The Urban Giantism Problem

Urban Giantism is the phenomenon of urban

settlements growing disproportionately large in size
due to rapid migration of people from other areas to
these urban settlements. 
First City Bias
It is a form of urban bias that has often caused
considerable distortions. The country’s largest or first
(“first place”) city receives a disproportionately large
share of public investment and incentives for private
investment in relation to the country’s second-largest
city and other smaller cities.
Causes of Urban Giantism

• Hub-and-spoke transportation system

• Location of the political capital in the largest city
• Import substitution industrialization: there is much
less international trade, and population and economic
activity have an incentive to concentrate in a single
city, largely to avoid transportation costs
• “Bread and circuses” for the first city (usually the
capital) to prevent unrest
 Rural-Urban Migration and
Urbanization in Developing
Countries: India and Botswana
CASE STUDY
INDIA
The main reason for rural to urban migration in
India is that employment in urban areas produces
higher wage and consistent employment
compared to rural areas. The time span for
employment was shorter in urban areas but are in
the informal sector as they run a corner store or
market stand as it only requires low skilled that
are usually self-employed.
As the informal sector become the stepping stone
for future success but only few where able to
increase their life style. As the earning of migrants
make up one third of the total income of the urban
sector because most of their earning are used in
their home towns or village. As the main reason of
migrating was for higher wage they choose to
transfer their earning to their families in the rural
area as it has a lower price of living expenses.
BOTSWANA
Robert E.B. Lucas, the one who conducted a study of
the migration behavior in Botswana, developed an
econometric model that consists of four groups of
equations - for employment, earnings, internal
migration, and migration to South Africa. The result
shows that that unadjusted urban incomes were 68%
higher than rural incomes for males only, but the
inequality was decreased when education and experience
were considered.  
The results of his study proved that the higher the
expected earnings and the higher
the probability of expected employment, the greater
the chance that a person would migrate. But if that will
be the situation in his home village, there would be
lower chance that the person will migrate. Lucas
estimated that one job created in an urban center would
draw more than one new migrant from the rural areas.
 Compared to India, migrants in Botswana moved to
“town sized” urban centers as opposed to
metropolitans such as Delhi or Mumbai.