Development in an Urban World

Project by UNU-Wider - 2008
Theme: Poverty, Inequality and Well-being

Abstract:

In 2007 the number of urban inhabitants will surpass rural dwellers as a percentage of the total world population. By 2030 the proportion of people living in cities globally is expected to reach 61%, with almost 80% of urban dwellers living in less developed countries. For the first time in history the world will tip from being predominantly rural to predominantly urban and virtually all projected world population growth will be absorbed by cities in the south over the next fifty years. We need to understand the implications of this 2007 tipping point for cities as well as the countries, regions, and international development systems of which they are a part.

Keywords:

urban, population growth, tipping point, urbanization, poverty, economic integration, ecological footprint, cosmopolitanism

Director:

• Jo Beall
  Project Co-Director
• Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis
  Project Co-Director
• Ravi Kanbur
  Project Co-Director

Assistant:

• Anne Ruohonen 
  Project Assistant 

Workshops

• 22 May 2009 UNU-WIDER Project Workshop on Beyond the Tipping Point: Latin American Development in an Urban World, Buenos Aires, Argentina  
• 15 December 2008 UNU-WIDER Project Workshop on Beyond the Tipping Point: Asian Development in an Urban World - Kolkata, India
• 26 June 2008 Project workshop Beyond the Tipping Point: African Development in an Urban World
• 18 October 2007 WIDER Project workshop: Beyond the Tipping Point: Development in an Urban World

Publications:

• Foundations of Minority Communities: Resident Koreans in Japan
• Agglomeration Index
• Building Sustainable Historic Centres:
• Challenges for Latin American Cities

  Paola Jirón - April 2012
  Current urban interventions, particularly in cities in developing countries like Santiago de Chile, evidence major neglect in understanding the way contemporary living takes place and how it is changing under processes of globalization, global warming, technological advances, as well as specific national and local processes. Traditional ways of analysing urban living are no longer adequate to tackle urban issues, thus new questions need to be asked in order to achieve better comprehension.

• The Challenges of Global Environmental Change for Urban Africa

  David Simon - May 2010
  Cities—especially those with substantial poor populations—will face increasingly severe challenges in tackling the impacts of global environmental change (GEC). As economic dynamos and increasingly important population concentrations, cities both contribute substantially, and often are very vulnerable, to the impacts of GEC. This applies strongly in Africa, one of the world’s poorest regions. The inability of even a relatively wealthy and well protected city such as New Orleans in the USA to withstand Hurricane Katrina has helped focus attention on the vulnerability of cities that are less protected. Coastal cities and towns from Dakar (which is used as a case study) via Lagos, Cape Town, Maputo and Mombasa to Djibouti contain many low-lying areas, often accommodating concentrations of poor residents, strategic infrastructure and economic production. However, different combinations of challenges will affect many inland urban centres. Tackling GEC successfully will require more than enhanced disaster preparedness.

• Cityness and African Urban Development

  Edgar Pieterse - May 2010
  This paper explores one possible argument for how to respond to the epistemic troubles in the production of knowledge about urban Africa. The problem I have in mind is the preponderance of policy-oriented research on the development challenges and absences of African cities, as opposed to a more rounded theorization of urban life (urbanism), or cityness. The paper starts by recounting the challenge thrown forth by Jennifer Robinson and Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall to take African ‘cityness’ or ‘worldliness’ seriously in our engagement with the African city. This starting point leads on to an exploration of what cityness can mean, given the overdetermining effect of violence in African social life, in no small measure a consequence of the colonial era of terror and exploitation, but also now remade and re-embedded in enduring inequalities that mark everyday life. In my reading this issue looms so large in the contemporary city that I found it impossible, within the constraints of this essay, to explore in detail other dimensions of urban sociality. As a result I simply assert that in the absence of a deep philosophical understanding of the social, it is almost impossible to hold on to a liberal humanist moral project of the kind which frequently underpins policy prescriptions to improve the quality of life, livelihoods, governance and social fabric in African cities.

• Cocaine Cities
• Dar es Salaam as a 'Harbour of Peace' in East Africa
• Evolving City Systems

  Henry G. Overman1 and Anthony J. Venables - March 2010
  This paper reviews the literature on the forces driving urbanization in developing countries. It presents a model outlining how globalization can lead to the evolution of an urban structure which may approximate Zipf’s law. Policy implications are outlined.

• The Excluded Poor
  How Targeting Has Left out the Poor in Peripheral Cities in the Philippines

  Michael P. Canares - May 2010
  Constrained by resource limitations and challenged by the increasing incidence of poverty in the country, the Philippine government embarked on an anti-poverty programme that sought to identify where the poorest people were, what were their specific needs, and how government and other stakeholders (e.g., non-government organizations, international development agencies, and the private sector) should respond to their pressing concerns. Despite deficiencies in methodology, poverty statistics in the Philippines have recently become not only as the means of identifying the most deprived regions or provinces, but also as a weather vane that points to where resources and efforts need to be directed and how these are to be spent. This paper scrutinizes the gains of this approach with particular reference to the urban poor in two cities: Butuan, the capital city of Agusan del Norte, once home to the largest logging operations in Mindanao, and Tagbilaran, the capital of the tourist province of Bohol.
  The study concluded that the poor in the cities in the periphery are sidelined by two different trends. On one hand, their needs and concerns are prioritized less because of a poverty targeting framework that dictates how development interventions are to be pursued and how development funds are allocated. On the other hand, their needs and concerns oftentimes are underinvested because of their relative low significance as an urban centre in comparison to other cities. If these trends continue, the future of cities, particularly those located in the peripheries of an archipelagic country like the Philippines, will become increasingly characterized by added poverty and vulnerability.

• The Face of Urban Poverty
  Explaining the Prevalence of Slums in Developing Countries

  Ben C. Arimah - March 2010
  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.

• Fiscal Decentralization and Urbanization in Indonesia
• The Gendered Nature of Asset Accumulation in Urban Contexts
• Globalization and Exclusionary Urban Growth in Asian Countries
• Globalizing Households and Multi-ethnic Community Building in Japan
• Globalizing Shanghai
• Growth and Recovery in a Time of Default
• Health and the Urban Transition: Effects of Household Perceptions, Illness, and Environmental Pollution on Clean Water Investment
• ICT Sector, Globalization and Urban Economic Growth
• Identity and Space on the Borderland between Old and New in Shanghai: A Case Study
• Infrastructure and City Competitiveness in India
• Infrastructure and Poverty Reduction
• Irregular Urbanization as a Catalyst for Radical Social Mobilization
• Is Internal Migration Bad for Receiving Urban Centres?
  Evidence from Brazil, 1995-2000

  Céline Ferré - April 2011
  During the twentieth century, internal migration and urbanization shaped Brazil’s economic and social landscape. Cities grew tremendously, while immigration participated in the rapid urbanization process and the redistribution of poverty between rural and urban areas. In 1950, about a third of Brazil’s population lived in cities; this figure grew to approximately 80 per cent by the end of the nineteenth century. The Brazilian population redistributed unevenly—some dynamic regions became population magnets, and some neighbourhoods within cities became gateway clusters in which the effects of immigration proved particularly salient. This study asks, has domestic migration to cities been part of a healthy process of economic transition and mobility for the country and its households? Or has it been a perverse trap?

• Is There Such a Thing as a Post-Apartheid City?
• Latin American Urban Development into the 21st Century
• Latin American Urban Development into the 21st Century: Towards a Renewed Perspective on the City
• The Legacy Effect of Squatter Settlements on Urban Redevelopment
• Local Government, Taxes, and Guns
• Moderating Urbanization and Managing Growth
• A New Way of Monitoring the Quality of Urban Life
• Parsing the Urban Poverty Puzzle
• Passage, Profit, Protection and the Challenge of Participation
• Public-Private Co-operation for Gas Provision in Poor Neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires
• Separate but Equal Democratization?
• Significance of Public Space in the Fragmented City
• Socio-Spatial Implications of Street Market Regulation Policy
• Solid Wastes, Poverty and the Environment in Developing Country Cities
• Special Issue: African Development in an Urban World: Beyond the Tipping Point
• Suburbanization and Residential Desegregation in South Africa's Cities
• The Tangled Web of Associational Life
• Toward Efficient Urban Form in China
• Urban Development Transitions and their Implications for Poverty Reduction and Policy Planning in Uganda
• Urban Myths and the Mis-use of Data that Underpin them
• Urban Settlement
• Urban Violence Is not (Necessarily) a Way of Life: Towards a Political Economy of Conflict in Cities
• Urbanization and Development in Asia: Multidimensional Perspectives
• Urbanization and Development: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
• Urbanization and the South Asian Enigma: A Case Study of India
• Violent Urbanization and Homogenization of Space and Place
• Women and Landed Property in Urban India