29 Stages of Urban Growth and Decay

Prof. Dipender Nath Das

Introduction:

The study of urban geography to a great extent is aimed at explaining the distribution of towns and cities and the similarities and the dissimilarities that exist between and within them (Pacione, 2009). However, if Heraclitus of Ephesos is to be believed, the only thing that endures and is constant in life is change, yet there ought to be some sort of conformity in the character of the urban spaces. The cities contain inherent characters unique to each of them but have in common features like commercial and residential areas, transport network, infrastructure, range of service provided to the residents to name a few. The only difference is that all these features vary in terms of degree and their operability across space.

It is a well noted fact that global urbanization is a recent phenomenon and started mainly in the Western countries of USA and UK and the beginning of the last century in these countries had close to a quarter of their population living in their urban areas as compared to the meager 2 to 3 per cent in the developing nations of the world. Ever since all the countries across the world are experiencing growth of urban population in terms of absolute numbers and proportion, phenomenon christened as urban growth and urbanization respectively. However, it is quite true that the experiences of the individual towns and cities have varied to a great extent in terms of their growth characteristics and has had a close linkage with the prevalent social and economic state of affairs. The urban growth of towns may be addressed from two broad perspectives as follows:

1. A macro-level perspective hinting at the growth of urban population at the global level throwing light on how the urban population have grown over time across the global cities and how the phenomenon of urbanization has occurred in them.
2. A micro-level perspective looks at the individual experiences of towns and cities passing through sequential stages of growth and how such growth is encountered by the differential movement of the population in different zones.

A clear idea of the stages of urban growth requires a systematic revelation of the macro-level perspective and gradually transcending to the micro-level perspective of growth experiences of individual towns and cities.

Urban Growth from a macro-lens: Perspectives of the Globe and India

It is a well established fact that what is urban today was constituted by a handful population in the initial years of the19th century. However, over the past centuries, the world that had been dominantly rural was getting transformed into an urban space and the situation may be illustrated well through the following table 1.

Table 1:

Urban Population Distribution Across The Globe, 1970, 1994

*Note- Asia excludes Japan and Oceania excludes Australia and New Zealand

Source: United Nations (1995). World Urbanisation Prospects: 1994 Revision. New York, United Nations.

Quite evident from the above table is the fact that the increase in urban population has been a global phenomenon as both the more developed world and less developed world has experienced a growth throughout the twentieth century and continues to do the same in the present one. It is clear that there is a distinct numeric divide when it comes to the volume of urban population in the developed and the developing world where the former has lesser numbers than the latter. But when it comes to the percentage of urban population, the former reports to have higher proportion of population in their urban counterparts than the latter. The less developed region reports to have around 37 per cent of their population in the urban regions as compared to close to two-third of population in the more developed region. Countries of Europe, Australia, Japan and North America have more than 70 per cent of their population in the urban areas compared to a little more than one third in the developing regions of Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania.

The story of urban growth and the stimulating factors of such growth have been a quite different experience for the developing countries and the developed ones. India being one of the much talked of countries in the developing world, would make the exploration of its urban growth over time an interesting exercise. For the ease of reference the four top urban agglomerations of India namely Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata have been considered and their growths have been traced from 1901 to the recent most census of 2011. This would in turn help to develop a clear understanding of how the major urban centres in India grew over time. The situation is illustrated in the table 2.

Table 2:

Population in the Four Major Metros of India between 1901 and 2011.

Source: Census of India, 2001 and 2011

The table (2) contains the population of the major urban agglomerated of Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata and it is revealed that all the four metros have experienced a growth in urban population in the last century. It is clear that Kolkata Urban Agglomeration (KUA) was the only urban agglomerate having more than a million population in the beginning of the twentieth century and continued to grow ever since. Mumbai joined the million plus league of cities in 1911 and continues to experience staggering growth at a pace which overpowered all the other major three agglomerates of the country. It presently houses the highest number of urban population of 18.4 million followed closely by Delhi (16.3 million), Kolkata (14.1 million) and Chennai (8.6 million) (Census, 2001, 2011). However, if the growth rates are taken into account, Delhi and Mumbai far supersede the remaining two urban agglomerates in the years of reference between 1901 and 2011.

Urban Growth from a micro-lens:

Having noted the growth of urban population at the global level, what is essential is to note the changes that come along with urban growth in the morphology and the nomenclature of urban spaces. It is evident that cities and towns acting as nodes of urban growth take different forms in accommodating the ever increasing urban population. Different agencies across the world have christened urban spaces on the basis of several selected criteria. The following section will throw light on some of the terminologies that are frequently used when the urban spaces are talked of. The

     Directorate of Census Operations, India, 2001 has defined the term “urban area” or “town” on the basis of the following criteria (Bhusan 2010):

(i) All places with a municipality, corporation, cantonment board or notified town area, etc.

(ii) All other places that satisfy the following criteria : Minimum population of 5000.

1. At least 75 % of its male working population engaged in non- agricultural activities and
2. A density of population of at least 400 persons per square kilometer or 1000 per square mile.

Though the basic criterion for the christening of settlement as towns have remained fixed, yet certain alterations have been made by the Directorate of the Census Operations in India from time to time since the very inception. However, a synoptic overview of the basic criteria may be provided in the following table 3.

TABLE 3:

CRITERIA BY THE CENSUS OF INDIA TO BE SELECTED AS TOWN (1891-2001).

    Source: Directorate of Census Operations, India, 2001, Series-A.

    *Definition of towns does not abide by the criterion.

*  Definition of towns abides by the criterion.

  Apart from the above stated criteria, certain modifications have been made in different years by the Directorate of Census Operations which may be summed up as follows:

1. Any continuous collection of houses inhabited by not less than 500 persons which according to the Directorate of Census Operations of the Superintendent of the state possessed pronounced urban characteristics and amenities could be defined as towns. The criteria were followed in all the census years between 1891 and 1971. However, in making the decision certain considerations were to be kept in mind as

a. The character of population,

b. Relative density of the dwelling,

c. Importance of trade and historic association in order to avoid treating the overgrown villages as towns. However, in case of trade as a criterion, the proportion of trading or industrial population to the total population had to be equal or more than that of the agricultural population.

2. However, the tests prescribed for distinguishing the towns from the villages in the different states of India were based on the ideas common to all of them but were not applied with meticulous uniformity. In case of the Princely states, the definition of the towns was applied little indiscriminately.

Certain terminologies come into frequent usage when urban studies are taken up.

They may be highlighted in the following discussion.

City has been defined as any town with population of 1,00,000 at the same time satisfying the other administrative, demographic and economic criteria as mentioned above.

On the other hand, a metropolis or million city has been defined as an urban area having a population of 1 million and above with a cosmopolitan character and administered by one or more municipal corporations or local bodies.

Much customarily found in any literature regarding the urban study is the term urban agglomeration which has been defined as a continuous spread constituting a town and its adjoining urban outgrowths (OG’s) or two or more physically contiguous towns along with any OG if present. In some cases railway colonies, university campuses, port areas etc. may come up near a city or a statutory town outside its statutory limits but well within the revenue limit of a village or villages contiguous to the town or city. Each individual area by itself may not satisfy the minimum population criteria to qualify to be treated as an individual urban unit but may deserve to be clubbed with the town as a continuous urban spread.

For the delineation of urban agglomeration during Census 2001, the following criteria were taken as prerequisite:

i. A core town or at least one of the constituent towns of an urban agglomeration should necessarily be a statutory town.

ii. The total population of all the constituent towns an out growth’s of an urban agglomeration should not be less than 20,000. With these two basic criteria having met, the following are the possible situations in which urban agglomeration would be constituted:

a. A city or town with one or more contiguous out growths.

b. Two or more adjoining towns with their out growths and

c. A city with one or more adjoining towns with their out growths all of which form a continuous spread

Central business district is the focus of intra-city transport routes having the maximum overall accessibility to the most parts of the urban area. It is characterized by peak land values and intense development with high densities. The development is usually more vertically than horizontally (ENVIS, SPA, 2008).

The term Urban sprawl in the way it is presently been used was coined by Earle Draper one of the first city planners in the south-east USA. It refers to the tendency towards lower city density as the city foot prints expand (Nechyba and Walsh, 2004). The urban sprawl can take different forms as low density residential developments or so called edge cities that give rise to business activity like office buildings, retail and even manufacturing that can take the form of planned communities.

The concept of Standard Urban Area (SUA), was developed with the intention of coverage of larger core towns or cities as well as its adjoining areas which might also be rural areas coming under the influence of the core towns (Roy, 1991).

Urban Primacy was formally recognized by Jefferson (1939) which denotes a condition where the largest city in a country is super ordinate in both sizes and national influence in comparison to the others. Scholars in various studies have referred to the fact that urbanization manifests itself in particular territories in urban primacy and thereby generates regional imbalances.

Similar concepts have been proposed by United Nations to refer to urban centres of various sizes. While megacities for instance are the cities with more than 8 million population, metacities or hyper cities are the conurbations with more than 20 million population. It is interesting to note that population in some of the hypercities is found to be more than the population in some of the countries of the world. For example, Greater Mumbai in India with a population of 12.4 million in 2011 is said to have their population almost equivalent to the combined population of Norway (5.0 million) and Sweden (9.5 million) in 2011.

The scrutiny of the urban terminologies help in the identification of the characteristics of the process of urbanization, its manifestations in different regions, its basic problems, recent policy interventions and the related governmental schemes (Kundu et. al., 1999).

Stages of Urban Growth:

It may appear that urban centres have experienced a simplistic growth from being the smallest to the largest though an inherent unidirectional process. But scholars over the time have come up with different theories to track the growth of the urban nodes through sequential stages. Theoretically several models have tried to explain the stages of urban growth (Das and Bhusan, 2014). The classic structural change model of Chenery and Syrquin (1979) identified characteristic features of the development process, such as the shift from agricultural (primary) to industrial (secondary) production and Northam (1979) identified characteristic phases of urbanization on the basis of logistic patterns in urban growth. On the other hand, some models have even tried to phase out urban growth on the basis of GDP per capita, industrial structure (the proportion of the economy devoted to primary, secondary, or tertiary industry), employment structure (the proportion of jobs associated with each industrial sector) and level of urbanization (the proportion of non-farm population in cities) as indicators of the stage of city development (Wang, Liu, Peng, Chen, Driskell, Zheng, 2011). However, Berg, Drewett, Klassen, Rossi and Vijverberg in 1982 conceptualised the urban growth in well sequenced stages and generated a model of urban growth on the basis of population growth in the urban regions and the shifts in population between the core and the peripheral zones. Population mostly focuses on the core for their economic activities. Berg’s model proposed that the urban regions develop in well deciphered stages of Urbanisation, Suburbanisation/Ex-urbanisation, Counter-urbanisation and Re-urbanisation (Clarke, 2003).

Theories of interdependency, mercantilism and that of global urban development have sought to propose a kind of causal between processes of wealth accumulation and the creation of hierarchy of the urban spaces. These have further talked of urban development as consequent upon the stages of economic development from mercantilism through industrial and monopoly capitalism to corporate capitalism. In the later stages of economic development the urban spaces at the macro level are open to exchange of both human and social capital. However, if the same is thought at a much smaller scale i.e. at a meso level, then such hierarchies are also found to exist within urban regions of particular nation. In India for example, the urban population is found to be concentrated in few of the major states and further if such individual states are considered then a primacy is indicated in some of the major cities or urban agglomerations in them (e.g., Kolkata UA accounts more than 48.4 percent of the total urban population of West Bengal in 2011).

Klassen et.al (1981) and van den Breg (1982) have employed the concept of cyclic urbanization wthin individual urban agglomerations and have identified four major stages in which they grow. The stages may be summed up as

a. Urbanisation

b. Suburbanization or exurbanisation

c. Disurbanisation or counterurbanisation and

d. Reurbanisation

While in the stage of urbanization, certain settlement grow and expand at the cost of their surrounding countryside, the suburbansiation or the exurbanisation phase experiences the growth of the peripheral ones of urban settlements at a higher rate in comparison to the core. In the stage of counter urbanization, the core experiences a loss of urban population which far exceeds the rate of population gain at the peripheries resulting in the overall loss of the urban settlement in terms of population numbers and in the stage of reurbanisation, the core starts gaining population where as the ring keeps on loosing population.

However, Breg’s model is based on the changes in the rate and direction of population movement between the urban core and the peripheral ring which together form the daily urban system (DUS) which together are functionally interrelated. Absolute change is noted in the urban settlement in cases the core and the ring experience change in population in two different directions and relative change is experienced when the population moves in both the zones but at different rates but in the same direction.

The stages with their relative change in the direction of population have been summed up in the following figure 1.

Figure 1:

Stages of Urban Development after van den Breg

Source: Pacione (2009)

Geyer and Kontuly (1993) postulated the phases of urban growth in their theory of Generalised Stages of Differential Urbanisation. They identified that the cities grow

through the following stages of

a. The primate city phase

b. The intermediate city phase and

c. The small city phase

In the initial primate city phase, population growth and economic activities are concentrated in the rapidly growing primate cities. The cities slowly attain their multi-nodal character through the stages of early primate city, intermediate primate city phase and advanced primate city phase.

On the other hand the intermediate city phase is characterized by the slowing down of the growth rate of the primate city and spatial deconcentration. This phase experiences the growth intermediate sized cities in close proximity to the primate city.

The small city phase on the other hand sees the growth of small urban centres which grow at a much faster rate in comparison to the primate city and the intermediate cities.

Conclusion:

It therefore follows that cities are constantly changing in terms of their population numbers and in comparison to the proportion staying in the rural counterparts. This change in the cities’ morphology and size is mainly in response to the ongoing changes in the social, economic and demographic scenario and different scholars have tried to phase the cities growth in different characteristics stages. However, it would be interesting to note that the cities mainly add the population through two main processes of natural increase (with higher birth rate than death rate) and through migration. It may be noted that the sequential phases of urban growth have been mainly proposed from the western experience of urbanization and therefore may not be true for the developing countries. However, if the stages of growth for the Indian cities are taken into account, the phenomenon may not be explained by a single model or theory rather a combination of a set of these.

References

• Bhusan, S. (2010). Patterns of Distribution of Basic Amenities in Different Size Classes of Towns in West Bengal, 1991-2001. Unpublished Dissertation submitted to Jawaharlal Nehru University for the partial fulfillment of the degree of Master of Philosophy.
• Chenery, H. and Syrquin, M. (1979). Structural Change and Development Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Clarke, D. (2003). Urban World / Global City, Second edition, Routledge, London.
• Clarke, D. (2003). Urban World / Global City, Second edition, Routledge, London.
• Das, D.N. and Bhusan, S. (2014). Magnetism in India’s Metros: A Study on Migrants’ Choice of Destination. Social Change, 44(4) 1–22
• Geyer and T.Kontuly. (1993). A Theoritical Foundation for the Concept of Differential Urbanisation. International Regional Science Review, 15(12), 157-77
• Klassen, W. Molle and J. Paelinck (1981). Dynamics of Urban Development. New York, St. Martin’s Press
• Van Den Berg, R. Drewett, L.Klassen, L.Rossi, and C. Vijverberg (1982). As Study of Growth and Decline. Oxford. Pegasus.
• Kundu, A, Bagchi, S and Kundu, D. (1999). “Regional Distribution of Infrastructure and Basic Amenities in urban India: Issues Concerning Empowerment of Local Bodies”, Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 34, Number 28, (July 10-16, 1999).
• Northam, R. M. (1979). Urban geography. New York: Wiley.
• Pacione, M.(2009). Urban Geography: A Global Perspective, Third Edition, Routledge, New York.