it can have a lot of impact on the process of global development. Let's see how that works. We will be exploring:
- The meaning of urbanisation
- The causes of urbanisation
- Examples of urbanisation
- Effects of urbanisation in developing countries
- The problems and advantages of urbanisation in developing countries
The meaning of urbanisation
More and more people live in urban areas, i.e. towns and cities, as individuals seek more available and better opportunities. Let's consider an official definition:
Urbanisation refers to the increasing shift in the number of people living in urban areas and a decrease in those living in rural areas.
Examples of urbanisation can be seen in the fact that only 15% of people lived in urban areas at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now, over 50% of all people globally live in an urban environment.
Robin Cohen and Paul Kennedy (2000) explain this further. They highlight how from 1940 to 1975, the number of people living in cities almost increased by a factor of 10 - from 80 million in 1940 to 770 million in 1975.1
Seoul in South Korea is a prime example of urbanisation. In 1950, 1.4 million people lived in this city. By 1990, that number rose to over 10 million.2
Rapid urbanisation
If urbanisation refers to the increasing number of people living in urban areas, then 'rapid urbanisation' is where urbanisation occurs faster than governments can plan and prepare for. This is a process occurring globally. However, the impacts are felt most strongly when it occurs in developing countries.
Rapid urbanisation puts pressure on infrastructure, schooling, healthcare, supplies of clean water, safe waste disposal and other services. Not only are these areas already stretched thin in developing countries, but they often have the highest rates of population growth in the world.
Fig. 1 - Urbanisation is very common in modern times.
Besides population growth, causes of urbanisation are driven by a mixture of ‘push and pull factors’. In other words, people are pushed out of rural life and/or are pulled into (attracted to) city life.
Causes of urbanisation: push and pull factors
Let's look at the causes of urbanisation using push and pull factors. They can often be interlinked, but note that you should be able to distinguish between the two.
| Push factors include: | Pull factors include: |
| - A higher number of employment opportunities and better-paying work
|
| - Easier access to higher-quality education
|
| - Easier access to healthcare
|
| - The perception that city life offers a better quality of life
|
Examples of urbanisation
Now we know what urbanisation means and what causes urbanisation to occur, thinking about examples of urbanisation shouldn't be tricky - nearly every country and all major cities all over the world have undergone a fair degree of urbanisation!
Nontheless, here are some examples of where urbanisation has occured.
My task for you reader...what type of urbanisation do you think each of these cities have undergone? Are they urbanised or are they an example of 'rapid urbanisation'? Have people been 'pushed' into these cities or 'pulled'?
- Seoul in South Korea.
- From 1.4 million people in 1950 to over 10 million by 1990.
- Karachi in Pakistan.
- From 5 million people in 1980 to over 16.8 million in 2022.
- London in the UK.
- From 6.8 million people in 1981 to 9 million in 2020.
- Chicagoin the US.
- From 7.2 million people in 1981 to 8.87 million in 2020.
- Lagosin Nigeria.
- From 2.6 million people in 1980 to 14.9 million in 2021.
What are the advantages of urbanisation?
Modernisation theorists argue in favour of the process of urbanisation. From their perspective, urbanisation in developing countries is shifting cultural values and promoting economic development.
In the following section, we will look closer at the advantages of urbanisation.
Urbanisation concentrates the labour force
'Concentrate', in this sense, means that large numbers of the workforce move to and reside in the same area (often big cities). This, in turn, allows for:
- Industrial development, along with an increased number of jobs
- Increases in tax revenues for local governments, enabling more efficient public services and more effective improvements to infrastructure as reach is increased
Urbanisation promotes ‘modern’, Western cultural ideas
Modernisation theorists like Bert Hoselitz (1953) argue that urbanisation occurs in cities where individuals learn to accept change and aspire to accumulate wealth. Put plainly, the increase in economic and social opportunities experienced in cities promotes the spread of Western, capitalist ideals.
For proponents of modernisation theory like Hoselitz and Rostow, the decline of 'traditional' beliefs and their replacement with 'modern' ideas is at the core of accelerating development within a country. This is because these all limit or prevent a universal and equal promise of growth and reward, spurred on by individual competition.
Examples of 'traditional' ideas that they see as detrimental include: patriarchal systems, collectivism, and ascribed status.
However, the impacts of urbanisation in developing countries have not been as beneficial as modernisation theorists believe. To outline some of the problems of urbanisation in developing countries, we shall turn to the perspective of dependency theory.
What are the disadvantages of urbanisation?
We will look at the disadvantages of urbanisation, mainly from the point of view of dependency theorists.
Dependency theory and urbanisation
Dependency theorists argue that the process of urbanisation is rooted in colonialism. They say that when current conditions in urban areas are taken into account, this legacy of colonialism is very much still alive.
Colonialism is “a situation of dependency in which one country governs and controls another country” (Livesey, 2014, p.212). 3
Dependency theorists argue:
1. Under colonial rule, a two-tiered system developed in urban areas, which has only continued since
A select group of elites owned the majority of wealth, while the rest of the population lived in squalor. Cohen and Kennedy (2000) argue that these inequalities have continued; what has changed is that colonial powers have been replaced by Transnational Corporations (TNCs).
Cohen and Kennedy also highlight the national two-tiered system that urbanisation creates between cities and rural areas. Specifically, cities concentrating wealth and political power means the needs of rural people often go unmet, and the development of rural areas is overlooked. As Cohen and Kennedy (2000, n.d.) state:
Cities are like islands surrounded by a sea of poverty".1
2. Urbanisation actually hinders development and creates growing social inequality
In developing countries, cities are often divided into small, well-developed areas and large slums/shanty towns.
- Most experts believe 1.6 billion people (1/4 of the world’s urban population) live in ‘slums’.4
- Orangi Town in Karachi (Pakistan) has over 2.4 million people living in slums.5 To put that in perspective, that is a slum city equal to the population of Manchester or Birmingham.
- In South Sudan, 91% of the urban population lives in slums.6 For all of Sub-Saharan Africa, this number is 54%.7
The standard of living in slums is extremely low: there is a lack of access to basic services (e.g. clean water, sanitation, waste disposal, educational institutions and healthcare facilities) and there is an increased risk of harm – makeshift homes are more vulnerable to natural disasters and crime is rife due to a lack of opportunities.
The impacts of COVID-19 illuminate the harm that growing social inequality and rapid urbanisation can cause.
With respect to housing, health and well-being, an RTPI paper (2021) highlights how place-based inequality and exclusion are the greatest predictors of the impact of COVID-19.8
They highlight how the effects are disproportionate to those who are most vulnerable, i.e. those who live in high levels of deprivation, overcrowding, poor quality of housing, and with less access to services. It is no surprise that they highlight how "Data from Mumbai, Dhaka, Cape Town, Lagos, Rio de Janeiro and Manila shows that neighbourhoods with slums...are found to contain the highest density of COVID-19 cases in each city" (RTPI, 2021).
And this is not just an issue in developing countries!
In New York, the average COVID-19 death rate was over double in areas with at least 30% deprived households vs areas with less than 10%.8 In the UK, you were twice as likely to die from COVID if you lived in a more deprived area than those who lived in other neighbourhoods.9
3. Surplus of labour in urban areas suppresses wages
Due to the speed of population growth, there are now more people than there are available jobs. Consequently, this surplus of labour suppresses wages and many are forced to turn to insecure / low-paid part-time work.
Fig. 2 - a variety of slums and shanty towns.
Problems of urbanisation in developing countries
Compared to those living in rural areas, living conditions for the poor in urban areas of developing countries are often worse. Due partly to enforced privatisation by Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), many basic services such as access to clean water and clean sanitation are inaccessible to many – they simply cost too much. As a consequence, there are many preventable deaths.
- 768 million people lack access to clean water.10
- 3.5 million people a year die from water-related diseases.10
- In Chad, in 2017, 11% of deaths were related directly to unsafe sanitation and 14% of deaths were related to unsafe water sources.10
Furthermore, in slums, there are also higher rates of infectious diseases and the presence of many preventable diseases.
Effects of urbanisation in developing countries
Let's take the Paraisópolis neighbourhood in São Paulo, Brazil, where only a fence separates the affluent residential areas from the slums.
Whilst both areas are affected by STIs, HIV/AIDS, influenza, sepsis, and tuberculosis (TB), only "residents of the slum area are additionally susceptible to diseases that rarely affect residents of the adjacent affluent area, such as leptospirosis, meningitis, hepatitis (A, B, and C), vaccine-preventable diseases, multidrug-resistant TB, rheumatic heart disease, advanced stage cervical carcinoma, and microcephaly" (Ogawa, Shah and Nicholson, 2018, p. 18).11
Urbanisation - Key takeaways
- The process of urbanisation refers to an increasing shift in the number of people living in urban areas and a decrease in those living in rural areas.
- Causes of urbanisation are driven by a mixture of ‘push and pull factors’. In other words, people are pushed out of rural life and/or are pulled into (attracted to) city life.
- Modernisation theorists argue in favour of urbanisation. From their perspective, the effects of urbanisation in developing countries are that they help shift cultural values and promote economic development.
- Dependency theorists argue that when current conditions in urban areas are taken into account, urbanisation is a continuation of colonialism. They argue, amongst other things, that urbanisation hinders development and creates growing social inequality.
- Living conditions for the poor in urban areas are often worse compared to those living in rural areas.
References
- Cohen, R., & Kennedy, P. (2000). Global sociology. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Kim, Y. (2004). Seoul. In J. Gugler, World Cities Beyond the West. Cambridge University Press.
- Livesey, C. (2014) Cambridge International AS and A Level Sociology Coursebook. Cambridge University Press
- What is a Slum? Definition of a Global Housing Crisis. Habitat for Humanity GB. (2022). Retrieved 11 October 2022, from https://www.habitatforhumanity.org.uk/what-we-do/slum-rehabilitation/what-is-a-slum.
- Shah, J. (2019). 5 facts about Orangi Town: the World's Largest Slum. Borgenproject. https://borgenproject.org/orangi-town-the-worlds-largest-slum/
- Population living in slums (% of urban population) - South Sudan | Data. Data.worldbank.org. (2022). Retrieved 11 October 2022, from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.SLUM.UR.ZS?locations=SS.
- Population living in slums (% of urban population) - Sub-Saharan Africa | Data. Data.worldbank.org. (2022). Retrieved 11 October 2022, from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.SLUM.UR.ZS?locations=ZG.
- Lerner, S. (2020). Coronavirus Numbers reflect New York City's Deep Economic Divide. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2020/04/09/nyc-coronavirus-deaths-race-economic-divide/
- LGA. (2021). Health inequalities: Deprivation and poverty and COVID-19. Local Government Association. https://www.local.gov.uk/health-inequalities-deprivation-and-poverty-and-covid-19
- Ogawa, V.A., Shah, C.M., & Nicholson, A.K. (2018). Urbanization and Slums: Infectious Diseases in the Built Environment: Proceedings of a Workshop.
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