The Growth Explosion

Abdur Rob is not afraid of travel — he often takes lengthy journeys throughout his home country of Bangladesh. Yet Rob, a 27 year old who lives at the northern end of Dhaka, rarely travels to see friends in the heart of Old Dhaka, near the south of the city. The journey, he declares, is simply unbearable. Traveling in just one direction could take over three hours.

Dhaka is only about eleven miles long at its longest point. Yet this city, home to 10 to 12 million people, is so congested that traffic moves at a snail’s pace at almost any time of day, making daily commutes a nightmare. Women traveling in open-air “baby taxis” cover their mouths with their head scarfs, choking on the visible smog. Every day, more people complain about the city — about the traffic, pollution, constant noise, horrible sanitation, and visible slums. Yet Dhaka continues to grow-in the past 30 years, its population has multiplied more than ten-fold. 

Dhaka may be larger than most cities, but in terms of demographic and economic trends, it is far from the exception. In about 50 years, the world’s population has gone from being two-thirds rural to being almost half urban. The change is largely in the developing world, where cities are growing at an unprecedented pace. By 2010, the United Nations Human Settlement Programme (Habitat) predicts, two of the three largest cities in the world will be in developing countries (Mumbai, India; and Lagos, Nigeria). London and Milan will no longer even make the top-30 list.

Developing world cities have traditionally been the domain of people who think more in terms of overall poverty reduction than in terms of urban planning, in part because cities have largely been a developed world phenomenon. Yet given that urban growth in the third world is now stronger — both in scope and speed — than in any other urban area around the world, the time has come for urban planners to think seriously about the developing world. This article, the first in a series about rapid growth in third world cities, will explore the changing dynamics of this growth in the context of the American “smart growth” movement. Smart growth is crucial both to the well-being of urban populations and to the long-term existence of cities throughout the world.

A Population Explosion

The major reason for urban growth in the developing world is the same as the reason for European urbanization in the 18th century and American urbanization in the 19th century: economic opportunity. This is perhaps a natural process; after all, services and businesses concentrate where they can reap the benefits of “agglomeration economies,” and people seeking opportunity go where those services and businesses have accumulated.

Yet some believe that this process is not quite as simple as it seems. Karen Polenske, head of the International Development and Regional Planning Group at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, thinks that governmental decisions may be helping to cause urban population explosions. “People need jobs, houses, schools, other facilities,” she notes, “and they will move to places where these occur. Governments provide these aspects of daily life mainly in urban areas.” She cites the examples of Town and Village Enterprises (TVEs) in the People’s Republic of China — which now produce 40% or more of the country’s industrial output — as well as the increasing tendency of some firms to reduce their production costs by locating along a global supply chain instead of in major urban areas. Such examples help to suggest that agglomeration economies and their concurrent population growth are not inevitable, and may instead be fostered or thwarted by governmental policy.

Whether the creation of cities is inevitable or not, enough people have already moved to developing cities to ensure continued growth through general demographic and social trends. Growth in rural areas is beginning to level off; in the next decade, says Kraig Baier of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), close to 90% of the growth of population in the developing world will be in cities. This phenomenon is only exacerbated by cultural changes in urban societies. With more and more urban families across the world living in nuclear rather than extended-family households, the number of new urban households is growing faster than ever before.

A Growth Dilemma?

The problem with rapid population growth is not growth itself, says David Satterthwaite of the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. Los Angeles, after all, grew much faster in the 20th century than Kolkatta (formerly known as Calcutta), but Los Angeles has a much higher quality of life. The problem in the developing world is that city and municipal authorities are often unable to manage the rapid population growth, leading to sprawl, environmental problems, and the concentration of the poor in unsafe and unhealthy areas of the city. Some cities — for example, Curitiba and Porto Alegre in Brazil — have overcome these problems quite successfully, developing long-term environmental plans in cooperation with citizen committees and businesses. Other cities, including many of the cities in sub-Saharan Africa that are stressed by refugee influx, have had less success.

The dilemmas associated with poor urban management take multiple forms. First is the problem most often discussed by smart-growth advocates in the United States: sprawl. Without adequate land-use planning, urban growth in the developing world threatens watersheds and agricultural land, and may not leave sufficient land in safe areas for housing construction. In many developing countries, different types of lands are regulated by different agencies-often with no coordinating agency-making it difficult to construct a comprehensive land-use plan. In some countries, this lack of coordination is also compounded by extensive bureaucratic corruption, which limits the effectiveness of the planning that does take place.

Second, as poor people flock into the city, low-cost housing in acceptable areas becomes more and more difficult to find. Illegal and informal settlements accordingly proliferate in areas where wealthier inhabitants and businesses do not wish to build-often, ecologically vulnerable areas such as those vulnerable to flooding (for example, settlements in Delhi, Bangkok, and Buenos Aires), or hillsides at risk for landslides or mudslides (Rio de Janeiro, La Paz, and Caracas). Many of the houses built in such areas are of very poor quality; 18% of all urban housing units worldwide are makeshift structures, and 25% do not conform to any building regulations. Population growth in third world cities is occurring so rapidly that the housing stock would need to increase by almost 5% each year — approximately 18 million units — to house all of the incoming residents. Moreover, because the areas of informal settlements are removed from the center of the city, it is difficult to service them with the same infrastructure (roads, drains, plumbing), or with the same health care or educational facilities. The concentration of the urban poor may maintain, or even exacerbate, economic and spatial power relationships from the colonial era, while also leading to the same sorts of sociological problems seen with the hyper-segregation of African-Americans in the United States.

Finally, unchecked urban growth also frequently causes dangerous environmental conditions. Excessive traffic and unregulated vehicle use may lead to dangerous air pollution. Without adequate drainage facilities, informal settlements quickly pollute their water supply, which is often limited and difficult to access in the first place. Furthermore, such water pollution quickly flows downstream, threatening the water supply of the entire city. Sanitation problems, particularly in informal settlements, breed disease and other health issues. Approximately one hundred million urban residents may have no toilet facilities whatsoever, and are instead forced to use the land, scrap paper, or plastic bags.

A Way Out?

In a report for the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, Satterthwaite argues that such problems should be seen with appropriate perspective: “In cities in high-income nations, it is taken for granted that there are planning controls on urban expansion and on new developments, that all new buildings meet official building standards, and that there are piped water, sewer and drainage systems into which new developments can connect. It is also accepted that urban government officials are answerable to elected representatives. Yet it has only been during the last 100 years or so that the governance structures needed to achieve this began to be accepted and developed.”

Seen from that vantage point, the future of third world urban smart growth may be in fact be brighter than it first appears. International agencies, governmental organizations, and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have just started to focus their attentions seriously on the problems of cities in the developing world, as opposed to rural areas. The United Nations agency responsible for urban regions, the United Nations Human Settlement Programme (UN-Habitat), was recently designated a full-fledged U.N. program (as opposed to a minor “center”) — the first time such a designation change has happened in the history of the United Nations. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has launched a series of initiatives aimed at improving life and managerial capabilities in urban regions, including their Public-Private Partnerships for the Urban Environment (PPPUE) initiative. USAID has also been actively involved in public-private partnership work, which it sees as essential to building the managerial capacities of local urban areas in a world of increasing decentralization.

Perhaps the most important — and most diverse — body of work on urban issues has been launched by NGOs, which often operate on a grassroots level to improve urban living conditions. In Costa Rica, NGOs like FUPROVI (Foundation for Housing Promotion) work on low-income housing and income generation, while in South Africa, MELISSA (Managing the Environment Locally in Sub-Saharan Africa) focuses on environmental management, sanitation, and associated issues. Perhaps the best anecdotal evidence of an increasing NGO focus on the urban realm is the growth in the number of broad-based NGOs which now operate urban as well as rural programs. While BRAC, for example, the largest NGO in Bangladesh, has been running rural microcredit and education programs for over thirty years, it began an urban microcredit and non-formal education program just five years ago. Its urban education work is particularly important to young sweatshop employees, who often cannot attend school if the school hours do not cater to the demands of a typical workday.

As more groups of people — whether urban planners or development practitioners — begin working on urban issues in the developing world, the risks of doing so clearly loom larger. Urban planning and development studies share storied histories of overly aggressive planning techniques — one might think, for example, of Robert Moses’ legacy, or of the criticism that the World Bank has recently received for “cookie cutter” development projects. This problem is only intensified by the fact that urban regions in the developing world are relatively new territory for both the urban planning and international development communities, making it harder to know which kinds of pitfalls to avoid. It is thus particularly important for development practitioners and planners to work together and to work for, respond to, and collaborate with local NGOs and local officials. The ideal terrain of “global smart growth organizations” is hard to envision —perhaps small NGOs would set local agendas and do the bulk of the social service work, while organizations like UN-Habitat would mostly serve as information clearinghouses for “best practices,” or fill in gaps in NGO coverage. More attention should clearly be paid to urban governance itself, which is an important prerequisite for much land use planning and social services activities. One thing, however, is quite clear: cities in the developing world are only going to get more important as the years progress. It is time for discussion in urban planning and international development circles to adjust accordingly.