Emerging Cities: A New Approach to Comparative Urban Politics

• In Event: City Limits and Urban Democracy: Through a Comparative Lens

Abstract

By 2050, more than two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in cities, and the futures of 7 billion people will depend on urban governance and development. Most of our knowledge about how cities work comes from the world’s largest and most established cities, ranging from New York and London to megacities like Mumbai and Mexico City (Kuipers & Post, Forthcoming). Yet most people live in emerging cities: urban areas of less than one million people that are rapidly adding population, re-defining territorial boundaries, and shifting away from an agricultural economy (Montgomery, 2008). These cities are also the fastest growing. Growing cities can be spaces of intense conflict but also experiments in inclusive governance. They are critical spaces to reduce poverty (Ingelaere et al., 2018) and leverage public resources to support equitable growth and development at the local level (Cities Alliance, 2020). Emerging cities can help bring development to the people, but only if scholars and policymakers understand how they work.

We examine the drivers of governance and development in emerging cities, which we define as cities with fewer than one million residents that have experienced a rapid gain in population in the last 20 years. These cities face unique challenges and constraints: They often depend on the central government’s administrative and funding decisions; electoral competition determines their bargaining power; and resource booms and social conflict can have an outsized impact on social welfare and security. Despite growing awareness of emerging cities and their potential impacts, existing scholarship does not explain why some peacefully incorporate a growing population while others see conflict. The roots of urban order, instability, and equitable development remain unknown.

The lack of basic knowledge of emerging cities has significant implications for development policy: current policies fail to account for the existing realities on the ground, undermining their effectiveness at achieving sustainable urban development. In this paper, we synthesize recent literature on the politics of urban space and the process of urbanization. We show that existing studies fail to distinguish between different characteristics of urban space, nor do they disaggregate the process of urbanization by drivers and rates of urban growth. We argue that these concepts are related and need to be analyzed together. The size of urban space might represent different stages of the urbanization process; but this might be a wrong assumption.

Second, we develop specific mechanisms linking the control of urban space to the process of social change. We focus on host-migrant relationships, inclusive governance, equitable development, and local order and security. We illustrate our review with descriptive cross-national data analysis that document patterns of urban growth and changes in governance, as well as illustrative examples from emerging cities in Ghana, Tunisia, and Brazil. We call for more systematic attention to “contextual” factors by integrating them into a common framework of institutional change (Lust 2022) that takes population growth seriously. We conclude by raising important questions that this framework can help inform and offer directions for future research.

Authors

• Jeffrey W. Paller, University of San Francisco

• Ellen M. Lust, University of Gothenburg

• Alison E. Post, University of California, Berkeley

• George Bob-Milliar, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology