Centralized versus Decentralized Pattern of Urbanization in Developing Countries: An Attempt to Elucidate a Guideline Principle

Abstract

I. Background There is no controversy on the ever-growing trend toward urbanization or the prospect that the largest percentage of the total population will find itself within urban regions and settlements 1--39 percent today according to Kingsley Davis.2 The concomitant development of urbanization is particularly spectacular today in which traditionally have been agriculturally based. The urbanization process in developing countries is a cumulative result of other basic trends such as demographic explosion, rural overpopulation, weakening of traditional allegiance to tribe and custom, increased mobility, and rise in personal aspirations and expectations. The problem confronting almost every developing country is whether this inevitable urbanization process will focus on a few urban poles of or whether a more articulated and dispersed pattern of urban centers will emerge. In the first case a split into two societies and economies-one urban and modernized, the other rural and traditional-may be anticipated. Factual evidence on the urbanization process in most of the developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America shows that the first alternative, that of polarized urbanization in a few primate cities, is the dominant one. It therefore appears plausible that in many developing countries a concentration of urban population in primate cities is accepted as natural, deeply anchored in the technological and economic settings of recent and, even more so, of future decades. It is considered that the break with tradition, custom, and tribal allegiance of a migrant from rural areas to a