Poverty, Inequality, and Social Segregation in Cities (PDF)

POVERTY, INEQUALITY, AND SOCIAL SEGREGATION - Alan Gilbert THIS chapter considers the quality of life and social relations in urban areas across the globe. Given its ambitious remit, discussion is limited to five themes that I regard to be highly significant: poverty inequality segregation crime and...

POVERTY, INEQUALITY, AND SOCIAL SEGREGATION - Alan Gilbert THIS chapter considers the quality of life and social relations in urban areas across the globe. Given its ambitious remit, discussion is limited to five themes that I regard to be highly significant: poverty inequality segregation crime and violence urban governance I will start with a generalization: the quality of most people’s lives over the last couple of centuries has generally improved and progress has been integrally linked to urbanization. Of course, urban growth has always created problems and some would argue that the quality of life for most people in the cities of sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent today is as bad as that in British cities of the past. As Davis puts it: ‘There is nothing in the catalogue of Victorian misery, as narrated by Dickens, Zola or Gorky, that doesn’t exist somewhere in a Third World city today.’ QUALITY OF LIFE AND POVERTY: DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CITIES AND REGIONS In the past, life in most cities across the world was fairly similar. Most people worked as artisans, servants, or trades people until the Industrial Revolution changed daily routines for many. Cities were densely populated because defensive considerations meant that most people lived within the city walls. And even when defence became less of a concern the lack of urban transport meant that most people had little choice but to live within walking distance of their work. It was not until the 1880s in London, and much later elsewhere, that cheap urban transport became available. Most cities were dirty and disease-ridden and lacked most essential public services. Of course, cities differed from one another in many respects. The Middle-Eastern city with its medina was very different from the layout of the Spanish colonial city with its grid-iron road plans and formal design. But everywhere, while the urban rich and powerful lived well, most of the poor lived in deplorable conditions. ‘Life expectancies in the urban centres of north-west Europe appears to have been mostly below the low 20s before the 19th century. Attempts at cutting disease and pestilence sometimes contributed to a worsening of living conditions. New public works and destruction of the notorious ‘rookeries’ or slums of inner London, for example, only increased housing densities for the very poor. Britain might have led the world in the 1850s but that did not bring many benefits for the urban majority. Today, however, there is a clear correlation between levels of economic development and the quality of urban life. Mercer Consulting’s survey of cities across the world shows that in 2010, every one of their seventy most liveable cities was located in rich countries. The best cities of Africa, Asia (outside Japan and Singapore), or Latin America only achieved a ranking in the eighth decile: Hong Kong, San Juan (Puerto Rico), Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo. All of the ‘worst’ cities were located in poor countries and the bottom ten cities in the list of 221 included Brazzaville, Port au Prince, Khartoum, N’Djamena (Chad), and Bangui (Central African Republic). Urban poverty and poor living conditions are a symptom of low levels of development In comparison to the past it is difficult to argue that the prevalence of poverty has increased in the contemporary era. In 19th-century cities, the majority lived in what today we would regard as poverty. Large numbers lacked an adequate diet, disease was rampant, there was often no source of fresh water, and housing was often overcrowded. If urban poverty was not worse it was because most poor people continued to live in the countryside. Technology has brought many advances. The railway reduced the danger of famine in the Indian subcontinent, the last global pandemic, Spanish flu, was in 1918, today there is better access to drinking water and most of the poor can look at television and talk into a mobile phone. Virtually everyone lives a longer life. Nevertheless, in 2005 some 1.4 billion people subsisted on less than US$1.25 a day, the vast majority of whom were living in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia and the Pacific. As a result, ‘over three-quarters of a billion people… are malnourished’. And, even if the incidence of poverty worldwide is in decline, urban poverty is increasing. This is a direct consequence of urban growth. Between 1800 and 2010, the world’s population increased from around 1 billion to almost 7 billion and, in the process, half of its inhabitants became city dwellers. As a result, even if a smaller proportion today lives in poverty and the severity of that poverty has diminished, contemporary cities contain far more poor people than ever before However, blame for the increase in urban poverty should not be attributed to the process of urbanization, for it is clear that poverty is far more pervasive in the countryside. If anything migration has helped to reduce poverty in rural areas. The difference between urban and rural living standards is why so many people over the years have moved from the countryside to the cities. While at times that movement has been accelerated by war or civil violence, economics is the prime motivation behind migration. More work is available in the cities and most of it is better paid. That does not mean that everyone is better off in the city and in some countries a significant, and sometimes growing, urban minority is living in acute poverty. Many poor people live in difficult conditions. Most self-help settlements in urban Africa and South Asia lack supplies of potable water and few have access to any kind of sanitation. Decent shelter is scarce and overcrowding is a chronic problem. As one horrified journalist reported: ‘In a squeezed square mile on the south-western outskirts of Nairobi, Kibera is home to nearly one million people—a third of the city’s population. Most of them live in one-room mud or wattle huts or in wooden or basic stone houses, often windowless… The Kenyan state provides the huge, illegal sprawl with nothing—no sanitation, no roads, no hospitals. It is a massive ditch of mud and filth, with a brown dribble of a stream running through it’ Fortunately, the urban majority rarely live in such awful conditions. Urban poverty in most poor cities is not as ubiquitous as the media suggest. Few poor people die on the streets although many suffer from inadequate diets, insecure incomes, and the perpetual threat of ill health. However, some of these problems are no longer confined to cities in poor countries. Urban poverty is present today in countries with relatively high GDP incomes. The disappearance of the state support system in Russia in the 1990s led to widespread distress, and the plight of so many after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005 confirmed that poverty is thriving in US cities. The combination of structural economic change, immigration, and globalization is creating poverty in the most unexpected places. INEQUALITY Most pre-modern cities consisted of a rich elite and a vast impoverished working population. Modernization gradually changed that picture by creating a substantial middle class and, in many developed countries, state intervention and the introduction of modern technology in the 20th century helped to improve living conditions for the poor. Progressive taxation wider access to education the gradual introduction of public services the emergence of a welfare state all contributed to the transformation. If many societies became more equal during the 20th century, the gap between countries and therefore cities in those countries grew. According to the World Bank, ‘while the world got richer, income inequality —relative and absolute, international and global—increased tremendously over a long period of time (1820– 1992). Since World War II, the gap between the richest and poorest countries in the world has widened enormously. ‘Measured as the ratio of average incomes in the industrialised and developing countries, they have risen from roughly 30:1 at the end of World War II, to 60:1 in the 1970s, to over 90:1 now Yet over the last half-century many once poor countries have gained ground on the North and some, such as Singapore, have even joined the ranks of the rich. Thus, while the gap between say Europe and Africa has widened, the emergence of an intermediate group of middle-income countries has made the old North–South gap much less meaningful. In the process, many fortunes have been made by entrepreneurs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Of the 85,400 ‘ultra-rich’ people in the world in 2005, who collectively owned 24 per cent of the world’s wealth, 15,400 were based in Asia/Pacific, 7,700 in Latin America, 3,400 in the Middle East, and 1,700 in Africa. In poor countries inequality is manifest by the gap between living standards in urban and rural areas (see Table 36.1). Increasingly, however, the greatest disparities in wealth are found within cities. Inequality is becoming particularly marked in fast growing cities of the South. But it is clear that inequality is growing almost everywhere. In Mumbai, London or São Paulo, the very rich live, at least figuratively, side by side with the poor. In Britain, Dorling claims that: ‘over the course of the last 30 years… growing financial inequality resulted in large and growing numbers being excluded from the norms of society, and created an expanding and increasingly differentiated social class suffering a new kind of poverty: the new poor, the excluded, the indebted. EXPLANATIONS OF CHANGING PATTERNS OF POVERTY AND INEQUALITY Many believe that the process of globalization has driven most forms of economic and social change over the last thirty or so years. ‘Globalization, simply put, denotes the expanding scale, growing magnitude, speeding up and deepening impact of transcontinental flows and patterns of social interaction. It refers to a shift or transformation in the scale of human organization that links distant communities and expands the reach of power relations across the world’s regions and continents.’ Technological change in computing, transport and communications, and the development of the silicon chip are at the centre of that process. The new geography of production Globalization has brought investment to areas that had previously been starved of capital. Manufacturing production has boomed in China and South East Asia and along the US–Mexico border. Call-centres have grown in some parts of India. The world geography of agriculture has changed; Vietnam is now the world’s second largest exporter of coffee and Colombia the second exporter of cut flowers. In many places, particularly in Asia, globalization has created new jobs and urban poverty has declined. At the same time, this process has often created unemployment elsewhere, for instance in the cities of Western Europe. Of course, many cities have been unaffected by the shifts in production because they have never been greatly involved in the world economy. Financial capital flows Globalization has led to much larger flows of capital moving across the world. The mechanization of stock markets, the creation of electronic markets, and the ability to transfer huge sums of money at the click of a mouse have facilitated capital flows and arguably increased economic instability. Property booms and busts, exaggerated commodity trade cycles, and currency speculation have created huge profits for a few in London and Wall Street and an uncertain future for the majority. Technological change has transformed the nature of work Fewer hands are needed to produce food or cars, mine coal, or to fill out invoices. However, more are needed to programme the computers, design new products, and advertise the vast flow of new services and manufactured goods becoming available. Fewer jobs are available for the old ‘blue-collar’ class of manufacturing worker and public sector employee. Those with lower education levels and skills are reduced to finding poorly paid work in the booming urban service sector. The earnings gap between the skilled and the unskilled is widening. These tendencies are most marked in so-called ‘global cities’ like London and New York but they are also apparent in places like Bangalore or Silicon Valley in California. The movement of people Globalization has allowed people to move in increasing numbers from poorer to more affluent countries. Vast numbers of Latin Americans have moved to North American cities, Africans, South Asians, and Turks to Western European cities, Indians and Pakistanis to the booming centres of the Middle East, and so on. In 2005, an estimated 191 million people were living in a country other than the one in which they were born, some 3 per cent of the world’s population. Almost one in ten people living in developed countries is now a migrant; in Switzerland one in six. The majority are condemned to low-paid work. Most of the office cleaners, bus drivers, and supermarket workers in central London are immigrants. The international movement of people has deprived many poor countries of desperately needed skills, for example, in health care. On the other hand, those countries have benefited from the remittances of those working abroad. More than one-quarter of the GDP of Jordan, Lesotho, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Tonga is made up of remittances and many households in Havana survive on the basis of the dollars they receive from kin living in the United States. Remittances reduce inequalities between countries but increase them internally. Neoliberalism Since the late 1970s, Keynesianism has given way to neoliberalism. In North America and to a growing extent in Europe, controls over multinational capital were loosened, tax rates on corporations and the wealthy lowered, and the social rights of the poor reduced. After 1980, multinational corporations prospered and their share of world production and trade grew enormously. Equity was no longer a principal goal of public policy. The post-war welfare state, based on progressive taxation and a belief that governments should protect and nurture everyone in society, was no longer accepted wisdom. After 1980, most governments interpreted their primary role as one of helping to accelerate economic growth. These shifts in attitude were bound to increase inequality. Population growth Had sub-Saharan Africa’s population not expanded from 243 million in 1965 to 865 million in 2010, that region would probably have been less poor. If too much emphasis in the 1960s and 1970s was put on population growth as a cause of poverty, it is still an important factor. After all, ‘high population growth leads to deeper poverty, and deeper poverty contributes to high fertility rates.’ In short, many different processes have contributed to a change in the way that the world economy operates. If that change has brought benefits to some once-poor countries, it has also led to the growth of inequality within countries and in virtually every city across the globe. And since well over 3 billion people live in urban areas the consequences of that inequality affect half of the world’s population. SOCIAL SEGREGATION: TRENDS AND PROCESSES European colonization created divided cities. Delhi, for example, was ‘built for two different worlds, the “European” and the “native”; for the ruler and for the ones that were ruled’. Most British, French, and Dutch colonial cities were similar. The European quarters demonstrated how the colonizers thought proper cities should be designed; the colonized lived in ‘unplanned’ areas and were generally left to their own devices. In North Africa the colonial authorities built new residential areas for the Europeans while Arab communities remained in the medina. Where the city was home to more than one set of ‘inferior’ people, elaborate rules were sometimes devised to keep the groups apart. In British Singapore, separate quarters were demarcated for Europeans, Chinese, Indians, Malays, and Buginese; in Dutch Batavia at least fifteen distinct tribal districts were established. One aim of urban planning was to keep the colonizers safe from tropical diseases—the so-called ‘sanitation syndrome’. But there were less laudable aims. In Africa, the ‘colonial authorities saw each opportunity to influence spatial form and function as an occasion not only to solidify their grip and control over the colonized but also an opportunity to reaffirm preconceived notions of European supremacy and power. But colonialism was not the only explanation for modern urban segregation. In some Islamic cities, different ethnic groups had gathered over the years: ‘the immigration of homogenous migrant groups (military units, members of the ruling class, transferred populations, refugees), mass regrouping within cities (e.g. the Jewish mellahs) and population movements on an individual basis, where clustering may be related to immigration patterns, family establishment patterns, differences in customs or mutual distrust, the presence of holy sites, or socio-economic status. When independence finally came to Africa and Asia, the only real change to the housing pattern was that some of the new rulers moved into the older European quarters. Most ethnic groups continued to live separately Ethnic and racial segregation is common in many contemporary cities around the globe although it is more marked in the United States and South Africa than elsewhere. African Americans constitute most of the population in the poorest areas of US cities because most white people choose to live elsewhere. And, in South Africa, even though apartheid has been condemned to legal history, its cities are still highly segregated along racial lines. Elsewhere segregation has sometimes been in decline. In Britain, for example, it is claimed that ‘Ghettos on the American model do not exist and, despite an unfavorable economic position and substantial evidence of continuing discrimination, the segregation trend amongst the Black Caribbean population in London is downwards. Racial segregation owes at least as much to differences in income by race as it does to outright discrimination. In Brazil, the favelas have long been racially mixed whereas its affluent areas have never been anything but white. In southern Africa most black people are poor, most white people are not. The clear correlation between residential segregation and income is troubling given that income disparities are generally increasing. In the United States: ‘after 1973, labour unions withered, the middle class bifurcated, income inequality grew and poverty deepened. This new stratification in the socio-economic sphere was accompanied by a growing spatial separation between classes in the spatial sphere. As income inequality rose so did the degree of class segregation, as affluent and poor families increasingly came to inhabit different social spaces.’ Saskia Sassen has claimed that inequality and segregation are especially marked in ‘global’ cities like New York, Tokyo, and London because of their reliance on financial and business services rather than manufacturing; the latter generating a more equal distribution of income than the new service sector. Fortunately, relatively few of the world’s urban population live in such global cities. Across the world, however, widening differences in purchasing power increasingly affect where people live. The rich live in leafy suburbs or elite central neighbourhoods, the poor live wherever they can, often in the suburban shanty towns that dominate so many poor cities in the world today. True, some cities are less segregated than others. In Japan, ethnic discrimination is less apparent largely because there are rather few immigrants. But there are also fewer class divides than elsewhere. In Japan a household’s social standing is based more on the man’s job and on the family’s social reputation than on the quality of their residence or the urban neighbourhood where they live. In some cities, the state or municipality has sought to reduce urban segregation and shelter problems by building social housing. For many years Communist cities lacked the economic divisions found in capitalist societies and vast areas of apartment blocks were built to offer everyone a decent home. In most advanced capitalist societies, efforts to improve the living conditions for the poor through social housing projects were much less successful and seldom led to real integration. Indeed, the social problems facing many French cities today stem from the separation of Arab immigrant families into public housing estates, spatially divorced from their more prosperous, usually white, French ‘neighbours’. Similarly, Cape Town is scarred by the legacy that apartheid left in the form of racially distinct public housing areas. The new neoliberal approach to helping the poor, through providing capital subsidies for home ownership, has replicated this pattern of social division. In Chile, effective targeting has grouped very poor households into the same, specially constructed, neighbourhoods. These areas are usually located in the least desirable areas of the city, which means it is extremely difficult to sell homes there and few families will ever manage to leave. In South Africa too, new subsidized housing has generally been located on cheap land miles away from the city centre. Elsewhere, suburbanization and urban sprawl have accentuated residential segregation. Improvements in public transport and the growth in car ownership have allowed cities to spread, and different classes now often live a long way apart. So-called gated communities, with their ‘walled condominiums, apartment buildings guarded by security towers, private policing, “armed response”, and so on’ represent an extreme version of this segregation. The appeal of these estates is that their inhabitants feel safe from crime and from the more unsavoury aspects of urban life. The walls and gates that surround the communities ‘prevent people from seeing, meeting and hearing each other; at the extremes, they insulate and they exclude’. People of every social class seem to be ‘walling and gating’. ‘Today one finds public housing projects in the United States, middle class suburbs, upper-middle class enclaves, retirement communities, with walls of various sorts around them, or with the equivalent measures designed to provide physical protection against social dangers.’ Poor communities in Bogotá and Santiago sometimes build walls or erect fences around their settlements in an attempt to keep crime and violence at bay. Similarly, with or without walls, ethnic and religious groups have long sought ways to live together. The desire to live close to synagogues or mosques has encouraged some Jewish and Muslim people to congregate in particular areas. Other cultural factors have also encouraged communities to live apart. In Britain, while employment and housing processes have forced the Pakistani community to concentrate: ‘The Muslim religion, language, halal dietary requirements, cousin marriages and Punjabi or Kashmiri village orientations, favour strong network contacts which are preserved by geographical proximity.’ The extent of outright discrimination on the basis of skin colour or religion has probably fallen over time in most cities, particularly over the last half-century but segregation according to income has become more important than ever. With rising inequality and increasing size, the urban rich and poor may well interact socially less than before. At the same time, it is doubtful whether in developed countries there is a growing group of urban outcasts marginalized by society. Cities have long been divided by religion, ethnicity, language, income, and social class and will continue to be so. CRIME, FEAR, AND VIOLENCE Statistically crime rates are not closely correlated with urbanization rates. Highly urbanized Europe is reasonably free of crime but less urbanized Latin America and South Africa are not. In any case, much crime is committed in rural areas and often the worst examples of pillage and genocide are carried out in the countryside, for example, in Colombia and Darfur. If the degree of urbanization is a poor guide to criminality, so is the size of city. While Los Angeles, New York, and Rio de Janeiro have high crime rates, other giant cities, like Tokyo and Cairo, do not. Nor is crime in the United States linked to city size; the most dangerous cities are those located in the south and those which have large African American populations Differences in culture and religious affiliation sometimes help explain variations in patterns of crime, for example, the low incidence of crime in the Muslim and Hindu worlds. However, it does not explain why crime is so high in the Americas when so many people are highly religious. Higher rates of gun ownership and alcohol and drug use are clearly factors there, as well as in South Africa. Poverty is often blamed for increasing crime rates but there appears to be little or no correlation between murder rates and urban poverty. Few murders are committed in the poverty stricken cities of poor South Asia or in the affluent cities of Scandinavia. Some authorities see differences in wealth explaining variations in crime and the fact that most of Latin America and South Africa are high in the league tables of both inequality and violence offers some support for that argument. However, some extremely unequal cities, like Buenos Aires and Santiago, are not dangerous places. What does seem to be critical in explaining urban violence is the trade in drugs Crime and violence is also closely associated with age and gender. Most burglary, crime, and violence is committed by and against young men; in Bogotá, for example, a 20–29-year-old man is 15 times more likely to be murdered than a woman of the same age. Fortunately, men seem to become less criminal as they age and the declining proportion of young men may explain why the number of robberies in London has fallen in recent years. In discussing urban violence, however, we should not only think about robbery and murder. In practice, more people are killed on urban roads than by all the murderers, criminals, and terrorists in the world put together. Six hundred and twenty million or so private cars, together with all the buses, vans, and trucks, kill around 1.2 million people every year and maim millions more. Road deaths are actually the single most important cause of death for people aged between 15 and 29. URBAN STRIFE In many parts of Europe, the fear of social and urban revolution was stimulated by stories of the storming of the Bastille. In 1885 one observer in London declared that: ‘I am deeply convinced that the time is approaching when this seething mass of human misery will shake the social fabric.’ Marx and Engels of course shared that opinion even though they viewed that eventuality more with hope than fear Communal violence is sometimes associated with the arrival of outsiders. The outbreak of violence in Johannesburg in 2008, for example, was motivated by local resentment against massive immigration to a city already lacking sufficient jobs and housing. But violence may also break out between established groups in the city, religion being a not infrequent cause, or at least ‘justification’, of conflict. The long struggle between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland; between Muslims and Hindus in Indian cities; differences between Shias and Sunnis in Iraq; the genocide of Muslim populations in towns of the former Yugoslavia; and the killing of Christians by Muslims in northern Nigeria all indicate how religion often sparks violence But communal violence can arise under wholly different circumstances. Urban riots were a frequent tactic in the struggles for independence, for example, in Algeria, and they continue to be mobilized by political rivalry, particularly at election times. Sometimes, albeit less frequently, mass protests break out in an attempt to remove unpopular governments, as in the Arab Spring of 2011. However, very few examples of communal violence have been caused by issues arising directly from urban life. Most protests have been riots in cities, rather than riots of cities. This is not what Castells once predicted. He believed that as cities grew in size, sustaining urban society would become more complicated. To resolve the problems of health, shelter, servicing, and employment, the state would be forced to provide, or at least, facilitate the ‘collective means of production’. This would be difficult given their limited budgets, rising public expectations, and widespread poverty. Conflicting demands from different groups in society would raise political pressure and lead to situations when the state would lose control. Urban protest would result, which, if appropriately harnessed, would lead to demands for the radical restructuring of society. Others pointed out that though Castells was mainly concerned with the prospect of urban violence in cities like London, Paris, and Madrid, his predictions were much more likely in the sprawling slums of Third World cities. There was a good deal of public interest in the 1970s and 1980s with the appearance of social movements ‘made up of young people, women, residential associations, church-sponsored “grass-roots” communities, and similar groups’. The community-based protests supported by the Church in Brazil, the collectives established in Chilean campamentos, and in the urban coalitions being built across Mexican cities showed that the poor were prepared to throw off their shackles. The ‘austerity’ or ‘IMF’ riots that broke out during the 1980s as a result of the debt crisis were seemingly another sign of a more turbulent future. Outraged about the quality of public services, the rising price of bread or bus fares or about the introduction of wage freezes, crowds protested in the streets of Algiers, Cairo, Caracas, Lima, and Rio de Janeiro Given these forecasts of communal protest, what is most striking about the urban transformation that has taken place across most of the world since 1900, and in much of Africa, China, and India since 1980, is how few urban revolutions there have been. Given the disparities in income, the numbers of poor people, the way that people of different nationalities, religions, and ethnicities have been thrown together, and the failure of so many governments to perform adequately in providing infrastructure and services, it is surprising that there has not been a great deal more conflict. The explanation, I believe, is simple. Most urban newcomers, whether they come from a neighbouring area or from far away, are seeking a better life. They are concerned with improving the lives of their own family. They are so busy looking for work, labouring for long hours, constructing their own shelter, and generally surviving in the city, that they have little time or energy for collective action. Class awareness has also been slow to develop. Unions have been thin on the ground, and because most people work in the ‘informal sector’ they ‘are caught between being petty capitalist employers as well as suppliers of their own or family labor’. Fear too plays a part. With so many governments, especially in countries with authoritarian regimes, prepared to use extreme violence against protesters, it is risky to gather in the street. URBAN GOVERNANCE AND POLITICS Throughout history few cities have been governed well. Most have lacked public services and adequate housing, and the authorities have ignored the needs of the mass of the people. As cities grew in size during the 19th century some governments began to pay more attention to urban issues, for example, Baron Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris and Joseph Bazalgette’s installation of sewers in London. Sometimes of course, new public works complicated or even worsened old problems, as in the over-crowding that resulted from demolishing the slums of central London in the 19th century. However during the 20th century urban life in the majority of cities in the developed world improved as a result of more professional and competent municipal governance By contrast, in too many poor countries, effective urban government has long been notable for its absence. ‘The end of colonial rule often meant the end of effective government. Particularly in Africa, colonialism frequently gave way to corrupt government or no government at all. Nothing so ensures hardship, poverty and suffering as the absence of a responsible, effective, honest polity.’ Fortunately, however, the quality of urban government has recently improved and in a few places, like Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore, it has transformed living conditions. Similarly, in Latin America, local authorities in Bogotá, Medellín, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Porto Alegre, Montevideo, Querétero, and Santiago, can all claim credit for having improved urban conditions over the last twenty years. Even where governments have been less effective in improving the quality of life, most have proved very adept at maintaining social peace. They have managed to co-opt political opposition and provide enough palliatives to urban problems to forestall violence. Most Latin American governments have tackled the housing crisis covertly by turning a blind eye to land invasions or even by encouraging them. The authorities have provided services for communities that have behaved and ignored those who have protested or failed to turn up in sufficient numbers at political rallies. When placatory action has failed the authorities have fallen back on repression. The brutal military governments in Argentina and Chile, the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and Mugabe’s thugs in Zimbabwe have all demonstrated how state aggression can be very effective at discouraging popular protest. In short, for both positive and negative reasons, the urban transition has not been as conflictive as many anticipated. CONCLUSION Most urban dwellers throughout history lived in poverty. They lived short and often brutal lives. It was only from the middle of the 19th century that some governments, mainly in Europe and North America, sought to improve life for the urban majority. Modern technology helped reduce the danger from epidemics and provided the means to assure the urban infrastructure and services that have transformed most people’s lives. For a time, it seemed that continued progress would produce a decent life for everyone. In practice, rapid population growth, corruption, and inappropriate government policies have combined to fail the majority and far too many people in urban Africa, Asia, and Latin America continue to live in poverty. And if the incidence of poverty has recently fallen in most countries, in most of the world the number of urban poor has been rising. Rapid city-ward migration has guaranteed the urbanization of poverty. It is also clear that urban inequality has been increasing. A shift in the geography of manufacturing, greater capital flows, and the economic miracles of the Far East may have reduced global inequality but have accentuated local income differences. Urbanization has played a critical role in creating both poverty and inequality. It has encouraged greater productivity, which has generated the resources with which to reduce poverty, but in most cities uncontrolled market processes have directed too much of the new wealth into the hands of the few. The speculative property market has created millionaires when those resources could have financed services and shelter for the majority. At the same time it is clear that without towns and cities, the world could not have supported over 7 billion people, let alone to have improved the quality of most people’s lives. Better urban living conditions are an important explanation why there has been relatively little communal violence. It is also a compliment to the perseverance of the masses of poor people who have been prepared to put up with such difficult social and economic conditions, eking out a living in the informal sector, building their own homes and too often suffering from a mixture of neglect and violence from the authorities. In arguing that urban life is characterized more by social harmony than social conflict, therefore, I am in no sense suggesting that the quality of life for most people is acceptable. Given our global wealth, our technological ability and our long experience of urban life, we should have done much better. Words Rookery - a dense collection of housing, especially in a slum area. Accentuate - make more noticeable or prominent. Bifurcate - divide into two branches or forks.