ABSTRACT
The rapid growth of cities in the contemporary Third World raises interesting intellectual issues for social scientists and presents vexing problems for planners and policymakers. Human ecology provides a very general image of the emergence of hierarchies based on “key functions” in particular communities, regions, or larger systems. Modernization theory argued that urbanization, industrialization, and human progress reinforced one another and grew together. But as early as the 1950s and 1960s, scholars became aware of the possible negative developmental effects of overurbanization. They argued that population concentration in large Third World cities was increasing so quickly that demographic growth was outstripping the newly urbanized societies’ ability to adjust, absorb, and cope with the human influx. The political nature of cities is quite obvious to planners. As practitioners trying to formulate and implement various types of policies on a day-to-day basis, they need no theoretical argument to convince them of the reality of political conflicts, struggles, and compromises.
