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Mega cities

Outcomes Overview Nature, character and spatial distribution Introduction to mega cities Growth of mega cities Challenges Responses Case study 1 Case study 2 Case study 3 Revision More

Jennifer Curtis Access Asia Coordinator Professional Support and Curriculum Directorate, DET

Outcomes

The student:

H1	explains the changing nature, spatial patterns and interactions of ecosystems, urban places and economic activity
H3	analyses contemporary urban dynamics and applies them in specific contexts
H5	evaluates environmental management strategies in terms of ecological sustainability
H6	evaluates the impacts of, and responses of people to, environmental change
H8	plans geographical inquiries to analyse and synthesise information from a variety of sources
H10	applies maps, graphs and statistics, photographs and fieldwork to analyse and integrate data in geographical contexts
H12	explains geographical patterns, processes and future trends through appropriate case studies and illustrative examples.

Extract from Stage 6 Geography syllabus. © Board of Studies NSW 1999.

Overview

This unit requires you to investigate geographically the ways individuals, communities and government and non-government organisations are managing the challenges of living in mega cities in the developing world. Investigation from a variety of primary and secondary sources, including case studies and illustrative examples, should enable you to explain and evaluate traditional and innovative urban management strategies employed to protect and improve the quality of life for the majority of urban dwellers in the developing world.

Mumbai (India) - housing

The nature, character and spatial distribution of mega cities

The 20th century has been called the age of urbanisation. At its commencement, the world was predominately rural; only 8% of the population lived in urban settlements. By 1950, the percentage had risen to 29% and by 1990 to 45%.
In the 21st century more people now live in urban areas than in rural areas. In the last decade of the 20th century, an increase of 83% of the global population occurred in towns and cities.
(graph - Urban population growth in less developed and more developed countries)

Historically, the world's largest cities have been in Asia and Africa. It is only in the late 19th and 20th century that the large cities in Europe and North America predominated. It is estimated that by 2015 the cities of the developing world will contain 3.2 billion of the world's estimated 4.1 billion urban dwellers. Indeed, the growth rates of urban population in the developing countries are such that they will contain the mega cities of the future.

Introduction to mega cities

"The United Nations coined the term mega cities in the 1970s to designate all urban agglomerations with a population of eight million or more. In the 1990s, the United Nations raised the population threshold to 10 million, following the practice of institutions such as the Asian Development Bank. From this definition, the United Nations estimates that there are 19 mega cities at the world in the beginning of the 21st century."
Source: "An Urbanizing World" Population Reference Bureau Bulletin Vol.55, no.3

According to the syllabus however, mega cities are very large agglomerations of at least eight million inhabitants. The United Nations listed 22 mega cities of the developing world in 2000 with a population of eight million inhabitants or more. The mega cities listed are:

• Mexico City
• Lima
• Buenos Aires
• Rio de Janeiro
• Sao Paulo
• Lagos
• Cairo
• Istanbul
• Tehran
• Karachi
• Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay)
• Bangalore
• Delhi
• Calcutta (now known as Kolkota)
• Bangkok
• Dhaka
• Shanghai
• Tianjin
• Beijing
• Seoul
• Metro Manila
• Jakarta.

(These mega cities of the developing world are the examples that you need to focus on for the HSC.)

Spatial distribution of mega cities

Growth of mega cities

Urbanisation is not a new trend; the rise and fall of great cities has been part of civilisation's cyclical history. The changes in patterns of urbanisation that continue today have created new challenges for all.

The increase in population of mega cities comes both from internal growth as a result of national population increases, relating to improvements in health care and sanitation, as well as from migration from rural areas, smaller towns and other cities or nations. People's perception of economic opportunities, particularly employment, is the major "pull factor" to cities. There are also a number of "push factors" related to rural to urban migration, ranging from environmental problems to natural disasters.
Graph - Urban and rural population growth

In 1950, there were only 10 cities of five million people or more in the world. Half of these were in western industrialised countries. Today, there are 19 mega cities with a population of 10 million people or more, including the ones listed previously. But there is only one city in the developed world (New York) within the ten most populous. The rest are in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Challenges

The process of urbanisation presents enormous challenges to governments, social and environmental planners, architects, engineers and the inhabitants of the world's cities.

Many countries in the developing world lack the legal and financial capacity to deal with rapid urbanisation, and particularly the speed of growth of mega cities.

London took 150 years to increase its population from one million to eight million people. Mexico City grew from one million to over 15 million people in just 50 years.

This increasing population in cities creates demand, in areas such as housing and services, that governments in those countries are often unable to meet. Urban policies, productivity and planning are more issues confronting mega cities today.

Environmental degradation and poverty are another two concerns, and this is coupled with the fear that the poor and powerless communities are displaced to make way for new roads and buildings for the rich.

Kolkota street

In every aspect of city life the density of population, availability of land, housing, slums and squatter settlements, municipal services, open spaces, the scale and character of migration, employment, traffic and transport, communications, crime, energy, waste disposal, atmospheric pollution and finance are the prevailing conditions at present facing mega cities.

Tehran garbage collection

Indeed, serious issues of urban poverty and deteriorating urban environments confront Asian, Pacific, African and Latin American cities.

Over half of the poor in Latin America, Europe and Central Asia now live in urban areas. Furthermore, the World Bank has estimated that 25% of all urban dwellers live in poverty and it is estimated that by 2025, two-thirds of the poor in these regions and one-third to one-half of the poor in East and South Asia will reside predominately in cities.

Responses to the challenges

Individuals, communities and governments, both local and national, have responded to the challenges created by the population explosion in mega cities in a variety of ways. They range from planned management to aided self-help management and to unaided self-management.

Examples of planned management are listed below:

1. Closed-city policies. Migrants must show evidence that they have a house and a job to obtain a residence permit or they must return to their place of origin. Mega cities in China are examples of this although the government has relaxed the policies somewhat in recent times.
2. Satellite towns. New towns on the periphery of mega cities are constructed to be self-sufficient in employment, housing, retailing, education facilities and services. Mexico City is a good example of the growth and development of satellite towns.
3. Growth corridors called desakota or kota dessai,. These corridors are planned along transport lines and contain a mixture of agricultural, industrial, service and residential activities in an urban environment. Bangkok has, for example, the Eastern Seabord Industrial expansion.
4. Family planning. Programs of contraception, education and job creating, especially for women, are aimed at reducing the birth rate in mega cities. Bangkok is also a good example of programs for family planning, HIV and AIDS preventative measures. Cabbages and Condoms is a restaurant in central Bangkok run by the Family Planning Department with the profits exclusively for the purchasing of condoms. Similarly, there has been a strong advertising campaign, not dissimilar to the Australian campaign, promoting the use of safe sex.
   
   Bangkok poster
   
   
   
5. Job creation. Where the attraction of investment by the formal sector in business expansion creates employment. This may be directed into import substituting businesses or into export orientation by adding value to local resources. Mega cities involved in the employment by export-oriented development include Bangkok, Mumbai and Kolkota.
6. Infrastructure provision. Which requires investment in physical and social infrastructure to attract businesses.

Because local and national governments lack financial resources, international authorities, including the World Bank and the IMF have been called upon to invest in planned management, but their solutions have often been expensive, technically inappropriate and costly to maintain.

Increasingly, communities and governments are realising that small-scale and inexpensive schemes, employing the resources of local communities, are more appropriate and more successful in responding to the challenges of living in mega cities.

Examples of aided self-help management are listed below:

• Government assisted upgrading services, such as water, sanitation, electricity, tarred roads, schools and establishing legal tenure.
• Servicing new land that is subdivided into housing plots.
• Core housing erection, comprising a simple concrete structure with water and sanitation that can be completed by the occupier.
• Granting self-government to local communities so that they can coordinate their own resources and prioritise their activities
• Non-government organisations may volunteer or be called upon to provide practical technical aid or financial management assistance to help local communities establish schemes to improve their own living environments.

When these forms of management are not established, a situation of "no management" forces urban dwellers to act on their own.

Examples of unaided self-management are listed below:

• Urban protest to publicise their problems and force governments to establish some form of urban management.
• Spontaneous community development projects to build their own facilities through the informal sector.
• Negotiations with formal business' to help in the provision of infrastructure.

Unaided self-management is valuable in creating employment, generating incomes and providing opportunities to develop skills, experience and leadership which can be used in both the formal and informal sectors, as well as building communities to cope with future challenges created by living in mega cities.

Case study 1

Children in the informal sector in developing countries in Asia

It is estimated that Asia has 45 million working children between 10 and 14 years of age. Of that total, 22.6 million or 50% are in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Iran).

Occupations in the informal sector in which children are employed include vendors (sellers) of many types of goods, shoeshine boys, porters, bidi-rolling (country made cigarettes), brick making, stone breaking, cleaning and washing cars, domestic work, trafficking drugs, scavenging, begging, sexual exploitation, carpet weaving, gem polishing, brassware and glass making.

Some of the everyday problems these children face are unhygienic atmospheric conditions or work environment, harassment and abuse from employers, physical and economic exploitation and lack of education or any protection. Chronic poverty is largely to blame for the extent of child labour. Simply to help their families survive, many children go to work in the informal sector.

Many governments have made only half-hearted attempts to reduce child labour. Children are used as cheap substitutes for adult workers. They reduce labour costs and help employers maintain competitive advantages, even at the international level. Child labour reduces the cost of goods that can earn foreign exchange, a huge amount of which is used to buy military equipment.

The solution for governments is to take adequate measures to remove poverty, the root cause of child labour. Until this situation changes, measures should be taken to improve the working and living environment of the children. Society and the international community must cooperate in this cause. What is being done?

International action

The ILO (International Labor Organisation), UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund), Anti-Slavery Society and the Minority Rights Group have been actively engaged in the welfare and development of working children. International labour conferences have adopted a series of conventions prohibiting the employment of children under a certain age and regulating working conditions in some occupations. But, no international action can replace action taken by state and national governments. They will act only when they see the urgency of the problem.

International cooperation

International assistance (Ausaid) to provide schools, hospitals, roads, irrigation, power and safe drinking water will help improve the quality of life and reduce poverty and thus reduce child labour. The international community should ban articles made with child labour and insist that exporters certify that goods (i.e. carpets) are not made with child labour.

The role of national governments

The tragic practice of child labour can only be abolished through sustained efforts to remove poverty and improve living standards. Immediate measures should be taken to regulate and humanise child labour and to create conditions for their normal physical and mental development.

Case study 2

Water supply in Bangkok

Bangkok's water supply situation is unsatisfactory. Only about 66% of the people have access to piped drinking water from within the city, with 8% of people having piped water from outside, 6% from wells and 20% from other sources, e.g. vendors. A major problem is the overuse of ground water as a source of supply. As much as 1,000 square kilometres of land in the southern and eastern suburbs have been sinking at a rate of 5-10 cm per year, much worse than Venice at its worst.

One of the major challenges faced in Bangkok is the extensive seasonal flooding. Several factors have combined to contribute to this flooding problem:

• widespread subsidence of the land
• location of the city in the lower reaches of the Chao Phraya River Basin
• problems of urban run-off
• overflows from the river
• high spring tides in the Gulf of Thailand
• obstruction of natural drainage due to converting canals into roads.

The response of the government has been to introduce projects to provide adequate internal drainage and storage capacity, large-scale dyking and pumping facilities, extension and improvement of the existing canal and drainage system and the construction of flood barriers.

Water supply in Jakarta

Jakarta has severe shortages of adequate drinking water. Less than 25% of the city's population receives clean piped water. Eighty per cent of the city's residents use underground water and thus the reserves are being quickly depleted. Wells have to be dug increasingly deeper to obtain portable water. Serious land subsidence has resulted which has made suburbs in the north of the city particularly susceptible to flooding. This land subsidence has also allowed sea water to seep inland some 15 km, polluting wells in the city and undermining some high-rise buildings. Untreated water is very badly polluted.

The government response has been to establish the Safe Drinking Water Company. Through its Five Year Planning programs the department has taken steps to repair damaged pipes, raise dam capacity, extend the water supply network, install more hydrants in populated areas and supply water in mobile tanks to suburbs which cannot be serviced.

Seoul, Dhaka, Karachi, Delhi, Kolkota and Mumbai are all mega cities in Asia with similar severe water supply problems.

Case study 3

The problem of urban infrastructure in mega cities in Asia

Generally, the condition of infrastructure facilities in many mega cities throughout the world is poor, the services provided are inferior and the financing systems are inadequate. This results in the quality of life being diminished.

Substantial investments in infrastructure have not been made in the past 15 years by national, regional and local governments, private firms and non-government organisations around the world. Individuals are most affected because they have fewer acceptable options.

Business production costs rise as firms contend with inadequate infrastructure or install their own capacity. Other consequences of poor service delivery include congestion, environmental degradation and poor health conditions. The critical and most immediate problems facing mega cities in developing countries are the health impacts of urban pollution that derive from inadequate water, sanitation, drainage and solid waste disposal services, poor urban and industrial waste management and air pollution.

The solutions require each city to embark on an environmental management strategy and action plan specific to the city. There is no one overall solution strategy applicable to all mega cities. However, five key policy areas are identified as requiring emphasis, if responses to the problems of inadequate infrastructure are to be addressed. These are:

• mobilising public support and participation
• choosing policy instruments which will change behaviour, relieve conflicts and encourage cooperative efforts
• building local institutional capacity
• strengthening urban service delivery and
• increasing local knowledge about the environment.

Education is crucial to finding appropriate and adequate responses from the majority of the city's population.

Revision

1.	What is a mega city? (H1)
2.	Describe the growth and spatial distribution of mega cities in the developing world. (H1, H10)
3.	Give examples of mega cities with specific environmental challenges. Offer responses to these challenges from a government and non-government perspective. (H5, H6, H12)
4.	What are some of the problems and concerns faced by non-government organisations when they become involved in projects relating to the issues of mega cities? (H6)
5.	What will be the global biophysical effect of the increase in the number of mega cities throughout the world? (H1, H6, H8)

More

New Internationalist Issue 276
http://www.newint.org/issue276/editor.html

Brave new world: housing and homelessness explores the processes generated by social, political and cultural interactions within the city. The site is particularly useful for the challenges and responses of mega cities including the street children of Brazil and squatters in India. Links to other New Internationalist issues are available at this site.

The Mega Cities Project
http://www.megacitiesproject.org/default.asp

The Mega Cities Project is a trans-national non-profit network of people who share innovative responses to the challenges of urban living. Its aim is to make cities more socially accountable and ecologically sustainable. The Mega Cities Project site also provides useful information about the character and spatial distribution of mega cities that is directly linked to the syllabus.

The Latin American Mega-City - an introduction
http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu23me/uu23me03.htm

This site has excellent information and statistics on the challenges faced by people living in the mega cities of Latin America. It includes definitions of mega cities, demographic trends, contemporary issues, management and case studies of a number of Latin America mega cities such as Mexico City and Lima.

Living in Asian Cities
http://www.unescap.org/pdd/prs/ProjectActivities/Prior2003/living/living_index.asp

This is an excellent article published by the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. The article titled: Where we come from: historical perspective and major trends gives examples of responses to challenges in the cities of the Asian region. For example, the satellite town development of Chandigarth in India is looked at in terms of urban development policies and programs. The article has a particularly good chronological timeline of events in a number of countries including India that you may be able to utilise in your extended responses.