[ Urban growth ]

Significant Dwarfs

To an increasing extent, small towns serve as junctions in global networks, connecting rural regions with big cities. Their fast growth deserves more attention.


[ By Rüdiger Korff and Hannah von Bloh ]

For a long time, there has been a sense of polarisation: development experts tend to focus on either rural regions or megacities. The view is widely shared that poverty exists either in the villages or slums. It is largely ignored, however, that the most dramatic and dynamic urbanisation does not take place in the megacities but in rather small towns and medium-sized cities.

It has become common knowledge that, since 2007, more than half of humankind lives in towns or cities of varying sizes. What is less known is that 52 % of these people live in places with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants (UNFPA 2007: 9). It is also significant that over 40 % of total urban growth in the years 2000 to 2015 is expected to take place in these localities (Tacoli 2004: 3).

In Germany, places with 10,000 or more inhabitants are typically considered small towns, and from 100,000 on they are regarded as cities. However, it is absurd to measure the degree of urbanisation by population size alone. It is obvious that, in Tajikistan, a settlement of 10,000 people has a different standing than one of the same size in China. What really matters, is what role a place plays as link between urban and rural spaces. The middle units, the “small towns” are important intersections for the flow of goods, money, information and people. Their significance as junctions in political, commercial and cultural networks is growing.

In this respect, they are similar to megacities. The major difference, however, is that the growth rates of small towns are higher (doubling within a few years is nothing special) and that they have not taken on a defined character yet. Structures are created afresh, so there is more scope for design than in the megacities, which have already been home to millions of people for many decades.

A boom in small towns and district capitals is taking place, above all in Asia. So far, donor countries have hardly taken notice. Fast urbanisation goes hand in hand with rapid economic growth and changing lifestyles. Multinational corporations open supermarkets in these places, internet cafés spring up, and new markets for consumer goods are created. There is less social control than in the villages and an abundance of new opportunities – with respect to education, employment and health care, for example. There is also a wider range of leisure time activities. The darker side of urbanisation consists in crime, drugs and prostitution.


Centres of change

Rural projects are often very slow to have any impact on the living conditions of local communities. By contrast, change is fast in small towns, and it also affects the village people.

Consider the example of Soppong in northern Thailand. This district capital is located in a remote mountain region. It has 5,000 inhabitants today. In the 1980s, a new road connected Soppong to Chiang May, and an economic boom ensued. Hospitals and schools were built. Trade de­veloped. Today, apart from products of farmers from the surrounding villages, one also finds cheap electronics from China, motorbikes and textiles. The local market has become internationalised. And a town elite has formed, composed of the heads of administrations, local entrepreneurs and political representatives.

Soppong now offers new opportunities, which, to some extent, displace old livelihoods. On street corners, where women previously sold food, restaurants serve customers today. Larger-scale manufacturing is taking over the production of traditional cloths. There is now even an internet café.

Opinions about small towns vary. In the past, modernisation theorists ascribed a positive role to them because of a “trickle-down effect”. They argued that wealth from the centres was redistributed to the regions through the towns. Representatives of dependence theory, on the other hand, claimed that small towns promoted the exploitation of the rural poor by the political and business elites in the metropolises.

Current studies refrain from assigning small towns a universally applicable role. Instead, they tend to regard them as independent territorial units. Their significance for the development of the region depends on idiosyncrasies and specific local needs.

It is significant, however, that small towns have a potential to mitigate the demographic pressure on the megacities. They represent an attractive alternative to the overburdened metropolises. Although they usually have poor infrastructure and only a little human capital, they can react in a more flexible manner to a large number of challenges. There is more room to manoeuvre when it comes to territorial expansion, for instance, and creative decision-making can make the most of regional competitive advantages and local resources. If this is done successfully, standards of living also improve in the surrounding villages; and migration pressure on the megacities eases.

Small towns provide rural areas with administrative, economic and social services. As a subordinate administrative level, they play a key role in spelling out local needs to government bodies. This is where the hierarchies of the state apparatus and rural people meet and interact.

The advantage of the small town is that the villages are directly represented. They speak the same or similar languages and important people are well-known. This kind of direct representation scarcely exists at higher levels. Slick functionaries are more likely to be found in the big agglomerations. While they may be rhetorically skilled, they no longer have first hand knowledge of everyday village life.

On the other hand, a distinctive elite formation is typical of small towns. Leading persons exploit the town’s opportunities primarily in pursuit of their own interests. For that reason, development-related demands for participation and strengthening civil society are especially urgent at this level. It would therefore make sense to draft new policies to influence urban development at the small-scale level.

D+C, 2008/11, Tribune, Page 425-426