Abstract
Global development trends are substantially shaping today’s cities. This chapter presents a brief overview about some of the most dominant development trends influencing the appearance of cities in the Global South and the way they are governed. To start with, the current prospects of population growth and urbanization are discussed as well as their temporal and spatial manifestation. This section is followed by a brief introduction of the on-going processes of democratization and decentralization. Devolution of power and responsibilities from national to local levels has become a dominant approach to satisfy local demands for more autonomy and participation in decision-making. The third section describes the framework conditions characterized by economic globalization and neoliberal policies in which all cities are embedded. The impacts and implications of these trends for urban areas in less-developed countries are discussed in a last section: increasing inequalities, exclusion of significant parts of society and poverty has created fragmented and spatially expanding cityscapes increasingly shaped by segregated spaces for the rich and the poor. These developments pose new challenges for the governance of cities, new obligations for local authorities, but also new possibilities.
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Notes
- 1.
Demographic transition means the slow change from a regime with high birth- and mortality rates to a regime with low birth- and mortality rates. As the mortality rate is falling first and the birth rate is coming down much slower, the population is strongly growing during the transition.
- 2.
The terms ‘neoliberal politics’ and ‘neoliberal agenda’ are used in this study as a description for a bundle of economic measures promoting liberalization, free trade and open markets.
- 3.
Economic conditions where people act according to the principle of homo oeconomicus.
- 4.
The changing mode of governance is discussed in Sect. 4.4.
- 5.
The concept of good urban governance is discussed in Chap. 4.
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Obermayr, C. (2017). The Global Development Context. In: Sustainable City Management. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49418-0_2
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