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Advances in Geographical and Environmental Sciences

Celine Rozenblat · Denise Pumain

Elkin Velasquez Editors

International and
Transnational
Perspectives on
Urban Systems
Advances in Geographical and Environmental
Sciences

Series editor
R.B. Singh
AIMS AND SCOPE

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Celine Rozenblat • Denise Pumain
Elkin Velasquez
Editors

International and
Transnational Perspectives
on Urban Systems
Editors
Celine Rozenblat Denise Pumain
Institute of Geography and Sustainability University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
University of Lausanne UMR CNRS 8504 Géographie-cités
Lausanne, Switzerland Paris, France

Elkin Velasquez
Regional Office of UN-Habitat for Latin
America and the Caribbean
United Nations Habitat
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

ISSN 2198-3542     ISSN 2198-3550 (electronic)

Advances in Geographical and Environmental Sciences
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Preface

Humankind has entered a new “Urban Age” with the majority of the population
already living in urban areas and with scientific evidence that this trend will be the
new normal of our future. It is therefore not surprising that sustainable urban devel-
opment has become an integral pillar of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable
Development, with a specific goal (SDG 11) dedicated to cities.
An analysis of the state of the world’s urbanization over the last 20 years by
UN-Habitat, the lead United Nations agency on urban development, shows that the
current trends are not only not sustainable, but also damaging for the quality of life
of future urban dwellers and for the planet as a whole. Cities in the world are
increasingly less planned and less dense, consuming 78% of the world’s energy,
producing more than half of all greenhouse gas emissions, and taking up much more
land than needed, with unaffordable housing. The dramatic consequences of these
trends are already felt in many parts of the world, especially in the developing
world, affecting most vulnerable populations.
The adoption of the New Urban Agenda at Habitat III in Quito in October 2016
has opened a new window of hope for the future urban dwellers, consolidating the
new urban paradigm shift that recognizes the positive and transformative outcomes
of well-planned urbanization. This paradigm shift is crucial, as it reaps the benefits
of good urbanization in seeking solutions to many of the problems the world is fac-
ing today. If we get urban development right, cities can be centers for creating jobs,
promoting social inclusion, and protecting local ecosystems. Cities, when planned
and managed well, as units but also as “systems of cities,” are engines of national
economic growth, social prosperity, and environmental sustainability.
Cities as individual entities are commonly analyzed by practitioners, academics,
and researchers as very complex entities; but the same is not true for systems of cit-
ies, i.e., for the interaction among cities and for the socioeconomic and political
dynamics when they are seen as part of a system. And here is one of the challenges
but also opportunities explored by this book, which has resulted of previous
exchanges with Celine Rozenblat at the early stages of the preparatory process of
Habitat III. Beyond the first work of the German geographers on the central places
theory, the work on development poles of Perroux, or the perspectives of the regional

v
vi Preface

science, do we have recent methodologies to better understand and handle systems

of cities? Better than that, do we dispose of practical and recently developed
approaches in order to take into account the structure and functioning of a system of
cities when it comes to design new urban policies and its instruments? The answer,
at least from isolated tools and instruments, might not be promising. Celine
Rozenblat and Denise Pumain have identified not only an academic challenge, but
a practical opportunity to make a compilation of the state of the art on system of
cities around the world, but also to advance with ideas on what should further be the
object of future work.
International and Transnational Perspectives on Urban Systems is an enriching
analysis of system of cities which comes at a crucial moment of the implementation
process of the New Urban Agenda, the outcome document of Habitat III. The New
Urban Agenda offers a set of five strategies conceived to guide national, regional,
and local governments in addressing strategically and in an inclusive manner, the
immediate and most pressing urbanization challenges as follows:
(a) Developing national urban policies including mechanisms of coordination
between central and local governments, preventing the duplication of services
and costs. The New Urban Agenda calls for a generation of national urban poli-
cies, with reinforced cooperation between central and local governments.
National urban policies can integrate the dispersed energy and potential of
urban centers within a national system of cities and towns. Still this system
needs to be better understood and fostered. They help coordinate the work of
different sectors and tiers of government, establish incentives for more sustain-
able practices, and provide a basis for the allocation of resources.
(b) Ensuring proper urban legislation. Urbanization has to be based on the rule of
law. Robust legislation and its equitable implementation shape operational prin-
ciples and stabilize organizational structures, fostering institutional and social
relationships that underpin sustainable urban development.
(c) Supporting urban planning and design. Urbanization generates prosperity when
there is a proper physical design. Good planning can change a city’s internal
structure, form, and functionality, contributing to more compact, integrated,
and connected urban layout, and leading to sustainable solutions. Social and
economic diversity, densification, resilience, climate change mitigation and
adaptation, economies of agglomeration, efficient use of natural resources, and
adequate public spaces, including vibrant streets, are all results of good urban
planning and design.
(d) Financing urban development. Urbanization is a socioeconomic phenomenon
in which public investment generates both public and private value. To create
employment, urban areas and regions require strong economic growth strate-
gies, including for instance redevelopment, regeneration, and promotion of eco-
nomic clusters and industrial areas. Strengthening municipal finance comprises
realigning fiscal authority, responsibility, and revenue sharing; designing new
financial vehicles and mechanisms; exploring new sources of capital; ­improving
Preface vii

systems of revenue collection; and improving budget management and

transparency.
(e) Implementing locally the New Urban Agenda. In materializing sustainable
urban development, there is a need to develop a number of urban-integrated
initiatives and operations, including planned city extensions, urban renewal,
and planned city in-fills. This results in lowered costs of basic urban services,
urban energy use, and greenhouse gas emissions, with a need for increased
number of operators on city development.
With regard to these five pillars for the implementation of the New Urban
Agenda, this book opens a much-needed avenue for analysis: the collective perspec-
tive of the systems of cities.
I am very confident that some of the key aspects for the new urban paradigm will
only be possible through this lens that will enrich and amplify the big picture of the
systems of cities.
And this is an invitation to academics, researchers, and practitioners to actively
take into consideration this perspective.
By examining these complex issues, this book serves as a reference study on
urban development and systems of cities developed by senior renowned experts on
the science and art of urbanization.

Regional Office of UN-Habitat for Latin America Elkin Velásquez

and the Caribbean
United Nations Habitat
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Introduction: A Global View of Urbanization

Urbanization and the urban way of life are now universal phenomena across the
globe. Symbolically, and for the first time in history, over 50% of the world’s popu-
lation is now classified as urban. Even larger proportions of the world’s economic
activities and social transformations take place in cities, especially larger cities.
Although too often described as an ‘event’ or as a challenging turn, this crossing of
a threshold does not represent a sudden change in the evolution of the complex
urban systems. There is a surprising continuity in the recent history of urbanization
in each region of the world that can be modelled and predicted. What is new and
may represent a true bifurcation in this history is indeed to be observed in the spatial
distribution of urban growth that has shifted from around the Atlantic towards the
Pacific regions and African continent and from the richest towards the poorest coun-
tries of the world.
This urban process, as it continues to evolve in highly varied manifestations in
cities, countries and global regions, offers opportunities for both increasing pros-
perity and reducing global poverty; it also presents serious challenges for local and
national governments and agencies, as well as for international organizations. The
basic challenge is twofold: on the one hand, each city and each nation state must
find ways to address the immense problems generated by the new realities of urban
growth and change, including uneven development, entrenched social inequalities,
widespread environmental degradation and climate change; while at the same time,
they must take advantage of new economic, technological and cultural innovations
to remain politically stable, socially cohesive and globally competitive.
Under these circumstances, it is timely – and indeed urgent – for social scien-
tists and planners to offer a balanced overview of the current consensus of new
scientific research on urbanization and to evaluate ongoing debates on theory,
methods and public policies. This book is intended to do precisely this. It updates
the general state of knowledge on urbanization, viewed through the lens of the
evolution of urban systems at the global level. For many researchers, this necessi-
tates understanding cities not only in terms of their inherent dynamics and intrinsic
diversity but also, and most importantly, through their mutual interdependences.
Indeed, we argue that cities have to be understood not simply as individual entities

ix
x Introduction: A Global View of Urbanization

but as parts of broader systems of cities at different spatial scales – from regional
to national and global – because their future is increasingly influenced by the
numerous linkages and interactions, including both direct and indirect interactions,
linking them all together.

 ities and Systems of Cities Within Perturbations at the End

C
of Twentieth Century

Thirty years ago, a book edited by Larry Bourne, Robert Sinclair and Kazimier
Dziewonski provided the first worldwide overview on ‘Urbanization and Settlement
Systems’ from a systemic perspective. By means of comparative analyses of the
spatial patterns and functional organization of cities within national states in various
regions of the world, the book widely confirmed the meaningfulness of observing
cities not as isolated entities but, as coined in a famous formula by Brian Berry, as
‘systems within systems of cities’ (1964). The book edited by Bourne et al. (1984),
which mainly compared national urban systems from American and European
countries according to a West–East typology of state economies, identified many
similarities across urban systems and their evolutionary histories. This revealed how
much urban trends and structures were becoming increasingly global. It also led to
considerations of the new science of complex systems as a source of methodologi-
cal inspiration for analysis and comparison.
Since that publication, dramatic perturbations have transformed the world. It is
worth recalling that the Eastern/Western line of division has disappeared and that a
more multi-polar international system has emerged. The rise of economic globaliza-
tion has affected all parts of the world, and the World Trade Organization was estab-
lished in 1995 (replacing the GATT1 of 1948) to regulate the growing number of
bilateral and regional agreements. The development of communication technologies
has fostered wider social and cultural globalization according to the increasing
speed at which information circulates. Extreme poverty has been reduced, and sev-
eral emerging countries now play growing roles on the international scene. However,
income inequalities at many geographical scales have never been as high as they are
today: across countries, they have multiplied by approximately 70 in terms of
income per person since 1900 (Piketty 2014). Although these transformations were
not urban per se (Scott and Storper 2015), they were largely instigated by urban
stakeholders and, at the same time, widely influenced the changes in cities. The fol-
lowing are major consequences of urban quantitative and qualitative developments:
the world’s urbanized population surpassing 50%; reinforcement of national urban
systems hierarchies; uneven regional (infra-national) development; transfer of gov-
ernance towards large metropolises through decentralization of economic
development policies; and implementation of multi-level governance systems
­
among states, regions and urban localities.

1
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
Introduction: A Global View of Urbanization xi

To assess the impact of such perturbations on the capacity for resilience among
systems of cities, we invited all authors in this book to expand their investigation
over a rather long period of time, starting in approximately 1950. This ensures better
comparability of the evolutions that are observed in all parts of the world and avoids
reifying some of the overly short-term fluctuations that are so frequently observed
in the dynamics of urban systems.

Comprehensive Urban Systems Rather Than World Cities

The IGU Urban Commission, ‘Urban challenges in a complex world’, in collabora-

tion with the UN-Habitat, felt it necessary to explore these changes and update our
knowledge of cities by looking at the most recent information available on the evo-
lutionary trends of the world’s urban systems. During the last thirty years, many
books on urban issues have underlined the emergence of ‘world cities’, ‘global cit-
ies’, ‘mega-cities’ or other ‘Worlding cities’ (Brunn et al. 2008; Roy and Ong 2011;
Sassen 2012; Scott 2012; Taylor et al. 2012; Jacobs 2013). However, the majority of
urban citizens do not live in these very large urban concentrations: in 2014, United
Nations accounted for less than 15% of urbanites living in agglomerations larger
than 5 million inhabitants, while 52% still lived in those below 500,000 inhabitants
(UN 2014). We think it is important to analyse urban dynamics at all levels of the
systems of cities by including small towns and medium cities as well as metropo-
lises. Indeed, the interdependencies among urban centres of all sizes sustain the
global processes of change, as cities co-evolve in a polycentric world. If we admit
that the largest metropolises trigger changes among leading global cities and widely
influence their own territories at continental, national or regional levels, we assume
that their development is directly dependent on the very large number and func-
tional diversity of small towns and medium-size cities, which create the conditions
of innovation dissemination and thus contribute to globalization processes.

National, Continental and Worldwide Urban Systems

From the projections by United Nations (2014), it appears that in 2030 two-thirds
of the world’s urban population will be concentrated in the poorest countries.
Since the 1950s, a dramatic shift has occurred in urbanization at the global scale
that is usually made visible from the evolution of the top list of world cities but
affected in fact the totality of urban hierarchies. In the middle of twentieth cen-
tury, most of the largest metropolises were located in the more industrialized
countries belonging to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development), among which New York, London, Paris and Tokyo are prime
examples. On the eve of the twenty-first century, if we look at the list of megap-
olises concentrating more than 10 million inhabitants each, many new names have
xii Introduction: A Global View of Urbanization

emerged. They are mostly located in less-wealthy countries in Asia, South

America and Africa and include cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Delhi,
Mumbai, Manila, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Cairo and Lagos. These cities lead the
global rankings according to the metric of number of residents, while they remain
much lower on the hierarchy when the values of production and income are con-
sidered. Major urban policy issues are related to the potential tensions created by
these new asymmetries at the global scale. Actually, many chapters in this book
enlighten the multi-scale consequences of these emerging metropolises, from
regional to national to continental levels.
Indeed, the world has not become as flat as described in Friedman’s (1986) futur-
ist vision to support the idea of a unique world urban hierarchy. It would be an exag-
geration to argue, as many globalization studies do, that all cities can be ranked
according to a unique world pattern (Taylor 2001; Hennemann et al. 2015). In fact,
boundaries still matter, and national and regional factors induce strong cohesions
where cities are – together – dependent on common geopolitical, economic, social
and governance systems (Polese 2005; Therborn 2011).
Dividing the world into appropriately relevant zones when analysing the systems
of cities is, however, not so simple. Since the previous period of the predominance
of nation states, two contradictory ‘rescaling’ trends have emerged that seem to
accompany the reinforcement of territorial inequalities (Brenner 2009). On the one
hand, new levels of infra-national governance have been empowered through decen-
tralization, especially in terms of economic and spatial planning policies (Scaling-­
down) (Lin 2009; Wu 2016). On the other hand, enlarged connections have been
created inside nation-states or within multi-state free-trading zones, such as the
European Union, the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and
Mercosur (Mercado Comùn del Sur) in South America (Scaling-up), where cities
become stronger nexus in these global networks widely driven by neo-capitalist
processes. However, because cities often lack adapted governance and the amount
of tax resources permitting them to face private productive or real estate actors,
these two opposite directions of scaling processes must be addressed at the levels of
national and continental urban systems.
This book outlines the reactions and adaptations of a set of urban systems at the
national or continental scale that are participating in these two levels of rescaling
processes in the context of the global urban rebalance. As much as possible, we have
chosen to completely cover all parts of the world. After a close examination of the
global patterns of financial linkages which are currently driving a large part of the
co-evolution of cities in the world, we retain a classification of countries and regions
according to their level of development, their stage in the urbanization transition
and their geopolitical trajectories (especially regarding the periods of settlement and
colonization), because these three factors have proven highly influential in deter-
mining the structure and evolution of systems of cities (Bretagnolle and Pumain
2010). The related partition adopted in designing the chapters of the book will be
detailed below.
Introduction: A Global View of Urbanization xiii

 onceptualization of Cities and Urban Systems at the World

C
Scale

Despite recurrent criticism of the relevance of urban comparisons made at the world
scale (Brenner and Schmid 2014; Robinson and Roy 2015), we consider cities to be
geographical entities that are produced through a common (universal) process of
concentration of people and activities. Urban stakeholders not only co-settle and
interact locally but also develop long-distance exchanges, mostly aiming to main-
tain and expand the economic and social values of their urban assets. These two-­
level urban processes allow the further emergence of social and economic
innovations and their diffusion to surrounding or linked spaces. Traces of the two
processes that led to the emergence of systems of cities, either as central places
rooted in local economic networks (Christaller 1933) or as hubs on the itineraries of
long-distance trade networks, are more or less still perceptible in the respective
positions and roles of cities. Indeed, many ‘old’ central places still represent the
nodes around which long-range networks developed during the last 70 years. Local
and regional networks did not disappear but rather created the initial conditions of
territorial constructions that oriented the variety of ways in which cities integrated
unevenly in globalization.
The diversity of systems of cities also originates in the history of national econo-
mies and the geopolitics of colonization. While in some regions, such as Western
Europe or North America, the urban transition was quite advanced in 1950, in other
countries it was only at its early stage. In some cases, strong national policies tried
to accelerate it, as in Japan or Korea, or to slow it down, as in the communist coun-
tries. However, more often, countries faced difficulties in resisting the universal
tendency for jobs to concentrate in urban areas while many workers in the country-
side became unemployed due to agriculture’s transformation by modern production.
As a consequence, the post–Second World War evolution produced strongly differ-
ent urban trajectories. It results a large variety of urban situations that are now fac-
ing the challenges of the next ecological transition in this century.

Updated Urban Issues, Theory and Methods

In the context of knowledge and information societies, new tendencies in the long/
medium-term evolution of urban systems, together with new data and methods,
require that prior theoretical assumptions and conceptualizations be challenged as
global urban hierarchies are reconfigured. The main processes acting upon urban
areas are being redefined at all geographical scales. The connections among urban
systems become increasingly relevant for understanding the transformations of cit-
ies. Especially, the emergence of a transnational subset of cities must be analysed
along with the still well-structured national urban systems in which small towns and
large cities continue their already longstanding co-evolution.
xiv Introduction: A Global View of Urbanization

Major issues in contemporary urbanization seem to be of growing relevance to

all types of cities in every region of the world. The globalization of finance and the
associated new international division of labour have created increasingly narrow
linkages between urban economies, while increasing national and international
migrations coupled with the expanded diffusion of electronic communication prop-
agates information more rapidly than ever before, favour cultural hybridization. We
believe that complementarities are more essential than are rivalries and competi-
tion in these processes, and we prefer to draw well-informed typologies of such
geo-diversity rather than present rankings established based on partial indicators.
However, this book also insists on more subtle interdependencies that are perhaps
less easily perceived, such as the possible growing tension between alternative mea-
surements of the importance of cities, whether in terms of population or in terms of
wealth. For example, tension may increase because the richest cities are frequently
those where populations are shrinking, whereas the poorest cities often have young
and growing populations that could lead to ‘a planet of slums’ (Davis 2006).
There is a risk of a disruptive trend when the necessities of urban development
are increasingly confronted by the significant requirements of managing a global
ecological transition. It is still uncertain whether digital technologies and new
devices, as well as the participatory policies involved in the so-called ‘smart cities’,
will ensure sustainable urban development. Although recent urban growth has been
paralleled by a global increase in income level per inhabitant, thus contributing to
reducing urban poverty at the world scale (World Bank 2009), it seems that inequal-
ities in income and quality of life may have increased locally within most of cities.
Because these processes create tension, or even conflicts, within a pattern of
widely diverse urban situations, it is not possible to draw plausible scenarios for the
future of cities by merely projecting recent trends in a linear fashion. The method-
ologies derived from the sciences of complex systems bring about new forms of
intelligibility regarding these urban dynamics. A variety of tools and methods have
been developed during the last 50 years for analysing the structure and evolution of
complex systems. Many of them have been tested on urban systems at different
scales of spatial and statistical analysis, developing a true ‘science of cities’
(Portugali 2012; Batty 2013; Boulton et al. 2015). Therefore, in this book, urban
hierarchies are systematically investigated using Zipf’s law or lognormal distribu-
tion for city sizes. Statistical tools derived from scaling laws enable to complete a
classic analysis of urban functions at different levels of centrality and of governance
trends, and network analysis allows comparing the positions of cities in a more
precise way (Rozenblat et al. 2017). The conception of cities as complex adaptive
systems also integrates the complementary knowledge accumulated from the simu-
lation tools that encapsulate the major stylized facts of urban dynamics using cel-
lular automata at the local level or multi-agent systems for multi-scale modelling
(White et al. 2015; Heppenstall et al. 2012; Pumain and Reuillon 2017).
Introduction: A Global View of Urbanization xv

Originality of This Book’s Contents

The main objective of this book is to review the recent worldwide, regional and
national evolutions of urban systems (comparative studies on long- and medium-­
term dynamics and history at relevant geographical levels) in order to revise the
theoretical fundamentals of urban systems. The ambition is to sustain reflections on
multi-scale urban governance and energetic transition, whether local, within national
systems or linked to the expansion of transnational networks.
To detect similarities and differences in the impacts of global processes of
change, the comparative aspect is a critical point. From this perspective, we simul-
taneously aim at producing comparative material and at adapting this material to
local conditions and to specific institutions and contexts. The authors who collabo-
rated to this state agreed to work according to a common template with some com-
pulsory indications – such as covering the whole urban system and the period from
at least 1950 to 2000 – but they were free to contextualize their chapters by empha-
sizing the specific stages and challenges that were encountered in their urban sys-
tem. Scholars from different parts of the world were associated with each chapter of
this book, which ensures that this common theoretical perspective is not superim-
posed on the local reality but rather properly rooted in a specific understanding of
the urban environment.
In the first part, we explain the contribution of geographical theory to a better
understanding of urban systems. The first chapter develops a theoretical concept of
urban systems as socio-spatial adapters; this assembles the major distinctive fea-
tures of the urban realm and explains the diversity of cities based on the general
dynamics of their evolution. The second chapter explores the particular processes
occurring recently in the accelerated globalization of urban systems, especially
through multinational firms’ networks. The third chapter presents a preliminary
typology of the systems of cities around the world according to their specific trajec-
tories during the last half-century and new expected trends; this typology introduces
the following chapters of the book.
The second part is dedicated to the urban systems of world regions that have
achieved their urban transitions – a universal process through which our habitation
of the planet shifted from rather homogenous and scattered patterns of small vil-
lages, towards much more concentrated, heterogeneous and hierarchized patterns of
urban settlements. During the last stage of that transition, the evolution was charac-
terized by a growing concentration of innovative functions into metropolises. In
these completely urbanized regions that are also among the world’s wealthier ones,
a major raising concern is to determine to what extent the future may be – to varying
degrees – threatened by ageing populations and shrinking towns. USA (Chapter
“The US Urban System”), Canada (Chapter “The Canadian Urban System: Urban
Canada Goes Global”), Europe (Chapter “Metropolization and Polycentrism in the
xvi Introduction: A Global View of Urbanization

European Urban System”) and Japan (Chapter “Changes in the Japanese Urban
System Since the 1950s: Urbanization, Demography, and the Management
Function”) are representative of such trends. How each of these urban systems will
manage the challenge to maintain technological advancement while moderating
growing gaps between social groups?
The third part examines the special cases of Latin American countries that have
already reached high urbanization rates but at a much lower income level than the
industrialized countries mentioned above (Chapter “The South American Urban
System”). As the demographic transition in those countries is relatively recent,
urban growth may still be booming and sustaining significant economic develop-
ment but could be hampered by strong income inequalities both between and within
cities. The Brazilian urban system is deepened in order to give example of the dif-
ficulties encountered by national urban policies (Chapter “The Brazilian Urban
System”).
The fourth part of the book analyses the booming regions where the urban transi-
tion is still in full swing. These regions are confronting the major issues of urban
development, although their urban evolutions seem to contrast sharply. They raise
very interesting theoretical questions that concern governance parties’ at all territo-
rial levels: to what extent specific patterns of urban systems may emerge under
common constraining processes because of the political choices as applied to differ-
ent social and cultural contexts? Comparing the largest countries, China (Chapter
“The Chinese Urban System: Political Evolution and Economic Transition”) and
India (Chapter “Diffuse Urbanization and Mega Urban Regions in India: Between
Reluctant and Restrictive Urbanism?”) could appear as a true experimental design
since rather different paths were chosen, either controlling politically the urban
expansion or letting more diffuse urban forms disseminate, while rural populations
adapt. Because of the drastic bifurcation in its political and economic orientation,
Russia is another exemplary form of experiencing urban transition (Chapter “The
Russian Urban System: Evolution Engaged with Transition”): How very slow urban
growth can result in a dramatic reorganization of a system of cities? South Africa
(Chapter “The South African Urban System”) offers another example of a striking
transition occurring after racial segregation and displaced urbanization, so specific
that one wonders how its recent stages of urban development may share so many
features with other BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
The fifth part of the book is dedicated to the low- and middle-income countries
where, in general, the urban transition is still at work but is proceeding in a variety
of geographical contexts. Which are the specific difficulties in the urban systems of
most of Africa (Chapters “Urbanization in Africa: Trends, Regional Specificities
and Challenges” and “The Sustainability of Urbanization in Africa’s Great Lakes
Region: Trends and Policies Options”) and Southeast Asia (Chapter “Extended
Metropolitan Development in Southeast Asia: From Primate Cities to Territorial
Urban Diffusion”) while entering more or less intense stages of the urban
transition?
Introduction: A Global View of Urbanization xvii

This global overview of diverse urban systems situations and answers in the
world actually adds some reflections and recommendations to the ‘urban system
framework’ proposed in Habitat III agenda. In fact, despite the name ‘urban system’
given to this ambitious agenda, the systemic perspective is not yet put in applica-
tion. The ‘City Resilience Profiling Programme’ (CRPP) that followed by
­implementing methodologies and indicators on 10 pilot projects was inaugurated in
October 2016 in Quito. But in this programme few attentions were paid to the
mutual interactions between cities at regional or global scales (Citiscope 2015;
Marino Castro 2017). The Un-Habitat (2015) defines the resilience as a key concept
for urban planner, local governments and business to explain the interconnected
nature of urban planning with social, economic and environmental levels, forming
‘…linkages between how urbanization that results in sprawl not only disconnects
residential areas from sources of livelihoods, but can also perpetuate a reliance on
high-emission, fossil fuel-generated energy and transport systems’ (Un-Habitat
2015). Habitat III agenda incorporates urban complexity concepts and methods
concerning socio-economic – political – cultural crises as a whole connection of
hazards in urban ‘ecosystem’ (sic), but this complexity remains embedded at local
scale (Kuecker and Hall 2011; UN-Habitat 2015). This is not only a local issue that
was already underlined by Castells in 1972, but it overall calls to a multi-level
approach of governance. Thus, this book intends to fill this gap and to establish an
agenda envisaging resilience at both levels of local and regional/global issues.

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University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne Denise Pumain

UMR CNRS 8504 Géographie-cités pumain@parisgeo.cnrs.fr
Paris, France

Institute of Geography and Sustainability Celine Rozenblat

University of Lausanne Celine.rozenblat@unil.ch
Lausanne, Switzerland 
Contents

Part I Explaining Cities from a System of Cities Perspective

 n Evolutionary Theory of Urban Systems��������������������������������������������������    3
A
Denise Pumain
 rban Systems Between National and Global:
U
Recent Reconfiguration Through Transnational Networks ������������������������   19
Celine Rozenblat
 New World Typology of Cities and Systems of Cities ������������������������������   51
A
Celine Rozenblat and Denise Pumain

Part II Metropolization in Countries Where Urban

Transition Is Achieved
 he US Urban System ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   69
T
Anne Bretagnolle, Fabien Paulus, Sukkoo Kim,
and Céline Vacchiani-Marcuzzo
 he Canadian Urban System: Urban Canada Goes Global������������������������   99
T
Jim Simmons and Larry S. Bourne
 etropolization and Polycentrism in the European Urban System ���������� 117
M
Celine Rozenblat and Denise Pumain
 hanges in the Japanese Urban System Since the 1950s:
C
Urbanization, Demography, and the Management Function���������������������� 143
Kazutoshi Abe, Tomoko Kubo, and Nobuhiko Komaki

Part III Advanced Urban Transition in Emergent Economies

 he South American Urban System�������������������������������������������������������������� 167
T
Luis Mauricio Cuervo González and Rosa Moura

xix
xx Contents

 he Brazilian Urban System�������������������������������������������������������������������������� 187

T
Cosmo Antonio Ignazzi and Reinaldo Paul Perez Machado

Part IV Rapid Urban Transition: Towards Integrated Urban Systems

 he Chinese Urban System: Political Evolution
T
and Economic Transition�������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 215
Elfie Swerts and Liao Liao
 iffuse Urbanization and Mega-Urban Regions in India:
D
Between Reluctant and Restrictive Urbanism?�������������������������������������������� 237
Elfie Swerts, Eric Denis, and Partha Mukhopadhyay
 he Russian Urban System: Evolution Engaged with Transition�������������� 263
T
Clémentine Cottineau and Irina Frost
 he South African Urban System������������������������������������������������������������������ 285
T
Solène Baffi, Ivan Turok, and Céline Vacchiani-Marcuzzo

Part V Different Stages of Urban Transition in Low Middle

Income Countries
 rbanization in Africa: Trends, Regional Specificities,
U
and Challenges ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 317
François Paul Yatta
 he Sustainability of Urbanization in Africa’s Great
T
Lakes Region: Trends and Policies Options�������������������������������������������������� 341
Remy Sietchiping, Claude Ngomsi, Michael Kinyanjui,
John Omwamba, and Elkin Velasquez
 xtended Metropolitan Development in Southeast Asia:
E
From Primate Cities to Territorial Urban Diffusion������������������������������������ 359
Charles Goldblum and Tai-Chee Wong

Conclusion: Toward a Methodology for Multi-­scalar

Urban System Policies ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 385
Celine Rozenblat and Denise Pumain
 Part I
Explaining Cities from a System of Cities
Perspective
An Evolutionary Theory of Urban Systems

Denise Pumain

Abstract The chapter develops a theory that encompasses as far as possible the
existing state of knowledge in urban sciences for identifying regularities at the
world scale and enabling worldwide comparisons of urban systems. Relying on the
specific concepts in geography that consider cities as complex systems which self-­
organize and coevolve in systems of cities through their socio-spatial interactions, it
provides an explanation of the emerging common properties of these systems,
including their hierarchical organization and functional diversity. Major driving
processes are the creative emulation in urban competition and the spatial diffusion
of innovation that are renewing opportunities and challenges to urban stakeholders.
Cities and systems of cities acting as socio-spatial adaptors can be considered as
expressing a collective territorial intelligence because of the resilience of urban sys-
tems over long time periods. According to variations in space and time, such generic
processes when contextualized and taking into account the path dependence effects
are compatible with a geohistorical interpretation of urban diversity.

Keywords Urban dynamics · Systems of cities · Evolutionary theory · Urban

hierarchy · Functional specialization

1 Introduction

The urban evolution seems to escape any global political or economic control that
the recently revealed scarcity in energy and resources renders necessary. Therefore,
a theory providing a better understanding of urban dynamics and processes could
help to draw future scenarios and potential effective policies. Since our theory stipu-
lates that evolution of cities is mainly driven by their specific relative situation, in
terms of location, size, and functions, within systems of cities, the challenge is to

D. Pumain (*)
University Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, UMR CNRS 8504 Géographie-cités, Paris, France
e-mail: pumain@parisgeo.cnrs.fr

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 3

C. Rozenblat et al. (eds.), International and Transnational Perspectives
on Urban Systems, Advances in Geographical and Environmental Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7799-9_1
4 D. Pumain

identify how the key principles of urban dynamic and interaction processes are
operating and to assess whether there is a chance for changing them using urban
governance at different levels.
In this first chapter, we attempt to theorize why cities of the same country or
region in the world maintain such huge differences in size, which may range from
possibly a few thousands to tens of millions of residents. We also try to explain why
they keep for long periods of time the same relative rankings in these regional urban
hierarchies and how and why urban growth is shifting between different “genera-
tions” of cities and between different regions of the world.
The theory developed in this book encompasses as far as possible the existing
state of knowledge in urban sciences for identifying regularities at the world scale
and enabling worldwide comparisons. Some of the major dimensions that we
develop below in a nontrivial way include considering the theory as comprehen-
sively geographical and rooted in complex systems’ science (Batty, 2005) and his-
torical evolution. Our urban theory is constructed according to nomothetic principles,
but it avoids any naturalism or determinism; it belongs definitely to the domain of
social sciences. As such, it tries to develop a meaningful interpretation of the com-
mon “universal” features of urban dynamics without forgetting to include the major
elements of urban diversity that were generated over centuries by different geo-
graphical conditions and historical geopolitical trajectories.

2 A Geographical Theory

Many scholars currently debate on urban theory and the “nature” of cities. We share
the opinion that “the crucial task [is] of demarcating the inner logic of urbanization
from other social processes” (Scott and Storper 2014, p. 4). We agree with the authors
that common features can be identified in the evolution of urban systems and that
“there are systematic regularities in urban life that are susceptible to high levels of
theoretical generalization” (ibid. p. 12). However, we think it necessary to avoid two
pitfalls in urban definitions, which would be overestimating the present urban func-
tionalities and reducing the interpretation to a single or too narrow a disciplinary field.
Compared to a dominant interpretation of urban systems that relies mainly on princi-
ples of economic geography and urban economy (Fujita et al. 1999) and because our
interest is in envisaging urban systems in their global diversity, we focus on dynamic
processes generating an open evolution through history, and we try to consider the
societal complexity of factors that are involved in the variety of urban structures.
Although the participants in this book belong to a variety of academic disci-
plines, the regularities that we want to explain with our theory are mainly the major
geographical features of urban systems. Because we pay attention to theoretical
building on a global scale and over historical time, “geographical” means including
three key elements in our theoretical construction: geographical space is conceived,
not as a topographic or administrative-political bounded container but as a rela-
tional space whose properties emerge from a variety of societal interactions; urban
An Evolutionary Theory of Urban Systems 5

entities are conceived at two distinct scales of analysis, i.e., cities and systems of
cities, in a way that keep a meaningful definition over centuries and across civiliza-
tions; our explanation for the regularities that are included in the theory is not based
on any “universal law” or “optimal solution” to urban processes, neither are they
considered as tending toward any equilibrium or as representing a more or less
desirable societal norm. Instead, our theory explains these regularities from a
generic open urban dynamic operating in the long run, and the deviations from the
derived statistical models are made interpretable by including in the theory the
major testable factors of this urban “geo-diversity.”1

2.1 Geography as Spatial Interaction

The dramatic proliferation of exchanges of all kinds, including goods, people, and
information at all geographical scales, using increasingly sophisticated technical
inventions, may lead us to think that entering a “network society” (Castells 1996) is
a recent phenomenon. However, this is far from new. For instance, the title taken for
this section is an expression employed by the American geographer Edward Ullman
in a paper dated 1954. Moreover, we know from archaeological and historical litera-
ture that the emergence of cities as a new kind of socio-spatial entities (i.e., com-
pared to previous forms of nomadic habitat or agricultural villages) is linked with
the establishment of relatively long-distance connections (Bairoch 1985; Marcus
and Sabloff 2008). Political analysts have long recognized the fundamental, rela-
tional, and competitive character of urban entities, as did Giovanni Botero in a
remarkable explanation “Delle Cause della Grandezza et Magnificenza della Città”
included in his book about “La Ragion di Stato” (Botero 1588, see Pumain and
Gaudin 2002).
In the long history of human societies, if viewed in a social engineer’s naïve
viewpoint as an expression of our “collective intelligence,” cities and systems of
cities could appear as an extremely sustainable invention, a multi-scale adaptive
tool for managing resources and for controlling territories and networks. In brief,
cities differ from villages by escaping from a strong local constraint threatening
their development because of the limited resources and uncertainties of their imme-
diate environment (i.e., their site) through the exploitation of more distant resources
that they capture or create from interactions with more distant sites (i.e., shifting the
constraint from their site toward a dependence upon their constructed geographical
situation). Networking enables cities to escape the limitations of local resources
and, at the same time, requires emulation to continue innovation in the rivalry and
competition with other cities. Although initially relying on their geopolitical power
and their technical ability in conducting wars (Turchin 2003; Turchin et al. 2013) as
well as on the capacity of their regional agriculture to accumulate a surplus and

1
See the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant GeoDiverCity http://geodivercity.
parisgeo.cnrs.fr/blog/
6 D. Pumain

sustain an embryonic division of labor, the development of cities and systems of

cities is increasingly rooted in the innovation process both stemming from local and
distant interactions, which constrains them to continue to change in order to have
the chance to survive and later maintain the economic and symbolic value of their
urban assets. This function of urban systems as a societal adapter is multiple and
operates at different scales in space and in time. It is not by accident that the same
word “city” has been kept for millennia for designing a way of inhabiting the planet,
which may include a variety of regional forms and changes in morphological
appearance and societal content over time.
The presence of cities still introduces a morphological distinction with the coun-
tryside because of a much higher density of buildings and infrastructures. Their
generally growing dynamics is today the opposite of the countryside where land use
is dedicated to agriculture and demographic trends generally oriented to outmigra-
tion or decline. However, over time, the sharp sociological and cultural differences
that were associated with the population residing in cities and the countryside (i.e.,
often marked by different political status for the inhabitants) have been blurred, and
the “urban way of life” has been widely disseminated all over the planet, especially
through new communication technologies. Differences remain, however, more per-
ceptible in the parts of the world that are still less urbanized. However, compared to
the initial stage of rapid urban development during the nineteenth century in indus-
trialized countries where urban immigrants were submitted to high mortality levels,
the sanitary conditions have improved to the extent that, currently, healthcare is now
of a higher standard in urban areas than in the countryside in less developed
countries.

2.2 Cities as Systems Within Systems of Cities

Observing cities through time and across a diversity of countries requires an under-
standing that enables an abstract view of the functions they fulfill. Classically, at
least since Brian Berry coined the expression of “cities as systems of cities” in 1964
(and as already mentioned by the French Saint-Simonian engineer Jean Reynaud in
1841 [see Robic 1982]), geographers identify two forms in relational space that
exhibit different properties and correspond to two distinct spatiotemporal scales of
interactions.
Because they create fields of spatial attractiveness and concentration, “cities” are
spaces of intense local interactions where people, households, firms, and a series of
collective institutions interact and organize their daily lives. As each of these urban
“individual citizens” has to connect on average to three or four different places of
activity each day, they usually dedicate 1 h of time to commuting (i.e., that regular-
ity is often referred to as “Zahavi’s law” [Beckmann et al. 1983]). It means that
there is a constraint on the spatial expansion of cities, which cannot exceed a radius
of 4–5 km when people were moving by walking. However, now, with space-time
An Evolutionary Theory of Urban Systems 7

contraction thanks to the acceleration of motor transportation, we can reach some

30 or 40 km or more within the same 1 h of time. We use this spatiotemporal enve-
lope of roughly 1 h for defining cities in a comparable way over time and making
cross-country comparisons, including the diversity of local statistical definitions
(Bretagnolle et al. 2002). At that level, the 1 h constraint is enough to understand
that under the growing demand for accessibility to the center of cities, a sharp gradi-
ent of urban prices and an increase in densities are generated between the center and
its periphery, while according to a variety of social and urbanism rules, different
mosaics of activity zones and segregation patterns among residents of different
income and origins may be observed.
At the upper geographical scale, systems of cities are sets of highly connected
cities whose interactions have generated strong interdependencies in their demo-
graphic and functional evolution. Such systems are not easy to delineate, especially
because the scope of interurban interactions is wider when cities are larger. One day
travel for connecting activities in another city within a system of cities would be
roughly the critical time for defining such systems. Although the interactions at that
scale are less frequent on average for individual citizens and firms, those requiring
face-to-face transactions are using travel as a means whose speed has increased
much more rapidly than those ensuring intra-urban movements: the speed was mul-
tiplied by a factor of approximately 40 for the past 200 years, whereas inside cities,
it has increased only by a factor of approximately five. In space-time, when linkages
are measured according to traveling time, the intraurban space now appears as rela-
tively dilated compared to the more constricted interurban space. From these weaker
but high-speed interactions, systems of cities have developed universal structural
properties, including a strong hierarchical differentiation of city sizes and an inter-
urban division of labor, inducing a diversity of functional specializations and more
or less regular spatial patterns.
An urban theory that would try to explain “the” city alone is thus necessarily
incomplete. Since their emergence in Mesopotamia and then in an independent way
in three or four other regions of the world (e.g., Indus Valley, South China, Central
America, and Tropical Africa), cities have always been connected with others in
systems of cities. For many centuries, the major constraint upon their development
remained, however, in the natural and political conditions within their close envi-
ronment, including natural hazards and local interurban rivalries. From the time of
the opening of maritime trade on a global scale and later with the first industrial
revolution, the developmental constraint seemed to be less embedded in local
resources and stemmed mainly from competition with other cities, while urban net-
works started covering the planet. Currently, the ecological constraint has become
again perceptible when envisaging the future of cities, but the resilient urban solu-
tions will no longer depend on the local environment only. The systems of cities will
be the channel through which the international regulations relative to energy and
climate will percolate top-down toward every city, while local initiatives for ensur-
ing a reduced consumption of natural resources will be disseminated bottom-up
from “creative cities” through the system of cities.
8 D. Pumain

2.3 A Geohistorical Interpretation of Urban Diversity

Spatially, urbanization can be understood only if the networks conveying exchanges

are multiple, diversified, and frequent. It is because goods, persons, and information
circulate that all over the planet cities are growing and adapting to the societal, tech-
nological, economic, and cultural changes that they continuously generate and have
increasingly become the reference for organizing the life of societies in geographi-
cal space. Because of the interconnectedness that ensures the interdependence in
their evolution, the dynamics of systems of cities are spatially universal; neverthe-
less, they exhibit multiple specificities linked with their history, the timing of their
development, and the interactions with their particular environment.
The emergence of cities as self-organized systems of cities occurred through
processes that can be observed at two main levels, i.e., local and long distance inter-
actions, which have often been simultaneous and combined in their effects. The
more general emergence proceeds from interactions between local villages, where
food storage and agriculture have accumulated a surplus and multiplied the popula-
tion densities by a factor of 100 compared to previous hunter-gatherer communities.
Only a small part of the population could live without spending all their time on
subsistence, and the speciation of new personal skills developed a division of labor.
Political, religious, craft and market functions concentrated in towns, which pro-
gressively hierarchized in networks of central places (Christaller 1933) through the
diversification of their activities (Marcus and Sabloff 2008). The multifold domina-
tion of the urban centers over their complementary agricultural settlements ensured
the sustainability of these early urban systems, while individual cities benefitted for
their development from resources that they shared or extracted from other cities. In
parallel, political territories and “civilizations” developed from these cities, and sus-
taining them was built up through the multiple institutions representing societal
order and behavioral norms. This was the major process of emergence of systems of
cities in history within territorial (i.e., geopolitical) “niches” mainly between the
Neolithic and Medieval times.
However, a second process sustained the development of more specialized cities
organized in networks through long-distance connections. That second process is
sometimes created mainly through trade, but more often, it is linked to the forma-
tion of very large and more or less sustainable empires, as observed in various
regions of the world. For example, some of the well-known examples at different
periods are the cities of the silk road between Asia and Europe, Phoenician trading
posts (i.e., from the twelfth century BC, as Tyr, Cyprus, Crete, Sicily, Malta, Cadiz,
and Carthage), Venetian trading posts and colonies (i.e., the thirteenth to fifteenth
centuries) on the Mediterranean shores, cities of the Hanseatic League (i.e., the
twelfth to seventeenth centuries) along the Baltic Sea, cities of triangular colonial
trade (i.e., the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries) on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean,
ports of the maritime roads on the Pacific Ocean (the twentieth century), and even
today, the nodes of global financial markets (i.e., whose physical connections do
matter) illustrate that mode of organization forming chained networks of cities (e.g.,
An Evolutionary Theory of Urban Systems 9

New York, Tokyo, and London). After a while, all urban regions in the world became
connected by more or less regular exchanges through which the local urban systems
were developing mutual influences and complementarities. The lowering of trans-
portation cost associated with the industrial revolution and the accompanying
immense progress in productivity triggered huge population migrations toward
urban centers starting around the end of the eighteenth century, and the “urban tran-
sition” has come to an end in the more developed countries but is still operating in
the emerging and poor economies.
Both processes of emergence and further consolidation of systems of cities,
either mainly based on local interactions or on long-distance trade, were observed,
and their traces coexist in all regions of the world. That is why very general princi-
ples of urban dynamics have been identified from their comparison, and we will see
below how they hold together in a consistent evolutionary theory of urban systems.
Due to the path dependence dynamics in complex systems (Arthur 1994, Martin
2008), cities keep specific identities in terms of their landscapes, morphological,
social, and cultural aspects; the urban conditions of living are not equalized nor
standardized, although they share many similar constraints in their organization and
transformation.
Moreover, although generic processes have had rather similar consequences on
the spatial organization and demographic evolution of cities, the delays that were
observed over history in urban settlement and development lead to broadly recog-
nize three distinct types of systems of cities at world scale. The regions where the
urbanization process was rather continuous include Asia and Europe because they
produced over millennia higher densities of small towns and less concentrated dis-
tributions of city sizes. At the opposite end of the spectrum, regions, where urban
settlements were imported later, i.e., the “New World,” including North America
and Australia, have lower densities in their systems of cities and sharper contrasts in
their size distribution. The less developed countries that entered much later (i.e.,
mostly around 1950) in the urban transition and were before for decades submitted
to colonization very often have a mixed (i.e., “dual”) pattern of cities, including
more or less regular networks of central places having emerged from local interac-
tions and large “oversized” metropolis, which were implemented for international
trade by the colonial power (Moriconi-Ebrard 1993). Thus, the geopolitical history
of the different world regions left traces in the geographical organization of systems
of cities, which adds a more systematic source of geo-diversity to the many other
urban cultural, linguistic, societal, and morphological local peculiarities.

3 A Complex Systems Theory

Why refer to complex systems about cities? Our intention is neither to be fashion-
able nor to import concepts and models from “harder” sciences to artificially inject
robustness in our epistemological construction. Indeed, if we refer to this frame-
work, it is because the observations that were made repeatedly on the processes of
10 D. Pumain

urban change (Pumain and Saint-Julien 1978; Pumain 1982; Pumain et al. 1989;
Lane et al. 2009) exhibited similarities with processes that were analyzed in other
disciplinary fields addressing self-organization then complexity theories (Prigogine
and Stengers 1973; Haken 1977; Arthur 1994; Allen 1997). We were able to suc-
cessfully transfer these concepts and models to the analysis of urban systems and to
integrate some of their powerful derived analytic tools to our statistical investigation
and computer simulation of urban dynamics (Pumain and Sanders 2013). We briefly
recall below the main results that were meaningfully integrated in our theory of
urban systems (Pumain 1997).

3.1  xplanation of Emerging Urban Properties from Socio-­

E
spatial Interactions

There is a paradox that we want to explain regarding the persistency of the rankings
of cities within urban hierarchies over rather long periods of time, i.e., many decades
or centuries (Fig. 1). The hierarchy of cities is maintained despite the multiple per-
turbations occurring in their environments, including major economic changes and
political events, which result in high fluctuations of the growth trends for individual
cities, and despite the apparently Brownian movement of people and firms, appear-
ing and disappearing, in- and out-migrating within cities over much shorter time
scales. The concept of “order through fluctuations” enunciated in theories of self-­
organized complex systems (Prigogine and Stengers 1973) illustrates this

Fig. 1 Cities’ coevolution in urban hierarchies. (a) Europe (Source: Bairoch and Geopolis). (b)
India (Source: Census of India) (Source: Bretagnolle et al. 2007)
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 Before the workmen from the United States arrived here a large
part of the bridge material was already in Mombasa. The Americans
left one man there to see that additional materials were forwarded
promptly, and came at once to the scene of action. They put up the
bridges at the rate of something like one a week, and constructed
the longest viaduct in sixty-nine and one half working hours.
What they did forms one of the wonders of civil and mechanical
engineering. The bridge material was so made that its pieces fitted
together like clockwork, notwithstanding the fact that it was put into
shape away off here, thousands of miles from the place of
construction and in one of the most uncivilized parts of the world.
The materials in the viaducts included about half a million feet of
southern pine lumber and over thirteen million pounds of steel. The
steel was in more than one hundred thousand pieces and the
heaviest piece weighed five tons. The average weight was about one
hundred pounds. The greatest care had to be taken to keep the parts
together and in their own places. Every piece was numbered and
those of different bridges were painted in different colours. At that, it
was hard to keep all the parts together, for, since most of the natives
here look upon steel as so much jewellery, it was all but impossible
to keep them from filching some of the smaller pieces for ear bobs
and telegraph wire to make into bracelets.
Besides all the other tremendous difficulties in building this road,
there were the wild beasts. There are a hundred places along it
where one might get off and start up a lion. Rhinoceroses have
butted the freight cars along the track, and infest much of the country
through which it goes. I was shown a station yesterday where
twenty-nine Hindus were carried off by two man-eating lions. Night
after night the man-eaters came, taking away each time one or two
of the workmen from the construction camp. They were finally killed
by an English overseer, who sat up with his gun and watched for
them.
It was not far from this station of Nairobi that a man was taken out
of a special car while it stopped overnight on the side track. The
windows and doors of the car had been left open for air, and the
three men who were its only inmates had gone to sleep. Two were in
the berths while the other, who had sat up to watch, was on the floor
with his gun on his knees. As the night went on he fell asleep, and
woke to find himself under the belly of a lion. The beast had slipped
in through the door, and, jumping over him, seized the man in the
lower berth and leaped out of the window, carrying him along. The
other two men followed, but they failed to discover the lion that night.
The bones of the man, picked clean, were found the next day.
An interesting “by-product” of the construction of the Uganda road
has been the development of the native labourer. Twenty years ago
the saying was: “Native labour is of little value, no dependence can
be placed upon it, and even famine fails to force the tribesmen to
seek work.” To-day that opinion has yielded to the belief that, if he is
properly trained and educated to it, the native can supply labour,
skilled and unskilled, for all manufacturing and industrial enterprises
of Kenya Colony. Remarkable progress in industrial education is
shown by the nine thousand African workers on the Uganda line.
 CHAPTER XXXI
THE CAPITAL OF KENYA COLONY

Nairobi is the capital and administrative centre of Kenya Colony,

one of the most interesting and prosperous of Great Britain’s African
possessions. It lies three hundred and twenty-seven miles from the
sea in the very heart of British East Africa, about halfway between
the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria. It is situated on a plateau at an
altitude higher than Denver, with mountains in sight far above any we
have in Colorado.
When the sun is just right at Nairobi, I can get a glimpse here of
Mt. Kilimanjaro and I can plainly see the peak of Mt. Kenya.
Kilimanjaro is about a hundred and fifty miles distant and Kenya, as
the crow flies, not more than one hundred miles. It is from Mt. Kenya
that Kenya Colony is named. Mt. Kenya is one of the giants of the
African continent, and is only three thousand feet lower than our own
Mt. McKinley. It is a dead volcano and is supposed to have once
been three thousand feet higher than it is now. The great peak,
seamed with no less than fifteen glaciers, is a mass of rocks covered
with snow, but the lower slopes are heavily wooded with forests of
cedar, camphor, and bamboo. Above the woods are pastures fit for
sheep, while in and below them are all sorts of wild game, including
lions and elephants, and even rhinoceroses and hippopotami.
In some respects Nairobi reminds one of our frontier towns of the
West. The high plain upon which it is situated has a climate in which
white men can live and work the year around, and farms are
springing up almost everywhere.
The city is comparatively new. Fifteen or more years ago it had
hardly a house. To-day streets have been laid out over an area ten
miles in circumference and hundreds of buildings of tin, wood, and
stone have been erected. The chief building material is galvanized
iron, which is so prevalent that Nairobi has been nicknamed the “tin
city.” There are no saw mills or planing mills worth mentioning, as the
forests have not been exploited, and about the only lumber available
is that brought from the United States and Norway and landed at
Mombasa. The ocean freight rates are heavy, and in addition there is
the cost of bringing the lumber to Nairobi by railroad. Hence the
galvanized iron, which comes here in sheets from England and
Belgium. Almost all the buildings are of iron, put up just as it comes
from the factory, giving the whole town a silver-gray colour. The post
office is of iron, the depot has an iron roof, and the same is true of
the governor’s offices. Many of the houses have iron ceilings and
iron walls, and the chief retail business section is a collection of one-
story iron booths, open at the front, in which Hindus stand or sit
surrounded by their goods. My hotel is half iron. The government
treasury near by, a shed not over fifteen feet square, is of tin and has
a tin roof. I could chop it to pieces with a butcher knife; and the only
sign of policing about it is the Negro who, gun in hand, stands
outside guarding the door. The office of the land surveyor is of tin,
and so are the police headquarters and the house where the
supreme court is held. The more fancy dwellings are now being
painted, and some stone and brick buildings are rising.
The Nairobi of to-day is largely cow pastures. It is a city of
magnificent distances. All the places of importance seem to be
several miles from each other and the patches between are often
grazing ground. The houses are of one and two stories, and are
scattered along wide streets which run for an indefinite distance out
into the prairie. The chief ways of getting about are on foot, on
horseback, or in jinrikishas, the last being by far the most popular.
The jinrikishas are much like those used in Japan, save that they are
larger and wider. I am told they are made in America. They are
pushed and pulled by black Africans, two to each vehicle. One man
goes in the shafts and the other pushes behind. They are each clad
in a single cotton cloth which flaps back and forth as they run,
exposing their nakedness. The streets are unpaved and frequently
masses of dust. Along many of them eucalyptus trees have been
planted and have grown so rapidly that most of the roads are now
shaded by this mournfully drooping foliage.
 The population of Nairobi is about twenty thousand, of which only
a tenth are Europeans. Of the remainder, about a third are Asiatics
from Hindustan, and the others are the queerest Africans one can
imagine. I speak of them first, because they are everywhere; one
stumbles over them on the street; they wait upon him in the hotels;
they carry burdens for him and clog his footsteps when he goes
outside the town. Many of them wear dirty, greasy cloths not more
than a yard wide and two yards long. They hang them about their
shoulders and let them fall down on each side, so that they flap this
way and that in the breeze. Some wear breech cloths, and not a few
are bare to the waist. In the early morning, when the air is still sharp,
many of these people, clad in red flannel blankets, go stalking along
with their legs uncovered to the thighs. I have already spoken of the
ear plugs. Some have the holes in the lobes of their ears so
stretched that I can put my fist through them. The loops are so long
that when a man takes out his ear plug he hangs the loop of skin
over the top of his ear to prevent its catching on something and
tearing. The loop looks just like a leather strap about as wide as
one’s little finger nail. I have handled many of them, twisting them
this way and that to be sure they were genuine.
 Nairobi, on a plateau higher than Denver, is the administrative centre of Kenya
Colony and a healthful place for white men. Farms are springing up about it, and
there are already 2,000 Europeans in this African outpost.
 “My room at the Norfolk looks out on a stable yard where a baby lion as big as a
Newfoundland dog is tied up. He is much too playful to suit me and, besides, he
roars at night.”

In Nairobi the popular way to travel is in jinrikishas much like those of Japan but
sometimes made in America. Two good-natured Negroes man each one and sing
a monotonous song as they trot uphill and down.
 The African smell is everywhere. It burdens the air of the market
places, and I verily think it might be chopped up into blocks and sold
as a new kind of phosphate. The natives cover themselves with hair
oil and body grease, and the combination of this when it turns rancid
with the natural effluvia which exhales from their persons is
indescribable. Some of the blacks smear their faces with a mixture of
grease and red clay, and cover their hair with the same material, so
that they look more like copper Indians than Africans.
These Africans do all the hard work of Nairobi. They are hewers of
wood and drawers of water. I see scores of them, carrying baskets of
dirt on their heads and bundles of wood on their backs and pushing
and pulling carts and wagons through the streets. Most of my trips
from one place to another are made in two-wheeled carts hauled by
wire-bedecked natives.
The retail business is done by East Indians, as is also the case at
Mombasa. I am told this is so in every settlement on this part of the
continent. The Hindus have made their way along all the travelled
routes, until their little stores may be found in every large African
village. They have trading stations upon Lakes Victoria and
Tanganyika. They are very enterprising, and as they live upon almost
nothing they can undersell the whites. They sell cotton of bright
colours and of the most gorgeous patterns, wire for jewellery, and all
sorts of knickknacks that the African wants. They deal also in
European goods, and one can buy of them almost anything from a
needle to a sewing machine. Here at Nairobi there is an Indian
bazaar covering nine acres which is quite as interesting as any
similar institution in Tunis, Cairo, Bombay, or Calcutta. The stores
are all open at the front, and the men squat in them with their gay
goods piled about them. These Hindus dress in a quaint costume not
unlike that of the English clergyman who wears a long black coat
buttoned up to the throat. The only difference is that the Hindu’s
trousers may be of bright-coloured calico, cut very tight, and his
head may be covered with a flat skullcap of velvet embroidered in
gold. Moreover, his feet are usually bare.
But Nairobi is a British city, notwithstanding its African and Asiatic
inhabitants; the English form the ruling class. They are divided into
castes, almost as much as are the East Indians. At the head are the
government officials, the swells of the town. They dress well and
spend a great deal of time out of office hours playing tennis and golf,
which have already been introduced into this part of the black
continent. They also ride about on horseback and in carriages, and
manage to make a good show upon very low salaries. Allied to them
are the sportsmen and the noble visitors from abroad. A scattering
element of dukes, lords, and second sons of noble families has
come out to invest, or to hunt big game. They are usually men of
means, for the prices of large tracts of land are high and it also costs
considerable money to fit out a game-shooting expedition. In
addition, there are land speculators, who are chiefly young men from
England or South Africa. Dressed in riding clothes, big helmet hats,
and top boots, they dash about the country on ponies, and are
especially in evidence around the bars of the hotels. There are but
few white women here. Some of the government officials have their
wives with them, and now and then a titled lady comes out to hunt
with her friends. I met three women who had themselves shot lions.
Nairobi has English doctors, dentists, and lawyers. It has one
photographer and two firms which advertise themselves as safari
outfitters. These men supply sportsmen with tents, provisions, and
other things for shooting trips, as well as porters to carry their stuff
and chase the lions out of the jungles so that the hunters may get a
shot at them.
It seems strange to have newspapers under the shadow of Mt.
Kenya, and within a half day’s ride on horseback to lion and
rhinoceros hunting. Nevertheless, Nairobi has three dailies, which
also issue weekly editions. They are all banking on the future of the
town and all claim to be prosperous. They are good-sized journals,
selling for from two to three annas, or from four to six cents each.
They have regular cable dispatches giving them the big news of the
world, and they furnish full reports of the local cricket, polo, tennis,
and golf matches. As for the advertisements, most of them come
from the local merchants and some are odd to an extreme. One of
to-day’s papers carries an advertisement signed by a well-known
American circus company which wants to buy a white rhinoceros, a
giant hog, some wild dogs, a wild-tailed mongoose, and a bongo.
Another advertisement, one made along farming lines, is that of the
Homestead Dairy, and others state that certain merchants will outfit
hunters for shooting. There are many land sales advertised, as well
as machinery, American wagons, and all sorts of agricultural
implements.
Nairobi has several hotels, the accommodations in which are
comfortable. I am stopping at the Norfolk at the upper end of the
town. It is a low one-story building with a wide porch in front,
separated from the dirt street by a picket fence, and shaded by
eucalyptus trees through which the wind seems to be ever sighing
and moaning. The charges are three dollars and thirty-three cents a
day, including meals, but I have to have my own servant to make my
bed and run my errands. I have a room at the back with a fine view
of the stable. A German sportsman next door has a little cub lion,
about as big as a Newfoundland dog, tied in a box outside his
window. During a part of the day he lets the baby lion out, and ties
him by a rope to one of the pillars of the porch. The animal seems
harmless, but its teeth are sharp, and it is entirely too playful to suit
me. Besides, it roars at night.
 To be a Swahili, a professing Mohammedan, and boy to a white man give three
strong claims to distinction in African society. This chap is proud of his white men’s
clothes and will steal soap to wash them.
 Many Europeans have taken up farms in the vicinity of Naivasha, where the flat,
grassy land is suitable for sheep. Though almost on the Equator, the altitude of
more than 6,000 feet makes the climate tolerable for white men.

John Bull designs his public buildings in Africa with a view to making an
impression on the native. His Majesty’s High Court of Kenya Colony, sitting at
Mombasa, administers both British and Koranic laws.
 The horses are fairly good here, but the charges for them are
steep. When I ride out on horseback it costs me a dollar and sixty-
five cents an hour, and the carriage rates are still higher. The best
way to get about is in the jinrikishas, using the natives as beasts of
burden, but for a long ride over the plains horses are necessary.
The heavy hauling of this part of East Africa is done mostly by the
sacred cattle of India. I mean the clean-cut animals with great humps
on their backs. They are fine-looking and are apparently well-bred.
Some of these beasts are hitched to American wagons brought out
here from Wisconsin. I saw such a team hauling a Kentucky plough
through the streets of Nairobi yesterday.
Indeed, I find that American goods are slowly making their way
into these wilds. American axes and sewing machines, and
American sowers and planters are sold by the East Indians. The
drug stores carry our patent medicines and every market has more
or less American cottons. The wood cutters are using American
axes, but they complain of the flat or oval holes made for the
handles. They say that a round hole would be better, as the natives
who do the wood cutting are very clumsy and the handles snap off at
the axe. If round holes were used, heavier handles could be put in
and the Negroes could make them themselves.
Nairobi promises to become one of the railroad centres of this part
of the world. It is the chief station between the Indian Ocean and
Lake Victoria, and a road is now proposed from here to Mt. Kenya.
The Uganda Railway goes through some of the poorest country in
the colony, and the Mt. Kenya road will open up a rich agricultural
region which is thickly populated by tribes more than ordinarily
industrious. The railroad shops are here, and the employees have a
large collection of tin cottages for their homes. The headquarters of
the railroad, where the chief officers stay, are one-story tin buildings.
The telegraphic offices are connected with them.
Both railroad and telegraph are run by the government. The
telegraphic rates are comparatively low. Far off here in the jungles of
Africa one can send messages much more cheaply than in the
United States. A message of eight words from here to Uganda costs
thirty-three cents, and one can telegraph to London about as cheaply
as from New York to San Francisco. This is so notwithstanding the
difficulty which the linemen have to keep up the wires, which the
jewellery-loving natives steal. During the Nandi rebellion, forty-odd
miles of it were carried away and never recovered, and in one of the
provinces adjoining Uganda, above Lake Victoria, the natives are so
crazy after the copper wire there used that it is almost impossible to
keep the lines in shape.
Another serious danger to the telegraph is the big game. The
giraffes reach up and play with the brackets and pull the wire this
way and that. At Naivasha the hippopotami have once or twice
butted down the poles, and I hear they have been doing
considerable damage to the lines along the coast near the Tana
River. In the heart of Uganda the monkeys have a way of swinging
on the wires and twisting them together, which stops the
transmission of messages, so that the way of the lineman is indeed
hard.
 CHAPTER XXXII
JOHN BULL IN EAST AFRICA

I have just had a long talk with Mr. Frederick J. Jackson, the acting
governor and commander-in-chief of this big territory which John Bull
owns in the heart of East Africa. Mr. Jackson came out here to hunt
big game years ago, and he has been on the ground from that time
to this. He has long been employed by the British Government in the
administration of Uganda and of the protectorate of East Africa, and
he is now lieutenant-governor in the absence of Colonel Sadler, the
acting governor of the country.
Let me give you some idea of this vast region which the British are
opening up in the midst of the black continent. This country
altogether is larger than the combined states of Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, and Wisconsin. It has a population of four million natives,
most of whom not so long ago were warring with one another. Some
of the tribes made their living by preying upon their neighbours.
Slavery was everywhere common, and one of the great slave routes
to the coast was not far from the line where the Uganda railway now
runs. To-day all these evils have been done away with. The warlike
tribes have been conquered, and are turning their attention to stock
raising and farming. Slavery has been practically abolished, and
peace prevails everywhere. The whole country is now kept in good
order by only about eighteen hundred police and less than two
thousand English and East Indian soldiers. A large part of the region
along the line of the railroad has been divided into ranches and
farms. Small towns are springing up here and there, and in time the
greater part of the plateau will be settled.
There is no doubt that white men can live here. The children I see
are rosy with health, and the farmers claim that, with care, they are
as well as they were when back home in England. There are some
Europeans here who have had their homes on the highlands for over
twelve years, and they report that the climate is healthful and
invigorating. They are able to work out of doors from six until ten
o’clock in the morning and from three to six o’clock in the afternoon,
and during a part of the year all the day through. As a rule, however,
the sun is so hot at midday that one should not go out unless his
head is well protected. The heat here is dry. The nights are usually
so cool that a blanket is needed. Notwithstanding the fact that we are
almost on the Equator, at any altitude above eight thousand feet ice
may be found in the early morning. Nearer the coast the land drops
and the climate is tropical. For two hundred miles back from the
Indian Ocean there are practically no white settlers, except at
Mombasa, for it is only on this high plateau that they are as yet
attempting to live.
But let me continue my description in the words of the man who
governs the country. My conversation took place in a long, blue, iron-
roofed building known as the Commissioner’s office, situated on the
hill above Nairobi. I had asked as to the colony’s future. Mr. Jackson
replied:
“It is all problematical. We have an enormous territory and millions
of people. We have not yet prospected the country, nor have we
dealt long enough with the natives to know what we can do with the
people. We have really no idea as yet as to just what our resources
are, or the labour we can secure to exploit them.”
 Not long ago the great plateau of Kenya Colony was inaccessible and unknown
and its four million blacks were in continual war with one another. Now, besides the
railway, it is being opened up with roads permitting the use of motor transport.
 Each group of huts is usually surrounded by a thatched wall, making an
inclosure into which cattle, sheep, and goats are driven at night. Some of the tribes
are practically vegetarians, living mostly on corn, beans, sweet potatoes, millet,
and milk.

“How many inhabitants have you?”

 “We do not know. We can get some idea from the taxes, for most
of the provinces have to pay so much per hut. In other places the
natives have hardly been subdued, and of no province have we an
accurate census. The number has been estimated at from two to
four millions, but I believe it is nearer five millions, and possibly
more.”
“How about your white settlers? Will this country ever be inhabited
by Caucasians?”
“That, again, is difficult to say,” replied the conservative governor.
“We have a few European settlers already, but whether we can make
this colony a second South Africa remains to be seen. I have lived
here for over twenty years, and I am not sure as to how much hard
manual labour any white man can do in this latitude. It is true we are
more than a mile above the sea, but nevertheless we are on the
Equator, and the climate on the Equator is not suited to the white
man. The only Europeans who will succeed here will be those who
bring some money with them, and who will use the native labour in
their work. I don’t think any settler should come to East Africa without
as much as three thousand dollars, reckoning the amount in your
money. He should have enough to buy his land, stock it, build his
house, and then have something to go on. He should not start out
with a very small tract. Much of the grazing land is now being divided
up into tracts of five thousand acres. If a man takes the first
thousand and pays for it, the other four thousand are held for him
subject to certain improvements and developments upon the first
thousand. After these are completed he may buy the remaining tract
at the price of the first thousand acres.”
“I understand much of your land is being taken up in large
holdings.”
“That is so to a certain extent,” replied Mr. Jackson, “but we are
now discouraging such allotments, and would rather have the land
apportioned in tracts of from six hundred and forty acres to about five
thousand acres each. If the land is for grazing the larger area is
desirable. If it is for grain farming or dairying, it is better that it should
be small. As to our large landholders, the British East African
Company owns about five hundred square miles, Lord Delamere has
about one hundred thousand acres, and Lord Hindlip a little less.
There are a number of settlers who have twenty thousand acres or
more.”
“How about your ranching possibilities? I understand that your
stock growers expect to found a great meat industry here which will
crowd our Chicago packers out of the markets of England.”
“I do not think there is room for alarm about that matter as yet,”
replied the official. “This country is just in the making, and we know
practically nothing about it. We realize that we have some of the
richest grasses of the world—grasses which have supported vast
herds of game, and upon which cattle, sheep, goats, and hogs will
thrive. But we do not know whether we can conquer the diseases
and insect pests which attack all the animals we have so far
imported. We seem to have every disease to which cows, horses, or
sheep are subject in other parts of the world, and I believe we have
some peculiarly our own. We have ticks by the millions and flies by
the myriads. So far, however, our experiments with cattle are turning
out well, and we know that we can produce excellent beef and good
butter. We hope to find our first market for our meats and dairy
products in South Africa, and later on to ship such things to Europe.
The creation of an industry of that kind, though, is a matter of
gradual development. We shall have to arrange about proper
transportation, which means cold-storage cars and cold-storage
ships. We have not gone far enough as yet to be able to predict what
we can do.”
“What other possibilities have you?” I asked.
“I think we may eventually be able to raise coffee, and we are
already exploiting certain fibres which grow well between here and
the coast. The plant which produces the Sansivera fibre is
indigenous to this country and is being exploited by Americans who
are working not far from the station of Voi, about one hundred miles
from the Indian Ocean. I have no doubt we can raise sisal hemp, and
know that we can grow ramie without cultivation.