The future is urban
South African township | Photo credit: Peter H. Maltbie
In decades spent studying growing cities in India and Africa, Stanford anthropology professor Thomas Hansen has identified social and communal relationships—including those based on ethnic, religious, or cultural ties—as major drivers of life in an urban environment.
“When we think about urbanization, we often think it is driven by economic forces,” he says. “But when we look at the way cities actually are shaped—where people map out their own existence—you can see the long history of suspicion, enmity, fear, and anxiety about the future, based on certain people you want or don’t want as neighbors. Those fault lines become the organizing principles in political and public life.”
Hansen’s ongoing work dates back more than 30 years, but questions—and answers—about how cities evolve are all the more pressing today as urban areas experience explosive growth. Currently, 4.4 billion people—just over half the world’s population—live in cities, according to the World Bank, but the urban population is expected to double by 2050 when nearly 7 out of every 10 people will call cities home.
Much of that growth will come from developing countries, including in Africa and South Asia, where people are seeking urban economic opportunities or fleeing conflict or the effects of climate change. Accommodating such a massive influx of people is—and will continue to be—a monumental challenge, requiring innovative ideas about the future and insightful reflection on the past.
That’s exactly the kind of work being supported across campus and beyond by the Stanford King Center on Global Development, where faculty, doctoral candidates, pre- and postdoctoral researchers, and undergraduate students are conducting wide-ranging research on trends in urbanization and infrastructure.
Hansen’s work explores unseen—and often unacknowledged—forces in city life. Other current and former King Center scholars in disciplines ranging from engineering to economics are using observational and experimental methods to study everything from new transit systems to competition among private firms. Research includes: analyzing housing policies, exploring how to quickly and efficiently build shelter that honors people’s culture and traditions, and assessing how city dwellers understand and address issues of relative wealth and inequality, among other efforts.
“Cities are front and center in the effort to improve the lives of people living in poverty around the world,” says Stanford Graduate School of Business professor and King Center incoming faculty director Katherine Casey, whose own work explores the interactions between economic and political forces in developing countries. “Through research on infrastructure development, job creation, housing, and many other topics, the King Center seeks to inform sustainable and inclusive urbanization.”
Driven by Data
Data is necessary to study any particular place. But, in development economics, research inquiries have historically focused more on rural areas. Nearly a decade ago King Center faculty affiliate and economics professor Marcel Fafchamps and former King Center faculty director Pascaline Dupas (now at Princeton), set out to change that by launching the King Center’s African Urbanization and Development Research Initiative (AUDRI). The initiative conducts wide-ranging, multi-year panel surveys on the changing economic, social, and political conditions in two of Africa’s largest cities, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.
Scholars working within AUDRI have studied how to measure relative poverty in urban contexts and conducted field and in-the-lab experiments on individuals and businesses. Ongoing work in Abidjan will explore allocative efficiency in households—basically who gets the resources to run a business within families—and whether there is a stigma associated with receiving public benefits that prevents people from applying to receive them, as there is elsewhere, including in the United States. Such questions are important in urban areas where people often make their living in the informal economy with family-run businesses and where public officials must make decisions about how to allocate limited resources.
Dupas and former AUDRI predoctoral researcher Daniel Agness are also working on a major study in Addis Ababa of how responsive public officials are to their constituents’ needs, why, and whether providing “report cards” of their performance affects their policy choices.
“The idea [behind AUDRI] was to create projects that had a presence on the ground and a commitment to long-standing data collection,” Fafchamps says. “We thought that even just documenting cities and how they evolve over time is something that would have lasting value.”
Cities Built on Social Networks
Hansen’s anthropological work studying the evolution of cities dates back to 1991 in Aurangabad, India, and 1998 in Durban, South Africa. He says he came to the field of urbanization “sideways” after initially focusing on the transformation of Mumbai (then Bombay) from a major manufacturing hub into a post-industrial city.
“I was looking at one piece of that—disaffection and frustration with the city and its inability to produce enough jobs for the millions of people who came there,” he explains. “Then I started looking at the relationships of various communities that had historically lived side by side but where political and religious polarization had led to segregation of neighborhoods, economies, and networks.”
Hansen adds that those conflicts resulted in riots that left nearly 1,000 people dead and 200,000 displaced in 1992 and 1993.
Hansen’s work on “vernacular urbanism”—or what actually happens on the ground in cities—has explored, among other issues, the “social and spatial segregation” of Muslims and Hindus in Aurangabad and Mumbai and the changing face of neighborhoods in Durban pre- and post-Apartheid.
Interpersonal and social conflicts are ubiquitous and not just in the developing world, he says, noting the use of so-called redlining practices to prevent people of color from accessing housing markets and financial services in U.S. cities.
“There’s no such thing as a city driven only by economic forces,” he says. “We need to look at some of these histories of ethnic, racial, and religious polarization as fundamental to urban planning. The problem is not beyond solution, but the first thing is to recognize that there is a problem and see it as a problem that’s worth addressing.”
One major concern in developing countries, where so much of the population works in the informal economy, is a lack of formal contracts governing housing or employment, Hansen adds. As a result, people rely on their social networks to provide and protect those parts of their lives—as was explored by AUDRI in Ethiopia and Côte d’Ivoire.
“That’s how informal economies work,” he says. “There’s a fundamental insecurity to where you live, to any job you might hold if you’re lucky enough to have one. That’s why people are looking for other kinds of guarantees and sources of trust and support. The problem is that those networks are often unstable, exploitative, and without accountability.”
Property Rights Equal Security
Hansen believes that securing people’s right to property would be one step toward promoting stability within urban communities, and, in fact, that is exactly what the Ethiopian government has tried to do in Addis Ababa. Since 2005, the government has constructed more than 200,000 condominiums in the capital city, distributing them to qualifying residents via a random lottery.
Agness first became aware of the policy when he was working on the initial wave of AUDRI surveys in the city.
As a PhD student, he turned his attention to the effort, studying the impact of the lottery on children in a natural experiment that he calls “an economist’s dream,” due to the scale and random nature of the housing allocation. After an extensive household survey of nearly 3,000 households who applied for the subsidized condos—and inspired by prior AUDRI data collection on condo dwellers—he found that winning a condo meaningfully improved children’s outcomes, including secondary school completion rates and post-secondary school attendance rates. Almost all those gains came from children whose families chose to own and occupy the unit they won (people can also rent or sell their units; some allow family members to stay there instead), and—in a finding reminiscent of Hansen’s research—people whose condos were closer to their current neighborhoods were significantly more likely to move into them.
“The best predictor of whether or not someone moves in is if the condo is close to them,” Agness explains. “And that makes sense. In a place like Addis, transportation is costly, and if you’re asking someone to move away, you’re breaking up their social network. That stuff matters.”
Agness says one policy recommendation from his study would be to construct units closer to the places people already live. That’s not always possible, he admits, but he credits Ethiopian officials with making an effort on an issue U.S. cities have failed to confront for decades.
“We know that housing is fundamental,” Agness says. “But overall, we don’t know how to build it, where to build, or when to build it. We can learn something from these governments that have already figured some of this out. It may not be optimal, but they’re doing a pretty good job.”
Building Better Housing
King Center Graduate Student Research Funding recipient Simi Aluko is also focused on housing, trying to answer the question of how governments and the private and nonprofit sectors can work together to build shelter for the billions of additional people who will live in cities in the coming years.
Aluko, who grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, is a PhD student studying sustainable design and construction in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She wants to combine the best of indigenous construction techniques—which are affordable and culturally accepted but often inefficient—with a process known as industrialized house building, in which prefabricated components are assembled onsite but at greater cost.
Aluko interned and worked part time in some construction-related roles before deciding to attend Stanford to earn her PhD.
“The construction industry is really focused on building new buildings and managing projects, not innovating how we build buildings,” she explains. “I felt like I wouldn’t be able to learn how to create innovation within the construction industry if I stayed in the industry.”
Aluko’s research includes traveling within Africa to study indigenous and industrialized construction practices.
“How can those two styles be merged?” she asks. “What can be learned and taken forward from both? Cities like Lagos have massive housing deficits. There’s no way at the speed they are building today that they can ever fill that deficit—it’s mathematically impossible.”
Aluko feels strongly about providing everyone with safe and dignified housing that incorporates parts of a community’s culture.
“The world really should look like the people living in it,” she says.
Urban Transit: On the Move
Another King Center researcher, Stanford Associate Professor of Economics Melanie Morten, focuses on the migratory processes of people in developing countries, including why people move and what happens to them and the places they move to and from when they do. She also has examined the infrastructure that facilitates such movement, including in a recent paper that looked at the effects of a new highway system in Brazil on trade and migration.
Morten is also leading an ongoing study of the effects of a new bus rapid transit (BRT) system in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, one of Africa’s fastest growing cities, including on low-income residents who were living near the bus lines when they were created, women’s earnings, and the cost of housing near the transit stops.
One advantage of the project—which is run in collaboration with the World Bank and the government of Tanzania— is that it follows people over time, even if they move away from the BRT system later. The model underlying the research could also be used to evaluate infrastructure projects in other cities, Morten says, adding that studying such projects is crucial in the effort to reduce income disparities within cities or geographic areas.
“Having the ability to work and earn wages where wages are higher can be a powerful tool to reduce poverty,” she says.
Charting Urbanization in Developing Countries
King Center scholars do more than produce thoughtful research; they disseminate their findings and collaborate with partners and policymakers to address problems associated with global development.
AUDRI researchers have studied the roll-out of a new health insurance model with the government in Côte d’Ivoire; Agness and his coauthor, Tigabu Getahun of the Policy Studies Institute in Ethiopia, collaborated with the Addis Ababa Housing Development Agency on their housing lottery research and are sharing their findings with the Ethiopian government. And in May, Aluko organized a workshop at the King Center to bring together industrialized construction practitioners who operate in developing countries. Representatives from several private companies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America attended, and she plans to make the workshop an annual event to “make space for recognition but also for mutual exchange.”
Despite the exponential growth of cities in recent years, urban areas in low and middle income countries remain understudied. But that is changing, and the King Center is at the forefront of those efforts.
Cities are “where the dynamism of a country is,” Fafchamps says. Billions of people are moving to urban areas, and for good reason. “They see that as the future.”
