Managing Urban Futures: Sustainability and Urban Growth in Developing Countries

THIS COMPILATION EXPLORES the conflicting challenges of rapid urbanization in low- and middle-income nations. It puts forward the vital role of cities for all societies as engines of ideas, technologies, societal change, democratic transformation and loci of political will to build a new regime of global sustainability. The contributions focus on different regions (Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific), on different challenges (the environment, globalization, multiculturalism) and different scales (local residents, cities, networks of cities). The book’s different chapters are organized in four parts.

Part I gives an overview of the ongoing urban development processes and their challenges in Asia, Latin America and Africa. The first chapter explores current economic and urban transformations in Asian cities, and the local and global environmental challenges that have accompanied these changes. Chapter 2 is concerned with the challenges facing the cities of Latin America due to widespread poverty and crime, uncontrolled urban expansion weighting on overused basic infrastructures, and the general lack of economic self-sufficiency in an increasingly globalized world. Chapter 3 describes the different challenges faced by sub-Saharan African cities and towns, and provides a broad overview of the different approaches to urban administration and the alternatives that have been developed in some cases, and which point to more effective forms of governance in the future.

Part II highlights the global interconnectedness of urban environmental development over space and time. Chapter 4 examines the new geography of centrality and marginality in urban areas engendered by the processes of globalization. With reference to examples from Asian countries, Chapter 5 addresses problems associated with the conventional boundaries used in analyzing processes of urbanization and devising means for planning and policy responses. Chapter 6 argues that time- and space-related impacts have transformed the timing, speed and sequencing of urban environmental transitions in the Asia–Pacific region, such that challenges are appearing sooner, growing faster and emerging more often simultaneously than those previously experienced by industrialized cities.

Part III on “Transforming state, space and society: political reform, promoting citizen rights and poverty alleviation” explores which models of governance to follow and how changes in policy and citizens’ participation influence the outcome of planning. Chapter 7 examines the historical underpinnings as well as the theoretical and practical implications of the transfer of power and decision-making to civil society in Latin America and China. Through the example of Brazil, Chapter 8 shows that the total top-down planning approach that imposes urban “solutions” is increasingly contested by civil society, claiming for a more people-centred management of urban space with plans that are based on and foster the exercise of democratic citizenship. There follow two case studies on urban poor and on the application of planning alternatives. Chapter 9 reports on findings about chronic poverty, persistent inequality, exclusion and citizenship based on panel studies over time in three favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Chapter 10 highlights the contrasts in China’s spatial development between the fast-growing cities and the rural areas, and explores some alternative development paths. The final part emphasizes the inclusion of citizens and the concept of “evolutionable” cities, and seriously questions whether solutions from the North can be applied in the South. Chapter 11 looks at a range of possible responses addressing the integration of immigrants, drawing primarily from examples of cities in Canada and Australia. Chapter 12 is devoted to the plight of relatively small but rapidly growing cities under the threat of becoming ungovernable “gigapolises”. It proposes several prerequisites for a sustainable