Reflections on the relations between development and urbanization: past trajectories and future challenges

This article examines the inter-relationship between economic prosperity and the growth of cities, tracing the field from its original preoccupation with over-urbanization and under-development in the 1950s and 1960s to its current fixation on dynamic global cities with redeveloped property markets that showcase new forms of wealth creation. The historical change in emphasis chronicled here is understood to be a combined product of three different causalities. The first is the shift from industrialization to financial and other services as the principal source of wealth creation in the post-1980s era. The second is the changing territorial scale of accumulation, reflected in the shifting importance of global markets vis-à-vis national markets and in the increasingly key mediating role that cities play in facilitating this transition. The third is the rescaling of state power, seen not just in terms of decentralization but also in the declining capacities of national states to discipline global investors in an era of intensifying economic liberalization. The entry ends with a discussion of the emergent social and spatial problems that accompany these shifts, ranging from the rise of urban informality to dispossession and displacement to newfound struggles over urban property rights.