Urban Migration Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Largely the result of migration from rural areas, urban growth can place tremendous burdens on urban institutions of governance, such as municipal authorities and community organizations, and also on the private sector. Rapid in-migration of new residents can significantly shift local political dynamics by creating new voting blocs, ethnic and cultural affinities, and new labor markets. These dynamics have played a significant role in shaping the politics and settlement patterns of North American cities after World War II (1939–1945), and currently shape the urban politics and settlement patterns of many cities in developing countries.

In the United States, the great migration north by agricultural workers during the 1930s and 1940s was prompted as industrialists in northern Midwest cities applied Fordist manufacturing principles in the car, steel, and other industries. This led to high rates of urban growth in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee. The migration fueling this growth then spawned the creation of new neighborhoods and settlements in these cities; these subsequently became segregated by race, ethnicity, and other forms of social status, with racial and ethnic tensions emerging as early as the 1950s. During the 1960s, however, North Americans began migrating out of central cities to suburban areas, drawn by affordable suburban housing. They also sought to escape issues such as urban fiscal crises; the redlining of poor, minority, and immigrant urban communities; and a range of other factors pushing for the development of what have become primarily suburban cities.

As suburbanization has become the norm, city centers have taken on an increasingly immigrant character, prompting scholars to focus on how ethnic and immigrant enclaves have come to characterize many North American cities. These immigrant sociophysical spaces have become cemented within host-country hierarchies and have played an important role in sustaining the economic viability of North American central cities. The important economic role that immigrants and immigrant neighborhoods have historically played is that of urban intermediaries for economies and communities, or ethnic economies. Scholars have defined such ethnic enclaves as important for understanding how immigrants build and retain enduring social ties within the majority culture. While such approaches have historically viewed immigrant neighborhoods as relatively insulated enclaves, there is growing anecdotal evidence that ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods are increasingly nodes of attraction. The existence of well-advertised Koreatowns across the United States, Little Havana in Miami, and Filipinotown in Los Angeles, for example, suggests that immigrant neighborhoods serve quite different functions in a larger urban mosaic of neighborhoods, and identities and created networks have both racial and spatial characteristics. These immigrant neighborhoods have attained an important role in urban government, and are now viewed as markers of cities’ attractive forces to rural workers as well as immigrants.

The transition from a primarily agrarian to an urban society, while largely complete in North America, is only just beginning in many developing countries. Comparable processes of industrialization and urban migration are currently underway in many fast-developing countries where job availability in growing urban agglomerations has attracted large numbers of agricultural workers. The appearance of these rural populations in cities reflects more than simply population growth. Increasing population concentration requires the development of expanded sociophysical infrastructure to manage the inevitable conflicts and problems associated with higher density living. Since urban governments in developing countries have rarely been able to keep pace with these new demands for urban services, innovative community level institutions have become important nonstate actors in governance, providing basic urban goods ranging from clean water supplies to housing. These institutions have taken on important intermediary roles in urban governance and have been forceful advocates for the poor.

This urban transition in developing countries describes societies that have rapidly changed from rural to urban forms of social and physical organization in relatively short time periods that are generally more compressed than those for North America and other industrialized countries. Some suggest that if they follow a similar trajectory to North American cities, their initial growth due to industrialization and consequent in-migration from agrarian regions will lead to residentially segregated neighborhoods, the loss of the industrial job base, and eventually the creation of long-term urban poverty and inequality. For these reasons, progressive urban policy and planning is a growing concern throughout the fast-growing urban centers in the developing world.

Bibliography:

Bonacich, Edna. “A Theory of Middleman Minorities.” American Sociological Review 38, no. 5 (1973): 583–594.
Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Lemann, Nicholas. The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. New York: Knopf, 1991.
Levy, Frank. The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change. New York: Russell Sage, 1998.
Montgomery, Mark R., Richard Stren, Barney Cohen, and Holly E. Reed, eds. Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its Implications in the Developing World. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2003.
Spencer, James H. “An Emergent Landscape of Inequality in Southeast Asia: Cementing Socio-spatial Inequalities in Viet Nam.” In Globalizations (forthcoming).
“Household Strategies for Securing Clean Water: The Demand for Piped Water in Viet Nam’s Peri-urban Settlements.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 28, no. 2 (2008): 213–224.

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