Cities in the developing world

Cities in the developing world are the cities of tomorrow, fertile breeding grounds for progression, innovation, and destruction. What distinguishes these cities from cities in other countries is the exponential overpopulation, which propels the citizens themselves to build their own city, instead of the traditional city planners, government bureaucracy, and financial investors. In the in the Western world, there is more time for a government to structure the layout out of a city, from skyscrapers to hospitals to public sewage. For better or worse, it is up solely to the impoverished class, to construct their communities (see squatting).

Major characteristics

Cycles of Overcrowding and DiseaseA defining characteristic of all major cities, both modern and ancient, is disease brought about by overpopulation. From the Plague of Athens in ancient Greece to the infamously overcrowded tenement buildings in New York City circa 18th and early 19th centuries, the density of housing and public services in major cities has always caused problems.

"Poverty, unemployment, disease, crime, and pollution have plagued urban centers for 10,000 years, since the earliest cities developed around granaries and armories in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. There is reason to believe, however, that while the individual problems facing cities are not new, an unholy synergy created in the developing world when explosive population growth, industrializatiuon, and capital scarcity meet means dangers on an unprecedented scale....crowded slums without running water or sewers and inadequate public health procedures allowed microbes to flourish, and epidemics regularly decimated populations. Advances in sanitation and the discovery of antibiotics have given humanity a century's respite from the ravages of infectious disease. But many epidemiologists fear this period is drawing to a close as urban growth outgrouws the installation of sanitation in the developing world and resilient microbes discover opportunities in the stressed immune systems of the urban poor. [1]

Cities in the developing world suffer from a lack of: health care, sanitation, education and other basic needs. A lack of sanitation allows disease to run rampant; it will spread quickly due to the density of population. Needless to say, life in the cities in the developing world is rough but not impossible. Companies close down because of all the instability, which leads to job losses and cutbacks in government spending. Foreign companies don’t want to take the risk. Because of the low quality of living, wealthier citizens move out, which rob the city of taxes.

SquattingTwo opposing developing world economists are Hernando de Soto (economist) and Robert Neuwirth.

Intensities

With people living in close quarters that cities require it is inevitable that the intensity levels rise. There are no one or two characteristics of a city; a city is defined by the way people interact with each other. In such close quarters, people have far less personal space; therefore the intensity of simple human interactions rises. In cities, the contrast between rich and poor is much more obvious. In many cities, especially those in the developing world, the well off often live as close as only a few blocks away from what some would consider “poverty stricken” areas. In many places squatter settlements are becoming more and more common. The people who live in places like that don’t pay for utilities or even buildings. Primarily, the intensity of these cities is obvious in the daily life of the inhabitants. They go through life just as we do, but they also have issues that most of us will never face. Questions like “what’s for dinner?” turn into “where am I going to find food or money to buy food for dinner?” and “what are we going to do today?” might change into “how am I going to survive today?” A single cut can turn into a deadly infection. Being arrested by the police may be a death sentence. True, this is not always the case. Some squatter cities have roomy houses with running water and electricity. However, most cities in developing countries do not yet have these luxuries. For all these reasons intensity levels in the cities of the developing world are high, and rising every day.

Examples

While the term, "developing countries," may be relative, the cities included in this list are essentially the most prominent cities of the Global South.

Brasilia, Brazil

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Sao Paulo

Beijing, China

Havana, Cuba

Cairo, Egypt

Delhi, India

Jakarta, Indonesia

Kingston, Jamaica

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Mexico City, Mexico

Kinshasa, Zaire

Representative space

In developed nations, a city's representative image are usually sky scrapers or other major buildings which are built by investors and businesses. There are many public debates about a city's landmarks and how they represent its city. Red tape, politics, design, and the vision of the "haves" of this world want to portray certain aspects of their cities in the Western world.

"Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the has stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down in Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilizzed before the eyes. It is tranfromed into a texturology in which extremes coincide- extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterdays buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space. [http://thispublicaddress.com/tPA4/archives/theory/michel_de_certeau/]

In the developing world, however, the population just grows too fast, and the impoverished government simply cannot pay for so many private commissions for fine architecture. While there are of course some sky scrapers in these developing cities, those are often not the landmarks people think of. Instead, the acres and acres of squatter communities, the farmers' markets, etc, automatically come to mind.

Of course, many developing nations depend on tourism and its accompanying gargantuan service industries as a primary economic base. Thus, millions of dollars are devoted to shaping potential vacation-goers' perceptions of certain places. Jamaica, for example, depends on tourist dollars for its yearly income, and so markets Jamaica and its capital, Kingston, selectively. Tourists usually never see Trenchtown, but are instead shepherded to remote resorts, or perhaps the gentrified neighborhood of New Kingston. [http://www.lifeanddebt.org/about.html]

Bibliography

* Linden, Eugene 1996. "The Exploding Cities of the Developing World." Foreign Affairs Jan/Feb 1996: 52-65.
* [http://thispublicaddress.com/tPA4/archives/theory/michel_de_certeau/ this Public Address 4.0 - Michael de Carteu Archives - Horizons]
* [http://www.lifeanddebt.org/about.html About the film Life and Debt]
* [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/world/27cnd-population.html?ex=1340596800&en=a0071968e60e5341&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss Half the World Soon to be in Cities. - The New York Times] Dugger, Celia W. (2007).
*Massey, Doreen, Allen, John, and Steve Pile (1999). City Worlds. New York: Routledge.
*Neuwirth, Robert (2005). Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World. New York & London: Routledge.