ABSTRACT
The relationship between cities and development processes has long been recognized as historically important. Charles Tilly, for example, observes that less densely urbanized regions gave rise to different kinds of states than areas with large numbers of cities because metropolitan centres played a key role in the transformation of states from feudal ‘war machines’ to ‘multipurpose organizations’ of a more developmental nature. Drawing on the European historical experience in particular, Tilly argues that strategic collaboration between urban-based capital and rural-based coercion specialists (i.e. warlords) – the former financing the latter’s warring, but also paying for their own security – symbiotically welded these two politically important groups together into a unit that over time coalesced into the modern developmental nation-state due to the fact that this ‘bargaining, in its turn, created numerous new claims on the state: pensions, payments to the poor, public education, city planning, and much more’ (Tilly, 1994: 9). Largely as a result of such analyses, urbanization has perhaps not surprisingly frequently come to be considered almost synonymous with progress, to the extent that the proportion of a country’s population that is urban and its urbanization rates are often presented as key indicators of its level of development (Beall and Fox, 2009).
