ABSTRACT
The increasing numbers of Third World city dwellers (i.e., absolute size of the urban population) and the growing proportion of total population residing in cities in the Third World (i.e., level of urbanization) have been dramatic in the 20th century. Bairoch (1988) estimates the Third World urban population at the beginning of this century at under 100 million, increasing to well over one billion by 1985. Existing cities have gotten much larger (e.g., Mexico City will have grown from a little more than 3 million in 1950 to a projected 26 million by the end of the century), and new cities have emerged (e.g., Brasilia). This tenfold increase in the numbers of urban residents has been accompanied by an equally remarkable shift in the distribution of the Third World population from rural areas to cities: the overall level of urbanization in Africa, Asia, and Latin America has increased from about 9 percent urban to almost 30 percent urban since the beginning of the 20th century. While these summary statistics mask significant differences across regions (e.g., the urban percentage in Latin America is about 67 percent) and within regions (e.g., the urban percentage in Paraguay is less than 30 percent), they are useful in characterizing patterns in the world’s less developed countries as a whole. Some of the factors leading to increased urbanization in these areas of the world are identical to those underlying urbanization anywhere during the modern era (e.g., increasing urban-based industrialization), but many conditions are substantially different; the differences are vital to the comparative social history of modern urbanization. The most important differences are the direct and indirect effects of the rapid population growth characteristic of most Third World countries, especially since the 1950s.
