Mike Davis, in The New Left Review writes about the urbanisation of the third world (as also touched upon in an earlier post):
Urbanists also speculate about the processes weaving together Third World cities into extraordinary new networks, corridors and hierarchies. For example, the Pearl River (Hong Kong-Guangzhou) and the Yangtze River (Shanghai) deltas, along with the Beijing-Tianjin corridor, are rapidly developing into urban-industrial megalopolises comparable to Tokyo-Osaka, the lower Rhine, or New York-Philadelphia. But this may only be the first stage in the emergence of an even larger structure: ‘a continuous urban corridor stretching from Japan/North Korea to West Java.’ [13] Shanghai, almost certainly, will then join Tokyo, New York and London as one of the ‘world cities’ controlling the global web of capital and information flows.
[…]
But slums, however deadly and insecure, have a brilliant future. The countryside will for a short period still contain the majority of the world’s poor, but that doubtful title will pass to urban slums by 2035. [49] At least half of the coming Third World urban population explosion will be credited to the account of informal communities. Two billion slum dwellers by 2030 or 2040 is a monstrous, almost incomprehensible prospect, but urban poverty overlaps and exceeds the slums perse.
A very frightening article, reminiscent, as Ken MacLeod also noted of science fiction novels like John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar.