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The City in the Developing World
Robert B. Potter & Sally Lloyd-Evans, Harlow, Addison Wesley Longman, 1998, 244 pp., 18.99, ISBN 0-582-35741-1
Geographies of Development
Robert B Potter, Tony Binns, Jennifer A. Elliot & David Smith Harlow, Addison Wesley Longman, 1999, 312 pp., 19.99, ISBN 0-582-29825-3
These books are intended to be up-to-date and comprehensive textbooks for undergraduate students in the fields of geography, development studies, planning, economics and social sciences, and their teachers. The two books, however, address different subject, they are, therefore, reviewed in turn.
The City in the Developing World is designed to introduce the study of towns and cities and to emphasize their salient role in developing countries. It has three main aims: first, to place an understanding of the developing world city in its wider global context; second, to illustrate and exemplify the argument that theories of development can be viewed as explicit theories of urbanization; and third and finally, to link the analysis of the Third-World city with current themes of debate in the social sciences. These aims are pursued in 10 chapters. The first aim is covered in Chapters 1 and 2, which defines the nature and scope of urbanization in the Third World in broad historical terms, using the concept of social surplus product as central to the emergence of cities and urban living. Cities and urban living are, therefore, products of any societies which produce a social surplus product and/or acquire an elite.
The second aim of the book is examined and illustrated in Chapters 3 and 4, which discuss the national urban systems and national urban development strategies in the Third World, while the third aim of the book is examined in Chapters 5 to 9. Apart from the traditional structure and morphology of cities, housing, employment and work, as well as cities and environmental sustainability, the authors include a chapter on urbanization and basic needs with specific reference to education, health and food. The authors should be commended for bringing issues of basic needs in Third-World cities to the fore, because they have tended to be overlooked either because of sectoral approaches or a mistaken belief that all residents of Third-World cities are better off than their rural counterparts. However, the authors' attempt to...