Urban areas of developing countries, whose populations will double to nearly 4 billion over the next generation
Megacities have populations in excess of 8 million
Hypercities have more than 20 million inhabitants
Exploding cities of the developing world are also weaving extraordinary new urban networks, corridors, and hierarchies
Increasing inequality within and between cities of different sizes and economic specializations
Urbanization must be conceptualized as structural transformation along an intensified interaction between every point of an urban-rural continuum
Collision between the rural and the urban is a partially urbanized countryside
Emergence of polycentric urban systems without clear rural/urban boundaries
Back to Dickens
Contemporary East Asian urbanization, accompanied by a tripling of per capita GDP since 1965, preserves a quasi-classical relationship between manufacturing growth and urban migration
In most of the developing world, however, city growth lacks the powerful manufacturing export engines of China, Korea, and Taiwan, as well as China’s vast inflow of foreign capital
The size of a city’s economy often bears surprisingly little relationship to its population size
Delink the growth of production from that of employment
Kinshasa, Luanda, Khartoum, Dar-es-Salaam, Guayaquil, and Lima continue to grow prodigiously despite ruined import-substitution industries, shrunken public sectors, and downwardly mobile middle classes
Slum growth everywhere in the South has outpaced urbanization per se
The cities of the future are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood
The Prevalence of Slums
Slum is an area of dirty back streets, especially when inhabited by a squalid and criminal population
A Global Slum Census
Residents of slums constitute a staggering 78.2 percent of urbanites in the least-developed countries
The number of urban poor is considerably greater
A Slum Typology
Megaslums arise when shantytowns and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informal housing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery
The urban poor have to solve a complex equation as they try to optimize housing cost, tenure security, quality of shelter, journey to work, and sometimes, personal safety
Inner-City Poverty
In most of the Third World, however, hand-me-down housing is less common than tenements and purpose-built rental housing
Other inner-city housing options, both formal and informal, include an ingenious spectrum of illegal additions, flophouses, squats, and mini-shantytown
Pirate Urbanization
Periphery is a highly relative, time-specific term: today’s urban edge, abutting fields, forest, and desert may tomorrow become part of a dense metropolitan core
Squatting, of course, is the possession of land without sale or title
Today squatting, stricto sensu, continues primarily in low-value urban land, usually in hazardous or extremely marginal locations such as floodplains, hillsides, swamps, or contaminated brownfields
Pirate urbanization is, in effect, the privatization of squatting
Invisible Renters
Landlordism is in fact a fundamental and divisive social relation in slum life worldwide
It is the principal way in which poor urban people can monetize their equity
The poorest of the poor, however, rent from the squatters
Renters, indeed, are usually the most invisible and powerless of slum-dwellers
Diversity of property rights and housing forms in large African and Latin American slums
The Pariah Edge
The urban edge is the societal impact zone where the centrifugal forces of the city collide with the implosion of the countryside
A migrant stream of polluting, toxic, and often illegal industries also seeks the permissive obscurity of the periphery
Urban waste and unwanted immigrants end up together, as in such infamous garbage slums
International refugees and internally displaced people are often more harshly treated even than urban evictees - and some of the Third World’s huge refugee camps have evolved into edge cities in their own right