Urbanization Past and Future

Thomas K. Park

Patrick Bond. Unsustainable South Africa. Environment, Development and Social

Protest. Pietermaritzberg: University of Natal Press, 2002. xxvi + 449 pp.
Teresa P.R. Caldeira. City of Walls. Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in So Paulo.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. xv + 487 pp.
John Friedman. The Prospect of Cities. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press,
2002. xxvi + 194 pp.
Peter Hall. Cities of Tomorrow. An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in
the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Blackwell 1995 (orig. 1988). xvi + 473 pp.
Gillian Hart. Disabling Globalization. Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xi + 385 pp.
James K. Mitchell, Crucibles of Hazard: Mega-Cities and Disasters in Transition.
Tokyo: United Nations Press, 1999. xiii + 535 pp.
Andr Raymond. Cairo. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. x + 436 pp.
Aidan Southall. The City in Time and Space. Cambridge: Cambrisdge University Press,
1998. x + 473 pp.
United Nations Settlement Program. The Challenge of Slums. Global Report on Human
Settlements 2003. London: UN Habitat, 2003. xxxiv + 308 pp.
Luigi Fusco Girard, Bruno Forte, Maria Cerreta, Pasquale De Toro, Fabiana Forte,
editors. The Human Sustainable City. Challenges and Perspectives from the Habitat
Agenda. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2003. xiii + 573 pp.

As urban populations predominate across the globe, and incrrease most rapidly in poorer
countries, urban problems and prospects have increasingly attracted attention. Southalls magnum
opus, The City in Time and Space, provides the best overall analysis to date of the history of
urbanization acrosss the globe. Southall uses a mode of production perspective to analyse the
growth of cities from the ancient world to the present and documents in excoriating detail the
exploitative dichotomy between elites and the masses at the core of city growth and decline.
Chapters deal, in order, with the pristine cities of the ancient world (pristine in conception not
hygiene), the cities of Greece and Rome, European feudal cities beginning with the decline of
Rome, Asian cities, colonial and Third World cities, and finally a lengthy and brilliant chapter on
the transformation of the city through the age of globalization. Southall's unwavering comparative
focus on urban problems and urban planning illuminates urbanization in ways that would be
simply impossible within the frame of a work on a single city. In the end, Southall proposes an
possible optimistic outcome in which urban problems could be overcome, cities converted largely
into cultural centers, population levels controlled and environmental impacts mitigated but
suggests such a world will require billions in "compensation, education, interreflexive
enculturation and mutual moral reconstruction" that could only occur under the clear threat of
apocalypse as the likely alternative. Thus his short-term gloom based on the massive and
increasing level of current problems, in good Marxist perspective, may be best interpreted as the
birth-pangs preceding the birth of a new world order.
Patrick Bonds, Unsustainable South Africa. Environment, Development and Social Protest,
is a tour de force focusing on the maladaptation of urban infrastructure in South Africa to the
needs of the majority and the reality of the local environment. Although Bond is the principle
author, all but two chapters also recognizes the co-authorship of one or more other scholars and
the broad expertise this provides may explain the extraordinarily rich and insightful detail in each
chapter despite the consistency of the prose throughout the book. The general theme of the book is
that capitalist development in South Africa from the Apartheid era to the present has been directed
at benefiting a small minority while even recently it has unscrupulously sacrificed the interests of
the poor. After the introduction the book is divided into four sections: I. An Unsustainable Legacy,
II. Unsustainable Projects, III. Unsustainable Policies, and IV. Environment, Development and
Social Protest. The second section examines in separate chapters urban planning in the cape and

Journal of Political Ecology: Reviews Vol. 10 2003 1

Thomas K. Park

the harnessing of Lesotho water for urban elites in Johannesburg. Section III critiques neoliberal
policy and its "eco-social injustice for working-class communities" in the South African context.
A second chapter focuses on privatising water and the cholera epidemics caused by depriving the
poor of an essential public good around Richards Bay Port. A third chapter discusses energy
inequity and the environmental impacts of energy policy. Section IV provides the conclusion
which suggests that both local and global conflicts over resource allocatiion and environmental
impacts should be viewed as data that can be used first to figure the lay of the land, what forces are
aligned with which positions and why, and second to use this analysis to change for the better the
impacts of the global and local captalist systems.
Caldeiras City of Walls. Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in So Paulo, though it deals
only with So Paulo addresses one of the most prominent features of large urban areas across the
globe but especially in the developing world; the rapid development of fortified enclaves or
wealthy housing surrounded by walls and defended by security personnel. The rapid proliferation
of such residences even across Africa is striking. Caldeira writes as a Brazilian trying to bridge the
gap between Brazilian public intellectual and American academic and focuses on discourse about
crime and its reflections on what might be called the de-construction of modern notions of
citizenship in response to perceptions of disorder in the urban fabric. This fascinating book details
the construction of literal and figurative walls as the rich increasingly see the poor as threatening
and the poor see the rich as criminals beyond reach of the law and both view the project of
modernity and democracy as failing. City of Walls is divided into four parts; I. The Talk of Crime,
II. Violent Crime and the Failure of the Rule of Law, III. Urban Segregation Fortified Enclaves
and Public Space and IV. Violence, Civil Rights and the Body. The first part explicates through
examples of discourse about crime how people, rich and poor, have reached the conclusion that
the classic promises of modernity may be beyond reach. The following part (three chapters) details
the excesses and failures of the police of government that have convinced people that democracy
is not working for them and that infringement of some of the rights traceable to the enlightenment
is necessary. Part Three explains how this has led to the implosion of public life (discourse and
participation) and withdrawal of the population to fragmented spaces in which they feel more
secure. The final part deals with a new discourse on crime and punishment among the public and
among public intellectuals that seems to be best understood in the frameworks set out by Foucault.
Raymonds Cairo is a translation of the original French that appeared in 1993. Its charm is
part the author's romantic attachment to his subject and part the panoramic approach which
endeavors to cover the development and transformation of Cairo from the time of the Islamic
conquest and the establishment of Fustat (642) up to the time of publication. The focus of the book
is on urban planning as response to demographic growth, environmental constraints and the urban
problems linked to a multi-ethnic and culturally pluralistic major city which always had to balance
the presence of a majority of poor and the interests of elites and the government. Raymond deals
insightfully with a host of sociological issues from Islamic law dealing with property or
citizenship to the constraints imposed by participation in the global economy on urban planning.
He is at his best, and perhaps most enthusiastic, when he describes the transformation of particular
places as inhabitants move out or in as the respond to economic and cultural factors. Raymond
does a superb job contrasting these human decisions and their sometimes unpredictable or
undesirable impacts on the urban fabric with the attempts by urban planners to rearrange the urban
space from the top down. Raymond gives us sixteen chapters divided into four parts: I.
Foundations (642-1250), II. Medieval Cairo (1250-1517), III. The Traditional City (1517-1798).
and IV. Contemporary Cairo (1798-1992). Throughout this grand sweep of history, Raymod
keeps his eye, even if it is always a little romantic, on the class structure in the city and the
problems of the poor as well as the strategies of the elites. In Cairo, even more consistently than in
other cities, the poor have always been a major factor that urban planning has never quite
succeeded in managing. They have long since taken over the cemetaries as residences and
landlords to accommodate them have long evaded construction permits and architectural safety
regulations with foreseeable consequences. Rapid growth in the second half of the 20th century
brought to the forefront the conflict between the environment and urbanization as a preference for
the more habitable fertile land and demand for red bricks for construction had major impacts on
agriculture. Urban planners have only partially diverted construction to the desert areas as urban
growth peaked at more than 4% per year in the 1960s and has continued to outpace overall
population growth in Egypt. Although Raymond presents some critical awareness of global
impacts on Cairo his theoretical position seems best described as viewing the world as neither a

2 Vol. 10 2003 Journal of Political Ecology: Reviews

 Urbanization Past and Future

grand conspiracy nor open to completely rational analysis: Egyptians are and have been engaged
in complex adaptations to changing circumstances for which apparently it serves no purpose to
engage in recrimination.
Mitchells Crucibles of Hazard: Mega-Cities and Disasters in Transition is an edited volume
that focuses exclusively on the significance of natural disasters, terrorism among other things
being explicitly excluded, for urban planning in mega cities in the modern era. There are case
studies of Tokyo (Yoshio Kumagai and Yoshiteru Najima), Seoul (Kwi-Gon Kim), Dhaka
(Saleemul Huq), Sydney (John Handmer), London (Dennis J. Parker), Lima (Anthony Oliver-
Smith), Mexico City (Sergio Puente), San Francisco (Rutherford H. Platt), Los Angeles (Ben
Wisner), and Miami (William D. Solecki) as well as introductory and concluding chapters by
Mitchell. The general theme is that the potential (and likelihood: 5-6000 deaths in Mexico City's
1985 earthquake, 6,300 deaths in Kobe's 1995 earthquake and in each case perhaps more than 100
billion dollars in damages) for massive mortality and monetary losses is both extremely high and
nowhere are cities adequately prepared. The authors focus attention on the notion of urban
sustainability from an environmental perspective and its almost complete exclusion from key
international conferences such as Habitat II held in Istanbul in 1996. They argue that there is a
strong institutional bias either toward considering Green hazards (due to industrial caused
environmental degradation) or Brown hazards (related to poverty and lack of urban services). Each
of these agendas have broad constituencies and now have regular and influential spokespersons in
international fora. Because natural disasters are less ideologically rooted in elite discourse they
appear less important even though their consequences may be as or more significant. In brief, this
may in part be due to the popularity of a politics of recrimination and the receding of a belief that
the world can be controlled.
Harts Disabling Globalization. Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa, is an
immensely sophisticated and interesting critique of globalization and its impacts in South Africa's
townships within the context of a national focus on urban areas as embodying the future. Building
on LeFebvre's ideas about the social construction of space, Hart suggests socio-spatial change,
viewed as a social construct transforming physical and social landscapes, occurs along multiple
trajectories and creates in the process places of power that might be seen as having both physical
location and social location. As the South African government under Mbeki advocates neoliberal
policies which benefit the elites it simultaneously takes positions in international fora which align
it with the poor and downtrodden. Similarly Industrialization remakes social spaces in townships
and urban areas but is itself reworked in response to global processes and this reworking in turn
reverberates on the social spaces it has constructed in South Africa and of course also transforms
the physical landscape. Urban and rural become cultural categories whose fluidity over time
reflects a discourse of spaces, social and natural. Hart suggests that the best way to conteract
globalization is to understand its multifarious influence on the remaking of social categories and
the use of this understanding to find current contradictions which can be exploited to effect
change. Disabling Globalization is divided into three parts: I. Forging Places, II. Transnational
Trajectories, and III. Post-Apartheid Possibilities. Hart, who is a specialist on Asia but a native
South African focuses on Asian investments in South Africa and their transformative impacts but
keeps his eye on the disjunctures and contradictions which might provide leverage for improving
the situation of the poor.
UN habitats The Challenge of Slums. Global Report on Human Settlements 2003 is both an
essential book for anyone interested in global urbanization and the first official UN publication to
decisively split from the orthodox neoliberal view that environmental problems in the developing
world are the fault of the poor rather than, as all but the most conservative scholars have long
argued, an effect of poor policies and poverty imposed by such policies. The book provides
statistics, graphs and data in aboundance about slums around the world. The data documents
major improvements where more enlightened policies are implemented, such as implementing
housing inspection regulations in Los Angeles to prevent landlords from obtaining excess profits
from unsafe housing, and provides numerous examples of recieved wisdom that now appears quite
misguided. The extremely broad coverage of The Challenge of Slums and the useful summaries of
key findings by city at the end make it easy to see that while major similiarities exist around the
world in terms of the basic shortage of hosing for the poor there are just as significant differences
in the social dynamics in cities on different continents. Many cities in South America share strong
perceptions of the poor as dangerous and are far along the path sketched out by Careira while key
concerns in Asian cities focus less on danger than on vulnerability, overcrowding and lack of

Journal of Political Ecology: Reviews Vol. 10 2003 3

Thomas K. Park

services with concomittant shortages of funds to ameliorate the latter problems and lack of social
will to tackle elite exploitation of the poor (who seem distinctly less politicised than their
counterparts in South America). Antagonisms against whites in Africa have little significance for
slum development outside of South Africa or Zimbabwe and nationalistic ideologies have by and
large included the majority. Though the cases of conflict in countries like Rwanda, Sudan,
Nigeria, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Uganda or the DRC reflect ethnic and religious conflicts of
major import, these do not translate into specifically intra urban issues. Thus the key concerns in
Africa remain ones of infrastructure, employment, tenure, health and environment and have not
yet developed into significant class conflict. Processes of enclave fortification in Africa are
currently focused on protection from tiny criminal minorities not protection from a perceived
criminal majority though African cities may be developing in this direction. One of the major
contributions of this book is the copious comparative data embodied in well designed graphics and
tables which document the extraordinarily rapid growth of cities outside the old industrial
countries and a multitude of figures on socio-economic conditions in those cities.
Though published in 1988, Halls Cities of Tomorrow. An Intellectual History of Urban
Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century remains one of the most insightful discussions of
urban planning on a global scale. Hall divides urban planning into a small number of types
grouped around what he considers the small number of key ideas and makes no secret of his own
preferences for the ideas derived in large part from 19th century planners with anarchist leanings
(read anarchism as against a significant role for the state not as in favor of chaos). Hall suggests
that the key inspiration for urban planning in the 19th century was the proliferation of urban slums
in the industrializing countries especially the United Kingdom and the United States. Hall
suggests that just as some initial ideas were developed changes in capitalism obviated many of the
worst problems of slums in the industrial world lessening the urgency and often displacing the
implementations to other countries. The few key concepts Hall adumbrate include the Garden City
concept of Ebenezer Howard (locally developed cities in the rural suburbs of London), the
extension of this idea to full regional planning characterized by ecological sensitivity by Patrick
Geddes, a monumental tradition of urban planning associated with the names of Georges eugne
Haussman or Ildefonso Cerda which was preoccupied with commercial boosterism or civic pride
and beloved of totalitarian regimes, Le Corbusier's solution to overcrowding which Hall abhors
but involved vertical construction with skyscrapers and even denser populations (if projected onto
a two dimensional grid). Two other streams of thought have also been critical: one emphasizing
participatory planning and the other focusing on the significance of mobility: giving rise to many
variants from commuter suburbs to utopian bicycle linked housing and productive units. Hall's
long perspective suggests that by the 1960s cities were begining to decay and all the earlier ideas
began once again to seem important and by late 20th century we were back almost where we had
been a century earlier - massive urban problems and a major need for ways to fix them but in
practice a preference for the anarchist approaches under perhaps different rubrics.
Friedmans The Prospect of Cities begins by characterizing the Habitat II conferences (La
Rochelle and Istanbul 1996) as well as a series of subsequent conferences in July 2000 (The
future of the City: URBAN 21 in Berlin and Urban Futures in Johannesburg) as overwhelmingly
dominated by an economistic neoliberal vision which characterized cities as divided into poor
cities of hypergrowth, middle-income cities with rapid growth and mature (rich country) aging
cities. The conference envisaged a world of cities competing for investment at the global level and
relegated all other differences to insignificance. Friedman recounts the failures of efforts headed
by Peter Hall and the World Commission 21 to get other issues on the table through an alternative
conference (Cities for All--Local Heroes 21--European Meeting of Urban Grassroots
Organization). Friedman goes on to discuss his own alternatives to the dominant neoliberal view
centered around the need for creative local inputs and significant autonomy at the urban level. In
Chapter 4 on transnational migration, Friedman, using Bourdieu's notion of habitus, makes a
strong case for the importance of integrating migrants into what he calls local citizenship via
special education, job training and restructuring local governance. The approach recognizes the
reality of modern cities and emphasizes the critical importance of real participation in civic affairs
if cities are to become vibrant places. In Chapter 5 (The City of Everyday Life: Knowledge/Power
and the Problem of Representation), Friedman goes on to review radical urban planning projects
(insurgent planning) which involve a broad spectrum of urban residents in creating the urban
fabric. Chapter 6 (The Good City: In Defense of Utopian Thinking), both reviews the history of
utopian or visionary urban planning and makes a case for its importance in the modern context.

4 Vol. 10 2003 Journal of Political Ecology: Reviews

 Urbanization Past and Future

The final chapter provides a thoughtful biographical review of Friedman's life as an urban planner
which gives the reader numerous examples of how particular projects come to fruition and insights
into the dynamics of the international urban planning community.
Luigi Fusco Girard et als The Human Sustainable City. Challenges and Perspectives from
the Habitat Agenda. includes 27 chapters each by different authors sorted into three sections: I. An
Environmental Approach, II. An Inclusive Approach, and III. An Integrated Approach. The nine
chapters in the first part focus on the sustainability of cities. The failures of urban policies to deal
with water, energy, waste, transport and housing are complemented by case studies of cities that
have been successful through a focus on the urban ecological footprint, ecological planning and
assessments of environmental resources, ethics and economics. The following ten chapters of the
second part emphasize governance, justice, construction and the role of business. One key theme
is the goal of creating socially inclusive cities that empower citizens to satisfy basic needs and to
partcipate in urban life. This goal is presented as a combination of Green and Brown agendas
referring to long term environmental goals and short-term environmental issues such as air or
water pollution and waste management. The final 7 chapters of the third part deal with integrating
issues of environment, cultural heritage and economics in the improvement of urban quality of
life. Each of the three parts has its own introduction (I: Pasquale De Toro, II: Maria Cereta, and
III: Fabiana Forte) and the book also has a preface by Vclav Havel, a general introduction by
Luigi Fusco Girard and a general conclusion by Bruno Forte.
This magisterial work, which includes far too many specific analyses to treat adequately in
this short space, focuses on reintroducing a human and spiritual element into urban planning.
Bruno Fortes conclusion summarizes the themes of the book as attempting to transcend the
postmodern abandonment of enlightenment values by refocusing on veritas rather than vanitas and
the need for urban development that promotes universal empowerment and community. The
totalitarian disasters of the enlightenments heirs have produced what he calls the weak thought
of postmodernism which is incapable of promoting strong ethical values and it thus falls to more
religious perspectives to bring human dignity and pluralistic community integration to the fore as
key goals in urban planning. The Human Sustainable City argues that poverty must be seen as
comprising insufficiency in a variety of forms e.g. of man-made, natural, human or social capital
and that cities as poles of civilization must be focal points in which economic development is
integrated with social and environmental justice. Every day 170,000 people move to cities and it
is estimated that the majority of humanity will be urban imminently (p.4) and that 93% of those
moving to cities in the future will move to cities of less developed countries. Girard suggests that
the great ethical challenge of the 21st century will be the reduction of poverty through the
humanization of economic development and in particular the amelioration of urban living for the
poor. Careful examination of Best Practices collated since 1996 by UN-Habitat suggest that the
most success in humanizing urban life were achieved by cities that focused on improvements in
six areas (adumbrated as ecoware/quality of natural built environment, hardware/systems of
transport and communications, finware/financial support services, orgware/ institutions of the
organization of urban life, civicware/civil infrastructure and software/skills and know-how and
innovation.
The numerous chapters give countless examples of successful projects in each of these areas
from the rehabilitation of the Medina of Fs (Radoine) to the innovative financing and the
conservation of cultural heritage in China (Jin and Zhao). Yet this volume places particular
importance on the spiritual element or an ethics of responsibility (p.391) and even discusses the
notion of spiritual capital (29 ff.) beginning with pointing out that since the 1990s major
international conferences (the U.N. Agenda 21, Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women,
Habitat Agenda, The Earth Charter and The Naples Declaration) have all emphasized the need for
respecting and promoting spiritual well-being. The Naples Declaration, included as an appendix,
has ten major clauses of which the last two are titled: 9. Towards a New Global Ethics and 10. The
Importance of the Spiritual Dimension. In the urban context, this translates to an emphasis on
making provision for cultural heritage preservation, including religious structures, and an attention
to the importance of the human dignity of all urban citizens whether through better governance or
explicit concern for social justice.
These ten books provide the reader with invaluable information for an understanding of the
history and current state of modern cities as well as the state of the art in urban planning. At the
same time they critique the overwhelming focus on basic socio-economic indicators and the
current inattention to what, other than money, makes a city interesting, livable or vibrant. They do

Journal of Political Ecology: Reviews Vol. 10 2003 5

Thomas K. Park

provide a number of approaches to improving this situation and several envisage, after
considerable time, a transition to a world less dominated by slums, poverty and environmental
disasters. Southall, for example, imagines a transition to decentralized living and production with
the aid of telecommunication systems but Caldeira imagines a long process of renegotiating civil
rights and re-empowering Brazilian public spaces before urban Brazil has any hope of mitigating
its current escalation of violence and fear. Girard et al, while envisaging disaster unless ethical and
spiritual values are prioritized, emphasize the many successful efforts that have already been made
to humanize cities.
It is probably reasonable to expect cities in different parts of the world to follow different
trajectories but even more we can, and should, hope that cities will not all end up the same and it
might even be best if they develop in different ways reflecting their multifarious cultural heritage
and their own ideas. A case might even be made for arguing that vibrant cities will provide a great
diversity of employment opportunities and not try to be mere clones of a general neoliberal
prototype. This will require rethinking the current ideas dominating aid and investment as well as
recognizing that diversity may be a better key to long term robustness and prosperity than
grinding, homogenizing, competitive emulation. Girard et al may even be correct that a new focus
on community needs to replace the individualistic ethic that has produced a post-modern
renunciation of the notion that human dignity, or anything else, could represent a universal
transcultural value.

6 Vol. 10 2003 Journal of Political Ecology: Reviews