Cities are getting bigger and rural communities are shrinking. It is a global trend that has been going on for decades. Alarm bells ring and there are calls for a return to an often-imagined romantic, idyllic vision of country life.
What is going on? What is going to happen? Is it really a crisis? Can’t we return to a simpler more sustainable way of life?
They are all questions that are ultimately linked to issues of globalisation, which has been an elemental component of capitalist development since its inception.
When capitalism emerged as the ruling idea, it initiated a dramatic shift from the countryside to the cities. This shift was determined by the need of capital for workers and, by the new working class, for sustenance.
The disruptions to social life were immense but the simple, if unpalatable fact was, that the old ways could be no more. Within a generation or two, capitalism was regarded as an almost ‘natural’ condition, an immutable and unalterable fact of life. This feeling was carefully and conscientiously promoted by the state, whose purpose in life was then, and is now, to facilitate capitalist development.
The next two centuries were marked by the movement of the working people to where they might find work. In more recent decades capitalist economics has seen this tendency shift somewhat, although the migration of workers certainly continues.
Today, extracting and manufacturing industries have tended to move to where ever cheaper sources of labour are to be found. This, in turn, has promoted the rise of urban populations, which mirrors the development of capitalism in the older, longer developed economies.
These developing economies produce, not only a new working class, but a rising middle class. They see futures beyond the boundaries of their individual countries and, not surprisingly, seek their fortunes abroad.
These futures are urban futures and so the growth of urbanisation grows.
Capitalism could not hope to exist within the confines of a national state and so it has globalised its relationships, has to a degree by-passed these national states, and has integrated its operations within a transnational setting.
Economic relationships that once were state-based are now global relationships. If we were to imagine the world as one country, then the developed world can be regarded as the middle class, while the developing world is the working class. It is in these developing economies that capitalism is able to extract the greatest degree of profitability. It is also the domain of the most intense poverty.
Is it any wonder, then that a growing middle class might seek to move to greener pastures? And nor is it simply a question of a mobile middle class. Donald Kaberuka, president of the African Development Bank, estimates that by 2030 over 2.7 billion people will have migrated from their country of origin to settle elsewhere.
Poverty, opportunity, and the need for work are the driving factors.
We have an urbanised and urbanising landscape, be it in Australia, or anywhere else in the world. This is not about to change. On the contrary. UN figures indicate that in 1950, 66 per cent of the world’s population lived in rural communities.
By 2014 that figure had shifted to 50 per cent and by 2050 the figure will be just 33 per cent. The move to the city is a by-product of capitalism’s development. Production centres are urbanised and agriculture has become industrialised. The family farm could never hope to be competitive in a country like Australia, or anywhere else. Urban expansion is a direct result of capitalist development, expansion and progress.
The state operates to facilitate this development. Poverty is a by-product of capitalist development, as is wealth creation. A globalised economy simply highlights the inequalities that capitalism creates. The more successful that capitalism is in creating wealth, the greater is the disparity in wealth. In geographic and demographic terms this is shown in the growth of urban centres. All cities reflect differentials in wealth. The developing countries simply show the poverty levels more acutely.
And so, what can we see?
Fewer workers are needed by capital in rural settings and more in urban centres. This is then exacerbated by a desperation on the part of poor rural populations to find a means to extract a living, however precarious, and in the developed world by the requirement to have access to better, more reliable services – health, education, cultural etc.
Ultimately, however, there are similarities that cut across rich and poor nations. Capitalism has made it necessary that we increasingly inhabit an urban environment. That is not going to change. To think otherwise is to romanticise the past and to seek to turn back the clocks.
The negative aspects of an increasingly urban environment are clear for all to see. They can be alienating, limiting, and isolating places for the poor, regardless of whether the poor are in Bangladesh or Australia. They can be enlivening, enriching and expansive places for the wealthy.
What then can be done?
Cities are here to stay. Making them liveable while maintaining the rule of capital is the problem. While the UN has made numerous well-intentioned calls, along the lines of its 2014 report on sustainable urbanisation that notes that if well managed, “cities offer important opportunities for economic development and for expanding access to basic services, including health care and education, for large numbers of people.
Providing public transportation, as well as housing, electricity, water and sanitation for a densely settled urban population is typically cheaper and less environmentally damaging than providing a similar level of services to a dispersed rural population.” The key phrase here is ‘well-managed’.
These are fine sentiments and doubtless true. The stumbling block to this is the simple but painful fact that the vast financial resources required to make cities better places must come from state apparatuses.
States are caught in a great bind. They operate to facilitate capitalist development. Capitalism requires ever greater degrees of profit. Infrastructure expenditure that would make the cities that capitalism has created pleasant, liveable places for all would necessarily have a negative impact on that profit accumulation.
A dilemma, but one that must be resolved …
*William Briggs has a PhD from Deakin University. He is based in Hobart, while still working as a sessional academic at Deakin. His specialist area of focus is in International Relations with particular reference to Global Political Economy.
