Harmonious cities - UN-Habitat

Urbanisation — the engine of growth
How urbanisation can be
the engine of growth
I have worked at the World Bank for over
30 years and I remind my colleagues
often of the importance of institutional
memory and learning from history. I was
around when the World Bank provided a loan
and technical advice to the Government of
Singapore in the 1960s that led to the establishment
of the city’s public transit system.
This included the first congestion charge in
the world – something that London and other
cities have only begun to introduce in more
recent times.
What Singapore has done over the past 40
years to build a truly livable and productive city,
we are only just starting to see happen in other
major population centres around the world.
The “old thinking”
I have also been around long enough to witness
a dramatic change in my own institution’s
thinking about urbanisation. The “old thinking”
was that urbanisation was a bad thing –
that it led to people living in miserable conditions
in slums with few opportunities to find
work, educate their children or escape poverty.
Public policy was regarded as biased towards
cities which in turn, increased the attraction
of rural people to urban areas. In those days,
cities were viewed as incapable of providing
the services and the jobs the rural migrants
were looking for. We – and I believe the development
community generally – were genuinely
interested in finding ways to encourage
people to stay in rural areas where they could
continue their traditional subsistence lifestyles
rather than migrate to cities and possibly face
the destruction of social networks and have to
deal with crime, violence and squalor.
It is in East Asia where we have seen this
old thinking about cities and urbanisation
November 2008
OPINION
In the rapidly growing East Asian region, we are expecting to see 25 million more people
moving to cities every year for the next two decades, says James Adams, Vice President for the
World Bank’s East Asia & Pacific Region. His views, excerpted from a speech at the World Cities
Summit in Singapore in June 2008, are reproduced here with the kind permission of the World
Bank.
A breathtaking view of Singapore, a city constantly reinventing itself and setting new urban development standards
Ph o t o © Si n g A P o r e ur B A n red e v elo P m en t Aut h o r i t y
either turned on its head or completely bypassed.
East Asia has embraced urbanisation
because it creates engines of growth in the
form of cities that, if planned and managed
well, then offer people opportunities to build
productive lives.
The “new thinking”
Nowhere is this thinking more evident
than in China. It was Deng Xiao Ping who
recognised around 20 years ago that people
needed to be able to seek wealth and build
productive ways of living. Cities were recognised
as “growth poles” – each one sending
a wave of economic growth to its hinterland.
Between 1980 – when reforms began – and
2000, 268 million Chinese people migrated
from rural to urban areas and that movement
of people to cities continues to this day. Extreme
poverty rates among rural populations
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