Cities: Small Guides to Big Issues

by Jeremy Seabrook

Overview

Small Guides to Big Issues is a new series of accessible introductions to the global challenges of the twenty-first century. The books in this series de-bunk myths and raise questions about the global economic and political system and how it works. They are designed for campaigners and activists, students and researchers, and anyone interested in looking behind the headlines. Produced in partnership with Oxfam, each book provides an informative and thought-provoking guide to current trends and debates, and what needs to happen in order to end poverty and injustice.Every year tens of millions of people abandon rural areas of the South for life in the city. With education, health care and even safe water in short supply, cities risk becoming sites of violent conflict for future generations. And yet world governments are doing little to address thesedemographic shifts.Jeremy Seabrook offers a vivid portrait of the lives of people who migrate from impoverished villages to towns and cities, the changes they face, and the impact these changes have on their psyche and well-being. Contrasting the attitudes of today’s governments with those of the past, the book provides a sharp critique of global policies, and an ideal introduction to the impact of urbanisation on modern life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745323084
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	08/23/2007
Series:	Small Guides to Big Issues Series
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.05(w) x 7.34(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Jeremy Seabrook is a researcher and writer. He is the author of The Refuge and the Fortress: Britain and the Flight from Tyranny 1933 - 2008 (2008), Consuming Cultures: Globalization and Local Lives (2006), Travels in the Skin Trade (Pluto, 2001) and Cities (Pluto, 2007).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

An urbanising world

No one really knows at which point a majority of the world's population will become urban. Has it already occurred? Will it happen in the next decade? In 1950, only 18 per cent of the people in developing countries lived in cities. By 2000, this exceeded 40 per cent, and the numbers continue to rise.

In any case, the distinction between urban and rural is hard to sustain. Few areas of the world have remained closed to the influence of industrial society. Not only is agriculture more and more dominated by industrial inputs, but contemporary communications systems ensure that the imagery of the metropolis penetrates more and more deeply into the consciousness and imagination of country people everywhere.

In Asia, the spread of cities has been phenomenal, and is still accelerating. China, in particular, whose celebrated economic success has been paid for by spectacular environmental destruction and a dramatic increase in inequality, is a country where it is widely estimateed that well over 100 million people are in a state of more or less perpetual migration between country and city. In the poor world, the urban growth rate is 2.35 per cent a year, whereas in the rich world it is a modest 0.4 per cent.

Few cities are prepared for this expansion. Neither national nor local governments have planned to provide the necessary extra land, housing, water, sanitation, work and waste disposal. Legal frameworks are inadequate and defective, especially in relation to land markets, including land registry, valuation and legal instruments to make the acquisition of land easier.

UN estimates of urban growth have repeatedly exaggerated the rate of development. 'Urban' is in any case a confusing definition, for it refers not only to cities but to big towns, market towns and even industrial villages. Projections of population growth in developing countries also serve as a diversion from the consumption and waste-generation rates of the rich world. In 1979 the United Nations predicted that by 2000 the population of Mexico City would be 31.6 million, of Sao Paulo 26 million and of Kolkata 20 million. Extrapolations from the recent past ignore social and economic change: the deindustrialisation of both Sao Paulo and Kolkata was not foreseen. In China, rapid urbanisation took place from 1949-60, but the cultural revolution deurbanised the country, as people were forced into new settlements. After 1977, urbanisation rose rapidly, and it has accelerated since, so that established urban settlements are being swept away to accommodate infrastructural developments and newcomers. The urban poor suffer disproportionately, especially in prestigious and capital cities: Beijing has been expanded in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, pushing migrants further from the centre.

It also became taken for granted in the 1950s and 1960s that 'urban bias' attracted people to cities: subsidised food, the availability of services and the infrastructure were seen as inducements to people to leave the countryside. It is true that average income of cities remains higher than that of rural areas, but conditions and the quality of life for some groups of urban poor are now worse than those of many rural people. It may be that a promise of wealth and the possibility of improvement draw people to urban areas, but the actual experience is often of declining health and new kinds of impoverishment.

Jorge E. Hardoy and David Satterthwaite insist each city must be looked at according to its specific history and circumstances. Some cities in Africa are now growing a large proportion of their own food, and rather than the city invading the rural hinterland, the countryside is imposing itself upon the city. Lusaka and Dar es Salaam, for example, have become more, not less, self-provisioning.

Cities also die: Delhi is the site of eight former cities. Mahasthangarh, now in Bangladesh, is a ruin of a major conurbation from the first millennium before the Christian era. More than four millennia ago, the southern portion of Mesopotamia had already become 80 per cent urban in the cities of Sumeria. In 1600 Salvador/Bahia was the largest city in Brazil, when Sao Paulo was a small frontier town. Potosi, with its silver mines, was the biggest city in South America: in 1640 it had an estimated 140,000 people. The fate of cities is far from uniform – dramatic growth awaits some, and rapid collapse perhaps lies in store for others.

Towns and cities may also be destroyed. The South Asian earthquake of 2005 destroyed large parts of Muzaffarbad in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Brigitte Overtop, an Oxfam worker, describes what she saw:

In many streets nothing is left. Every school has collapsed. Hotels, hospitals, banks and homes have been razed to the ground. About 70 per cent of the people are homeless. There is no water and no electricity. We have to wear masks over our noses and mouths because the stench of rotting human flesh is almost too much to bear. People roam the streets dazed. Many of them are women and children. Many people came from surrounding areas to seek help.

Apart from the scene of desolation, the destruction of a city of some 600,000 people illuminated how far the surrounding rural area was dependent upon the city: the life of the whole region was disrupted.

Agricultural 'improvement' is inseparable from the growth of cities: patterns of land ownership, the dominant crop or livestock, the role of intermediaries in marketing cash-crops, diversion of land to other purposes by developmental imperatives, all undermine a self-reliance which has, in any case, already been much reduced. The Green Revolution, with its intensifying industrialisation of agriculture, increased productivity but impoverished many small farmers over the long term. Landholdings become more concentrated, as small-scale farmers sell their land, unable to keep up with the cost of agricultural inputs.

The need to increase agricultural exports to earn foreign exchange sets poor countries in competition with one another to produce the same products, and prices decline continuously. The dumping of subsidised agricultural goods from the North – rice, wheat, cotton – makes many local growers uncompetitive, and they quit cultivation. The compulsory purchase of land for plantations, cattle-ranches and agribusiness often leads to the employment of former subsistence farmers as wage labourers. Land reform, good agricultural productivity and agro-processing opportunities may reduce rural-urban migration, but so far the only significant reverse in the one-way traffic towards the city has been the flight of the rich from the cities, as they reclaim the peace and tranquillity of partially abandoned rural areas.

The Challenge of Slums

The most recent effort to define the likely outcome of accelerating urbanisation is the United Nations Human Settlements Programme 2003 report, The Challenge of Slums. This shows that in 2001 924 million people (31.6 per cent of the urban population) were living in slums. In the developing world this rose to 43 per cent, while in the developed world it amounted to only 6 per cent. The report estimates that there will be 2 billion slum dwellers within 30 years 'if no firm action is taken'.

The Challenge of Slums is the most far-reaching official assessment of the implications of urbanisation. Despite the convoluted, and sometimes contradictory, diplomatic style, its overall message is clear: the 'firm action' of which it speaks means public, government or international intervention, since the growth of the kind of cities we are now seeing is a result of a global policy of unrestricted free markets, which has been rehabilitated since the fall of the Soviet Union and the decay of socialism.

The failure of governments to prioritise urbanisation leads to some dramatic, even apocalyptic, forecasts. 'Urban disaster', 'explosion', 'powder keg' and 'time-bomb' are some of the lurid images. This may be designed to inject some urgency into a debate which scarcely reaches the mainstream press in the West, but it underestimates the power of people to accommodate themselves and to create livelihoods: to find a niche in the urban economy in some of the most hostile and intractable conditions on earth. The slums are not just the sites of breakdown, violence and despair which some see. Women in particular do much to make repellent environments habitable. Human attachments, of kinship, neighbourhood and belonging, temper the worst excesses of city life, while in many places rural roots offer seasonal lifelines, and family livelihood strategies sometimes bestride both city and country occupations.

At the same time, new health problems arise in the slums. Life expectancy is lower than in the city as a whole. People are worn out prematurely by work and want, and must struggle daily for the necessities of life. This relative quietism should not be read as satisfaction with their lives; but neither should it be taken for granted that they will remain inexhaustible absorbers of the humiliations and injustices heaped upon them.

The migration of poverty

Until recently, it was generally believed that poverty was essentially an issue of the rural areas of the world. It is now clear that poverty itself is migrating with the people who have left the wasting villages and abandoned farmsteads to seek refuge in growing city slums. The rate of increase in the population in sites of urban desolation has created a new crisis, which will worsen in the next two decades: the UN forecasts that the numbers of people living in slums will grow to 2.5 billion. By 2030, rural populations will have reached their peak, and almost all subsequent population growth will be absorbed by cities.

Most people who have left the global countryside have been driven by necessity from a homeplace that may have sustained them for millennia. They have been evicted by the deteriorating productivity of the land, the cost of industrial inputs, drought, waterlogging or salination, declining prices for the commodities they produce for the market, the enclosure of agricultural land for airports, highways, resorts, or for developmental projects such as big dams or wildlife reserves.

It is one of the great paradoxes of development that people are leaving the areas where food is produced, in order that they may eat adequately. This has meant movement to urban areas, the livelihoods these generate and the markets that serve them. However, as more people arrive in the cities, many discover they have an appointment there with the very evil they are fleeing.

And for a very good reason. A dying rural tradition, made obsolete by mechanised agriculture, meets an industrial culture, which is itself obsessed with a productivity that evicts more and more people from the industrial process. Where these two epic evictions meet, city slums are formed.

Why cities grow

Migration is not the only cause of rapidly rising city populations, although historically it certainly was. Between 1551 and 1801 the death rate in London was higher than the number of births. Without continuous migration, the city would simply have perished.

Today, the natural increase of people within the city itself has become an equal factor, accounting for one-third of the growth in many urban areas. This partly reflects the youth and fertility of recent migrants. The third cause of growing numbers is the constant expansion of city boundaries: this absorbs former villages and rural areas, and also accommodates poor people dumped by authorities outside earlier city limits, as well as new middle-class settlements which have established themselves beyond the reach of pollution, overcrowding, social dislocation and crime.

There are other contributors to urban growth too. Violence, war, ethnic cleansing, religious persecution, as well as climatic disasters, earthquakes and landslides, drive large numbers of people into temporary settlements – the flimsy tents of refugees in Darfur and temporarily in Falluja – which themselves constitute the rudiments of new cities. Palestinian refugee camps have become semi-permanent slums. In Uganda, the widespread kidnapping of children pressed into the service of the Lord's Resistance Army has driven people into urban night shelters, while every year Dhaka in Bangladesh is swelled by hungry people seeking escape from the monga lean season. A report from Colombia in the New York Times5 described the slum of La Isla:

a kind of halfway house between an urban slum and a refugee camp. The inhabitants live as 'internally displaced persons' a term the bureaucrats use to describe refugees who stay in their own country, victims of war who were uprooted from homes elsewhere in Colombia, either by Marxist guerrillas or right-wing paramilitaries.

Although urban poverty is different from its rural counterpart, it is not necessarily easier. It is attended by new forms of insufficiency, insecurity and violence, unfamiliar kinds of exploitation and sickness.

Asymmetrical cities

If we understand globalisation to mean the incorporation of all the countries of the world into a single economy, it is clear that this process is occurring at a varying pace. Some countries are advantaged over others. Certain regions gain while others are bypassed. Parts of Africa are excluded, left to survive on a dwindling resource base.

Cities too present great differences in the extent to which they are absorbed into the global economy. Most Western cities have been remarkably successful, since they have long been at the centre of global economic activity. Some urban centres in the South have also adapted, specialising in industrial manufacture, finance, tourism or serving as regional headquarters of transnational companies; although this usually leaves large tracts of the city beyond the reach of formal housing markets, and devoid of services and basic infrastructure. There is a thriving central area, with its commercial and business districts, and pockets of middle-class development, but the greater part of the city is abandoned to the informal sector, where a majority of people must create their own employment.

The growth of Dubai – a materialised desert mirage – illustrates the global asymmetry. It is the largest building site on earth, employing one-fifth of the cranes in use in the world and an army of Indian and Pakistani construction workers housed in temporary barracks. More than US$100 billion is being invested in creating a metropolis of giant malls, hotels, the tallest building in the world and a series of artificial islands, a centre for trade, travel, tourism, commerce and financial services. Dubai is to be a model of what Arabia might be in the twenty-first century, a response to Western perceptions of the 'backwardness' of much of the Middle East. According to Adam Nicolson:

this is the Dubai sandwich: at the bottom, cheap and exploited Asian labour; in the middle, white northern professional services, plus tourist hunger for glamour in the sun, and, increasingly, a de-monopolised western market system; at the top, enormous quantities of invested oil money, combined with fearsome political and social control.

At the same time, the mirror-image of this is occasionally glimpsed in the rich world. The waters that swept through New Orleans in August 2005 did more than inundate a beautiful and historic city. Among the debris of buildings, stores, churches, casinos, factories and fields, human wreckage was deposited on the desolate streets – pictures of used-up humanity, the shut in and the locked away, an incarcerated populace, a concealed people, those who pay the true cost of the expensive maintenance of the American dream, intruded brutally into the sequestered dwelling-spaces of wealth.

Participants in globalisation

As cities dissolve into an increasingly amorphous countryside, the beneficiaries of globalism inhabit sites of privileged conservation. These occupy old city centres, the embalmed core, or the transformed industrial décor of warehouses and abandoned factories, or former aristocratic or merchants' dwellings. Such people are linked through networks of belonging in finance, communications, global media and discerning consumption. In one sense, they have bought themselves out of the buy-in society; they use the restaurants, concert halls and theatres of the city, and rarely meet those who have been banished to the peripheries. Indeed, such encounters are only at dangerous intersections of public transport systems, where they may occasionally run into danger from muggers, pick-pockets or the drug-crazed. Much of their leisure is spent in a distant global elsewhere - the unspoiled town, the undiscovered beach, the private resort, often outside their country of origin. These city dwellers are free of the taint of the city, while still enjoying its social amenities.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Cities"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Jeremy Seabrook.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Series preface     vi
List of boxes     viii
List of abbreviations     ix
Introduction     1
An urbanising world     7
Cities of the past, cities of the present     20
The global network     31
Migrants to the city     44
The spectre of the poor     58
Slums     66
Livelihoods     83
Cities of fear     99
Provision of basic services     111
City borders     127
The country and the city     138
The triumph of the middle class     149
Conclusion     168
Resources     180
Notes     196
Index     202