Elfie Swerts

Multilevel comparison of large urban systems

For the first time the systems of cities in seven countries or regions among the largest in the world (China, India, Brazil, Europe, the Former Soviet Union (FSU), the United States and South Africa) are made comparable through the building of spatio-temporal standardised statistical databases. We first explain the concept of a generic evolutionary urban unit (“city”) and its necessary adaptations to the information provided by each national statistical system. Second, the hierarchical structure and the urban growth process are compared at macro-scale for the seven countries with reference to Zipf’s and Gibrat’s model: in agreement with an evolutionary theory of urban systems, large similarities shape the hierarchical structure and growth processes in BRICS countries as well as in Europe and United States, despite their positions at different stages in the urban transition that explain some structural peculiarities. Third, the individual trajectories of some 10,000 cities are mapped at micro-scale following a cluster analysis of their evolution over the last fifty years. A few common principles extracted from the evolutionary theory of urban systems can explain the diversity of these trajectories, including a specific pattern in their geographical repartition in the Chinese case. We conclude that the observations at macro-level when summarized as stylised facts can help in designing simulation models of urban systems whereas the urban trajectories identified at micro-level are consistent enough for constituting the basis of plausible future population projections.

The Substantial Share of Small Towns in India’s System of Cities

Understanding Indian urbanisation is challenging. Despite a slight trend of metropolisation, small towns with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants are still home to one-third of the Indian urban population and its demographic growth. Making sense of this trend and precisely qualifying their demographic contribution to the dynamics of the Indian city system is the aim of this chapter. We have built and exploited a harmonised database comprising all the Indian cities which allows us to compare their evolution, whatever their size and the state they belong to, over the last 50 years. It highlights that small towns’ dynamics since 1961 do not differ from those of larger cities. All the cities in the system have the same growth opportunities regardless of their size. A very dynamic demographic evolution distinguishes a group of small towns whose growth is generally independent of their distance from the nearest million plus cities. An important number of the most dynamic small towns remain governed by the rules and provisions of rural administration, thus questioning the governance of urban transformations.

Megacities: The Asian Era

Asian megacities concentrate 60 % of world megacities population in 2010. The demographic trend which lead to this current situation since the 1960 is exposed. Then the population mass of these megacities is compared to their economic weight opening on a reflexion on their position within the world cities system. The analyse is supported by an original geodatabase in which all the 2010’ 100 largest cities in the world are defined as physical agglomerations, using remote sensing images and census data series in order to assess their population size.

Mapping Small Towns’ Productive and Employment Configurations

The aim of this chapter is to highlight the linkages between economic dynamism and the diversity of small towns. The main challenge is to assess how far the substantial role small towns play in the Indian process of urbanisation is accompanied by their economic expansion and diversification, as well job creation. In the first part of this chapter, we examine the correlation between the sectorial GDP allocation by district and the distribution of small towns. It provides a first glimpse of the economic specificity of small towns in comparison to the larger ones with above 100,000 inhabitants, in their relations to sectorial economic characteristics, and shows the weight of the district’s GDP. In a second part, we explore how those small towns are characterised by differentiated employment structures. This approach validates the enduring importance of agricultural employment as a discriminatory factor between small and larger towns. Finally, the analysis offers an original entry point into the substantial disparities in the landscape of small towns across the subcontinent, in terms of intensity of employment. These disparities help understand how far small towns are often, notably in the backward regions, places of unemployment, coping strategies and poverty, in a context of agricultural transition marked by massive job destruction associated with jobless economic growth. In other regions, some towns emerge as the core of job intensive industrial re-deployments and successful creative clusters often linked to a national and global chain of values and markets.

The Chinese Urban System: Political Evolution and Economic Transition

The huge Chinese urban development supports the growing importance of China in the world urbanization, politics, and economy. In this context, our goal is to evaluate whether the Chinese urbanization process reveals some universal dynamic or if the 40 years of strong political control singles out the Chinese urban system. Our analysis of the Chinese urban system is based on an original data corpus, which describes the demographic and economic characteristic of the 9476 cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants in China. It allows to draw up a first picture of the demographic evolution of the Chinese city system from 1982 to 2010 and of the resulting functional specialization of Chinese urban agglomerations in 2011. It shows that the Chinese urban system follows universal dynamic trends but is quite influenced by the administrative system which defines the powers of cities. The Chinese urbanization is both characterized by the development of huge megalopolises and the strong growth of some small and medium cities. This can be partly linked with the political decentralization that gave to cities, including the small ones, the role of “engine producing modernity.” The evolution of the administrative system and economic specialization also influences the urban development. Thus, the cities in the Eastern coast have been steadily developed during the past decades mainly because of the advantage of SEZ policies and the development of manufacturing activities. But with a more recent development of the SEZ in the Central and Western part of China, and the diversification of the Chinese economy, the strongest potential for demographic and economic growth could be expanded from the Eastern coast to all over the country.

Diffuse Urbanization and Mega-Urban Regions in India: Between Reluctant and Restrictive Urbanism?

Although India is home to some of the biggest global metropolises, it is still predominantly rural though in the midst of an ongoing urban transition. In this context, the Indian system of cities challenges trends currently associated with an urban transition. The goal of this chapter is to assess how India’s urban transition impacts the demographic and economic evolution of its urban system. Our analysis is based on a diachronic city series that adjusts and harmonizes changes in the definition of urban localities over 50 years. We find that India’s urban growth is evenly distributed among cities, across size and location. One third of the fastest growing cities are small towns, emphasizing that the Indian urbanization goes beyond the million-plus cities. This can be attributed to a slow process of metropolitanization of the economy and the development of specialized clusters, often combining cities of different sizes and villages. The proportion of marginal workers tends to be higher in the small towns and in the cities of the Indo-Gangetic valley, where job intensity is also the lowest, highlighting the challenge of the economic transition from agriculture in terms of employment and the associated role of the smaller towns. Urban growth is mostly due to the natural growth of cities and to a lesser extent to rural-urban migration. Finally, seasonal migration and daily commuting that connect the rural world to the urban system also contribute to urban growth and blur the limits of the urban localities.