There are more than 20 cities worldwide with a population of more than 10 million. Seventy per cent of the "mega-cities" are in the Third World, but some cities in the advanced capitalist countries are undergoing their own process of "Third-Worldisation". In these cities, the whole social infrastructure is collapsing; and the social geography of nearly all large modern cities is undergoing rapid change. Mega-urbanisation and infrastructural collapse ares part of the same worldwide crisis, argues PHIL CLARKE.
Ridley Scott's cult movie Blade Runner pictures Los Angeles in the year 2019 as a multi-level mega-city, where high technology jostles with almost total infrastructural collapse. The mass of the population lives at ground level in constant rain and filth, amidst dire pollution and collapsing buildings. The city itself seems to go on forever, upwards and outwards.
Twenty years ago, this might have seemed the most improbable nightmare. Not so today: economic and social developments in late capitalism have given a dramatic spurt to the process of global urbanisation. Not only are new "mega-cities" coming into existence and growing rapidly, the social structure and geography of existing cities are also changing dramatically, to the detriment of the poor and the oppressed.
In 1994 there are more than 20 cities worldwide with a population of more than 10 million. Tokyo, depending on where you draw the city boundary, has more than 24 million; Mexico City has 15 million.
Thirty years ago the biggest cities — Tokyo, New York and London — had about 10 million each. Now Jakarta with 10 million is only 13th in size. The mega-city is a social and environmental catastrophe. Mega-urbanisation is a rapidly accelerating process; Karachi, which now has 8 million people, will reach 11 or 12 million by the year 2000; in the same period, Bombay will go from 13 to 18 million, Jakarta from 10 to 13 million.
The problem is not just that of poverty and inequality, which imperialism and local elites impose on the Third World urban masses. The sheer size of impoverished mega-cities distorts the entire social fabric of Third World countries, imposing housing, health, employment and environmental problems which even the most enlightened socialist government would find it difficult to resolve.
Mega-urbanisation is not a "natural" process resulting from industrialisation and "progress". In the Third World it has two central causes. The first is rural impoverishment. World economic crisis, together with IMF and World Bank debt policies, has imposed ultra-low prices on agricultural produce from poorer countries, bankrupting hundreds of thousands of peasants and small farmers.
Millions leave the land and drift towards the cities; they know even a "marginal" city existence, as peddlers, beggars or even turning over rubbish tips, gives them a better chance of survival than a pitiful existence in the countryside.
In both advanced and Third World countries, even where farming is potentially profitable, debt and agribusiness conspire to drive the small farmer off the land.
Combining with rural poverty is the problem of population growth. This is not mainly a question of ignorance about birth control techniques, but of material pressures. On the land or in the cities, millions of poor people know their chances of survival depend on having enough children to support them in their old age.
Worse, in countries like India and Egypt, child labour is an important source of income for families, especially one-parent families. In rural Egypt rich farmers will employ only children to pick jasmine — the key ingredient of the ultra-profitable French perfume industry — because their small hands do less damage to the flowers; because the flowers open during the day, the work is done during the night. They are paid a pittance and only according to the weight of flowers they pick, but their income is still vital for their families.
Violence, prostitution, drugs and child labour are the inevitable consequences of the marginal existence of hundreds of millions in the Third World mega-cities.
The typical form of expansion of such cities is the construction of barrio shantytowns. The shantytowns don't have electricity and sewage facilities, and thus become massive centres of environmental and health problems.
The cholera epidemic which hit Latin America in the last three years was directly spurred by the lack of clean water and sewage facilities in the barrios.
The mega-cities inevitably develop a huge problem of refuse disposal. Inadequate public transport often means a glut of cars, adding to industrial atmospheric pollution.
Third World mega-cities don't just damage their own environment, but also the surrounding countryside, which is pillaged for building timber, leading to deforestation and soil erosion. The mega-city's environmental impact extends well beyond its own boundaries.
Endemic violence, crime and political volatility lead directly to repression. The only way to police the dispossessed masses is through state violence, whether it be in Los Angeles, Karachi or Lima.
Keeping the masses down requires a large and brutalised police force like the notorious Los Angeles Police Department, with its constant helicopter patrols of the black areas of Watts and South Central — or more simply a murderous army.
The US "war on drugs", which results in a staggering 1 million arrests for drug-related offences every year with no noticeable effect on the drug trade, is in reality a war against black youth.
But as well as having the multimillion poor who have to be policed, the mega-cities in the advanced countries are the centres of economic and political world power. They are the work and play centres of the cosmopolitan rich, whose luxury downtown office blocks and snazzy night clubs often stand cheek by jowl with the most run-down inner-city communities of the urban poor.
Mega-urbanisation in the Third World is paralleled by the crisis of the city in the advanced countries. This is a product of severe financial cutbacks in local government, and the restructuring of production and relocation of sections of the population.
In dozens of cities in North America and Europe, the traditional manufacturing base has declined or disappeared; in Pittsburgh, for example, once the steel-making centre of the United States, the local university is now the biggest single employer. Modern manufacturing, high tech and many service industries have moved to the suburbs, and so have more affluent sectors of the population, leaving swathes of decaying city centres to the poor.
But the social segregation of the city in advanced countries is more complex than the rich moving out to the suburbs and the poor staying in the inner cities. In Paris, the process has been reversed under right-wing Gaullist Mayor Jacques Chirac: traditional working class neighbourhoods in the central east of the city are being demolished and replaced with smart new apartment blocks and offices while the local population is expelled to the austere tower blocks in the outer suburbs.
Most Western cities in the 1980s developed a complex spatial segregation, including slum areas (where the marginalised population is allowed to live), affluent suburbs, but also inner-city working-class areas generally populated by service workers — while industrial workers, like those in Sydney, have migrated to outer suburbs. Often the traditional working-class neighbourhoods (but not outright slums) become the site of gentrification as younger middle-class professionals push out the local population.
In the United States, as in most advanced countries, the "yuppie boom" of the 1980s sharply accelerated the differences in living standards between rich and poor, which together with the restructuring of production, has led to a new racial resegregation.
In the 10 largest US cities, the proportion of whites living in the metropolitan core areas has fallen drastically. In the 20 years between 1970 and 1990, the proportion of whites in inner New York fell from 75% to 38% and in Los Angeles from 78% to 37%. In Detroit only a fifth of the inner-city population is white, compared with more than 55% in 1970. The US inner city has become the redoubt of the black and Latino underclass.
Growing class and racial segregation of the city leads to an obsession with security and privatisation of space. Class segregation of public spaces has always existed for simple economic reasons — the poor never went to expensive restaurants in any case. But in a city of deepening economic inequality and rampant crime, the "public" spaces of the affluent have to be physically guarded. Rich shopping malls in Los Angeles are accessible only by car, and in some only obviously expensive cars are permitted into the parking lot. In many areas pedestrians (ie poor people) are by definition police suspects.
Even in London, a haven of tranquillity compared with major US cities, the South Chelsea estate of affluent apartments (Michael Caine has a home there) is walled in and patrolled by armed guards.
The city in advanced countries is a victim of the collapse of the postwar mixed economy and welfare state settlement. With local authorities stripped of taxes from national governments, local services go into crisis and collapse. In Detroit a hospital only 20 years old was demolished in 1992 for lack of money to keep it open.
A political shift to the right among layers of the middle classes internationally has produced strong "anti-tax" movements in many countries. Opposition to taxation was a strong element in the 19 million votes which Ross Perot got in the 1992 US presidential election; it is a vital part of the program of the Northern League which has mass support among the middle classes in key Italian cities like Milan and Turin; and it has been a permanent theme of Britain's Tory government, which has slashed local government spending to the bone. As crisis squeezes the middle classes economically, they revolt against their taxes being paid for welfare systems, "handouts" to the "lazy" poor and even key infrastructural projects like sewers and transport.
The figures for cutbacks in spending for key city projects in the US during the 1980s are amazing. Subsidised housing spending was reduced 82%, economic development assistance 78% and job training 63%. Economist Demetrios Caralay estimates that US cities lost $26 billion in federal aid in the 1980s. In the same period the US government spent $2 trillion on arms (that's a 2 with nine noughts after it!).
As US socialist writer Mike Davis puts it: "Forced to abandon redistributive programs and too broke to pave streets and sewage systems, America's pariah big cities struggle to simply pay their creditors and keep a thin blue line of cops in uniform". Britain is going the same way as the US at a rate of knots.
The way out of the crisis of the city is political. Spontaneously, in the Third World, the advanced countries and the collapsing economies of the east, it will only get worse. Driving the rural poor from the land and wrecking public services in Western cities is part of the same international economic crisis. Only by different international, national and local political structures can rational social priorities be imposed.
Change at a purely local level is fraught with difficulties, even when popular or left-wing forces capture local "power". The administration of London from 1980 to 1985 by the left-wing Greater London Council(GLC) under Ken Livingstone resulted for a period in cheap transport and the creation of around 15,000 jobs. But such gains were demolished when Thatcher's Tory government simply abolished the GLC.
The local reforms contained their own contradictions. For example, cheap fares worsened the already bad overcrowding of the London Underground train network, while the GLC lacked the cash for any substantial investment in renewing the system.
Many Brazilian cities have in the past few years been administered by the Workers Party. But lacking state power and the resources that go with it, local reforms can bring improvements to some of the worst urban problems, but not fundamental solutions. Local success stories often create their own new problems.
For example, the administration in the Brazilian town of Curitaba found that efficient transport, job creation, housing projects and an exemplary refuse recycling project led to an influx of people from other parts of the country, swamping the town and undermining the gains made.
Solutions at the level of one city can have only a limited impact in the absence of a change in political regime and social priorities nationwide.
In the Third World the first priority is land reform, which can give a stable income to peasant farmers, stemming the flight to the cities. Wealth redistribution and a decent social security system for the elderly are preconditions for reversing the trend to having large families for purely economic reasons.
Self-organisation often comes naturally to the shantytown dwellers; they have to organise things like water and electricity for themselves. This self-organisation is an immense reservoir of revolutionary potential, given socialist political leadership.
But everywhere, in advanced countries and Third World countries, the rush to pathological urbanisation will only be stopped by different political priorities, and above all by a nationally planned economy.
Socialism surely won't dismantle the cities. But over time they can be transformed and made livable.
Modern communications mean that it is no longer essential for production and living units to be piled upon one another. The ultimate barbarism portrayed in Blade Runner is just one that capitalism has in store for us, if it survives.