From Asterisk magazine, Issue 7, September 2024:
Historically, cities in industrializing countries were often identified with the things they produced. Manchester is where they made textiles, Pittsburgh is where they made steel, and Detroit is where they made cars. These urban identities weren’t confined to heavy manufacturing: New York is synonymous with finance, Los Angeles with movies, and Milan with luxury goods. Nor has the tendency to identify urban areas with specific economic activities fully disappeared: Today, the Bay Area is where they write software and Taipei is where they fabricate semiconductors.
These are all examples of what the sociologist Max Weber called, in a 1921 article The City, 1 producer cities: urban areas organized economically around some specific trade or particular manufactured goods that could be exported to other areas.
In contrast to these producer cities are what Weber called consumer cities. These were places organized economically around a specific set of residents with rights or privileges to some stream of income, like land rents or taxes. Weber used historical Beijing, which was centered on government officials, and Moscow, centered on landowners collecting rents from peasants, as examples. A contemporary example is Dubai, which grew rapidly around oil revenues. 2
Weber attributed the economic development of Europe relative to Asia to the predominance of its producer cities. The advantage he posited wasn’t because producer cities were necessarily larger — Beijing was perhaps 10 times as large as Manchester on the eve of the industrial revolution — but because producer cities had a higher capacity for innovation. They were dynamic.
Because producer cities are dependent on trade with other cities or countries, they have more incentive to innovate to gain market share. Consumer cities, on the other hand, are more likely to rely on rent seeking — and therefore experience economic stagnation. Moreover, innovations in one producer city can spill over to other producer cities through supply chains (cheaper steel in Pittsburgh makes for cheaper cars in Detroit) — but anything that benefits a consumer city likely comes at the expense of another city or region (like higher rents for agricultural tenants).
Weber’s city classification was a useful framework for understanding the historical processes of urbanization and economic growth. But how useful is it in understanding economic growth — or the potential for economic growth — in the modern developing world?
It isn’t hard to come up with developing cities that fit his scheme. Zhengzhou, China, is home to a Foxconn manufacturing plant that employs around 350,000 people and produces about half of all new iPhones. On the other end of the scale are consumer cities like Luanda, Angola, a city built around oil revenues and of which The Economist said: “Shiny shopping malls are filled with everything the Angolan heart could desire, from gourmet food to the latest fashions and car models. Prices are wildly inflated. Virtually everything … has to be imported.” 3
The economic and demographic context today is of course quite different from that of 1921. The City centered on agrarian nations and emerging cities with populations in the hundreds of thousands. Modern developing nations are already heavily urbanized compared to historical norms. Some of the poorest countries in the world are nevertheless home to cities with tens of millions of residents.
But we can still take a Weberian approach and ask whether poor countries home to producer cities developed — and will continue to develop — faster than poor countries host to consumer cities. We just also have to consider whether the relatively early urbanization and unprecedented absolute size of cities in these poor countries has locked them into a consumer city-like economic model — and stifled the opportunity for sustained development.
A short history of urbanization and development
Let’s start by establishing how the relationship between urbanization and economic development has changed since Weber first made his observations.
The figure above shows that in both 1913 and 2020 higher urbanization rates are associated with higher GDP per capita. 4 In 1913 the poorest countries were barely urbanized, often with less than 10% of their population in cities. The richest places had urbanization rates of 40%–50%, with one big outlier in the form of the U.K., at an urbanization rate of 75%. Over the last century, however, the entire world has become more urban — as of 2007, over half of the global population now lives in cities.
As a result, the association between urbanization and GDP per capita is no longer as steep. In particular, there has been significant “poor-country urbanization.” 5 By 2020, even the very poorest countries had urbanization rates of 20%, and some reached 50%.
You can get a sense of this shift by looking at specific examples. China has an urbanization rate of around 64%, in recent years passing Poland and Austria. 6 Each of these countries are emerging or established industrial producers. But their urbanization rates are similar to, or below, those of Gambia (64%), Ecuador (65%), and Algeria (75%), none of which approaches our idea of an industrial powerhouse. Perhaps more surprising is that all these countries are far behind, for example, Gabon (91%), a West African country with a per capita GDP below $9,000 but with proportionally more city-dwellers than the United States (83%), United Kingdom (84%), or South Korea (81%)....
....MUCH MORE
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Today
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Keep Growing, Corporations And People Always Die, And Life Gets Faster*)
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Frankly, I look forward to experiencing anything in the year 2100.
*The estimated seven most populous cities in 2100 via the construction mavens at B1M:1. LAGOS, NIGERIA - 88.3 MILLION
2. KINSHASA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO - 83.5 MILLION
3. DAR ES SALAAM, TANZANIA - 73.7 MILLION
4. MUMBAI, INDIA - 67.2 MILLION
5. DELHI, INDIA - 57.3 MILLION
6. KHARTOUM, SUDAN – 56.6 MILLION
7. NIAMEY, NIGER – 56.1 MILLION
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