Growth of Poverty and Slums in Contemporary Cities - Essay Example

?Document the growth of poverty and slums in contemporary cities and outline some of the key reasons underlying reasons for the rapid recent global growth of cities and discuss some of the key challenges it raises. Rapid urbanization is a problem that confronts the modern world. In the past, it used to be an indication of progress and development. Today, however, because of unmanageable population sizes, uncontrollable consumption habits, as well as the alarming depletion of our resources, rapid urbanization now comes with multiple costs that governments can no longer choose to ignore. This essays looks into some of the particular costs of urbanization. An important reason is access to resources and the environment. Another is the social cost, i.e., the increase in rural poverty because of uncontrolled rural to urban migration. In the end, however, I conclude argue that these are issues that can be addressed through efficient governance, sound urban planning and policies on sustainable resource use. It must be made clear at the onset that not all urbanization signals development, although many are wont to think that the presence of skyscrapers and gleaming edifices are indicative of a country’s growth. There is urbanization that indeed heralds development – as for example, urbanization accompanied by job generation, equitable distribution of resources, and access to social protection instruments. However, there too is urbanization that only makes poverty more acute, urbanization whose uneven growth has made the rich even richer, whilst plunging the poor deeper into the margins. Cheru further describes this kind of urbanization – visible in many parts of the developing world, also known as the Global South – as follows: Urbanization without development (or limited development), on the other hand, occurs when overall national economic growth and development are inadequate to meet the needs of a growing population. This type of urbanization takes place in sub-Saharan Africa, low-income Asia and Central America. The key characteristics of urbanization without development are: weak agricultural sector; poor national economic performance; lack of national policy that integrates economic and spatial planning; relative absence of intermediate cities and market towns; over migration leading to growth of mega-cities with poor economic bases and poor municipal capacity to provide minimum basic services. The case of Africa Nelson (2006: 2) likewise challenges the conventional assumption that rapid urbanization is indicative of progress. He cites the case of Africa as evidence that urbanization cannot be linked to development. This is because urbanization in Africa was the result of inequitable allocation of state resources, which were in turn driven by global market processes. As a consequence of this, the rural areas suffered deeply. Rural poverty and rural hunger had spiked up. (Nelson, 2006: 3). To quote Nelson, “Resources directed toward agriculture have been very small and of these most have been directed toward large-scale farming of export crops such as tobacco, not only causing environmental damage but also food shortages and impoverishment of small farmers. (Nelson: 3)” But these have long term consequences too. Because the rural areas are the suppliers of food for the entire country, impoverishing the rural areas diminishes capacity to produce food and ultimately lead to food prices going up. In Africa, more and more of its citizens are migrating to the cities, creating a rural to urban diaspora that, as described by Cheru, “take on more of the qualities of their rural hinterlands: increasing importance of urban agriculture by disobeying restrictive land-use controls—paving the way for more diverse use of urban space; the spontaneous growth of illegal settlements and of petty commodity production; and the maintenance of rural economic links and regional and cultural identities on the part of urban migrants. (page 7)” Although this is true, there is also validity in the assertion that urbanization has many positive possibilities as well. According to Hammond (2007:2), “if cities create environmental problems, they also contain the solutions.” Indeed, countries that have attained economic development have done so under a model that invariably included urbanization. One of the clear effects of urbanization is the increase in wealth, and this will ultimately lead to benefits that will affect the rural areas as well. The second aspect is the social costs. Nelson talks about how rural to urban migration has “transferred poverty to the cities”. (Nelson, 2006: 3) This has led to urban areas bursting at the seams, unable to manage the volume of people coming to find jobs, shelter, and resources. This places a toll on the government, who cannot provide social services for a huge volume of people. Infrastructure likewise breaks down (Nelson, 2006: 3), causing severe public health and public safety issues. One only has to look at the shanties in the developing world to understand this notion. Entire families live in matchbox houses, under subhuman conditions. People come to the cities looking for jobs and finding none, thus creating scores of people seeking welfare. However, Hammond says that there may be more good than bad. Cities, according to him, offer infrastructure, education and health care at lower prices (Hammond, 2007: 5). Also, and this is a crucial point, in urban areas, people are less likely to have babies than in rural areas (Hammond, 2007: 5) thus keeping population levels manageable. Globalisation as the root of urban poverty This paper argues that globalization is one of the key causes of urban poverty and will look at the case of Latin America, and in particular Brazil, as an illustrative example. The main point is that the benefits of globalization were not showered equally to all countries participating in it. The developed countries, such as the United States and member countries of the European Union, benefited greatly from globalization, while the developing countries became more and more poor. For example, financial assistance is given to developing countries like those in Latin America, but this aid comes with conditionalities to comply with the requirements of globalization and liberalization. This includes the privatization of basic services, the removal of tariffs on certain commodities, etc. and this all resulted in massive unemployment and even deeper poverty. Also, the social and environmental costs were massive, because globalization led to the unsustainable pillage (usually in the developing world) for resources, resulting in deforestation in the Amazon, water pollution in Africa, land scarcity in Southeast Asia. Before we look at and analyze whether or not it is globalization or internal governance that is causing poverty, it is necessary to understand the debates concerning poverty and its roots. In Latin America, where Brazil is situated, critics of capitalism and globalization argue that it is the uneven distribution of the benefits of globalization that is creating unfortunate outcomes for the peoples of the developing world. The problem of uneven distribution, whilst originally a problem of globalization, is mediated by state actors and public policy. Hence, it is difficult to view one as independent of the other. Latin American social scientists started using marginality as concept in the early 1960s to describe certain social consequences generated by the rapid and massive urbanization process1 that followed a ‘population explosion’, and a high rate of rural-urban migration. (Kay, 2006: 455) First, marginality was used to refer to the physical location of the shantytowns on the periphery of the cities; then to the absence (or very low quality) of housing and social services in these areas; later the concept was broader used to describe the social conditions experienced by shantytowns residents (unemployment, poor working conditions, low living standards, and so on); and finally its use was extended to include rural groups with similar problems and broader, “any group suffering from poverty and located on the lowest rung of social hierarchy” (Kay 1989: 90). Two approaches to marginality can be identified amongst Latin American social scientists. One group working with modernization paradigm conceived marginality as lack of integration of certain social group in society; the other group worked from a Marxist standpoint and understood marginality as embedded in the country’s integration into the world capitalist system. In the group of scholars that work marginality from a Marxist perspective, and close to dependency theory ideas, we highlight the work of Anibal Quijano and Jose Num2 and some critiques coming from Brazilian scholars (Saad-Filho, 2005: 128). Both Nun and Quijano frame the discussion using Marxist concepts such as ‘relative surplus population’ and ‘industrial reserve army’. They argue that the penetration and dominance of transnational corporations into Latin America has created such a large relative surplus population that is not anymore functional, but non-functional to capitalism. Nun and Quijano argue that part of the relative surplus population is not absorbed into this monopolistic capitalist sector, and does not work anymore as an industrial reserve army. (Ibid) Num, for instance, using insights from dependency theory explain the inability of the industrial sector to absorb this labour, and coined the concept ‘marginal mass’ to refer to it. Although Quijano and Nun share many ideas, the former goes a little further identifying various sources of urban and rural marginality: unemployment due to the bankruptcy of competitive industries generated by the development of monopoly sector; partial destruction of small handicraft, workshop and commerce sector; and the penetration of capitalism in agriculture, thus expelling labour. In this context, Quijano coined the term ‘marginal pole’ to describe the mechanism by which the ‘marginals’ make a living. He describes this ‘pole’ as not directly linked to any production function; out of the reproduction of capital; a place where the marginal population is exploited as consumers by the capitalist monopoly sector; but still a part of the economy that does not constitute a separate sector (Quijano in this way rejects dualism). This paper now proceeds to discussing how domestic policy has a bigger influence over the extent to which a country experiences poverty and inequality, particular in the urban areas. Brazil is a country of amazing wealth and dramatic inequalities. The World Bank ranks the Brazilian economy the ten richest in the world, with a GDP of $1.7 trillion PPP. Income concentration is extremely high: 1% of the population, that is less than 2 million over a population of 187 million, have 13% of all household income. According to data provided by the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA), 30.3 % of Brazilians are considered poor and, within this group, 11.5 % of them are ranked extremely poor. This poverty level is three times higher than of other countries with a per capita similar to that of Brazil [$9,000 PPP](Oxfam, 2008). Poverty and inequality are not due to scarcity of resources, but rather to their unfair distribution. Brazil has kept a conservative approach to modernization: economic development was not followed by a change in the socio-economic order. Despite many poverty alleviation programs being implemented and despite the efforts of the institutions of globalization to pour money into Brazil because of its potential in providing resources, inequality and poverty remained grave problems of the day. To quote Pero and Szerman (2005: 5), The increase in public social spending and the new poverty-alleviation programs were not accompanied, however, by reductions in poverty and inequality throughout the 1980s. The Gini coefficient climbed from 0.58 in 1980 to 0.64 in 1989, and the poverty headcount ratio followed its historical counter-cyclical behavior: at the lowest point of the early 1980s recession, in 1983, the percentage of the poor reached 49%, whereas in 1987, after two years and a 10% GDP growth, this number dropped to 26%. These figures reflect a historical feature of social spending in Brazil – its inability to reduce poverty and inequality, or even to act counter-cyclically, as a safety net, preventing their increase during macroeconomic shocks. This observation soon led to concerns about the effectiveness of social policy in Brazil. For instance, the World Bank published in 1988 a report showing that despite spending around 8.8% of its GDP on the social sector – one of the highest levels among middle-income developing countries – Brazil had a poor performance on social welfare indicators such as infant mortality and illiteracy. We look at one of the core policies of the Brazilian government: the Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT). Brazil was the first country in Latin America to implement CCT’s and it was meant as a poverty alleviation measure to complement the measures being taken by the World Bank and the IMF so that Brazil can reap the benefits of globalization. Advocates have repeatedly claimed that apart from creating impact on extreme poverty, children’s well-being and women empowerment, the CCTs have also been advantageous to implementing governments. For one, the scheme is market neutral, boosting local economy without compromising producer’s prices, unlike food subsidies. Two, its computerised data systems have ensured accurate information on prospective and actual beneficiaries, minimizing targeting errors as well as clientelism and corruption. Three, its implementation cost is relatively low, with Latin American CCTs pegged at less than 1% of the Gross Domestic Product. Critics of CCT in Brazil view it a part of the neoliberal project of rolling back the State and depoliticising the issues of poverty and inequality. The targeting and conditionality components that are undertaken in the name of efficiency and expediency are often “an outcome of the deliberate attempt to delimit the state” (Mkandawire 2005: 2). On one hand depolitisation refers to the palliative poverty reduction programmes in the near-obsessive target of meeting the MDGs which only distract governments and societies from confronting the structural roots of poverty and inequality (Adesina 2011, Fischer 2010). “Depolitisation then serves to veil underlying agenda and allows paradigmatic shifts... to be hidden behind principles of charity and altruism.” (Fischer, 2010: 40). That the Brazilian government has chosen cash transfers instead of redistributive land reform, job creation, moratorium on debt payments or challenging neo-liberal policies It is said that Brazil’s CCT program, the Bolsa Familia program, because of its selective nature as a result of targeting and conditionalities, only reinforces segmentation in society, and consequently exclusion of thousands, even millions of people. Kerstenetzky (2009: 71), for example, asserts that through a universal access to basic social services such as education and health, as well as the inclusion of those who are unjustly excluded – those who cannot pay or are not able to comply with the conditionalities and the middle class who are paying for the social transfers – could gather the political and financial support it needs. In conclusion, we must ask: what then is the solution? Nelson calls for stimulating rural development (Nelson, 2006: 6) and channel resources to improve agricultural development. However, Hammond argues that policymakers must “reconsider their bias against urban growth” and focus on developing infrastructure and coming up with efficient urban planning. It is clear that no sustainable interventions are possible without taking into account both the need to ensure sufficient agricultural production and the importance of developing urban areas. However, economic development for all must be the moving force for all policy actions. There is persuasive evidence that urbanization is still the way to go. (word count: 2568) References Adesina, J. (2011). “Beyond the Social Protection Paradigm: Social Policy for Africa’s Development.” Paper presented in the International Conference for Social Justice. Institute for Development Studies, The United Kingdom. (13-15 April 2011). Beghin, Nathalie. (2008). Notes on Inequality and Poverty in Brazil: Current Situation and Challenges’ in From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World. New York: Oxfam International. Cheru, F. (2005) “Globalization and Uneven Urbanization in Africa: the limits to effective Urban governance in the provision of basic services”. UCLA Globalization Research Center. Available at http://www.international.ucla.edu/media/files/57.pdf De Medeiros, S. L. (2007). “Social Movements and the Experience of Market-led Agrarian Reform in Brazil”. Third World Quarterly. 28, No 8, p.1501 – 1518. Fischer, A. (2010). “Towards Genuine Universalism Within Contemporary Development Policy.” Institute of Development Studies Bulletin, 41(1): pp. 26-44. Hammond, A. (2007). The Next Four Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy at the base of the Pyramid. Washington: World Resources Institute, International Finance Corporation. Hoover, J. and De Heredia, I. M (2010). “Philosophers, Activists, and Radicals: A Story of Human Rights and Other Scandals”. Human Rights Review. Vol. 12, p.191-220. Kay, C. (2006) 'Rural Poverty and Development Strategies in Latin America', Journal of Agrarian Change 6(4): 455-508. Kay, C. (1989) Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment: Cristobal Kay. London [etc.]: Routledge. Kerstenetzky, C. (2009). “Redistribution or Development: The Political Economy of the Bolsa Familia Programme”. Journal of Social Sciences. Vol. 52, No. 1, pp. 58-68. Nelson, N. (2006). Urban poverty in Africa: from understanding to alleviation. London: Goldsmith College Press. Pereira, A. (2003). “Brazil's Agrarian Reform: Democratic Innovation or Oligarchic Exclusion Redux?” Latin American Politics and Society. Vol. 45, No. 2, p.41-65. Pero, V. and Szerman, D. (2005). “The New Generation of Social Programs in Brazil.” International Food Policy Research, Inc. Available at http://www.ie.ufrj.br/eventos/pdfs/seminarios/pesquisa/the_new_generation_of_social_programs_in_brazil.pdf. Sauer, S (2009). “'Market-led agrarian reform' in Brazil: a dream has become a debt burden”, Progress in Development Studies, , Business Source Premier. Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 127-140. Spero, J. E., and Hart, J. (2010). The Politics of International Economic Relations 7th Ed. Boston: Cengage. Starr, A. and Martinez-Torres, M. E. and Rosset, P. (2010). “Participatory Democracy in Action : Practices of the Zapatistas and the Movimento Sem Terra.” Latin American Perspectives Vol. 38 no 1, p.102-119 Read More