The transitions in developing countries of origin

The second urban transition has different implications for cities in the developing world. Several countries currently classifi ed as ‘developing’ are well on their way through both the fi rst demographic and the urban transitions. The boundary between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ is constantly changing, with an increase in the number of countries in the former category and a reduction in the number in the latter. These countries are to be found particularly in Asia, such as China, India, Malaysia and Thailand, but can also be expected in other parts of the world, perhaps South Africa, Brazil or Mexico. Hence cities at specifi c locations in the developing world are, like those in the developed world, likely to emerge with a labour defi cit.

TRANSITIONSIN A GLOBALSYSTEMAND POLICY RESPONSES 65 It might seem strange to argue that the demographic giant, China, will experience labour shortages. Nevertheless, two million job vacancies were already reported in the south-east coastal region of China in 2004 (Economist, 9–15 October 2004), and labour shortages spread north into the Yangtze River and the north coastal region in 2005 (Wang et al, 2005). To an extent, these shortages refl ect bottlenecks in the internal labour market within China for certain types of labour, but more recent evidence suggests that the shortages may have structural components as well.

China’s accession to the World Trade Organization and programmes to diffuse development more widely into the interior have created opportunities closer to the areas of origin of internal migrants. The result has been severe labour shortages in coastal regions and increases of around 25 per cent in the basic wage in Shenzhen, for example (International Herald Tribune, 3 March 2006). China will not yet be seeking to import workers from overseas, but already the era of cheap labour in China appears to be ending. China, like the other developed economies in Asia, has seen a precipitous decline in fertility, from 4.9 children per woman in the early 1970s to 1.7 in the period 2000 to 2005, and United Nations projections envisage China’s population starting to decline after 2030. That decline will lead to a slowdown in the rate of growth of the labour force and, if China follows the Japanese pattern, to a slowing in internal migration. The idea that the rural areas will be drained of their population might seem far-fetched given current levels of unemployment and underemployment in rural China. Nevertheless, the speed of economic growth and social transformation in that vast country has been astonishing, and assuming that the current growth continues – and that in itself is a big if – it is surely not inconceivable that pressures to import labour may emerge in certain cities within a generation.

However, it is clear that not all cities or countries in the developing world will necessarily follow the above pattern. In towns that began as administrative centres of external powers, with linkages back to metropolitan areas that were stronger than those to their immediate hinterlands, different patterns are likely to emerge. The fragility of post-independence economies in Africa, for example, has not allowed many of the urban areas to develop a strong production base, and they remain mainly centres of extractive industries or administration.

The economic and political crises of the 1970s and early 1980s saw rural–urban income differences contract; migration to the cities slowed and, in countries such as Ghana, a signifi cant return of migrants back to rural areas took place (Songsore, 2003, p112; Potts, 1995). Nevertheless, in Ghana, levels of urbanization increased slowly, from 29 per cent in 1970 to 32.9 per cent in 1985, despite high rates of natural increase in the towns, because of reduced rural–urban migration.

In recent years, improving economic performance in Ghana saw annual GDP growth per capita increase. The average for the period 1975 to 2003 was only 0.4 per cent per annum, but that increased to an average of 1.8 per cent per annum for the last part of that period, 1990–2003 (UNDP, 2005, p268). Ghana’s level

66 THE NEWGLOBALFRONTIER

of urbanization was estimated to have reached 47.8 per cent by 2005 (United Nations, 2006b), and its fertility had declined to 4.39 births per woman by that year. This fi gure was high by Asian standards, but down by some 34 per cent since the mid-1970s and less than the average for Africa of 4.97.

With fertility still high throughout Africa, and urbanization levels also increasing, the question must be the extent to which the continued concentration of population in towns is sustainable in the context of levels of economic growth that are low at best. The annual average growth in per capita GDP between 1990 and 2003 for sub-Saharan African countries as a whole was 0.1 per cent, and for the period 1975–2003 it was negative, at −0.7 per cent (UNDP, 2005). In this context, Ghana is one of the better performers, but for many countries the urbanization is based on very weak foundations. A reversal of migration in a period of economic downturn, as seen in the 1980s, is certainly a possibility, with any continued growth of towns largely based on natural increase. However, given the demand for labour in other parts of the world, as discussed above, and the fragility of the migration fi elds in many of these countries, it is possible that the internal movements will develop into international movements. While this conclusion is purely speculative at this stage, such an outcome would represent the origin side of the migration equation in the second urban transition as hypothesized above.

These migrations need not be primarily directed towards the cities in the present most-developed parts of the world, although some will be – they will also be targeted at the new centres emerging in Asia, the Middle East and in parts of Africa itself. Again, international migration substitutes for internal migration. Any such transition in migration need not simply be from the towns to destinations in other countries, in other words internal migrants moving into unemployment in local towns and then moving on to seek jobs in another country in a stepwise progression. Some movements will evolve directly from rural origins to international destinations, as observed in some countries in Asia (Skeldon, 2006a). In this way, many towns in the periphery of the developing world may become short-circuited from their hinterland in the second urban transition and enter a period of stagnant growth.

C

ONCLUSION

: T

HE

T

RANSITIONAND

U

RBAN

D

EVELOPMENT The evolution of this second urban transition will be predicated upon the continuation of globalization and current patterns of uneven development.

Global foreign development investment (FDI) is still very much concentrated in the developed world. Africa still accounts for only about three per cent of global FDI, with over one-quarter of that tiny proportion concentrated in North Africa.

Sub-Saharan Africa is still only tenuously linked to the global system, even if these links appear to be growing. Investments are still focused primarily on oil and other minerals, with increasing amounts coming from China. The latter’s trade with

TRANSITIONSIN A GLOBALSYSTEMAND POLICY RESPONSES 67 Africa quadrupled between 2001 and 2005 to US$40 billion, and China is now Africa’s third largest trading partner after the US and France (Furniss, 2006, p55).

However, investments in extractive activities make a weak foundation on which to build a solid urban economy.

Moreover, the importation of cheap manufactured goods from China appears likely to undermine local urban production systems. Reports are emerging that the termination of the Multi-Fibre Agreement at the end of 2004 has led to Chinese imports replacing locally produced clothing. The value of clothing and textiles in fi ve African countries fell by 17 per cent in 2005, with signifi cant job losses in Kenya, South Africa and Lesotho, as well as a reported 350,000 in Nigeria (Furniss, 2006, p58). Increased trade brings increased migration, and large numbers of Chinese traders and entrepreneurs are to be found throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

But if history teaches anything, it is that reverse migration will also occur. As China and other Asian economies move through the second demographic and urban transitions, is it too far-fetched to envisage signifi cant fl ows of African labour eastward? If programmes of temporary migration of labour give rise to later more settled migration of people, such a scenario will have signifi cant consequences for the patterns of both Asian and African urban development.

The role of the city is central in the demographic transition. Prior to the industrial revolution, towns were demographic ‘sinks’ where the populations experienced high mortality and were in constant need of replenishment by migration from surrounding areas. With the decline in mortality rates and a rise in fertility, natural increase became a more signifi cant relative component of urban growth, while migration remained important. The decline in fertility to very low levels in the post-industrial era has seen the shift back to the importance of migration as the dominant component of urban growth, but with the signifi cant difference that national reservoirs of labour have become exhausted and the migration fi eld extended to other countries. In London at the beginning of the 21st century, some 2.2 million people, or 30 per cent of the population, had been born outside of England. Of the social and linguistic groups that could be identifi ed as non-indigenous, some 50 communities had populations of 10,000 or more, and over 300 languages were identifi ed as spoken by the residents of the city. Some 36 per cent of the population of New York was foreign-born in 2000, representing 2.9 million people, again with a high degree of diversity in origin (City of New York, 2004). None of the new cities of immigration in Asia can yet match this degree of diversity or level of immigration. For example, according to Benton-Short and Price (2005), only about 2.4 per cent of the population of Tokyo may be foreign-born.

An integral part of this transition from internal to international sources of migrants is the emergence of new dynamic centres of urban development away from the traditional developed world. Beginning, and as yet still concentrated, in East Asia, such centres are emerging in parts of South Asia, Gulf States such as Dubai, parts of Latin America and even in sub-Saharan Africa, for example

68 THE NEWGLOBALFRONTIER

in South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria. The process of globalization underlies this shift. Declining fertility, slowing labour-force growth and the rising cost of labour have forced labour-intensive industries out of core industrial countries to locations overseas and laid the basis for the emergence of new urban complexes that themselves would embark upon the demographic and urban transitions.

While it is accepted that ‘[in] general terms, urban evolution seems to follow the same pattern all over the world’ (Geyer, 2002, p11), it has been argued in this chapter that there are several pathways through the transition. Signifi cant shifts in the pattern of the leading components of urban growth, fertility and migration, occur through the transition, to the extent that a distinction between a fi rst and a second urban transition seems warranted. As fertility declines, a gradual shift from national to international sources of labour occurs in the most-developed parts of the world. As the process continues to evolve, more centres emerge to compete with the early ones, and they, too, go through this transition. Given a sustained demand for labour in these cities, their migration fi elds extend ever further into the periphery and, where development remains weak, migration to local urban centres shifts to regional or even global movements, leaving the local towns short- circuited. Some whole regions in the periphery may begin to depopulate in the same way as the rural areas throughout the developed world have done, and their urban centres may stagnate.

Forecasting accurately what may or may not happen in an urban future is always fraught with diffi culty. Urbanization will continue throughout most of the world, although patterns in developed and less developed regions may differ. But any continuation into a second urban transition will depend upon the persistence of present processes of globalization, and this is by no means guaranteed. Globalism itself may collapse (Saul, 2005). The present direction of development may be unsustainable, and global warming will cause rises in sea levels that will threaten most of the global cities in the world. The evidence for such heroic speculation, however, remains weak. During the fi rst urban transition, which involved essentially internal migration to cities, policy seems to have been largely ineffectual in affecting the course of migration to cities over all but the short term. During the second transition, which involves international migration, policy will play a much more signifi cant role, as, indeed, it has done for global migration in general since the end of the Second World War (Hatton and Williamson, 2005).

Policy on international migration is the responsibility of national governments, yet it is city governments that have to administer and provide for the majority of international arrivals. One of the intriguing and as yet unknown dimensions of future policy is the relative role of metropolitan and national governments.

Whether there is collaboration or contradiction between them will determine the effectiveness of future migration management in the cities. Irregular migration to developed economies draws parallels with internal movements to cities in earlier contexts. Ultimately, the underlying economy is the driver of migration, and no

TRANSITIONSIN A GLOBALSYSTEMAND POLICY RESPONSES 69 guarantee exists that future attempts to regulate population movement to the largest cities will be any more successful than in the past.

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