China has had a long and varied urban history dating back more than 2000 years. Throughout the imperial period (221 BC‐1911 AD), the Chinese dynasties established administrative centres throughout their empire and domestic trade flourished, especially in China's major river basins. As a result, cities of different sizes were exceptionally evenly distributed across the country and most of its citizens were influenced by some kind of urban centre. In fact, even before the mid‐nineteenth century, China had the largest number of city dwellers in the world. But China's bureaucratically‐controlled and evenly‐distributed urban configuration began to change after Britain's conquest of China in the Opium War of 1842 (Whyte and Parish, 1984). Once China's treaty ports like Shanghai, Nanking, Tientsin, and Wuhan were opened to foreign trade by the British, they started to grow disproportionately as thousands of people migrated to these cities, concentrating the country's urban population in the central and coastal areas. Soon, problems like unemployment, crime, prostitution, and drug addiction reached epidemic proportions in China's rapidly expanding cities. Consequently, when the Communists took control of China's government in 1949, they were determined to decentralise the country's urban population, to restrict urban growth, and to purge big cities of the social pathologies which had plagued them since initial contact with the West one hundred years earlier. It is, therefore, interesting to analyse each of the three major periods of China's urbanisation under Communist rule up to 1982, the year of the most recent national population census — that is, 1949 to 1960, 1961 to 1976, and 1977 to 1982 — and to discuss the most salient demographic developments during each of these periods.
When the nations of Sub‐Saharan Africa won independence some twenty years ago, they faced formidable constraints on development which continue to impede their economic and social progress, despite considerable interim achievements. This article discusses five of these constraints‐internal factors based largely on historical circumstances and the physical environment: (1) underdeveloped human resources; (2) military and political conflict; (3) the colonial institutional heritage; (4) climate and geography; and (5) the twin factors of rapid population growth and expanding urbanisation. However, as an urban sociologist, the author will focus on the fifth development constraint and on the contrasting policies Tanzania and Kenya have devised in response to it. These two countries were chosen because while Tanzania is a low‐income Sub‐Saharan African nation, defined by the World Bank as one with a per capita income of $370 or less, and Kenya is a middle‐income Sub‐Saharan African nation with a per capita income exceeding $370, Tanzania and Kenya are similar in total population, being the fourth and fifth most populous nations in Sub‐Saharan Africa (Nigeria ranks first with a population of 82.6 million; Ethiopia, second, with a population of 30.9 million; Zaire, third, with a population of 27.5 million; Tanzania and Sudan essentially tying for fourth place with populations of 18 million and 17.9 million, respectively; and Kenya, fifth, with a population of 15.3 million, its closest competitors being Uganda with a population of 12.8 million and Ghana with a population of 11.3 million). Moreover, Kenya and Tanzania had the same average annual rate of population growth‐3.4 percent‐between 1970 and 1980, and their projected populations for the year 2000 are only 1 million apart – 34 million and 35 million, respectively. Even more relevant to the theme of this article, however, is the fact that by 1980 Tanzania had reached nearly the same level of urbanisation – 12 percent and 15 percent, respectively, as well as nearly the same concentration of urban population in their capital or primate cities—50 percent and 57 percent, respectively (World Bank, 1983).
Virtually all developing countries, irrespective of size and level of industrialisation, are experiencing rapid urbanisation as limited land for cultivation and growing agricultural populations continue to expel families from agricultural regions into cities and large metropolitan areas. By the year 2000, the urban population of the world is expected to grow by 1,400 million, but 1,100 million of that increase will occur in Africa as the urban population of South Asia more than doubles and that of Latin America almost doubles (United Nations Center for Human Settlements, 1984). Within the next few decades, this phenomenon will present unprecedented challenges of massive proportions to policy makers and planners in these areas of the world. Relevant to the theme of this article, the land and housing needs of low‐ income and disadvantaged groups, in particular, will become increasingly urgent. Indeed, the central characteristic of the Third World urban housing crisis is the fact that the majority of households cannot afford the cheapest legal housing plot, let alone the cheapest legal house. Thus, in the developing nations of the world, a third to three‐quarters of the largest cities' inhabitants live in residential developments consisting mainly of self‐constructed dwell‐ings on illegally occupied or subdivided land with few basic services (Satterthwaite, 1983).
During and after World War II and until fairly recent years, most American cities experienced rapid aging and physical decay, resulting in an exodus to the suburbs of their middle-class residents and in the attendant erosion of their tax bases, which made it impossible to cope effectively with a wide range of social problems. At present, however, there is considerable evidence of a rebirth of our central cities, the single most important factor contributing to this trend being the federal government's enouragement of their economic development. The differential investment and employment tax credits, expanded Economic Development Administration (EDA) and Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) funding, and related proposals in our new national urban policy promulgated in 1978 are intended to help offset the job and revenue losses resulting from central cities' outmoded manufacturing facilities and transportation systems. Moreover, this new urban policy emphasizes the importance of state governance and tax policies for the well-being of cities. Most experts agree, however, that it takes at least 20 years to effect significant changes in urban development patterns, and the ultimate test of our new urban policy will be the degree of momentum it is able to achieve and sustain over time.
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