Courses

Cities in Developing Countries: Problems, Politics and Policies

Over half of the world’s population is now urban.  As urban populations swell, metropolitan areas in both the developed and the developing world struggle to provide basic services and address the negative externalities associated with rapid growth.  Sanitation, transportation, pollution, energy services, and public safety typically fall to sub-national governments.  Yet local sub-national institutions face difficulties as they tackle these challenges because development tends to spill over political boundaries and resources are limited.  Such difficulties are particularly acute in the developing world due to tighter resource constraints, weak institutions, and the comparative severity of the underlying problems.  Moreover, democratization and decentralization suggest that urban governance and service delivery may have become more democratic, but presents challenges with respect to priority-setting, coordination, and corruption.

This course will examine the most pressing problems facing metropolitan areas in the developing world.  It will also consider the political and institutional environment in which efforts to address metropolitan problems have been developed, the financial and institutional vehicles used to provide services of different types, and the role of political parties and other forms of political organization in the development and allocation of services. This course will draw on a number of disciplinary perspectives that offer analytic leverage as we try to understand underlying social and economic changes in cities of the developing world, as well as the institutional and political forces that influence our ability to address problems and adapt to these changes.    Empirical examples will be drawn from across the globe, though readings will lean most heavily towards Latin America.