The Exploding Cities of the Developing World

Ayesha Tahir
Feb 11, 1998


Lured by the bright lights, or driven from the countryside by political and economic
turmoil, pressures, and ecological breakdown, billions of people have been
migrating to the cities.

This influx strains the resources, leadership, and infrastructure of already
overburdened countries. Migrants from the desperately poor interior sub-Saharan Africa
continue to come to Kinshasa, Zaire, despite the collapse of its and services,
which has led to rampant disease and malnutrition and brought the city to the edge of
anarchy. Pakistanis pour into despite factional violence characterized by car
bombings and gun battles in the streets. Question marks hang in the polluted air over
megacities like Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Jakarta, Mexico City, Cairo, , and Beijing
and tens of thousands of smaller cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Many First
World cities are also coping with the waves of poor newcomers at a time when their tax
base is eroding as companies and well-to-do move out, driven away by high costs,
crime, and a deteriorating quality of life.

More and more, the of cities determines the of nations and regions. ,
for instance, accounts for half of revenues in , 20% of GDP. It is the
country’s financial center, the only port, and has the highest concentration of
literate people. Given the ties between ’s ethnic groups and powerful tribes
elsewhere in the country, if the current factional violence in the city intensifies,
unrest could engulf the rest of ’s well-armed populace, perhaps leading to
international conflicts and large cross border movements of people.

With ever-increasing global integration, problems that arise in one city can quickly
spread throughout its region and even worldwide. The of cities in developed world
depends in some measure on developing nations’ efforts to control new diseases and
drug-resistant strains of old ones incubating in their slums. At the turn of the century
roughly 5% of the world’s people lived in cities with populations of over 100,000.
Today an estimated 45%-- slightly more than 2.5 billion people—live in urban centers.
In recent years the most explosive growth has been in the developing world. Between 1950
and 1995 the number of cities in the developed world with populations greater than 1
million more than doubled, from 49 to 112; in the same period, million-plus cities in
developing world increased six-fold, from 34 to 213. The estimates that
rural numbers will remain virtually steady while the urban populations continue to soar:
by 2025, it predicts more than 5 billion people, or 61% of humanity, will be living in
cities.

Migration to the cities is also difficult to analyze or predict. Often it is a product
of (a) the pull of perceived opportunities and services in the metropolis, and (b) the
push of rural unemployment caused by the mechanization of agriculture, over-subdivision of
farmland, and environmental degradation. In ’s rural Sichuan province, for
example, where the land cannot come close to supporting the people on it, workers are
squeezed out to join the country’s "floating " of some 100
million souls.

The conventional wisdom has been that megacities will continue to grow to horrific
size. Experience, however, has sometimes proved otherwise, as in Mexico. As economic and
political power was consolidated in Mexico City from the 1940s onward, peasants flocked to
the capital, drawn by the prospects of jobs and lavishly subsidized transportation,
care, and . Since the mid 1980s, when Mexico began opening its markets, many
companies producing for domestic consumption have closed down; the job losses and cutbacks
in spending hit the capital disproportionately, and has moderated
in response. What might be called the rising cost of admission, as scarcity of land,
water, and other resources drives up prices in the capital, is also having an effect. In
recent years Mexicans have followed jobs to secondary cities like Monterrey. Thus UN
projections for Mexico City’s at century’s end have been halved since
1973, from 32 million to 16.4 million, and have been wildly off the mark for other cities,
from Rio de Janeiro to Seoul.

The general picture of the developing world in the latter half of the twentieth century
painted by international institutions is one of tremendous progress in improving
and raising incomes: child mortality has been cut in half and incomes have more than
doubled, according to the World Bank. These statistics, however, have been skewed by the
tremendous gains and economic growth of and the newly industrializing Asian
Tigers. Roughly one billion people—more than at any other time in history—live
in households too poor to obtain enough to provide nourishment for normal work,
points out James Gustave Speth, the current head of the U.N Development Programme. Another
2 billion live in conditions Speth describes as deplorable. About 1.5 billion poor people
now live in cities, and many of them see their prospects dimming and and community
ties dissolving at the same time that assaults on their personal well-being have risen
sharply.

Even the greatest and most enduring cities seem vulnerable when one considers the
natural, political, and economic upheavals the must contend with. , unemployment,
disease, crime, and have plagued urban centers for 10,000 years, since the
earliest cities developed around granaries and armories in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. There
is reason to believe, however, that while the individual problems facing cities are not
new, the unholy synergy created in the developing world with explosive growth,
industrialization, and capital scarcity means dangers on an unprecedented scale.

After the decline of ancient Rome, nearly 1,800 years passed before a city again
reached a of one million, as London did in the nineteenth century. Until then,
crowded slums without running water or sewers and inadequate public procedures
allowed microbes to flourish, and epidemics regularly decimated populations. Advances in
sanitation and the discovery of antibiotics have given humanity a century’s respite
from the ravages of infectious disease. But many epidemiologists fear this period is
drawing to a close as urbanization outruns the installation of sanitation in the
developing world and resilient microbes discover opportunities in the stressed immune
systems of the urban poor.

Diseases transmitted by insects are staging a comeback from the ditches and trash heaps
of squatter settlements. Mosquito hosts for larvae of the parasite that causes filariasis
can breed in polluted water. Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes need cleaner water but find it
in open water tanks and the irrigated urban gardens of and Africa. The malaria they
carry is now the leading cause of hospital visits and deaths from infectious disease in
Latin America and Africa, according to Carolyn Stephens, an epidemiologist at the London
School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The mosquito that transmits dengue has also
benefited from urbanization, multiplying in old tires, flowerpots, and water drums.

While diseases vary from city to city, one motif the megacities of the developing world
share is . To live in Mexico City or is to live in a place where the basic
elements of life—air, water, and soil—have become inimical to . Many of
the cities in have five to ten times the levels of particulate and sulfur dioxide
found in the air of First World cities; a recent sampling in Guangzhou revealed
concentrations of these pollutants among the highest ever measured anywhere. In Beijing
and other Chinese metropolises ordinary people have been driven to riot by
ranging from incessant noise to choking clouds of coal dust. In some parts of Poland the
land and water have been so poisoned by toxic waste that 10% of babies are born with birth
defects. Inadequate zoning regulations and enforcement, antiquated technologies,
, rising consumption, and burgeoning populations all play a part.

also has a role in the renewed spread of infectious disease. Untreated sewage
flowing into the Bay of Bengal off made its way into the bilge tanks of a
freighter headed for South America; a relatively new strain of cholera came along for the
ride. According to Paul Epstein, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public ,
when the tanker emptied its bilge on the coast of Peru, the microbe found a home in algae
blooms in the coastal waters that had been nurtured by sewage from Lima. From there the
cholera made its way into cities as people ate contaminated shellfish. Since arriving in
Latin America in 1991, the disease has struck 320,000 people and killed 2,600.
Stephens’ work has shown that poor people in cities die disproportionately from both
infectious diseases and chronic illnesses, such as cancer and heart disease, associated
with more developed societies. She and others argue that disease, along with , is
a symptom of a larger threat to urban dwellers: . Many people endure these risks in
the that work in the city will pay enough for them to move their families out of the
harm’s way. But as cities continue to swell because of migration and births, workers
face crowds of competitors like themselves. Beijing is now home to an estimated one
million floating workers in search of jobs. Unemployment rates in scores of African cities
top 20% and are unlikely to drop soon.

Violence, disorder, and disease can ultimately become so severe that
authorities abdicate, foreign investors retreat, and a city begins to slide into chaos.

The world’s major cities already cast a long shadow, and as they absorb the great
majority of those born in the coming of decades, their economic and electoral significance
will only grow—along with the danger of conflict as cities protect their interests.

How long, for instance, will ’s central be able to maintain
control of booming coastal provinces dominated by industrial cities as the opens
up and these local units gain clout?

Internal migration may also drive coastal cities to break with . The 100 or 120
million surplus workers in the country fled toward cities in search of employment. Cities
such as Guangzhou, which in 1990 averaged 5.7 people per room (the average in United
States is 0.5) are already too crowded to absorb migrants. Yet the great urban migration
has only begun in , which is still more than 70% rural.

Despite these dangers, economists view in a positive light. Urbanization has long
been seen a necessary step in economic development. Urban living carries built-in
incentives to have smaller families, take mass transportation, recycle garbage, use
, water, and space carefully, and do other things deemed desirable in a crowded
world with limited resources.

Cities are where entrepreneurs hatch their schemes and find the markets and financing
to bring them to fruition, where the elite of , industry, and the arts meet to
brainstorm, and where deep shifts in culture and politics might begin with an unexpected
encounter. In fact, the fortunes of cities are increasingly hostage to factors beyond
their control. pressures and the integration of the world have
unleashed forces that can overwhelm a city, however well managed.

City dwellers have proved their resilience many times over. Kinshasa refuses to die,
and Monrovia and Mogadishu still function despite hellish upheavals. But now there is
reason to believe the cycle has been permanently interrupted. One cannot expect the
transition from the 300 million urban of 1950 to perhaps 6 billion in 2050
without widespread collapse, if for no other reason than that it would run counter to the
rhythm of history. In its own interest, the more developed world should help the
developing cities with investments that promote planning, foster for
girls as well as boys, improves sanitation and care, and better the lot of those in
rural areas.

If the world’s cities cannot absorb the unprecedented influx, masses of the
desperate may overwhelm entire nations and regions. As populations grow and cities become
more crowded, the margin for error narrows and the cost for mistakes rises. If peaceful,
functioning cities are to exist in 2050 a -abiding, harmonious, hardworking,
ecology-conscious citizenry must be supported by enlightened leaders. Little in the cities
of today suggests that this will come to pass.