Development And Urbanization Research Paper

1. Historical Antecedents

Most scholarship on this subject traces its intellectual origins to writings by nineteenth and early twentieth-century sociologists and economic historians who sought to account for the development of capitalism, the nation-state, and social modernization in early Europe, and who posited a direct and positive role for cities in these fundamental transformations.

1.1 Cities And Development In The Early Modern World

In early modern Europe cities emerged from and fueled processes of capital accumulation, by virtue of their role as exchange nodes in local, national, and international trade (Pirenne 1936, Weber 1927). Their growth also was tied to the demise of feudal or absolutist orders ( Weber 1958) and the rise of the modern nation-state (Tilly 1975). By the late nineteenth century, cities also served as the sites in which the social relations of modernity materialized (Durkheim 1933, Simmel 1950), in turn transforming markets and states.

1.2 Twentieth-Century Developments

In the twentieth century when nationalism, war, empire, trade, democracy, and fascism grabbed European scholarly attention, their US counterparts adopted the concern with cities. This was a time when American society demographically tipped its balance to become more urban than rural, and when new waves of postwar black migration combined with renewed streams of international migration to spark interest in the social relations of urban life. Initial research concentrated on the social process and experience within cities, ranging from ghetto life, immigrant social clubs, and gang organization to criminality. Few initially paid attention to the larger political and economic processes that engendered patterns of urbanization in the US, as occurred in Europe; and even fewer tried to link urbanism or urbanization to patterns of national development, understood either politically or economically. It was only when US sociologists began studying cities comparatively and historically, starting in the 1950s, that debates over the relationship between development and urbanization garnered a central place in the social sciences. When the March 1955 (Vol. 60, No. 5) edition of the American Journal of Sociology published an entire volume on ‘World Urbanism,’ the importance of these themes was firmly established.

The desire to examine other parts of the world was partly grounded in a passion for testing ideas drawn from the European-derived grand theoretical narratives of sociology. Practically the only counterfactual cases available for confirming prevailing propositions about the connection between urbanization and developmental progress—whether understood in terms of democratic state formation, capitalist development, and/or ‘modern’ social values—were the countries of the so-called ‘underdeveloped’ world of Latin America, East Asia, and Africa. These were countries of the world racked with poverty, limited industrialization, and governed primarily under oligarchic pacts or by despotic or authoritarian governments. To the extent that their urbanization patterns also differed across country contexts, scholars were inspired to revisit general claims about development and urbanization, as well as to ascertain how these two processes were articulated in practice.

Working under the influence of the Chicago School, initial scholarship on what were then called Third World cities focused primarily on the folk-urban continuum and urbanization as a social process, including the ways that urbanization produced individualism and severed kinship bases of social organization (see for example Hauser 1957, Redfield 1941, 1953). Over time, interest grew in urbanization as a demographic and spatial process, with scholars examining patterns of population concentration and the growth of cities in a wide variety of comparative and historical contexts (Berry 1973, Hauser and Schnore 1965), occasionally linking them to general propositions about national development. In addition to Hauser and Schnore’s seminal The Study of Urbanization (1965), the Chicago-based journal Economic Development and Cultural Change served as an important outlet for new ideas on the topic.

2. Twentieth-Century Dilemmas: Questioning The Nature And Direction Of Causality

It was one thing to quantify urban population patterns across time and place (Davis 1969, Hoyt 1962), to identify the extent to which urbanism, as a social attribute, materialized in different localities around the world (Breese 1966, Mangin 1970), and to elucidate growth processes in these cities (Gugler 1978, McGee 1971). American social scientists were quite good at these tasks, especially the first; and their successes helped catapult the field of demography onto the disciplinary map in the 1960s and 1970s (see for example Goldscheider 1971, Goldstein and Sly 1979). It was quite another to demonstrate a direct relationship between urbanization and patterns of economic development, especially within the confines of the nation-state, the unit that most social scientists were then using for assessing such issues. It was on these latter counts that scholars were least successful, and that longstanding propositions about the positive relationships between urbanization and national development began to generate widespread skepticism.

As Third World cities burgeoned over the 1960s and 1970s, scholars faced the fact that even with high urbanization rates, developmental gains in most of the Third World remained minimal, not just in comparison to the modal patterns established in Europe and the United States, but also as measured in per capita income, GNP, and practically all other standard macroeconomic indicators (Friedmann 1967). With dependency theory taking center stage at about the same period of time, certain attributes of both urbanization and national development were being traced to colonial or mercantile relations that spanned national boundaries rather than to political, social, and economic conditions within the formal confines of the nation-state. These transnational relations modified urbanization and development processes, at least when compared to early modern Europe, even as they raised new questions about the best unit of analysis to study the nature and direction of the proposed relationship. Did urbanization husband development, or vice versa; and was it possible that in the late developmental context the relationship between the two sets of processes was more likely to be negative than positive, with one impeding rather than facilitating the other? The answers to these questions shifted over time.

2.1 Development And Urbanization Circa 1950: A Positive Synergy

The predominant argument in the 1950s and early 1960s was that the plight of developing nations and their low rates of urbanization owed to their ‘back- ward’ social and economic nature, which not only explained why industrialization was minimal, but also why tradition-bound peasants demographically out- balanced ‘modern’ urban folk. Analytical attention was directed towards how to facilitate one so the other would follow suit, a normative preoccupation pervasive in American social science and quite consistent with US foreign policy goals of the times.

There were disagreements about which domain deserved intervention first. Some urbanists argued that the best way to jump-start Third World development was to shift population and resources out of the countryside and into the city, where industry could expand and modern values flourish (Herrick 1965, Field 1970). Others called for more foreign aid or national investment to buttress urban economies, primarily through industrialization (Richardson 1973), in the hopes that such macroeconomic policies would stimulate employment opportunities and perhaps even produce individuals inculcated with rationality and enough achievement drive to sustain further urban and national gains. Despite policy disagreements, both schools of thought expressed enough faith in the idea of a positive relationship between development and urbanization to keep it alive, albeit embodied in a variety of paradigmatic forms.

Over the 1960s and 1970s, one particularly popular variant was demographic, as those interested in urbanization as a social process looked for linkages between urban growth and national development in fertility patterns as well as family structure and employment. During this period ideas about the demographic transition, at times recast in terms of the ‘urban transition’ (Friedmann 1975), generated considerable interest among economists and sociologists, who developed expert quantitative skills that sustained a field of research broadly understood as ‘population studies.’ Those less preoccupied with the social or economic behavior of individuals and more interested in overall patterns of city growth and distribution were more likely to concern themselves with ideas about the proper balance between urban and rural populations (El-Shakhs 1974, Friedmann and Alonso 1964).

During this period, scholars who assumed that the US served as a model of successful economic development paid considerable attention to the extent to which urban systems in developing countries achieved a lognormal rank-size distribution, as opposed to being dominated by one or two large ‘primate’ cities (Berry 1961), basing their interest on the assumption that rank-size log normality correlated with economic development. In counterattack, these ideas were criticized as inherently Western-biased, if not drawn directly from the American experience, and thus inapplicable in the Third World (El-Shakhs 1972, McGreevey 1971). While there was no resolution on this contentious issue, in the process the concept of ‘over-urbanization’ gathered widespread attention, since a city could only be ‘too’ urbanized if it grew beyond its expected and economically efficient size, which often was calculated on the basis of a rank-size distribution logic.

To the extent that most Third World countries fell into the latter camp, with their cities ballooning in size beyond their fiscal and infrastructural capacities, scholars began to study the internal social and demo- graphic processes that fueled patterns of over-urbanization, and what Michael Lipton (1977) called ‘urban bias,’ including rural-urban migration and the national investment decisions that over-privileged a few urban centers at the expense of struggling provincial towns and the impoverished countryside. Still, concerns about city systems died hard, rematerializing in slightly new packaging in the 1980s in the form of arguments about the importance of ‘secondary cities’ to sustaining national development (Hardoy and Satterwaithe 1986, Rondinelli 1983). This claim, like the rank-size distribution argument, was built on the understanding that (smaller) size and (more equal) distribution of cities mattered; and both arguments confirmed the preoccupation with a relationship between patterns of urbanization and development that had initiated and sustained the field.

But far from merely confirming a connection between cities and national development, these findings laid the foundation for an immanent critique of long-standing claims. Indeed, to the extent that the burgeoning growth of Third World cities was soon seen as an obstacle to economic well-being, there was now evidence that a positive relationship between urbanization and development was effectively reversed on substantive grounds, even if analytically the connection remained. To be sure, there were scholars who conceived of large cities as economically efficient localizers of economies of scale, and they continued to claim a positive relationship between large-scale urbanization and development (Richardson 1973). But by and large, promoters of this idea were arguing against a tide of contrary evidence.

2.2 Development And Urbanization, Circa 1975: A Destructive Relationship

The ascendance of ideas about a negative relationship between urbanization and development owed partly to the fact that between 1950 and 1975 conditions in the developing world changed dramatically. This was the period when most Third World cities began to grow enormously, outpacing the capacities of their governments to invest in infrastructure or sustain industrial output in ways that contributed to national development. With large cities peopled by new migrants and unor underemployed folk with limited education and skills for a newly industrializing economy, they soon were seen as a drain on national coffers. The increasing urban inequality and economic polarization accompanying these trends also sustained urban social movements and overall political coalitions that themselves limited national developmental prospects, by bringing to power governments with restrictions on foreign investment, populist economic policies, and or protectionist measures that frequently undermined short-term efficiency goals. These social and political problems became so salient in the urban landscape of the developing world that eventually scholars of Third World cities turned their attention directly to them (see Abu-Lughod and Hay 1977, Gugler 1988, Mangin 1970), partially eclipsing the concern with national development. Among the most documented issues were urban housing and employment scarcities, rural-urban migration flows, illegal settlements and urban ‘marginality,’ and migrant or informal sector politics (Cornelius 1973, Drakakis-Smith 1987, Perlman 1976).

This is not to say that all scholars who looked internally to cities over the 1970s and 1980s failed to examine the larger relationships between urbanization and national development that had consumed their predecessors. Economists at the World Bank and other macroeconomic policymakers loyal to free market ideals continued to study urban economies of scale and the ways urban growth interfaced with industrialization, still seen as the principal route towards prosperity; although they too concerned themselves with questions about housing, illegal settlements, and urban service scarcities more generally (Linn 1983). Likewise, but on an entirely different front, sociologists and political scientists began to examine the national political conditions that made these urban problems so pervasive (Eckstein 1977, Gilbert and Ward 1985, Rabinowitz 1973, Roberts 1978). But this also meant that urban scholars were focusing as much on political as economic developments, linking urbanization patterns to national politics as much as markets.

When dependency theory kicked in as a dominant paradigm among both resident and foreign scholars of the developing world over the 1970s and 1980s, fewer urbanists began to pose questions about the relations between urbanization and national development unless they were framed within a focus on international economic conditions (Castells and Velez 1971, Portes and Walton 1981, Walton 1985); and even fewer saw the articulation of urban and national development in positive terms, as had their predecessors. If anything, when urbanization was linked to capital accumulation, the social effects were seen as relatively negative (Armstrong and McGee 1985). By the late 1980s, the main idea in good currency was that capitalist development on a global scale produced and/or reinforced mercantilist relations that fueled the growth of cities, even as they disadvantaged the countryside or the nation as a whole. Scholars focused not just on the ways that unequal, semi-imperial relations between core and periphery brought a few large cities, themselves parasitic with respect to their hinterlands. They also examined the ways these relations produced a form of ‘internal colonialism’ predicated on extreme income and investment polarization between city and countryside, which further fueled migration, contributed to over-urbanization, and reinforced income and other inequalities within cities themselves (see Timberlake 1985). With world-systems analysts turning full attention to cities in the 1980s (Smith 1996), claims for a substantively negative relationship between urbanization and sustained or autonomous national development reached new heights of acceptance.

2.3 Development And Urbanization, Circa 1990: Disarticulated Processes

The growing popularity of world-system theory over the 1980s and 1990s may have strengthened scholars’ understandings of the strong connections between urbanization and (under)development; but in the long run it contributed to the analytic disarticulation of cities and nations, thereby casting a mortal blow to studies of relations between these two domains. As scholars joined the world-system bandwagon and bypassed the nation-state as a unit of analysis, few examined national development as analytically distinct from global processes. Those development scholars who did concern themselves with the domestic dynamics of macroeconomic development rarely reserved a place for cities in their analytic frameworks, turning instead to states, classes, and the global economy. The result was that scholars who analyzed Third World cities did so increasingly in the context of global economic conditions, even as most scholars of national development ignored cities by and large.

This analytic disarticulation of urbanization and national development was further fueled by intellectual and political dynamics in the developing world. With many countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia becoming less democratic and more authoritarian throughout the 1960s and 1970s, their states became stronger and more repressive. These political regimes tended to privilege capital over labor and cities over the countryside, using macroeconomic policy, national investments, and targeted subsidies to accomplish these aims. Resident and foreign observers saw little autonomy for cities, with urban developments mostly dictated by powerful (if not militarized) national forces. This was most evident in the largest cities, home to their nation’s most significant industries and investments; but it also was seen as a pattern more generally. The result: in studies of the Third World, urban dynamics were frequently subsumed under national ones. This conceptual sleight of hand may have reinforced views about the direct relationship between city and nation to some extent; but it also chipped away at the analytic distinction between urban and national dynamics. And with these two processes increasingly collapsed into each other, the tendency was to examine one or the other, but not the interactive relationship between the two.

Among the few still fervently examining the direct connections between urbanization and national economic development were neoclassical economists, and World Bank staff and their clients. They worked under the supposition that by facilitating and or managing cities, national actors could insure productivity, efficiency, and the flow of people and goods sufficiently to maximize overall development. Yet in most of the nonapplied fields, urbanists and developmentalists hardly spoke to one another.

3. A New Articulation (Or, Development And Urbanization In The Age Of Globalization)

As scholars now widely accept the premise that globalization is a central point of entry for studying changes in the contemporary world, there is a renewed interest in the urbanization-development nexus. But because the units of analysis for theorizing these connections have changed, slightly different claims and different types of research dominate the scholarly agenda. Among them are an increasing preoccupation with large cities, a resurgence of interest in urbanization in advanced countries of the world, and renewed debate about the direction and nature of the relationships between cities, nations, and the global economy

3.1 Globalization And Urbanization

One of the main characteristics of the new scholarship is the fixation with cities of enormous size and importance, frequently labeled world or global cities, whose growth and character owed to the role they play not just within their national borders, but also within global networks of production and consumption (Henderson and Castells 1987, Lo and Yeung 1998, Sassen 1991, 2000). The idea of world cities is not new of course (Friedmann and Wolff 1982); and much current work draws inspiration from earlier writings on over urbanization in Third World cities in which the inflated size and rapid growth of primate cities was linked to unequal relations of exchange between so-called core and peripheral economies. But in the new millennium, world cities are less likely to be seen as fetters on the national development of their host countries, and more likely to be conceptualized as the mechanisms through which global economic integration takes root.

Such views not only challenge past understandings of the destructive impact of global dynamics on cities and nations, they also come with a shift in geographic focus. Over the period 1960–2000 most scholars interested in the urbanization-economic development nexus examined the Third World; but now the US and Europe are back in the center of the conceptual map (King 1990, Sassen 1991), bringing the field full circle in terms of its country origins. The questions being posed also have changed considerably. Given the fact that many of the world cities being studied with renewed vigor—like New York, London, Tokyo, Paris—are in the most economically advanced nations of the world, fewer scholars care about their potentially negative impact on national economies, since developmental dynamics in these countries are assumed to be impervious. As a result, attention is redirected to urban employment patterns, shifts in sectoral character, and the extent to which these patterns are owed to the globalization of capital and labor (Fainstein et al. 1992, Sassen 1991). There also is renewed interest in the changing ‘locations’ or economic roles these cities play in a regional, national, or international hierarchy of urban places (see Knox and Taylor 1995). Yet several pressing questions remain about the nature and direction of the relationship between urbanization and globalization.

3.2 Development And Urbanization By Way Of Globalization

One relatively unexplored issue concerns the impact of globally induced urbanization patterns on aggregate trajectories of economic development, be they understood nationally or on some other scale. On these counts, some headway is being made by those who identify regional dynamics both within and among established nation-states and how they factor into the equation. Saskia Sassen (1991), for example, argues that the globalization of capital and labor flows fuels the growth and economic successes of some cities (e.g., New York) while constraining others (e.g., Detroit), in the process exacerbating regional economic polarization. Taking an entirely different line, contemporary scholars of Europe or even East Asia—where globalization has already increased transnational economic integration in such a way as to form mega-regions with their own supranational governing institutions, and where cities on the receiving end of global investments and labor flows assume greater political and economic significance—are examining the extent to which globally-integrated cities will bypass the nation-state and negotiate directly with one another in larger regional pacts. Both lines of research have direct implications for understanding the dynamics of cities and national development, if only because they underscore the ways that, in an increasingly globalized world, the nation-state either comes under challenge or remains the politically relevant unit for mediating among cities, addressing intra-national regional disparities, and/or coordinating new supranational regional institutions.

To the extent that questions about the interconnected relationships between cities, regions, and nations were once the mainstay of studies of early modern Europe and the Third World, the developmental context where regional analysis reigned supreme (see Friedmann and Alonso 1964, Hardoy and Geisse 1972), scholars can look to the past—and across developmental categories—for insights (Clark 1996). Preliminary results point to a convergence in ideas and research programs, capable of transcending space and time, much like globalization itself, and holding the potential to unite scholars from all parts of the world around a common intellectual project.

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