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Contributions from
the Column
Focus
In most countries, populations are ageing
Fast track change: Chinese realities
The urgency of family planning
Small cities will have to carry the heaviest burden
06/2005
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Small cities, big agenda
Over the next decades, population growth will particularly affect small cities in developing countries. Consequently, the management and governance of towns of up to 500,000 people will be decisive for how humankind copes with the demographic challenges ahead.
[ By Barney Cohen and Kimberly Vilar ]
Cities are currently home to nearly half of the world’s population, and their share will grow. Over the next twenty five years, most of the two-billion-person increase in global population is expected to occur in urban areas in the developing world. This is because, on average, rural population growth in developing countries will be almost exactly offset by rural-urban migration, as people are drawn to cities both for better basic services and in search of better jobs, or by reclassification, as once rural areas are reclassified as being urban as new urban centres are formed and existing metropolitan areas expand outwards.
By 2020, the developing world as a whole is likely to have become more urban than rural. The changes that are underway are not only a matter of percentages, but also of scale. At the beginning of the twentieth century, just 16 cities in the world – the vast majority in advanced industrial countries – contained a million people or more. Today, almost 400 cities are of this size, and about three-quarters of them are found in low- and middle-income countries.
This trend of urbanisation is welcome. If well-managed, cities offer important opportunities for social development. High population density typically implies lower per capita cost of providing infrastructure and basic services. Moreover, urban residents typically have better access to education and health care, as well as other basic public services such as electricity, water, and sanitation than people in rural areas. This is so in spite of the fact that there are major inequalities amongst urban residents, especially in large cities.
As cities grow, managing them becomes increasingly complex. The speed and sheer scale of the urban transformation of the developing world presents formidable challenges. Of particular concern are the risks to the natural and physical environment, to health conditions, to social cohesion, and to individual rights. But for many observers, the greatest concern is surely the massive expected increase in the numbers of the urban poor. Manifestations of poverty are clearly visible in all large cities. They include overcrowding, high rates of crime, pollution and environmental hazards, inadequate housing, as well as inadequate access to clean water, sanitation, electricity and other basic social services. Each year squatter settlements and shanty towns expand due to natural increase as well as from rural-urban migration, exacerbating problems of congestion, and confounding the ability of local authorities to provide adequate infrastructure and basic amenities.
When imagining an urban future, it is perhaps only natural to think of a world in which everyone lives in mega-cities the size of São Paulo, Cairo, Mexico City, Beijing, or Lagos. But that is not correct. The bulk of urban population growth for the foreseeable future will take place in far smaller cities and towns. This point receives virtually no media recognition. Large cities will play a significant role in absorbing future anticipated growth, but for the foreseeable future the majority of urban residents will still reside in much smaller urban settlements.
Exact data on this point is hard to find since no comprehensive database of cities under 750,000 exists in a readily available format. Nevertheless, according to the most recent estimates of the United Nations’ Population Division, the lion’s share of the increase in urban population over the next 15 years will continue to be in towns and cities with fewer than half a million inhabitants. By 2015, towns and cities under half a million will account for over half of the total urban population. In comparison, only approximately 9 percent of the world’s urban population is expected to live in mega-cities of 10 million or more by 2015.
Size matters
We are by no means suggesting that large cities be neglected in the future. But there are good reasons for putting smaller cities more centrally on the development agenda. First, as discussed above, there is their demographic scale: when combined, the total population of smaller cities and towns is very significant. Furthermore, because by definition they are starting from a smaller base, small cities typically grow faster than large cities. In fact, it is rare to find cities of several million inhabitants growing by more than five percent per annum while it is quite common to find double-digit growth rates for smaller cities and towns.
Second, according to a recent study of urban infrastructure, residents of small cities in developing countries are significantly underserved with respect to basic services. According to a recent study of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which was based on an analysis of data from more than 90 countries, residents of small cities suffer a marked disadvantage in the provision of piped water, waste disposal, electricity, and schools. In these terms, residents of medium or large cities are better off. Furthermore, levels of infant and child mortality are typically higher in small- and medium-sized cities than in large cities. In view of the role that will be played by small cities in accommodating future population growth, it is clear that their need for improved basic services must be addressed.
Currently many small cities lack the necessary institutional capacity to adequately manage their rapidly-growing populations. Of course, this task becomes more daunting as cities grow. Moreover, the nature and tasks of urban management and governance are undergoing fundamental changes. In many countries, national governments have decentralised service delivery and revenue raising to lower tiers of government. In the areas of health, family planning, and poverty alleviation, many national governments have begun to allow hitherto untested local governments to operate the levers of policy and programs. At present, however, few small city local governments are equipped with the technical and managerial expertise they need to take on these new responsibilities.
At the same time, there are advantages to being small. For one thing, small cities have time to address residents’ basic infrastructure and other needs before the magnitude of these problems becomes overwhelming. Small cities that are growing rapidly also offer critical opportunities for bypassing old technologies and shaping development into more sustainable futures. The concept of urban governance has itself undergone a major transformation over the last decade and a half. Movements towards democratisation and political pluralism, an emphasis on decentralisation, and the rise of civil society have all affected patterns of governance of small cities throughout the developing world.
New forms of local governance are emerging that are creating enabling environments for positive change. These new directions for urban governance involve larger roles for non-governmental organisations and community groups, greater transparency and accountability of local government officials, and the devolution of legal and financial responsibility for urban affairs away from the state or national to the local level. Small cities are also coming together to form networks that are designed to exchange information and share innovative solutions to similar urban problems with one another. One particularly promising strategy amongst small cities has been the development of city plans based on social, economic, and environmentally sustainability principles under the rubric of Local Agenda 21.
Promising experiences
What has set the Local Agenda 21 apart from previous attempts at localising the notion of sustainable urban development has been the leadership, active participation, and broad consultation of a wide variety of local stakeholders, including local nongovernmental actors such as private contractors, universities, professional associations, indigenous groups, and other civil society representatives. Some of the most effective experiences in Latin America have been in small and intermediate sized cities such as Curitiba and Porto Alegre in Brazil, Ilo and Chimbote in Peru, and Manizales in Columbia.
Many small city planning processes are being improved through horizontal collaboration amongst cities pursuing similar goals. This occurs both within countries as well as across borders. One country-specific example is the Cities for Life Forum (Foro Ciudades para la Vida) in Peru (Miranda, 2004).
Over a ten-year period, the Cities for Life Forum has developed a network of twenty nine Peruvian cities that are pursuing locally-driven urban management plans. The network promotes horizontal communication and collaboration between government actors and civil society actors, between municipal authorities and between different civil society institutions, in order to provide an enabling environment for problem-solving and conflict resolution with higher degrees of commitment and accountability. Moreover, engaging non-governmental city institutions and fostering relationships between institutions of various small cities with the assistance of a permanent local support network has proven beneficial to long-term planning and overcoming the discontinuity of urban policies that result from frequent changes of government.
Managing urban growth has increased in both scope and complexity and has become one of the most important challenges of the 21st century. Development programs of major international agencies have yet to adequately recognise the anticipated rapid growth of small and medium sized cities and the deteriorating living conditions of the urban poor. Furthermore, solutions to urban problems are increasingly being sought at the local rather than the state or national level. These trends underscore the urgent need to build and support the capacity of local governments to manage the environmental and social service problems that accompany rapid urban growth.
Many of the problems facing rapidly growing urban areas are amenable to scientific and engineering expertise. Working in close collaboration with our sister academies of science and engineering around the developing world, the United States’ National Academy of Sciences is currently developing a large initiative to promote scientific exchange and to help build and support the capacity of local governments in smaller cities in the developing world to address their most serious urban challenges. If there is one lesson from recent comparative analysis it is that well-managed small cities are able to effectively cope with many of the challenges associated with rapid population growth.
Urban governance, moreover, is not only essential in times of rapid growth. It also matters where the demographic transition has further progressed. Declines in fertility, coupled with declines in mortality have the effect of ageing the population, that is increasing both the average age of the general population and the proportion of the population over a certain age. Although longer life-expectancy is obviously highly desirable, societal ageing, if it is achieved rapidly, will leave city governments little time to adapt to the various economic, social, and political challenges that it presents. In some European countries, population ageing occurred gradually over the course of centuries. In some developing countries, it will happen far more rapidly: The same transformation of the age pyramid that took 130 years to accomplish in France will take just 27 years in China.
Some cities in developing countries are already beginning to face some of the challenges that population ageing creates. In Argentina, for example, population ageing began sooner and occurred more rapidly than in neighbouring countries, so that, by the 1990s, cities such as Greater Buenos Aires already contained several neighbourhoods with significant numbers of elderly residents. Social problems – be they rapid growth or the dynamics of ageing – are most acutely felt at the local level. Local administrations must therefore be put in a position to deal with them.
Barney Cohen, PhD,
is the Director of the National Research Council’s Committee
on Population at the U.S. National Academies of Sciences in Washington DC.
bcohen@nas.edu
Kimberly Vilar
is currently working as
a consultant on the Committee on Population at the U.S. National Academies of Sciences in Washington DC. Formerly, she worked on multi-stakeholder urban sustainable development projects in governmental and non-governmental organisations in Latin America.
kimvilar@hotmail.com
Further reading:
National Research Council, 2004:
Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its Implications in the Developing World. Panel on Urban Population Dynamics. M.R. Montgomery, R. Stren, B. Cohen, and H.E. Reed, eds., Committee on Population, Division of Behavioural and Social Sciences and Education. London: Earthscan.
Miranda, L., 2004:
“Cities for Life Revisited: Capacity-Building for Urban Management in Peru, ” Environment and Urbanization, vol. 16, No. 2., pp. 249-261.
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