18-12-2007

Satterthwaite first wants to stress the meaning of two different concepts which are often used interchangeably: urbanisation and urban growth. “Urbanisation is the proportion of a population living in urban centres, which is caused by a net movement of people from rural to urban areas. Urban growth obviously is fuelled by natural increase as well as by net in-migration. For that reason, urban growth is often the dominant factor behind an urban centre’s growing population. But it is a very minor factor in increases of urbanisation within nations.” The main reasons for urbanisation thus lie somewhere else, David Satterthwaite states. “What we know drives urbanisation in most places is the concentration of new investment in particular urban areas. You can see this in the structural change within most economies as the increasing proportion of GDP generated by industries and services, or the increasing proportion of the workforce working in industry and services. There are exceptions, but in general, it is economic growth that is driving urbanisation.”

Satterthwaite also states that political developments can have a great influence on urban change. Especially in Africa, politics have played an important role. “Independence and the movement away from colonial regimes played an important role.” Satterthwaite points at the formation of governments, the development of infrastructural services that were not there under colonial regime and the setting up institutions such as universities, hospitals and schools. “Obviously these were political changes that had enormous implications for urban change in the pre- and post-independence period. The dismantling of the apartheid controls on the right of Africans to live in cities also was a political change that had huge implications. That is one of the reasons why for example Dar es Salaam grew so rapidly in the fifties and sixties as women and children were coming to join their husbands, which they were not allowed to do previously. So clearly, it was political change that had a huge influence on urbanisation in these areas. However, these influences are less in most nations today. The role of economic growth is the most dominant factor now.”

“If you have got a large sophisticated economy, good infrastructure pretty much everywhere and every urban centre has electricity, water, sanitation and drainage, obviously you no longer need to concentrate in the few locations that have those. Subsequently, large companies and corporations have the ability to use lower cost production centres, to divide their production systems so that a lot of the administration and the actual production is no longer done in large cities. We know that this is one of the main stories of urban change in Europe and Northern America for forty to fifty years.” However, this development does not only take place in Europe. Satterthwaite stresses that the same is happening in other parts of the world today. He refers to South-East Brazil where smaller cities compete successfully for new investment with Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Bella Horizonte. Also in India you have got smaller cities that are competing successfully with the very big ones such as Mumbai, Kolkata (Calcutta) or Chennai for instance. “Generally as an economy becomes more sophisticated and has regional infrastructure improved, there is a natural tendency for a lot of production to decentralise away from the larger cities.”

Urban growth in Africa, Asia and Latin America is often addressed as ‘unprecedented’ and ‘out of control’. This is one of the myths you try to counter. Why is it a myth?

“Part of the reason is that a lot of research is based on insufficient census data. In many cities there is a lack of census data, which means that city populations have to be estimated. The techniques used for estimating city populations often assumed that cities that had grown very rapidly in the fifties would continue to do so. For instance, you had the projection twenty years ago that Mexico City would be 31 million people by the year 2000. They only had half of that in 2000 though. For most cities in Africa and Asia, the projection presumed they would be much bigger than they actually are. However, there are also some exceptions. The exceptions are largely the economies that have been very successful and the cities that have been very successful in those economies. There are many Chinese cities for example that are actually bigger now than people anticipated twenty years ago, because they have been so successful in attracting new investment.”

Unprecedented urban growth is often given as a reason for the very severe urban problems many low- and middle-income nations face. Satterthwaite however points at the tens of thousands of urban centres around the world that have not grown rapidly, but that have conditions as bad or even worse than some of the fast growing cities. Other cities, that have indeed grown very rapidly, show comparably good conditions. “Porto Alegre in Brazil for example, is a city that has grown very rapidly in the last fifty years. However, it also has a life expectancy better than many cities in the United States, a very low proportion of its population living in informal settlement and a good provision for water, sanitation and drainage. It is a city where the government system expanded to cope with the rapid growth. The main reasons for the problems that cities have thus do not lie in the growth of their size, but in the way they are governed.”

So, local governance is extremely important?

“Yes, there is an economic logic to where the larger cities are developing. If that is the case, then in a sense the enormous proportion of people living in squatter settlements lacking water, sanitation, drainage, health care and schools, is not the fault of rapid growth, but of governance systems unable to adjust to the concentration of people there. Good governance therefore is of great importance everywhere.”