Is urbanization sustainable? A longitudinal study of developing nations, 1990-2015

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sustainability scholars have long asked whether urbanization fosters sustainable development. To stimulate progress on this question for the cross-national quantitative literature, we draw on theories from modernization and political economy and address two empirical issues: the lack of a comprehensive metric on sustainable development as well as a need to differentiate between the multiple dimensions of urbanization. Covering the years 1990–2015, first in models with listwise deletion (n = 88) and then using full information maximum likelihood (n = 156), we regress change in the Sustainable Development Index (SDI) and its component parts on changes in the basic percentage urban variable as well as on independent measures for country-level density, urban primacy, the size of urban agglomerations, and slum prevalence, controlling for unit fixed effects. For developing nations, results from these models indicate that the multiple dimensions of urbanization exert countervailing pressures on the social and environmental components of sustainable development. These results highlight competing claims from urban-ecological theories of modernization and political economy.