Special Report: Seeking a New World : Case Study / Urbanization : The Rush to the Cities Is Straining the Social Fabric of Nations

Ninety years ago, when Mohandas K. Gandhi established Phoenix Settlement on this fertile knoll, it was a rural commune sheltering a dozen families. Dedicated “to serve mankind,” it grew its own crops, operated a clinic and published a newspaper preaching nonviolent resistance to discrimination.

The legacy of Gandhi’s 21 years of exile in South Africa lives on at the clinic. But what happened to the rest of Phoenix Settlement reflects the “urban revolution” now sweeping at least 120 of the world’s 170 countries.

Today, more than 10,000 squatters are crammed around the shells of now-abandoned buildings from Gandhi’s era. They have come from rural and tribal homelands, in search of better jobs, better homes--better just about anything.

Instead, they end up in homemade shacks of cardboard and plastic sheeting. Crates marked “Toyota spare parts” are favored building materials; their thickness better protects barefoot children from rain and biting winter winds.

Phoenix Settlement squatters are but a tiny fraction of the mass of humanity rolling into cities around the globe. In 1800, only 3% of the world’s population lived in cities. In 1900, it was 10%. By the beginning of the 21st Century--for the first time in history--at least half the people of the world will be urbanized.

The impact of that transformation, which is occurring at its most uncontrolled in Third World countries least able to handle it, is staggering--on the people pouring into cities, on the cities themselves and on the nations of a world grown so interconnected that few will escape the shock waves from one of the greatest migrations in human experience.

For the Third World, “this situation is going to produce a social disaster, increasing the level of illiteracy, downgrading public health, converting cities to slums and creating a social structure with a deep cleavage and a large percentage of marginalized people,” warned Atilio Boron, an Argentine political economist.

Chief among the consequences of runaway urbanization:

* The economic and political fabric of countries is strained perhaps to the breaking point as national treasuries are drained without meeting even the minimal needs of urban migrants. Food production drops in rural areas and existing institutions collapse under the strain of unsupportable burdens.

* As the public and private sectors fail to cope with millions of new residents, so-called “informal” institutions mushroom to deal with everything from jobs and housing to commerce and social services-- de facto states-within-states, all outside the control of government.

* The rise of impoverished megacities, urban centers besieged by rings of teeming slums, sets the stage for explosive urban strife as the burgeoning fringe vies for limited resources.

“Urbanization usually means housing problems, job problems, overcrowding, disease, social conflict,” said Dr. Simon Baynham of Pretoria’s Africa Institute. “As more and more impoverished people come in from the rural areas, they come into areas that are already limited in terms of the amount of land available.

“So you’ve got fighting over land, fighting over housing, over influence in these areas.”

The developed world is not exempt. The populations of Los Angeles, New York, London and Moscow are all expected to top 10 million by the year 2000, while Tokyo-Yokohama will exceed 20 million. Advanced nations have far more resources available for dealing with such growth than poorer nations, however.

Some countries are already facing nightmares--intensified, ironically, by political and economic reforms. New freedoms stimulate urban migration even as they reduce governments’ control over patterns of growth.

In Turkey in 1983, for example, the end of military rule and the accompanying economic reforms triggered a rush to the cities--and the rise of hundreds of gecekondus , or built-by-night suburbs. The fastest-growing area in Turkey is Sultanbeyli, a gecekondu outside Istanbul. In 1985, it was home to 3,741; today the population is 180,000.

In China, which has the world’s largest rural population and limits migration, new urbanization fervor has broken out since the end of forced programs that had sent millions of city dwellers into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. By the end of this decade, up to 200 million Chinese--equivalent to two-thirds of the U.S. population--are expected to move to cities, 46 of which already have more than a million inhabitants.

In South Africa, the repeal of apartheid laws limiting black migration from rural areas is spawning an influx so massive that Johannesburg’s Urban Foundation predicts all of that country’s major cities will double in population in just the next 10 years. With as many as 7 million urban squatters, South African cities would have to construct 800 homes a day for the next 10 years just to resolve the housing crisis.

“This is the century of the great urban explosion,” concluded a recent United Nations report. And, it said, “governments are discovering the impossibility of reversing urbanization--or even of slowing it down.”

They are also discovering that when existing institutions--public or private--fail to meet the needs of urban migrants, the newcomers begin to develop their own, often-imperfect answers. The result: mushrooming growth of informal, ad hoc institutions that spring up to deal with human needs when governments don’t.

Greater Lima, now teeming with 7 million of Peru’s 22 million people, is among the worst cases. Some 800 illegal slumlets ring the capital, including San Juan de Miraflores, a labyrinth of mud-brick and reed-thatch hovels, bleached colorless by the sun, in which the entire extent of government services is a single telephone.

Destitute and all but officially abandoned by a debt-ridden government, Peru’s squatters have started mobilizing themselves.

Lima, always alive with street vendors, is now a giant open-air market. On decrepit main roads, hawkers walk among speeding cars or near stoplights pushing hardware, magazines, fly swatters, cake covers, car fluid or any other new product or import. At Plaza dos Armes, the site of Lima’s ornate 17th Century city hall, hundreds of street merchants offer fruit, underwear, toys and watches, each “business” neatly laid out on the sidewalk. Near one vendor, a child taps out tunes on empty Coke bottles.

Once called the subsistence sector, such informal institutions are becoming among the most dynamic--and volatile--elements in Peruvian society. Analysts estimate that “informals” now account for 80% of all markets and bus transport in Lima and at least 40% of the capital’s overall economic activity--patterns mirrored throughout the developing world.

“Many planners see the informal sector as probably the greatest source of new urban jobs in the next few decades and as an important safety valve to fill the gap created by inadequate city services,” the World Resources Institute reported this year.

Informals are creating vast networks of wholesalers, suppliers, service industries and even quasi-governments, everything from bus lines and small cooperatives to police forces dispensing informal justice.

“Because of the magnitude of economic problems, the informal sector is going to increase in importance and significance,” said Yunus Carrim, a South African sociologist.

In Mozambique, informal businesses in homes and garages make shoes, clothes, even car parts. “Our markets are now 50% informals. They began to develop in 1983-84. They were doing a significant part of the nation’s business by 1986,” said Firminio Mucavele, a Maputo economist.

In South Africa, the roads between Johannesburg and its black suburbs bustle with some 4,000 Toyota or Nissan mini-buses, all operated by informals. Informals even extend into the arms industry: there is the qwasha handgun, named for the sound it makes, as well as a rifle that takes standard-issue military ammunition.

Informals account for at least 20% of South Africa’s GNP, according to Johannesburg’s Small Business Development Corp.

But the hope of self-generated communities is matched by potentially self-destructive problems--for the informals themselves and for the states. As Carrim warned: “It’s going to become a much more strident feature of urbanization. It’s going to be very difficult to have a controlled, orderly pattern” of development.

One problem is declining food production. “All the expected growth in Latin America is going to be in urban settings. That means a decreasing percentage for feeding growing urban populations,” said Eric Rodenburg of the World Resources Institute.

Another problem is that “none of the cities in the developing world can afford the infrastructure of mega-cities,” the U.N. report said. Lima is expected to double in 14 years-- theoretically requiring a doubling of services. That is an impossible task for a city government unable to meet even the current demands for schools and jobs.

A third danger is political breakdown. “The fact that (informals are) growing usually is a commentary on the failure of the political system,” said Jonathan Moyo, a Zimbabwe political scientist. “You can’t tax them. You can’t ensure standards in health.” Nor does construction conform to building codes, schooling to basic curricula, or businesses to safety, sanitation or environmental standards. And homemade guns are not registered.

“Although the process will play differently in different cities on different continents,” said Francisco Sagasti, a World Bank forecaster, “it’s clear that the future of cities around the world will be determined more by the overwhelming numbers coming in at the bottom than by the people who now run them at the top.”

Finally, left on the fringe, the informals’ alienation and isolation could turn to instability and conflict. Squatter camps and informal suburbs worldwide are riddled with drugs, crime and prostitution. San Juan de Miraflores and other Lima slums, for instance, offer ripe recruits for Peru’s Shining Path insurgents.

Violence caused in part by the urban crunch is already part of daily life in informal slums from Argentina to Zimbabwe--including Gandhi’s beloved Phoenix Settlement.

In many countries, the result may be that cities, traditionally centers of human and societal progress, will stagnate and decline under the rising burden of poverty.

“Dating back to Greek times, cities have been seen as places where people become ‘urbane’ and have access to the benefits of progress,” Sagasti said.

“But at the close of the 20th Century, the historic role of cities is now being compromised. They still offer the main means for upward mobility and modernization. . . . The problem is that cities are becoming massive ghettos of people confined in small spaces with little interaction with the rest of the city except through violence or illegal activities. The danger is that these ghettos will be institutionalized.”