Republic of the Philippines

POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES

TAGUIG BRANCH

Module 7:
Urbanization and
Rural-Urban Migration:
Theory and Policy
Prepared by:
Dahan, Devije
Dalumpiniz, Jefrrey Elainah Nicole
Dellota, Pamela
Diansig, Elysis
Dolz, Jazz Jade

BSA 2-1
A.Y. 2019-2020
Faculty/Facilitator:
Ms. Carmelita Dalida Gomez
 Objectives:
After reading the module, the reader would be able to:

 To have an overview of the role of cities in fostering economic development.

 To describe urban growth in countries, especially Philippines.
 To have knowledge about the policies of the government to ameliorate unemployment
problems.
 To understand causes and effects of rural-urban migration and its impact through the years.
 To examine developing countries and their potential dynamism and productivity.

Concept:

People move from the rural country-side to burgeoning cities and in fact, according to
estimates by the UN Population Division, for the first time in human history, in 2009 globally, “the
number of people living in urban areas which is 3.42 billion, had surpassed the number living in
rural areas with 3.41 billion.” In this section, we tackle various policy options that governments in
developing countries may wish to pursue in their attempts to moderate the heavy flow of rural-
to-urban migration and to ameliorate the serious unemployment problems that continue to
plague their crowded cities.
 Essential Questions:

 Does urbanization play a significant role with per capita income?

 What are the causes of rural-urban migration?
 What is Migration Development?
 How do we resolve migration problems?
 What are the policies that the government implement to address the problems in
unemployment?

In this chapter, we focus on one of the most complex and nuanced dilemmas of the development
Introduction:
process: the phenomenon of massive and historically unprecedented movements of people from
the rural countryside to the burgeoning cities of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. After reviewing
trends and prospects for overall urban population growth, we examine in this chapter the
potential role of cities—both the modern sector and the urban informal sector—in fostering
economic development.
7.1 Urbanization: Trends and Living Conditions
Year 2009 is when the world became majority urban and even the developing world is expected
to become majority urban before 2020. Currently, most urban growth is widely experienced in
the cities of Asia and Africa. The United Nations projects that Asia and Africa will account for
some 86% of the global urban population increase in this period.
In fact, there will be so much rural-to-urban migration in Asia that will take place in this period,
thus will result to a decline in the rural population.

The positive relation of urbanization and per capita income is one of the most significant and
obvious fact of development process. Whenever urban population growth exceeds rural
population growth, urbanization rates increase.
Generally, the more developed the country, measured by per capita income, the greater the
share of population living in urban areas. At the same time, while individual countries become
more urbanized as they develop, today’s poorest countries are far more urbanized than today’s
developed countries were when they were at a comparable level of development, as measured
by per capita income. According to UN projections, almost 5 billion urban dwellers were
expected by 2030, nearly five-eighths of projected world population for that year.
Urbanization has continued in decades now even those that have experienced only minimal
industrialization. Although the World Bank caption to the figure stated that “urbanization is
closely associated with economic growth,” it may also be interpreted as showing that
urbanization is being experienced everywhere, at high and low levels of income and whether
growth is positive or negative.
 Figure 7.2

Urban population growth (annual %) in Philippines was reported at 1.375 % in 2016, according
to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized
sources.

In addition, urbanization is happening everywhere in the world, although at differing rates.

Thus, it becomes clear that urbanization is not driven solely by income.

Figure 7.3

A megacity is a very large city metropolitan area, typically with a population of more than 10
million people. Figure 7.2 provides a map locating megacities, the largest urban agglomerations
in the world containing a population of at least 10 million people. As the figure shows, in 1970,
there were only 2 megacities, but as years passed by, the number of megacities increased, that
by 2011, there were already 23 such metropolises.
Based on numbers of people, when megacities are compared with the small and medium cities
in developing countries, the latter have added more residents. But while the number living in
cities of fewer than 500,000 will more than double (grow by 2.4 times) from 1970 to 2025, the
number in megacities will increase by 16 times, from 39 million to 630 million. Figure 7.5
presents total urban populations in millions by different city sizes for 1970, 1990, and 2011,
with projections to 2025.

Figure 7.4
The largest cities in developed countries in the past were much smaller than the large cities of
developing countries today
 Figure 7.5
Figure 7.4 shows the forward movement of almost of the increments to the world’s population
will be accounted for by the growth of urban areas as migrants continue to stream into the
cities from rural areas and as urbanization rates in the developing world continue to approach
those of the developed world. A central question arises on how these cities will cope in all vital
aspects with such high and rapidly rising concentrations of people.
Along with the rapid spread of urbanization and the urban bias (governments in developing
countries extend more favor in urban sectors than in rural economies that causes a gap
between the two) Along with the rapid spread of urbanization and the urban bias in
development strategies has come this prolific growth of huge slums and shantytowns. About
4.5 million people are homeless or living in informal settlements in the Philippines, with its
population of about 106 million, according to the statistics office.
(Source: https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2018/0607/Slum-dwellers-in-
the-Philippines-build-homes-through-community-programs)
 Figure 7.6
The Annual Growth of Urban and Slum Populations, 1990-2001

Figure 7.5 shows the annual growth of urban and slum populations in the 1990–2001 periods,
drawn from the 2006 UN Millennium Development Goals Report. Sub-Saharan Africa is the
world’s most rapidly urbanizing region, and almost all of this growth has been in slums, where
new city residents face overcrowding, inadequate housing, and a lack of water and sanitation.
In Western Asia, as well, most of the urban growth is occurring in slums. The rapid expansion of
urban areas in Southern and Eastern Asia is creating cities of unprecedented size and
complexity and new challenges for providing a decent environment for the poor. Northern
Africa is the only developing region where the quality of urban life is improving.” The
importance of addressing this problem has been enshrined in the Millennium Development
Goals in which Target 11 of Goal 7 commits “to improve the lives of at least 100 million slum
dwellers by the year 2020.” Yet even though this number seems likely to be met, it represents
only about one-tenth of all urban slum dwellers as of 2013. It is extremely difficult to provide
reliable projections of slum populations further into the future because much depends on
uncertain future policies and economic growth rates, as well as the extent of migration that
occurs in response to growth and policy change
Part of the blame rests with governments for the explosion in urban shantytowns along with
chiefly responsible population growh and accelerated rural-urban migration (movement of
people from rural villages, towns, and farms to cities in search for job).
Their misguided urban-planning policies and outmoded building codes often mean that a
majority of new urban housing is “illegal.” For example in Manila, Philippines, a large majority
of the population has historically been too poor to be able to buy or rent an officially “legal”
house. In fact, a widely held belief in some developing countries is that governments have
intentionally sought to make the lives of new migrants as miserable as possible, hoping this will
be an effective deterrent to prospective migrants; but when people come to cities anyway,
slums are the inevitable result. But often times, even through government’s neglect or
destruction in this issue, it can never cancel out the many socially oppressed rural areas.
A critical issue that needs to be addressed is the extent to which national governments can
formulate development policies that can have a distinct impact on trends in and the character
of urban growth.
Before looking closely at other problems and policy approaches in developing country cities, let
us first consider the potential advantages offered by cities. Urban areas have played a highly
constructive role in the economies of today’s developed countries, and they offer huge and still
largely untapped potential to do the same for developing countries.