ABSTRACT
Students of development and development practitioners have long concerned themselves with urban-rural relationships. A familiar assumption has been that ambitious people will move to urban areas to improve their lot. In the 1950s and 1960s an apparent bias in favour of urban-industrial models of development was justified by three key ideas. W. Arthur Lewis (1954) proposed that there is disguised unemployment or underemployment in rural areas of poorer countries, where the marginal productivity of labour is often very low. Men and women move to the city to find more productive work and to pull their families out of poverty. Hans Singer (1950) and Raoul Prebisch (1950) further argued that there is a long-run tendency for the terms of trade – the ratio of export commodity prices to import commodity prices – to move against primary commodities like foodstuffs and raw materials. Import substitution was commended partly on this basis. Urban planners, meanwhile, argued that goods and services would be diffused most efficiently from major cities to smaller cities and rural areas. Cities benefited from, and generated, economies of scale. This, after all, had been the experience of most Western countries.