Rather than portraying rapid urbanisation in terms of overconsumption, we should be celebrating it
In January, China marked a historic milestone in its development: for the first time ever, city dwellers outnumbered the rural population. According to the Chinese statistics bureau, 691 million people now live in cities, amounting to more than 51% of the population. Yet this fact merited just a single sentence in a Chinese government press release. Meanwhile, in the western media, to the extent that this genuinely historic event was covered, it sometimes seemed less a matter for celebration than trepidation.
Such a reaction says a lot about the way rapid urbanisation in the developing world is viewed. Over the next 20 years or so, the global urban population is expected to rise to approximately 5 billion. This explosion of urban life could be greeted enthusiastically, as a sign of progress and development – moving people off the land and out of back-breaking labour. But far too often, urbanisation is instead seen through the contemporary prism of social, political and ecological concerns: overpopulation, fears about the breakdown of traditional communities, and the dangers cities create for the broader environment, to name but a few.
Even those who nominally assume cities to be a force for good, acknowledging their attraction as places to live and work, seem troubled by the pace of change. According to Paul James, director of the Global Cities research institute in Melbourne, the speed of development is not culturally or ecologically sustainable.
Elsewhere, urbanisation's welcome association with increased prosperity is often turned into a tale of woe. The growth of cities, we are warned, will accelerate the depletion of water resources, which in turn may drive more country dwellers to leave the land. New city dwellers in China and India are condemned on the grounds that their urban lifestyles and changing diets require more energy to maintain than their village-based counterparts. Given such a negative worldview, it's perhaps no surprise that a reported 72% of developing countries have adopted policies designed to stem the tide of migration to their cities.
The current view of urbanisation is problematic on two fronts: it demonstrates how a negative worldview dominates much discussion of population and development, and highlights the collapse in confidence about humanity's ability to create a better future.
It's remarkable the extent to which people are now considered the problem rather than the solution. Last week, John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, described population as "our biggest challenge", highlighting UN's growth projections suggesting Africa's population will grow "frighteningly fast".
Others have expressed concerns that focusing on overpopulation is a potentially racist distraction from the real issue: western overconsumption. Yet here, too, people are portrayed as the problem, and said to bear responsibility for the planet's supposedly imminent implosion. Such views may be presented in acceptably PC language, but the suggestion that humanity's drain on resources is the problem is again indicative of negative attitudes.
The regrettable consequence of such thinking is that it provides the justification for lowering ambitions for the types of cities and levels of development required for the future. If overconsumption is accepted as the problem, then the slums that have grown in many areas of the world as part of the process of urbanisation – and which should be viewed as a temporary solution for people on their way to something better – can instead be romanticised as a way to save the planet, celebrated as metabolically efficient because people recycle or get around on foot, bicycle or rickshaw.
For all that the slums represent a positive route into urban networks, and offer new urban dwellers the potential to create a better future, they also stand as a testament to the failure to develop far enough and fast enough. The belief, espoused by the likes of Architecture for Humanity, that informal settlements are not just tolerated but learned from as a way of keeping the city "in check" is in fact dehumanising. Viewing people as a problem to be contained within slum environments is an outlook that condemns the latest generation of urban adventurers to live out their lives as victims of circumstance, rather than the creative agents of their own transformation.
Thankfully, there's something in the human spirit that leads people to demand more rather than accept less. The creative minds and productive hands of new urban dwellers will hopefully mean that more wealth and energy use, and western standards of mobility, are realistic prospects. The real problem today is the culture of low aspirations. It's time to stake out the case for modernisation as the key to successful urbanisation.
• Alastair Donald is associate director of the Future Cities Project, and co-editor of The Lure of the City: from Slums to Suburbs. He will be speaking at the Newcastle International Development Conference 18-19 February 2012