Urbanization is the process by which human population in the cities grows more rapidly than in the rural areas. It has sparked a lot of interests from the economic scholars and social scientists. As urbanization has increased in the third world, there are social, economic and environmental problems that have arisen. There are differences in the conditions that exist now during the urbanization in the Third world and the conditions that exist at the same time in the First world. There is a shortage of resources in the developing countries.
First of all, the West has superior natural resources and higher levels of development to sustain the rise in urbanization. The absolute increments in the population in the urban cities in the Third world are also much higher than the population increase in the First World. In the city of Mexico, the population was 3.1 Million in the year 1950 however it is expected that by the year 2020, the population will have risen to a staggering 24 Million. A similar population increase is expected of the Sao Paulo city. It will be at 24 Million yet in 1950, the population was only 2.8 Million. Comparing the population increase in the Third World cities and cities in the First World, there is a huge difference. In New York City, it took a century and a half for the population to expand by eight million (Kasarda and Crenshaw, 469).
The urbanization in the developing countries is also not entirely based on industrial or manufacturing employment as the West urbanization. There has been an increase in migration, rural to urban migration despite the depressing conditions in the cities.
The people are still drawn to the towns despite the mass retrenchments, inflation and shrunken public sectors (Davis, 10). The urbanization in the Third World is taking place in those countries with the lowest economic growth levels. In the First World the urbanization started in the Western Europe and North America regions where the rates of economic growth were the highest. The rise in urbanization in developing countries is caused mainly by migration and population increase.
In the developing countries, they now have better access to great medical care, sanitation and food supplies which has reduced the number of death in the countries. There has also been a rise in the fertility rates which has caused a population explosion. There is also a lot of rural to urban migration as the people seek better employment opportunities in the town. The people in the rural areas also move to the cities to escape political or tribal chaos or strife. There are also no basic infrastructures in the rural areas. The cities however offer few jobs for the youth but they are attracted by the cities as they want to experience the city life.
In the West, the major causes of urbanization has also been caused by migration and population increase. The population increase however is not as high as in the developing countries. There has been rural to urban migration however unlike in the developing countries, there has been a great inflow of immigrants into the West who are searching for better jobs and want to give their family members a better life.
There are also those immigrants who are escaping harsh political or social conditions in their countries and want to live in a country that has peace or political stability.
The urbanization in the Third World has been referred to as over urbanizationsince it has had an adverse effect on the economic growths of these countries. The labour markets have been saturated leading to an increase in unemployment levels. The government public services are overburdened as they are unable to provide sufficient social services.
The available city resources are unable to meet the population demands for water, solid waste management and sanitation. There has therefore been an increase in air and water population. The rising population and the decline in jobs cause congestion and the creation of many slum areas in the cities. The raw sewages in the cities are released in rivers and other water canals causing pollution and posing significant health risks to the population and environment. The children are exposed to the dirt as they play. Many people in the slums get diseases such as cholera and typhoid. With inadequate and delayed access to medical care, the number of deaths due to these diseases is high.
The houses that exist in the slum areas are made up of materials that are highly combustible. When a fire breaks out, hundreds of people lose their homes and possessions.
Challenges of urbanization in Bogota, Columbia
The wealth in Bogota is unevenly distributed. Bogota is the largest city and therefore a critical economic centre for the nation. The slums in Columbia like other slums in the developing world arose due to the rapid increase in the population yet there were no adequate housing facilities to cater for the incremental population. There has been high rural to urban migration due to poverty and violence in the city. There has also been occupation and development of the marginal areas of the country by the immigrants. As the urbanization has been increasing in the city, there has been a deterioration of the physical and social structures. The inner city slums have also accommodated a lot of the people who have come from lower socio-economic classes (U-N Habitat, 205).
There have therefore been several factors that have led to the development of the inner city slums. There have been subdivisions in the marginal lands. The subdivisions are due to lack of sufficient physical and social structures. The buildings are later improved by the government or the self-help organizations. There have also been squatter settlements in the region with even more dire social and physical limitations. There were also relocations of the industrial and military functions away from the traditional urban centres to better locations. These urban areas therefore deteriorated due to the urban abandonment. These areas face a lot of dire social conditions such as poverty, high rates of drug abuse and delinquency.
The houses are dilapidated rental units and there is high level of overcrowding conditions. The inner slum houses are usually rented but the squatter houses in the marginal areas are owner-occupied. There are higher levels of violence and crime in the inner city slums than the other areas of the city as the people struggle to cater for their material needs.
With the increase in population and urbanization, the slums will continue to increase in the future. In 1994, 19.4% of the population was living below the poverty line but by the year 2000, the population had increased to 23% ((U-N Habitat, 205).
The people in the slum do not get to participate in enjoying the economic progress of the country. They live in urban isolation. It is hard for them to get physical and social amenities. There are also high levels of poverty and unemployment. The positive thing that occurs in the slums is that the people look for areas of common interests. Through social activities there arises a platform through which change can be auctioned. The social structures get stronger and lead to empowerment of the people. They gradually get the will and desire to act and react. There is a lot of social class stratification with the non-slum dwellers viewing the people who live in the slums as undesirable. They describe the people using such terms such as tamps, commoners and street boys. The government however in the last few years have been looking into the slum areas and addressing the problem.
There have been administrative changes in the social policies that have promoted efficiency and reduced corruption in the government. The change has enabled the policies to be implemented in the critical sectors such as social housing, transportation and education. There have therefore been political transformations and reforms that have uplifted the living standards of the people.
The government faces a challenge in addressing the housing resources for more than 500,000 units and spreading the increase of the informal settlements(U-N Habitat, 205). The challenge however can be overcome by real political involvement and knowledge of the social problems that these people face. There will be valuable lessons learnt by the leadership on handling the poverty in the country.
Depiction of Slum through Social Artefacts
The Slum Dog Millionaire is a movie that shows clearly the life and challenges that those children who live in slums face. Jamal Malik, at eighteen years enters as a contestant in the game “who wants to be a millionaire”, where he is able to answer all the questions correctly. However, just before the final question he is taken for questioning as he is suspected of cheating. During the police interrogation, Jamal narrates his life growing up in the slums and the public gets to see the state of the slums in Juha village in Bombay, India
(Slum Dog Millionaire, 2008).
The slums shown in the movie are as depicted in the book, Planet of Slums by Mike Davis. The author describes a slum as an environment that has several characteristic such as poor or informal housing, poor access to water and sanitation and insecurity in terms of securing shelter every month (Davis, 23). The slums in Bombay are made up of congested small houses made up of dilapidated materials. There are many people sharing one room or two room houses. The places have poor sanitation. Waste is thrown everywhere and it exists in heaps near the houses or the rivers. The people are exposed to the dirt and get all kinds of diseases.
There is high poverty and the children do not even go to school. Jamal grew up with his brother and mother in the Juha slums. Life is crazy as their mother struggles to feed them daily. Unfortunately, when Jamal is seven years old, the mother is killed in a religious riot. The boys’ father is never mentioned in the movie and there are no close male role models for the young children. With no father and mother, the two brothers are forced to find a way to feed themselves on the street.
There are predators on the street that are ready to take advantage of the desperate young people who need to get money. In the slums there are high rates of crime, prostitution and child abuse be it sexual or physical. They are taken by an orphanage which turns out to be a fraud. They are forced to become beggars on the streets by men who simply want to make money quickly and without any sweat. The men find out that blind child beggars earn more than others so they blind one of the boys in the orphanage. When Salim, Jamal brother
finds out, he tells Jamal and they escape.
They live in the trains where they steal food and money in orderto survive. In the orphanage the boys had befriended a girl called Latika. Jamal fell in love with her. Later when they go back to her, they find she is being forced to be a dancer and a prostitute. The movie shows the high exploitation of children in the slums. When Salim and Jamal try to rescue the girl, the bad men follow them with guns and there is quite a confrontation.
In the slums, most of the people have casual jobs such as clerks, watchmen, cooks or waiters. In the movie, Jamal works as an unofficial tour guide at the Taj Mahal.
At eighteen years old, he works as a tea boy in a mobile phone call centre. There are limited education opportunities in the slums due to lack of money to get a good education. The young men and women are therefore semi-skilled or unskilled locking them out of working in middle class and upper class jobs in the companies. They are mostly employed as casual or temporary workers. The money is not high so they are really not able to uplift their families. Even if the people in the slums get an education, they are few employment opportunities. This scenario is portrayed well in the movie. It is one of the characteristics of a slum depicted by the author of TheNew Urban Sociology (Gottdiener and Hutchinson, 359)
The people are therefore poor for the next generation, circumstances that have come to be referred to as the vicious cycle of poverty. The cycle of poverty continues until it is broken by rags to riches story as the one in the Slum Dog Millionaire movie. Jamal answers the last question correctly and wins 20 Million rupees. In conclusion, the developing world has to come up with viable solutions to handle the eradication of slums through the actual implementation of social and political policies at the grass root levels.
Works Cited
Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. New York: Verso Printers. 2006. Print.
Gottdiener, Mark and Ray Hutchinson.The New Urban Sociology. Colorado:
Westview Press. 2006. Print.
Kasarda, John and Edward Crenshaw “Third World Urbanization: Dimensions, Theories,
and Determinants”. Annual Review of Sociology, 17(1991): 467-501. Print.
Slum Dog Millionaire.Dir. Danny Boyle.Perf.Dev Patel, Freida Pinto and Madhur.
2008. Film.
U-N Habitat.The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003
UK: Earthscan Publications. 2003. Print.
