Cities in the Developing World: Issues, Theory, and Policy.

• Author: Tejirian, Jeremy
• Position: Review

Cities in the Developing World: Issues, Theory, and Policy

Josef Gugler, Editor (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997) 396 pp.

Addressing world poverty is impossible without understanding the explosive growth of cities in developing countries. The statistics are sobering; the urban population in developing countries roughly tripled between 1960 and 1993, mostly due to rural-urban migration, and in 1990 it was estimated that at least 600 million urban dwellers lived in unsafe conditions because of poor quality housing and inadequate provision of environmental services. This edited volume of twenty-five works, devoted to analyzing the causes and consequences of this massive demographic shift, offers some important contributions to the field of urban studies.

The collection is separated into five sections: rural-urban migration, urban employment structures, social organization in the city, housing and environment, and patterns of political integration and conflict. Each section consists of an introduction by Gugler and several articles examining the topic through a variety of analytic lenses. Most of the studies are based on participant observation and survey research or economic data. About half the contributions are published in this volume for the first time and most of the others were published within the last ten years.

Gugler uses the introductions to each section to place the essays in the larger context of academic theory There have been three major perspectives influencing the study of urbanization since the end of the colonial period: modernization theory; urban bias theory; and dependency theory. Each of these perspectives offers a different explanation of the dynamic between poverty and urbanization.

The earliest--modernization theory--asserts that people should be encouraged to leave their farms and move to urban areas to pursue industrial sector occupations. Industry was expected to facilitate national economic expansion and cities were expected to modernize social customs. During the 1960s and 1970s, when modernization theory was in vogue, the most common approach to industrial development was import-substitution industrialization (ISI). This strategy to promote local production of commodities which were imported in large volumes was often accomplished by exploiting the agricultural sector by regulating production and overvaluing currency Although these policies hurt export crops, they effectively subsidized urban...