The Exploding Cities of the Developing World

Eugene Linden

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1996

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Summary:  Humanity is on the move as never before, and most of those who leave home seeking a better life head for a city. The most explosive growth has been in the Third World, which has 213 cities of more than a million people and some 20 at the 10-million mark. Megacities breed megaproblems--pollution, disease, and desperation. With the fate of urban areas increasingly determining the fate of nations and regions, how these overburdened poorer cities handle the influx will affect us all.

Eugene Linden is a Contributor at Time and author of The Alms Race: The Impact of American Voluntary Aid Abroad.

VULNERABLE GIANTS

The rhythm of history has been the rise, collapse, and occasional rebirth of cities. Until recently urban populations waxed and waned as disease, changes in trade and technology, and shifting political fortunes rewarded some cities and penalized others. In this century the rhythm has been interrupted in the developing world, where urban populations almost always rise. Lured by the bright lights, or driven from the countryside by political and economic turmoil, population pressures, and ecological breakdown, billions of people have been migrating to the cities.

This influx strains the resources, leadership, and infrastructure of already overburdened countries. Migrants from the desperately poor interior of sub-Saharan Africa continue to come to Kinshasa, Zaire, despite the collapse of its economy and services, which has led to rampant disease and malnutrition and brought the city to the edge of anarchy. Pakistanis pour into Karachi despite factional violence characterized by car bombings and gun battles in the streets. Question marks hang in the polluted air over megacities like Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Jakarta, Mexico City, Cairo, Delhi, and Beijing and tens of thousands of smaller cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Many First World cities are also coping with waves of poor newcomers at a time when their tax base is eroding as companies and well-to-do citizens move out, driven away by high costs, crime, and a deteriorating quality of life.

More and more, the fate of cities determines the fate of nations and regions. Karachi, for instance, accounts for half of government revenues in Pakistan and 20 percent of gdp. It is the country's financial center and only port and has the highest concentration of literate people. Given the ties between Karachi's ethnic groups and powerful tribes elsewhere in the country, if the current factional violence in the city intensifies, unrest could engulf the rest of Pakistan's well-armed populace, perhaps leading to international conflicts and large cross-border movements of people.

With ever-increasing global integration, problems that arise in one city can quickly spread throughout its region and even worldwide. The health of cities in the developed world depends in some measure on developing nations' efforts to control new diseases and drug-resistant strains of old ones incubating in their slums. Moreover, as Earth becomes more and more crowded, how successfully developing world cities absorb continuing migration will have much to do with whether tides of humanity overwhelm nations and regions in years to come. The developed world ignores at its peril the problems of Third World cities.

MISMEASURE OF A METROPOLIS

At the turn of the century roughly five percent of the world's people lived in cities with populations over 100,000. Today an estimated 45 percent--slightly more than 2.5 billion people--live in urban centers. In recent years the most explosive growth has been in the developing world. Between 1950 and 1995 the number of cities in the developed world with populations greater than 1 million more than doubled, from 49 to 112; in the same period, million-plus cities in ...

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