ABSTRACT
More than a half a century on, John Friedmann’s early writings on urbanization and regional development resonate with policy-makers, planners and political actors, notably in the rapidly urbanizing countries, regions and cities of the “global South.” This influence can also be felt in the work of researchers, which often provides the “evidence base” for urban and regional policy and practice. The impact is felt most strongly in contemporary Asia and Africa, which are, not coincidentally, at the leading edge of global urbanization and global urbanism. According to United Nations estimates, Africa had the highest rate of
urban demographic growth over the last 20 years, at 3.5 percent per year. Some 40 percent of Africa’s population of 1.2 billion now lives in urban areas; this is estimated to rise to 56 percent by 2050. Africa and Asia will add 90 percent of the expected 2.5 billion addition in urban population by 2050, with India contributing 404 million, China 292 million and Nigeria 212 million (United Nations 2014). I begin this essay by attempting to understand why these writings inform
contemporary urban and regional planning and specifically, “influence the decisions of politicians and administrators,” to use Friedmann’s words in describing his interlocutors and clients at the time (1966, p.255). I then use Friedmann and Miller’s ground-breaking paper “The Urban
Field” (1965) to discuss how its identification of a new “scale of urban living” (p.313) informed the initial research into the massively scaled and conjoined urbanization and urban-suburban-regional spatial expansion process in contemporary Nigeria (Bloch et al. 2015). I conclude by identifying a number of productive tensions in Friedmann’s
work. Building from these, I propose directions forward, for both planning research and planning practice.
