Urbanisation is the most consequential demographic process in the developing world. Whether cities become the sites of institutional development or institutional failure determines the trajectory of billions of lives.
The Urban Scale
The global urbanisation process — the movement of hundreds of millions of people from rural to urban areas in Asia, Africa, and Latin America over the coming decades — is the largest institutional stress test that local governance systems will face in the current century. The cities receiving this population growth must simultaneously build the housing, the infrastructure, the employment systems, the health services, the education, and the governance institutions that the population requires — without the fiscal resources, the institutional capacity, or the time that the scale of the challenge demands. The cities that succeed will become the institutional development success stories of the next generation. The cities that fail will become the sites of the urban poverty, the social dysfunction, and the political instability that inadequate institutional response to urbanisation produces.
The African urbanisation trajectory is particularly consequential. African cities are growing faster than any other urban areas in history, in countries with weaker institutional infrastructure and more limited fiscal resources than the Asian and Latin American cities that have navigated prior urbanisation waves. The institutional challenge is not only building the physical infrastructure — the housing, the roads, the water and sanitation — but building the governance institutions that make urban life functional: the property rights systems that provide security of tenure, the fiscal systems that fund urban services, and the political institutions that make urban governance accountable to the populations they serve.
Urbanisation is the governance challenge that most determines whether the developing world's institutional trajectory produces broadly shared improvement or concentrated inequality. The cities that build the institutional infrastructure to serve their growing populations will generate the agglomeration economies and the human development that development theory promises. The cities that do not will generate the spatial concentration of poverty and institutional failure that unmanaged urbanisation produces.
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