ABSTRACT
One answer to this question is that concentrations of urban-industrial power damage the ‘authenticity’ of a country. Gandhi (1997[1908]) believed that the soul of India was to be found in its villages. For him, large-scale industrialization was a form of social evil. Some deep ecologists also think in these terms, which for the most part are recognizably normative (that is, they advance a value judgement). In the 1960s Michael Lipton began to develop a more positive (or testable) account of urban bias in the process of world development. His urban bias thesis (UBT) was formally presented in his book Why Poor People Stay Poor: A Study of Urban Bias in World Development (Lipton 1977). The UBT proposes that urban classes in poorer countries use their social power to bias (distort) a range of public policies against members of the rural classes. Lipton argued that urban bias ‘involves (a) an allocation, to persons or organizations located in towns, of shares of resources so large as to be ineff icient and inequitable, or (b) a disposition among the powerful [urban classes] to allocate resources in this way’ (Lipton 2005: 724, summarizing Lipton 1977).
