Urban Poverty and the Rural Development Bias

It has often been said that there is an ‘urban bias’ in development, due to the assumption that economic growth and modernization naturally occurs in cities and has as its ultimate destination development by urbanization. This has meant that problem oriented interventions are typically focused on excluded rural people and built around rural paradigms. Even in development practice that is explicitly urban, stakeholders are often viewed through a rural lens. This has often left development practice with what amounts to a rural bias. Nowhere has this urban bias in development policy and rural bias in development practice been more clearly manifest than in the developmentalist states of Asia. Drawing on contemporary empirical data from the Urban Poverty Project (UPP), an ongoing World Bank/Indonesian government urban anti-poverty initiative in Northern Java, we discuss some of the ways in which this rural bias has weakened the conceptual tools for imagining development in urban environments. It will be our argument that the dominant rural/village development trope and its corresponding scalar dichotomies between local and global and social dichotomies between traditional and modern have formed the basis of much of the way we think about and practice development. This has often obscured, rather than clarified what people actually want and need and how it can best be delivered.