Whither National Urban Policy in Developing Countries?

Abstract

Most attempts to implement national urban policies in developing countries have failed. The causes of failure have been many (infeasible goals, poor implementation, poorly designed policies) but the most difficult problem has been the isolation of national urban policy from national economic planning and from the overall context of macroeconomic and sectoral policies. National policy should not be equated with slowing down urbanization; if so, it will be ineffective in early developing countries and unnecessary in late developing and developed countries. It should not be defined largely as a primacy problem, because the issue is not whether the primate city is too big but rather how will primate city growth be managed. The resource costs of urbanization absorb a very high proportion of the available investment pool, but many of the policy implications are non-spatial (e.g. reducing standards, promoting savings) rather than spatial (e.g. changing the pattern of urbanization). Urban development should be treated as a horizontal slice cutting across almost all sectors rather than as a vertical sector in itself. This may require institutional reorganization at the central government level. Policy innovations should aim for much closer integration between urban development policy and national development planning and give less emphasis to independently conceived spatial policy.