a) Organization and Coverage

The comparative study included two port cities in each of five countries. It was designed to select a larger and more rapidly growing city to compare with a smaller and less rapidly growing city in each country. By using port cities, the economic function of the city could be held roughly constant, and the study could ask what are the sources, causes, and consequences of rapid population growth. The countries and cities chosen for the study are shown below.

Country Smaller City Larger City China Lianyungang Tianjin India Calcutta Bombay Indonesia Padang Surabaya Japan Niigata Kobe Korea Mokpo Pusan

In each case a local team of scholars reviewed the history of the cities, interviewed city administrators and wrote a history of population growth and port growth. Each considered the sources of population growth and its causes and consequences.

Before turning to the lessons learned from this study, it will be useful to review briefly the five sets of cities.

China: Tianjin and Lianyungang. Both cities can trace their histories back more than 2000 years. Tianjin has for many centuries been the major port for Beijing. It is a river port, lying 50 kilometers up the Hohai River from the Bay of Bohai, which gives onto the Yellow Sea. South of the Shantung Peninsula, Lianyungang is more directly on the sea. For the past one or two centuries it has been eclipsed by Tianjin on the north and Shanghai on the south. Recently, however, it has been designated the terminus of a "land bridge," connecting Europe and Asia by rail, and this has given it the impetus for recent and very rapid growth.

India: Bombay and Calcutta. Both major ports developed under the British imperialist thrusts that began in the 17th century. Bombay lies directly on the sea, but is protected by a series of islands. Calcutta, like Tianjin, is a river port, lying about 130 kilometers up the Hooghly River from the Bay of Bengal. Calcutta was for many years the largest city in India, a major sea port, and before Delhi, the capital of British India. Over the past few decades, however, it has been neglected by the central government because it, and its state of West Bengal, was ruled by parties in opposition to the central government.

Indonesia: Surabaya and Padang. Surabaya lies on the northeast coast of East Java, facing the island of Madura. Like many Asian cities it can trace its history back many centuries. It was here (as well as earlier in Tonkin, Vietnam) that Mongol invaders were turned back from their attempts to conquer Southeast Asia in 1293. Both under the Dutch colonial rule, and now under independent Indonesia, Surabaya is the country's second largest port. It lies on a broad alluvial plain that is also a center of rich rice production. Padang is now a small and rather sleepy sea port on the west coast of Sumatra, facing the Indian ocean. In the 19th and early 20th century, however, it was a major port since it lay close to the coal fields of west Sumatra. Thus ships from Europe called there first to take on coal and water. The transformation from coal to oil shifted sea lanes north around Sumatra and through the Straits of Malacca, thus eclipsing Padang.

Japan: Kobe and Niigata. Kobe did not really exist, other than as a small fishing village on the Hyogo Peninsula, until the opening of Japan to the West. Then Kobe and Yokohama were designated open ports, to maintain a safe distance from major political and cultural centers of Osaka and Tokyo. From the 1860s Kobe grew rapidly and is now Japan's leading seaport. Niigata was a major sea port all during the Tokugawa period (1600 to 1868), shipping rice, seafood and gold from Sado island to Osaka through the Straits of Shimonoseki and the Seto Inland Sea. It lies on two rivers, on the edge of a rich alluvial plain that has for centuries been a major center of rice production.

Korea: Pusan and Mokpo. Pusan developed after Korea's independence from Japan in 1945. Like Kobe, it lies on a sheltered, deep water bay, surrounded by rugged mountains. Today it is Korea's major sea port. Mokpo, like Niigata, was a major sea port before the present era. It lies on the inland sea, also on a rich, rice-producing, alluvial plain. Under Japanese colonial control, Mokpo was a major center of the rice trade that went to Japan from Korea.

The studies provided a series of stories with substantial detail on the patterns of population growth, its causes and consequences. Observations are summarized first, then we turn to the lessons learned from the studies.


b) Observations

     Site characteristics are important. Deep waters and high mountains, as in Kobe and Pusan give a good harbor, but present severe engineering problems in the need to extend available land. River ports, like Niigata, Calcutta, Tianjin face constant problems of siltation.

     Population growth rates varied, and not always as predicted. The major cause of growth in these cities was clearly the economic growth, or decline, of the port.

     The sources of growth varied, and provide an important observation and lesson from this set of studies. Urban growth by natural increase and by migration are well recognized, even if not always well measured. But cities also grow by expanding their boundaries, by aerial expansion, and this is seldom explicitly recognized in considering problems of urbanization. Growth by natural increase raises demands for hospitals and schools. Growth by migration, usually driven by employment and usually implying a surplus of young men, increases requirement of jobs and special kinds of housing. Growth by aerial expansion can mean no additional strains or demands on the infrastructure other than transportation, and can usually provide benefits in revenues and in planning facility.

     Consequences of growth typically include traffic congestion, the demand for increased infrastructure, and inner city decay. But these are not the only consequences of growth. In all cases, the growth, driven by increased port and economic activities, gives the city resources to address its problems. This includes both revenues and increased political influence with the central government. Often administrators from the smaller cities expressed the desire for more rapid population growth, or for more people so that they could have both greater revenues and greater voice with the central government.

     Quality of life was often found to be better in some respects in the smaller cities. This was true of such things as air pollution and water quality (though not in Calcutta). On the other hand, it was also found that traffic flows could be more rapid, with less congestion in the larger cities.

c) Lessons Learned

     Population and development are important. In these cases, population growth by itself did not seem to pose much of a problem to the administrators. More often slower growth, smaller size, or stagnation were seen as problems. What was important was the combined view of population and development. Development could provide resources to improve human welfare, and lack of development reduced the resources to improve welfare.

     The importance of autonomy. Greater local autonomy at the city level provided the administrators with greater capacities and incentives to address their problems and solve them. Kobe's autonomy, for example, led it to solve its traffic problems much more effectively than could Pusan, which was heavily controlled by the central government. In all cases the urban administrators undertook projects to address their problems. These were most successful in areas where the administrators had real control.

     Administrative capacity and personnel turnover. The cities that made the most progress in addressing their problems were those that had a stable administration with staff of long tenure and experience. Where staff turnover was high, this was recognized as a source of administrative weakness.

     The fundamental need for capital. Many of the urban problems we saw in these studies called for capital investments: more and better roads and public transportation facilities, housing, public utilities and investments for jobs. All of this requires capital, and capital was usually more often available to the larger and rapidly growing cities than to the smaller and slower growing ones.

     Family planning programs were widely recognized by all urban administrators as being especially important in helping to reduce fertility and population growth rates, and thus to reduce the strains on cities.