ABSTRACT
Urbanization and (large) cities have been long seen as symbols of ‘progress’ or, as it has become more usual to say from the 1950s onwards, of ‘development.’ Growth and modernization theorists, for instance, usually overestimated the positive character of capitalist urbanization in the ‘developing countries’ (or ‘underdeveloped countries,’ as people used to say in the less euphemistic parlance of the 1960s), arguing that “continued concentration of economic growth in large cities is necessary to achieve economies of scale and increase externalities in the form of indirect costs and social and economic infrastructure because these are, in turn, the prerequisites for the subsequent growth needed to provide the resources required to overcome social deficiencies” (Berry, 1978: 51).
