EUKN - European Urban Knowledge Network - The ten and a half myths that may distort the urban policies of governments and international agencies

The ten and a half myths that may distort the urban policies of governments and international agencies

Introduction

The paper identifies twelve myths on urban areas that often form a basis for urban policies. It explains how this myths were created and why they are false.

Description

Over the last 100 years, the world’s urban population has grown more than tenfold and now close to half the world’s population lives in urban areas. There are many positive elements to these urban changes. These positive elements of urban change often go unnoticed.

This paper identifies twelve myths about urban areas. These myths underpin and perpetuate ineffective and often inappropriate policies by governments and international agencies.

Background information

For many nations, rapid urban change over the last 50 years is associated with the achievement of independence and the removal of colonial controls on people’s right to move in response to changing economic opportunities.

The concentration of population in urban areas greatly reduces the unit costs of providing good quality water supplies and good quality provision for sanitation, health care, schools and other services. It also provides more possibilities for their full involvement in government. And, perhaps
surprisingly, urban areas can also provide many environmental advantages including less resource use, less waste and lower levels of greenhouse gases.

These positive elements of urban change often go unnoticed. And many publications exaggerate the scale and speed of urban change.

Methodology

This paper identifies twelve myths about urban areas – or to be more precise, ten and a half myths, since three of them are partially true statements in need of qualification to make them useful.

These myths will be presented under five headings:

the links between economic change and urban change, especially the contribution of urban areas to national economies and the relationship between rural and urban areas (are cities ‘parasitic’?)
the scale of urban change (including the role of mega-cities), the speed of change (are city populations ‘exploding’ and cities ‘mushrooming’?) and the extent to which the world is or will be predominantly urban (“will all regions of the world will be predominantly urban by 2025”?)
rural versus urban areas (is most poverty in rural areas? is urban
development opposed to rural development?)
the links between poverty and environmental degradation (is poverty a major cause of environmental degradation and do large and rapidly growing cities have the worst environmental problems?)
what should be done (do we need “national strategies” and “best-practices” from which to learn?)

Conclusions

The paper identifies and explains a number of myths in urban policy. Them main general conclusions are:

Urban growth is less rapid and less concentrated in very large cities and that the links between urbanization and stronger, more robust economies are often ignored.
The increasingly urbanized world need not imply insuperable environmental problems.
There is a need for far more support to ‘good local governance’

Publication date

Project finished

01/01/2002

Researcher

David Satterthwaite

Download the 'The ten and a half myths' Report (PDF, Eng, 355 KB)

Document type

research

Themes

Urban Policy

Keywords