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the agricultural regions they serve.[1]
29. There are some important lessons to be learned about spatial strategies for urban development:
- Nothing much short o coercion will prevent the growth the major city in the early stages of development.
- The key to successful intervention is timing, to encourage deconcentration only when the advantages of concentration are diminishing.
- Avoid policy interventions that increase the attractiveness of the major city. particularly subsidies on food and energy. overly generous provision of urban infrastructure and other services, and excessive concentration of administrative power in the capital.
- The best way to encourage the growth of secondary centres is to build on the natural economic advantages of their regions. especially in resource processing and marketing, and the decentralized provision of government services.
- Rural and urban development strategies and approaches should be complementary rather than contradictory: The development of secondary centres is to the direct economic benefit of the resource areas they serve.
30, The job opportunities and housing provided by cities are essential to absorb the population growth that the countryside cannot cope with; as long as price controls and subsidies do not interfere, the urban market should offer advantages to rural producers. But there are obviously conflicts of interest between developing country city-dwellers and farmers. A major thrust of the discussion on food security (see Chapter 5) was to assert the importance of decisively turning the- 'terms of trade' in favour of farmers, especially small farmers, through pricing and exchange rate policies. Many developing countries are not implementing such policies, partly for fear of losing the support of politically powerful urban factions. Thus they fail both to stem urban drift and to improve food security.
31. These considerations can provide the basis for developing an explicit national settlements strategy and policies within which innovative and effective local solutions to urban problems can evolve and flourish. Every government has such a strategy in effect, but it is most often implicit in a range of macroeconomic, fiscal, budget, energy. and agricultural polices. These policies have usually evolved incrementally in response to the pressures of the day and, almost invariably, they contradict each other and the stated settlement goals of the government. A national urban strategy could provide an explicit set of goals and priorities for the development of a nation's urban system and the large, intermediate, and small centres within it. Such a strategy must go beyond physical or spatial planning. It requires that governments take a much broader view of urban policy than has been traditional.
32. With an explicit strategy, nations can begin to reorient those central economic and major sectoral policies that will reinforce megacity growth, urban decline. and poverty. They can
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- ↑ See Chapter in J.E. Hardoy and D. Setterthwaite (eds.), Small and Intermediate Urban Centres: Their role in Regional and National Development in the Third World (London: Hodder and Stouqhton, 1986).
