The 21st Century

The 10 and 1/2 Myths that may distort the Urban Policies of Governments and International Agencies

Theme 2: THE SCALE, SPEED & LOCATION OF URBAN CHANGE
It is often stated that urban growth in Africa, Asia and Latin America is explosive, unprecedented and out of control. For instance, "...it is in the Third World that the urban explosion is taking place" and the "...health and well-being of literally hundreds of millions of men, and especially women and children, are threatened by an urban population explosion in the developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America." These are typical of the kinds of general comments made about urban change in Africa, Asia and Latin America. A paper in Foreign Affairs in 1996 was entitled "The exploding cities of the developing world" . An article in Newsweek in 1994 talked about Asian mega cities running riot, driven by explosive economic and population growth. It is also often assumed that not only is rapid urbanization taking place all over Africa, Asia and Latin America but that it will continue. For instance "Unrestrained rural-to-urban migration has caused rapid urban growth in all countries in the developing world and is expected to continue." Most of this is untrue or at best partially true. The predictions are unlikely to come true.
[Myth 4]	Mega-cities are growing rapidly and will dominate the urban future
[Myth 5]	Africa's urban population growing out of control without economic development
[Myth 6]	The future is predominantly urban

[Myth 4]

... Mega-cities are growing rapidly and will dominate the urban future

The latest census data show that there are far fewer mega-cities than had been expected and that they contain a small proportion of the world's population. Most proved to have several million inhabitants less than had been expected in 2000. Many of them are growing slowly with more people moving out than in; some are losing population. In addition, more decentralized patterns of urban development are apparent in many nations, which suggests that fewer mega-cities will develop and that most of those that do will be smaller.

Mega-cities are generally defined as cities with populations of ten million or more inhabitants. By concentrating such large numbers of enterprises and people, they do present particularly challenging difficulties both for ensuring that their populations' needs are met and for good environmental management (including keeping down air pollution and limiting their ecological impact on their region). But:

there are relatively few of them; by 2000, there were 16 mega-cities. This is much less than had been anticipated;
These 16 mega-cities had less than 4 percent of the world's population;
They were heavily concentrated in the world's largest economies (as discussed earlier);
Most were much smaller in 2000 than had been anticipated. For instance, Mexico City had 18 million people in 2000 - not the 31 million people predicted 25 years ago. Calcutta had around 13 million by 2000, not the 40-50 million predicted during the 1970s. Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul, Chennai (formerly Madras) and Cairo are among the many other large cities that, by 2000, had several million inhabitants fewer than had been predicted;
Most have life expectancies and provision for piped water, sanitation, schools and health care that are well above their national average - even if the aggregate statistics for each mega-city hide significant proportions of their population who are living in very poor conditions;
Their populations are often over-stated because the figures given for their populations are for the population in large metropolitan areas or planning regions which include many rural settlements and separate urban centres. For instance, population figures for most of China's large cities are not for the city but for the 'municipality' that is much larger than the city. This confusion between local government area and city area explains why the city of Chongqing sometimes appears as the world's largest city with a population of 30 million. But this is the population in Chongqing municipality which covers 82,400 square kilometres (about the size of Austria or of all of the Netherlands and Denmark combined); the city population is around 6 million.

If London wanted to 'boost' its population, it could easily re-establish itself among the world's largest cities by following the example of the largest Chinese cities and having more extensive boundaries. This could be achieved if the Greater London Authority was able to convince the national government that a new London municipality be created, incorporating neighbouring counties such as Surrey, Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire - although one suspects there would be a certain reluctance on the part of most people living in these counties to such a change.

Many of the world's most economically successful regions have urban forms that are not dominated by a large central city, with new enterprises developing in a network of smaller cities and greenfield sites - for instance in Silicon Valley and Orange County in California and Bavaria in Germany and in the network of cities in Southeast Brazil that have attracted much new investment away from Sao Paulo.

In all high-income nations and many middle and low income nations, smaller cities have a growing capacity to attract a significant proportion of new investment away from the largest cities. In the many nations that have had effective decentralisations, urban authorities in smaller cities have more resources and capacity to compete for new investment. This suggests that successful economies may produce more decentralized patterns of urban development in the future with less development concentrated in very large cities. Advanced telecommunications systems have helped underpin more decentralised patterns of production which, in turn, means more decentralised patterns of urban development. The exceptions are the large cities that can adapt or that are successful at retaining a role as command and control centres for global corporations and the producer services they require.

What we do not know is whether the trend towards more decentralised urban patterns will manifest itself through huge sprawling urbanised regions or through networks of connected compact cities with well-managed surrounds. In part, this also depends on what urban policies are implemented. It also remains to be seen whether the smaller cities that have attracted new investments away from Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Beijing, Shanghai, New York and Calcutta become very large cities or in turn lose out to another generation of successful smaller cities.

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[Myth 5] (semi-myth):

... More than half the world's population live in cities

The latest census data shows that the world was less urbanized in 2000 than had been expected. The date at which the world's urban population grows to exceed that of its rural population has been delayed; this transition had been expected in the late 1990s but is now predicted to happen around 2007. The world's urban population in 2000 had 270 million people fewer than had been predicted twenty years previously. As a later section describes in more detail, many nations had much slower urban population growth rates than anticipated during the 1980s and 1990s, in part because of serious economic problems. For most nations, urban population growth rates also dropped due to falling fertility rates. For some, it was also because of rising mortality rates. By the late 1990s, this included large and growing levels of mortality from HIV/AIDS. This is particularly apparent in certain sub-Saharan African nations with high levels of infection and the absence of drugs to control it. This problem is reshaping urban trends in many nations.

The world's urban population may soon come to outnumber its rural population but this is not the same as half the world population living in cities because the proportion of people in cities is considerably below the proportion living in urban centres. There are thousands of settlements in Africa, Asia and Latin America (and also North America and Europe) that are classified by their national governments as urban centres but which lack the economic, administrative or political status that would normally be considered as criteria for classification as a city.

Perhaps too much is made of the fact that soon, more than half the world's population will live in urban areas. The figures for the proportion of the world's population living in urban areas are strongly influenced by how 'urban centres' are defined in the large-population nations. If China or India chose to change its urban definition, it could increase decrease the proportion of the world's population living in urban centres by several percentage points. If India chose to use Sweden's definition for urban centres, most of India's population becomes urban and the world would already have more than half its population living in urban areas (see Box 1).

BOX 1: The different definitions used for 'urban centres'

The urbanisation level for any nation is the proportion of the national population living in urban centres. So it is influenced by how the national government defines an 'urban centre'. For instance, most of India's rural population lives in villages with between 500 and 5,000 inhabitants and if these were classified as 'urban' (as they would be by some national urban definitions), India would suddenly have a predominantly urban population rather than a predominantly rural population. Each nation uses their own criteria for defining urban centres (or for distinguishing them from other settlements). In virtually all nations, official definitions ensure that urban centres include all settlements with 20,000 or more inhabitants. However, governments differ in the size of smaller settlements they include as urban centres from those that include all settlements with a few hundred inhabitants as urban to those that only include settlements with 20,000 or more inhabitants. This greatly limits the accuracy of international comparisons, because most nations have a large part of their populations living in settlements that fall into this range. By its 1996 census, 17.5% of Egypt's population lived in settlements with between 10,000 and 20,000 inhabitants which had many urban characteristics, including significant non-agricultural economies and occupational structures. These were not classified as urban areas - although they would have been in most other nations. If they were considered as urban areas, it would make Egypt much more urbanised and would bring major changes to urban growth rates. If the Indian or Chinese government chose to change the criteria used in their censuses to define urban centres, this could increase or decrease the world's level of urbanisation by several percentage points. And there are good reasons for thinking that the current criteria used in China considerably understate the size of its urban population. Revisions by, for instance, the Nigerian or Brazilian census authorities could significantly alter Africa's or South America's level of urbanisation. In some nations, revisions in their urban definitions are partly responsible for changes in their urban growth rates and levels of urbanisation. What all this adds up to is that the world' s level of urbanisation is best understood not as a precise figure (47.7% in 2001) but as a figure somewhere between 40% and 55%, depending on what criteria are used to define urban centres

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[Myth 6]

... "The speed of urban change in poorer nations is unprecedented with new cities mushrooming everywhere and with Africa, Asia and Latin America having the fastest growing cities"

The scale of urban change over the last fifty years is unprecedented. But the speed of urban change in low and middle income nations is not unprecedented. There are many historical precedents of nations with increases in their levels of urbanization that are as fast or faster than most of those taking place in recent decades in low and middle income nations. Many high income nations underwent periods when they had increases in their level of urbanization over a 30 year period that were larger than that experienced by most low and middle income nations. For instance, the level of urbanization in Japan increased from 24 percent in 1930 to 64 percent in 1960 while that in the UK went from 37.1 percent urban to 60.6 percent urban between 1850 and 1880.

The change in the level of urbanization in low and middle income nations between 1950 and 1975 was comparable to the change in the level of urbanization in Europe and North America between 1875 and 1900. The rates of net rural to urban migration required to achieve these increases may have been greater in Europe and North America in the late 19th century than in low and middle income nations from 1950-1975 in view of the fact that the rates of natural increase in rural areas were probably higher than the rates of natural increase in urban areas at that time.

In addition, some of the most rapid increases in levels of urbanization in recent decades has not been in Africa, Asia and Latin America but in Europe. Very few countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America have had increases in their levels of urbanization that compare with Lithuania between 1959 and 1989 (from 39 percent to 68 percent) or Belarus (from 31 to 66 percent urban in these same years) or Finland or Norway between 1960 and 1990. Although sub-Saharan Africa is generally considered as a region experiencing very rapid urbanization, several African nations have among the smallest increases in their level of urbanization in recent decades (including Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Somalia). However, as noted earlier, some caution is needed in making generalizations for sub-Saharan Africa because there is no recent census data for many nations.

Perhaps surprisingly, new cities are not mushrooming everywhere. Most of the largest urban centres in Europe, Latin America, Asia and North Africa today have been important urban centres for centuries. Of the 388 cities in the world that had more than a million inhabitants by 2000, more than three fifths were already urban centres 200 years ago, while more than a quarter have been urban centres for at least 500 years. There is also a, perhaps surprising, comparison in that it is North America and sub-Saharan Africa that stand out as having most 'new cities' among the world's largest cities today. These are cities that now have more than a million inhabitants but had not been founded or did not exist as urban centres by 1800

Not all the fastest growing cities are in low and middle income nations: It is often assumed that the world's most rapidly growing cities are concentrated in Latin America, Asia and Africa. But several cities in the United States were among the world's most rapidly growing large cities between 1950 and 2000. Nairobi, Kenya's capital, is often held up as an example of a particularly rapidly growing city - but both Miami and Phoenix in the United States had larger populations than Nairobi in 2000, although all three were small settlements in 1900. The population of Los Angeles was around one tenth that of Calcutta in 1900, yet in 2000 it had about the same number of people in its metropolitan area.

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