"Africa has recently experienced dramatic urbanization. Standard theories of structural transformation cannot explain this result, as it was not driven by a green revolution or an industrial revolution, but by natural resource exports. I explain how the Engel curve implies that resource windfalls are disproportionately spent on urban goods and services, which gives rise to "consumption cities". I illustrate this theory using both cross-country evidence and within-country evidence from Ivory Coast and Ghana using new data spanning one century and two identification strategies (an instrumental variables strategy and a fixed effects approach). I find a strong causal effect of the production of cocoa, a ruralbased natural resource, on the growth of cities. I discuss the implications of urbanization without structural transformation for long-run growth."

This demonstrative country study on urbanization is part of a broader study of five major developing regions. The thrust of this study is to provide an understanding of the scale and nature of urban population change and the interconnections between urban development and demographic, economic, social and political processes and contributors to this change in Ghana. The study is aimed at helping clarify rural-urban linkages, evaluate policies, remove obstacles and biases, and clear the way for more proactive approaches towards upcoming urban growth. The case studies will serve as blueprints for the subsequent promotion of analogous studies in other developing countries, in a second stage that would be carried out under the auspices of UNFPA’s country offices.

We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved center stage both politically and ethically. A lot of political energy is put into promoting, protecting and articulating their significance in the construction of a better world. For the most part the concepts circulating are individualistic and property based and, as such, do nothing to fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics and neoliberal modes of legality and state action.
We live in a world, after all, where the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights one can think of. But there are occasions when the ideal of human rights takes a collective turn, as when the rights of labor, women, gays and minorities come to the fore (a legacy of the long-standing labor movement and the 1960s Civil Rights movement in the United States that was collective and had a global resonance). These struggles for collective rights have, on occasion, yielded some results (such that a woman and a black become real contestants for the US Presidency).
I here want to explore another kind of collective right, that of the right to the city. This is important because there is a revival of interest in Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on the topic as these were articulated in relation to the movement of ’68 in France, at the same time as there are various social movements around the world that are now demanding the right to the city as their goal. So what might the right to the city mean?

by Marcelo Lopes de Souza
Abstract
Coined at the end of the 1960s by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, the expression “(the) right to the city” has become fashionable these days. The price of this has often been the trivialisation and corruption of Lefebvre’s concept: In many cases it seems to mean just the right to a more “human” life in the context of the capitalist city and on the basis of a (“reformed”) representative “democracy”.
In contrast to this, David Harvey, an eminent Marxist urban researcher who has paid attention to Lefebvre’s ideas since the beginning of the 1970s, retains a non-reformist understanding of the “right to the city”.
What is more, he reaches beyond the usual academic level of critical analysis in order to make political-strategic evaluations and recommendations.
However, from a libertarian point of view, his words sound very much like an attempt to see (partially) new phenomena (such as many contemporary, autonomy-oriented and radical-democratically based social movements as well as the conditions under which they act) through old lenses: namely through the lenses of statism, centralism, and hierarchy. The result of this is often a misrepresentation of today’s social actors, their agency, potentialities, and strategies.
The aim of this paper is to show the limits of such an interpretation, as well as to discuss what a “right to the city” (and the strategy to achieve this goal) could be from a libertarian point of view - not as a purely speculative enterprise, but under inspiration of the experiences of different, concrete social movements from Latin America to Europe to Africa.

Only a preliminary framework is sketched in this report. The first part is theoretical study, trying to model urban-rural interlaced area (desakota) in China using multifractals dimension spectra. The second part is empirical analysis, and the object is to reveal the dynamic process of development and evolution of urban-rural interlaced area under the condition of exo-urbanization. The first part has been finished based on digital simulation, but the second part, the main body of this project, is still in progress

Chapters 1, 4 and 7 explore the idea of cities as sites of economic concentration and density. But a city is not a homogenous unit. This paper explores spatial inequalities within cities: how they are generated, what characteristics they have, and—similarly to inter-country, inter-territory and urban-rural inequalities—how these spatial inequalities become persistent and self-perpetuating, embodying serious economic and social problems. This conceptual frame views cities as agglomerations of ‘urban regions’—which exhibit significant spatial intra-urban inequalities, and where trends towards equality are constrained predominantly by labour immobility and land-use policies.

Economic theories of systems of cities explain why production and consumption activities are concentrated in a number of urban areas of different sizes and industrial composition rather than uniformly distributed in space.
These theories have been successively influenced by four paradigms:
(i) conventional urban economics emphasizing the tension between economies due to the spatial concentration of activity and diseconomies arising from that concentration;
(ii) the theory of industrial organization as it relates to inter-industry linkages and to product differentiation;
(iii) the New Economic Geography which ignores land markets but emphasizes trade among cities, fixed agricultural hinterlands and the endogenous emergence of geography;
(iv) the theory of endogenous economic growth.
Among the issues examined are specialization versus diversification of cities in systems of cities, how city systems contribute to increasing returns in national and the global economies, the factors that determine skill distribution and income disparity between cities, the impacts of income disparity on welfare, whether population growth should cause economic activity to become more or less concentrated in urban areas, and how resources should be allocated efficiently in a system of cities. Related to the last issue, we consider models where cities are organized by local planners or developers as well as cities that self-organize by atomistic actions. A conclusion of the theoretical study of city systems is that markets fail in efficiently allocating resources across cities when certain intercity interactions are present and that a role for central planning may be necessary.

The report throws new light on current issues and challenges which national and local governments, the business sector and organised civil society are facing. On top of putting forward a number of recommendations, this report testifies to the wealth of good, innovative practice that countries of all sizes and development stages have accumulated across the region. It shows us that sustainable human settlements are within reach, and that cooperation between public authorities, the private and the voluntary sectors is the key to success. This report highlights a number of critical issues – demographic and economic trends, poverty and inequality, the environment, climate change and urban governance and management.

This title, State of China’s Cities, is a joint effort between UN-HABITAT, China Science Center of International Eurasian Academy of Sciences and China Association of Mayors. This report, covers five strategic steps to nurture and grow smarter cities. It aims to make easy access of international readers to the information about policies and practices that have engendered smart urbanization of China in the past 60 years. It also provides the experiences, lessons and challenges faced by China in sustaining its urban development in the context of rapid industrialization and urbanization within a globalizing world.

A growing number of cities around the world have established systems of monitoring the quality of urban life. Many of those systems combine objective and subjective information and attempt to cover a wide variety of topics. This paper introduces a simple method that takes advantage of both types of information and provides criteria to identify and rank the issues of potential importance for urban dwellers. The method combines the so-called ‘hedonic price’ and ‘life satisfaction’ approaches to value public goods. Pilot case results for six Latin American cities are summarized and policy applications are discussed.

Many commentators have noted the existence of a historical correlation between cities and democratization. This image of the city as an inherently civic space is linked to the notion that the spatial concentration intrinsic to urban contexts promotes a democracy of proximity. Seen from this perspective, it is perhaps not surprising that the most urbanized region of the global south, Latin America, is also a heartland of vibrant and much applauded democratic innovation. Of particular note are the myriad local level ‘radical democracy’ initiatives that have proliferated throughout the region’s cities during the past two decades. At the same time, however, it is a significant paradox that Latin American urban centres are also amongst the most segregated in the world, something that is widely considered to have a significantly fragmenting effect on public space, and is therefore undermining of democracy.

Some of DFID’s work to address urban poverty is impressive and is making a noticeable contribution towards meeting the Millennium Development Goal 7 target on slum upgrading. However, the Department needs to sharpen and refine its approaches to urban poverty. The last five years have seen rapid urbanisation, almost all of it within developing countries, yet DFID—along with other donors—has downgraded its support to urban development over this period. This process should be reversed.

The Department overwhelmingly focuses its efforts to address urban poverty in Asian, rather than African, countries. This balance needs to be redressed. Africa is the world’s fastest urbanising region and it has the highest proportion of slum dwellers. Without a new and comprehensive approach to urban development in Africa, a number of cities could face a humanitarian crisis in as little as five years’ time, given the huge expansion of their urban populations. Addressing urban poverty offers the opportunity to tackle wider development issues such as: unemployment and crime; social exclusion; population growth; and climate change and the environment.

Globalization and market reforms have significantly facilitated urbanization of the population of the People’s Republic of China. This study assesses the structural and spatial redistribution of urban population and Chinese cities since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Prior to the 1978 economic reforms, the system of cities created by the Maoist regime was dominated by large and extra-large cities because of the imperatives of optimal industrialization. For national defense considerations, most of the new cities were created in the central and western interior rather than the eastern coast. Market reforms and relaxation of state control over local development since the late 1970s have allowed a large number of small cities to flourish on the basis of bottom-up rural transformative development. The intrusion of global market forces has helped re-consolidate the dominance of the east coast in China’s urban development. Although small cities and towns have absorbed large number of rural migrants, large and extra-large cities have remained the most efficient and productive economic centers for capital investment and production. China’s urban development over the past five decades has been a direct outcome of state articulation and reconfiguration against different political and economic contexts. A superimposed dual-track system of urban settlements integrating the Maoist legacy of large city dominance at the top with the rapidly expanding component of small cities and towns at the bottom is quickly taking shape to characterize China’s urban development and urbanization.

As the world moves towards its so-called urban ‘tipping point’, urbanization in the global South has increasingly come to be portrayed as the portent of a dystopian future characterized by ever-mounting levels of anarchy and brutality. The association between cities, violence, and disorder is not new, however. In a classic article on ‘Urbanism as a way of life’, Louis Wirth (1938: 23) famously links cities to ‘personal disorganization, mental breakdown, suicide, delinquency, crime, corruption, and disorder’. He does so on the grounds that the urban context constituted a space that naturally generated particular forms of social organization and collective action as a result of three key attributes: population size, density, and heterogeneity. Large numbers lead to a segmentation of human relations, the pre-eminence of secondary over primary social contact, and a utilitarianization of interpersonal relationships. Density produces increased competition, accelerates specialization, and engenders glaring contrasts that accentuate social friction. Heterogeneity induces more ramified and differentiated forms of social stratification, heightened individual mobility, and increased social fluidity.
While large numbers, density, and heterogeneity can plausibly be considered universal features of cities, it is much less obvious that they necessarily lead to urban violence. This is a standpoint that is further reinforced by the fact that not all cities around the world – whether rapidly urbanizing or not – are violent, and taking off from Wirth’s characterization of the city, this paper therefore seeks to understand how and why under certain circumstances compact settlements of large numbers of heterogeneous individuals give rise to violence, while in others they don’t, focusing in particular on wider structural factors as seen through the specific lens of urban gang violence.

Do local improvements in infrastructure provision improve city competitiveness? What public finance mechanisms stimulate local infrastructure supply? And how do local efforts compare with national decisions of placing inter-regional trunk infrastructure? In this paper, we examine how the combination of local and national infrastructure supply improve city competitiveness, measured as the city’s share of national private investment. For the empirical analysis, we collect city-level data for India, and link private investment decisions to infrastructure provision. We find that a city’s proximity to international ports and highways connecting large domestic markets has the largest effect on its attractiveness for private investment. In comparison, the supply of local infrastructure services – such as municipal roads, street lighting, water supply, and drainage – enhance competitiveness, but their impacts are much smaller. Thus, while local efforts are important for competitiveness, they are less likely to be successful in cities distant from the country’s main trunk infrastructure. In terms of financing local infrastructure, we find that a city’s ability to raise its own source revenues by means of local taxes and user fees increases infrastructure supply, whereas as inter governmental transfers do not have statistically significant effects.

Population density gradients for South Africa’s cities are quite small in absolute value, indicating a relatively flat population distribution across the cities. In contrast employment is less flatly distributed than the population. The relationship between employment densities and distance across South African cities has remained constant between 1996 and 2001 whilst there has been on average a slight increase in population density further away from the city centres. As per capita income of the population rises, density in the central city areas decreases. Employment growth has no significant impact on suburbanization indicating that population settlement does not necessarily follow jobs. Finally, it is found that there have been decreases in segregation in South Africa’s metropolitan cities since 1996 especially in the former white group areas, which could suggest that the formerly spatially excluded black population is slowly moving into former white areas, which are also closer to where economic activities are located.

The paper presents a theoretical model that seeks to answer the question of why former squatter settlements tend to upgrade/redevelop at a slower pace than otherwise similar settlements originating in the formal sector. We argue that squatter settlers’ initial strategy to access urban land creates a ‘legacy effect’ that curtails settlement upgrading possibilities even after the settlements are granted property titles. We test our model using the case of Cochabamba, Bolivia and obtain results consistent with our theoretical model prediction. Our results suggest that the commonly used ‘benign neglect while keeping the threat of eviction’ policy has profound impacts on how land is developed in the informal sector and this poses costly consequences for local governments after legalization.

The urban population of the developing world is projected to increase by some two billion in the next 30 years. Urbanization rates are strongly correlated with per capita income, productivity tends to be high in cities, and urban job creation is an important driver of economic growth. But urbanization is also one aspect of the widening spatial disparities that often accompany economic development, and many countries have urban structures dominated by their prime city. While cities are highly productive, they create heavy demands for investments in infrastructure and accommodation, in the absence of which slums and informal settlements develop. Urbanization gives rise to numerous policy challenges, both to make cities work better and to ensure that the overall city structure (the number and size distribution of cities) is as efficient as possible. There is no presumption that an unregulated free market pattern of urban development is socially efficient (even when conditional upon appropriate levels of public investment).
Urban activity creates many externalities, both positive and negative, so economic theory tells us that an unregulated outcome will not achieve efficiency. We observe the grim conditions of developing mega-cities, and we know that, in some developing countries, the primate city takes a far larger share of population than was the case in much of the developed world at similar stages of development (Bairoch 1988). The performance of the urban sector also bears on overall economic growth. Much job creation – in modern sector activities and in the informal sector – takes place in cities. What determines the attractiveness of a location as a host for investment, and how can city environments be developed to maximize job creation? Do ‘bad’ city structures impede overall growth?

This paper describes the methodology of a longitudinal multi-generational study in the favelas (shantytowns) of Rio de Janeiro from 1968 to 2008. Major political transformations took place in Brazil during this interval: from dictatorship to ‘opening’ to democracy; major economic transformations from ‘miracle’ boom to hyperinflation and crisis, and to relative stability; and major policy changes from the removal of favelas to their upgrading and integration. However, despite the cumulative effects of these contextual changes, poverty programmes and community efforts, the favela population has continued to grow faster than the rest of the city and the number and size of the favelas has consistently increased over these decades.

This paper describes the gaps and limitations in the data available on urban populations for many low- and middle-income nations and how this limits the accuracy of international comparisons – for instance of levels of urbanization and of the size of city populations. It also discusses how the lack of attention to data limitations has led to many myths and misconceptions in regard to growth rates for city populations and for nations’ levels of urbanization. It ends with some comments on how data limitations distort urban policies.

A common challenge in analyzing urbanization is the data. The United Nations (UN) compiles information on urbanization (urban population and its share of total national population) that is reported by various countries but there is no standardized definition of ‘urban’, resulting in inconsistencies. This situation is particularly troublesome if one wishes to conduct a cross-country analysis or determine the aggregate urbanization status of the regions (such as Asia or Latin America) and the world. This paper proposes an alternative to the UN measure of urban concentration that we call an agglomeration index. It is based on three factors:
• Population density
• The population of a ‘large’ city centre
• Travel time to that large city centre.
The main objective in constructing this new measure is to provide a globally consistent definition of settlement concentration in order to conduct cross-country comparative and aggregated analyses. As an accessible measure of economic density, the agglomeration index lends itself to the study of concepts such as agglomeration rents in urban areas, the ‘thickness’ of a market, and the travel distance to such a market with many workers and consumers. With anticipated advances in remote sensing technology and geo-coded data analysis tools, the agglomeration index can be further refined to address some of the caveats currently associated with it.

One of the most visible and enduring manifestations of urban poverty in developing countries is the formation and proliferation of slums. While attention has focused on the rapid pace of urbanization as the sole or major factor explaining the proliferation of slums and squatter settlements in developing countries, there are other factors whose impacts are not known with much degree of certainty. It is also not clear how the effects of these factors vary across regions of the developing world. This paper accounts for differences in the prevalence of slums among developing countries using data drawn from the recent global assessment of slums undertaken by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme.
The empirical analysis identifies substantial inter-country variations in the incidence of slums both within and across the regions of Africa, Asia as well as, Latin America and the Caribbean. Further analysis indicates that higher GDP per capita, greater financial depth and increased investment in infrastructure will reduce the incidence of slums. Conversely, the external debt burden, inequality in the distribution of income, rapid urban growth and the exclusionary nature of the regulatory framework governing the provision planned residential land contribute positively to the prevalence of slums and squatter settlements.

Kenya’s slums are growing at an unprecedented rate as more and more people move to Kenya’s cities and towns in search of employment and other opportunities urban areas offer. The government and local authorities are faced with the serious challenge of guiding the physical growth of urban areas and providing adequate services for the growing urban population. Kenya’s urban population is at present 40 percent of the total population. More than 70 percent of these urbanites live in slums, with limited access to water and sanitation, housing, and secure tenure. They have poor environmental conditions and experience high crime rates. If the gap continues to grow between the supply and demand of urban services such as housing, the negative consequences of urbanisation can become irreversible.

Urban Age is a worldwide investigation into the future of cities. Organised by the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Alfred Herrhausen Society, the International Forum of Deutsche Bank. The URBAN AGE CITY DATA section has been derived from various official statistical sources, including the United Nations Statistics Division, Instituto Basileiro de Geografia e Estatistica (Brazil), Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadistica (Colombia), Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Censos (Argentina), Instituto Nacional de Estadistica e Informatica (Peru), Observatorio Urbano (Lima) and Ministerio de Desarrollo Urbano (Buenos Aires) as well as individual Ministries, Departments and Secretariats for each city, state and country. Complete data sources available at www.urban-age.net