NEWS ANALYSIS : L.A. Riots Called Symptom of Worldwide Urban Trend

Within a week of the Los Angeles riots, violence flared in Toronto for two nights when black, white and Asian youths went on a rampage, damaging stores, looting and skirmishing with riot police. The same week in Lagos, rioters set fire to government buildings, banks and the offices of political parties after a fuel shortage in oil-rich Nigeria curtailed public transportation.

And for two days, the central Panamanian city of Colon was the site of riots, arson attacks and fighting when police confronted 3,500 demonstrators demanding government action on chronic local problems of unemployment, inadequate housing and health services.

Although the unrest exploded in far-flung corners of the world, they had a common denominator, U.S. and foreign specialists contend. They were part of an urban revolution taking place on all six inhabited continents, brought on by conditions very similar to those that exist in Los Angeles: crime, racial and ethnic tension, economic woes, vast disparities in wealth, shortages of social services and deteriorating infrastructure.

“Los Angeles is symptomatic of a global trend,” said Mahbub ul Haq, the former Pakistani minister of finance and planning, now a special adviser to the U.N. Development Program. “And every city in the world should take note of what happened in Los Angeles. It sent us all an important message.”

To some extent, the problem is rooted in sheer numbers. In 1950, the world had only 10 metropolitan areas with 5 million people. Only 30% of the world’s people lived in cities. Over the next 35 years, the population of cities almost tripled, increasing by 1.25 billion, according to a U.N. survey.

The trend is most pronounced in the Third World. Fed by higher birthrates and heavier migration from rural to urban centers, city populations there quadrupled, to 1.15 billion people, according to the survey.

But industrialized nations--in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia--were far from exempt. Their combined urban population has nearly doubled, from 450 million to 840 million, since 1950.

“This growth has been far beyond anything imagined only a few decades ago--and at a pace that is without historic precedent,” the survey concluded. As of 1990, 54 cities had populations of 5 million or more, according to a report by the Population Crises Committee, a Washington-based public-interest organization. And six--Tokyo-Yokohama, Mexico City, New York, Sao Paulo, Osaka-Kyoto and Seoul--have 15 million or more.

Since 1950, the population of metropolitan Los Angeles has tripled and U.N. demographers expect the number of people in the area to increase by 2 million between 1990 and 2000, to nearly 14 million, making it the ninth-largest urban area in the world.

Around the globe, the crushing numbers have altered the dynamics of urban areas--from centers of wealth and progress to centers of poverty. “There is a growing global underclass that is living at the margin of existence. Most of that underclass is now concentrated in cities,” Haq said.

Urban centers with decreasing opportunities for upward mobility--especially in incomes, job quality and housing--are witnessing comparable increases in unrest, crime, prostitution, drug use and other social maladies.

“The thing these rioters (in different cities) have in common is that they are poor and marginalized and not able to participate in the life of their cities,” said Dr. G.P. Goldstein of the World Health Organization’s Rural and Urban Development Program. “Wherever people feel excluded, it can lead to demoralization or crime or violence or rioting. That’s now a general principle in many cities worldwide, both in the developing and developed worlds.”

U.S. and foreign specialists believe the trend will only get worse. By 2000, the number of poor urban households living in poverty is projected to increase by 76% over 1985 levels in the developing world, according to the U.N. survey.

The poverty figures are even more volatile because they are growing at the same time that governments are cutting back on food and other subsidies of basic necessities--either because of government funding problems, particularly in the Third World, or because of economic reforms, as in Eastern Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union.

“Subsidies needed to survive in urban communities--for energy, for water, for education, for health, for food--began to dry up in the late 1980s,” said Michael Cohen, chief of the World Bank’s urban development program.

Cities in Brazil, Albania, Venezuela, Egypt, Nigeria, Iran, Romania, Lebanon, Zaire and a host of other countries have witnessed demonstrations, strikes or riots because of price hikes involving such things as bread, bus fares, gasoline and water tariffs.

Again, the industrialized world--North America, Europe, Japan and Australia--is not exempt. At least 100 million people live below the poverty line. The largest share, 32 million, are in the United States, mainly in cities, Haq said. And the number is growing.

On several counts, Los Angeles does not fare well in comparison with other major cities of the world, according to the Population Crises Committee.

Of the world’s 11 most populous cities, greater Los Angeles ranks eighth in public safety. In terms of the murder rate, only Mexico City, Sao Paulo and New York City are considered more dangerous. Los Angeles ranks seventh in housing standards, fifth in percentage of children attending secondary schools and fifth in telephones per 100 people.

Such conditions are magnified in many cities by a related problem: the growing gap between rich and poor. “Wealth disparity accentuates social tensions that originate with poverty,” Cohen said.

In general, the difference is greater in the developing world. Globally, the top 20% of society has 150 times the wealth of the bottom 20%, according to the U.N. survey. Thirty years ago, the ratio was 30 to 1.

In the United States, the ratio today is 9 to 1, the widest in the developed world. But in Los Angeles and New York City the gap is twice as wide--at least 18 to 1--a level of disparity comparable to Karachi, Bombay or Mexico City, Haq said.

Differences in the quality of urban life are so serious that the life expectancy of a Harlem resident is only 46 years--lower than in Bangladesh, Sudan or Cambodia--and in stark contrast to the average American life expectancy of 75.9 years, according to a U.N. Development Program report released last month.

The ratio is less extreme in Europe. It is 6 to 1 in France and Germany and 5 to 1 in the Scandinavian countries. Yet several European cities, including Frankfurt, Paris, Berlin and Birmingham, have witnessed unrest in recent years originating in poor communities and focused on symbols of wealth and power. Over the last two years, France has been troubled by sporadic unrest in suburban ghettos in at least eight cities.

The potential repercussions are dire. “Urban poverty will become the most significant and politically explosive problem in the next century,” a World Bank report on cities predicts.

Because modern mobility also opened the way for large migrations, the tensions in cities today are often complicated by another dimension--racial or ethnic diversity.

With the exception of highly skilled professionals, the vast majority of migrants and their offspring traditionally started new lives on the fringes of society worldwide. But in the 19th Century and first half of the 20th Century, frontiers were still open or space was available, and expanding industries needed labor.

Then as cities reached, or exceeded, their capacities and skilled technology replaced manual industry in the 1970s and 1980s, opportunities for minorities to assimilate, succeed and climb the social ladder have become more limited, urban experts say.

As a result, racial or ethnic minorities are increasingly being stranded on the cities’ poor outskirts--physically in slums or squatter camps, politically and financially--adding to the volatility of urban life.

The United States is widely credited with accepting more migrants of all racial and ethnic groups than any other country.

“Minorities account for at least a quarter of the American population. In Europe, minorities are only a single digit of the population. Some have only 2 or 3%,” Haq said.

The sense of social discrimination has been linked to much of the recent rioting in Europe.

In France, many protesters have come from North African immigrant families who charge that they are discriminated against by police, employers, landlords and politicians.

Yet racial or ethnic minorities may fare better in Europe because “governments balance the inequities of the market,” Haq said. “In Germany, France and Britain, about 20% of GNP goes for social services--pensions, education, health care and so forth. In the Nordic countries, the average is 35%.”

In contrast, the United States spends only 12% of GNP for comparable services. “America takes in the huddled masses but then it doesn’t take very good care of them,” he said.

As a final factor, urban experts claim a lack of planning in cities worldwide has contributed to growing unrest. “Urban social policy dropped off the agenda in many countries in the 1980s,” Cohen said. “It was replaced by national issues, like debt or inflation.”

The global economic downturn in the late 1980s added to the difficulty of maintaining or improving urban infrastructures.

“Governments are simply not doing enough to balance the highhandedness of the marketplace, where only the fittest can survive,” Haq said.

The United States gets particularly poor marks. “The crisis state of many of the largest (U.S.) cities coincided with the decision not to have a national urban policy,” writes economist Anita Summers, editor of “Urban Change in the U.S. and Europe,” a forthcoming book by the Urban Institute.

Most Third World cities are even worse off. In African, Asian and Latin American countries that have become independent since the 1960s, urban growth has generally been haphazard. Lack of planning, urban expertise and funding has resulted in an unprecedented influx of the rural poor, a declining standard of living, huge squatter communities ringing cities--and a rise in social tensions.

Over the last 30 years, authoritarian or one-party rule has often squelched unrest. But U.S. and foreign urban specialists predict that countries moving toward political pluralism may, along the way, witness eruptions of the built-up frustrations from urban decay, overcrowding, poor social services and ethnic tension.

U.S. urban specialists also predict that many cities in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, or Commonwealth of Independent States, may soon face similar problems. In varying degrees, totalitarian rule regulated the pace and pattern of urbanization. The former Soviet Union merely declared certain cities closed when they reached saturation levels.

But new freedoms as well as growing tension among ethnic groups is almost certain to lead to swelling migrant populations in cities unprepared for them, urban experts said.

Western European countries are among the few that have urban development strategies at both the national and local level, said Anthony Downs, another contributor to the Urban Institute study of cities. But even Europe has been unable to defuse tensions.

Britain has adopted policies that promote development in Wales, Scotland and northern England to decrease the urban buildup in London and southern England.

Yet over a two-week period last fall, riots erupted in Oxford and at housing projects in Cardiff, Birmingham and the northeast city of North Shields. Among the issues that spurred the violence were unemployment, poverty, tension with police and racial issues.

Short of government intervention and major new efforts to coordinate urban development strategies at the local and national level, experts predict greater unrest in cities globally.

“Urbanization is like an engine that you can’t cut off. It’s like a machine that keeps turning things out and won’t stop,” said Roy Beck, Washington editor of The Social Contract magazine. “Regulating the engine is the only way to prevent further trouble.”

Los Angeles, Cohen said, “was not the first city to experience urban unrest, and it won’t be the last. What we’re seeing is a series of social manifestations of a lot of economic problems which are likely to last for quite a while in cities around the world.”