Who will live in the countryside?
I was struck by a sentence in the World Bank’s recent announcement of a knowledge sharing partnership with USC.
“In East and South Asia, one-third to one-half of the poor will reside in cities or towns by 2025.”
Describing the population as a proportion of a whole (the poor) without enumerating the whole (#?) makes it hard to know how many poor will be living in those foretold mega-cities, and it is unclear if these poor have always been in cities, or are people who have left the countryside for the city. But given that the announcement goes on to talk about “the sheer pace of urbanization overtaking capacities,” we can presume that the plan is that all the new poor in the cities are thought to be coming from the countryside.
But why? In all the forecasts of urbanization in East and South Asia--of its speed, its scale, and its effect on the environment--there is never a discussion of what is driving this exodus from the countryside. Because if it were steady, wage employment there wouldn’t be the concomitant fear that urbanization turns a city into a slum. Bill McDonough has famously and repeatedly 1,2,3,4... said that China must build housing for 400 million people in 12 years (2005-2017). But he never discusses why all those people are coming.
I sometimes wonder if all the predictions about the scale of urbanization in China, and East and South Asia, are less based on extensive demographic analysis and projections of employment opportunity growth, and more words that seek to create a world in their image. If we say it, they will build it, and if we build it, they will come. But, again, why? Why would people want them to come?
Isn’t anyone else worried that these predictions, and pursuits, of urbanization may be too much in hand with large-scale dispossession of small-holders’ lands? That we are witnessing the making of another working-class, as small farmers and rural residents are dispossessed of their land through the pursuit of the profits promised by consolidated, corporate farms? It is noteworthy that as the promises of rapid urbanization came to the fore in China, policies to encourage the consolidation of small land holdings and their lease or sale to a corporation were already being tested.
25 February 2009 4:49 PM
Unintended Signals
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