I have a hard time articulating this question in the topic title, let me explain:
Q:
Do you believe that a long-standing city-sized communities, can (or indeed should) be shifted by either market or legislative power, to another part of the country, for their own good – or do you believe that city-sized communities are anchored to their location, and should be improved where they are?
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My question carries a bit of baggage:
In China, tens of millions of villagers have migrated to large cities, to reap a middle class lifestyle (so we are told, there is some evidence to suggest at least some return to their villages with salary in hand), leading some western economists to argue that this is a healthy process, and western countries should, and must, follow suit.
Some people believe the north of England must ‘move south’.
But the other school of thought in the world, which I must say is the one followed by most historians I read, and many developing world oriented economists, is that communities must be improved where they are – we are long past the era in which settlements were so small that they could simply be depopulated by demographic diffusion (and when that did happen, it tended to create problems) – the problems of the area must be tackled where they are, in order that residents become more affluent.
Some people in the UK who make policy or vote for it, seem to think that the north of England, population 40 million, is too spread out, or too unpopulated, to be economically sustainable. Many in Europe I think would find this laughable, since it contains some of the largest urban areas within the ‘Blue Banana‘, and the cities have aging imperial assets that developing world countries would die to get. Many of the thinkers I read would contend that this notion is childish hogwash – half of a large European country, rooted by time, cannot simply migrate, their cities must be provided with infrastructure, connectivity, local political power, etc.
Northern England is by no means poor in international terms (although it is doing badly in western European terms, which is what matters), but to draw a comparison with developing world economics – the ‘migrate to Shanghai’ policy was leading to starvation, food price inflation, suicide, and land abuses in South Asia – on the other hand, micro-finance, micro infrastructure investment, etc, in settlements as small as villages, has done more to expand the South Asian middle class in problem states, than moving to cities, and it has done so without uprooting communities.
For all India and China’s urbanisation, it hasn’t put much of a dent in rural monstrosities like Uttar Pradesh – they can only be improved in situ. Northern England on the other hand has a fairly ready-made urban population, waiting to be turned into European powerhouses.
