The City Beckons

Reference: Grigg, V. (2005). Cry of the Urban Poor. GA, USA: Authentic Media in partnership with World Vision.

Talk about urbanization with its big, powerful, secular cities: they stand there like giants, iron chariots, enemies of the church. Today one city alone may have 20 to 25 million people. And like a giant, it shouts at the church, “I’m here. Now what are you going to do about it? I don’t want the gospel. Just leave me alone!”

— Thomas Wang, AD2000 chairman

What if the size of the Muslim world or of the Hindu population doubled every ten years? Suppose furthermore that these population blocs were found to be among the most responsive to the gospel on the earth? How would this affect our present strategies of Christian mission? Would we take up the challenge?

The answer is a dramatic “Yes!”

Yet the number of urban squatters and slum dwellers in the world’s major cities constitutes a bloc as large as either the Muslims or the Hindus, it doubles in size every decade, and all indicators show it to be a responsive group. Logi­cally missions must swing their strategies to make these their priority target.
    The majority of migrants to the mega-cities will move into the slums (Bangkok), squatter areas (Manila), shanty towns (South Africa), bustees (India), bidonvilles (Morocco), favelas (Brazil), casbahs (Algeria), ranchitos (Venezuela), ciudades perdidas (Mexico), and barriadas or pueblos jovenes (Peru). I will describe these in general with the term squatter areas.

These tend to be slums of hope. Their occupants have come in search of employment, have found some vacant land and gradually have become established. They are building their homes, finding work and developing some communal relationships similar to those of the barrios or villages from which they have come. In slums of hope social forces and expectations create a high degree of receptivity to the gospel.
    Missions today must reach the last tribes and fulfill prior commitments to the rural poor. But new mission strategies must focus on the crucial point of spiritual war­fare for the mega-cities. Within this broad objective, mis­sion to the urban poor becomes a central target, as they are the ultimate victims of the oppression and evil of the mega-cities and nation states. They loom large in the heart of God. They are the key to the elite and the heart of the city. Among the most reachable of people groups today are mi­grants living in community, groups of peasants who have moved to cities and live in squatter areas.

Over the past thirty years, about one billion people have moved from rural areas to cities. In the next ten years, an­other one billion will board overladen buses and come to the cities. For most of them, the first step is into squatter areas—centers of great darkness and demonic activity.

Between 1950 and 1980, urban growth in Third World mega-cities rose from 275 million to just under one billion. From 1980 to 2000 it doubled  In the next two decades the global urban population will grow to 5 billion.  Wherever land can be found, huts and plywood shacks will go up. Few governments have the capacity to prevent it or to serve the needs of the people arriving. Even the United States may not remain immune as its economy slows down.

Some of the most destitute of the poor live in mud homes on the streets of modern Dhaka city in Bangladesh, a new city that is now home to five million people, a city that will grow to contain 20 million people by the turn of the century. The 730,000 people in Dhaka’s 771 squatter areas in 1984 have increased, until by the year 2000, they will make up the majority of the city’s twelve and a half million population. Because of the lack

 of raw materials and other factors, there is little possibility for the city’s industrial growth to keep pace with the migra­tion influx.

Almost all of the world’s population growth in the next decades will be in cities. Rural populations will tend to re­main at present levels.

There is usually one mega-city per country. It drains re­sources from the entire country. Its bureaucracy locks up the potential for growth in the smaller cities. The next larg­est city as a rule is only 10 percent the size of this mega-city. Chiang Mai, the second largest city of Thailand, for example, is thirty times smaller than Bangkok.
    To understand the process of bringing the kingdom of God into squatter areas, we need first to live among them and learn their ways. But we must also come to understand the processes that are creating them. The following state­ment from Sam Wilson rings true:

Ghettos per se (even the most pathological ones) are not the real problems of our times but are visi­ble symptoms of fundamental, systematic pro­cesses. To treat ghettos as the basic urban disease, or even to make them special targets of evangeliza­tion strategies as the sine qua non of urban minis­try, is like treating a sick person’s temperature, rather than the disease . . . Evangelism is most effec­tive when the passion for evangelistic effectiveness is adorned with broad ranging concerns and goals for the renewal of the whole of city life.¹

The extent of the squatter areas
    Research from Bangkok shows the growth of these slums, from 80 in 1940 to 1020 in 1982.² In other megacities, research collated from various sources shows that the number of squatter areas in each ranges from 177 to 1000. The statistics on the previous page summarize conclusions from research studies in various cities on the percentage of urban poor.[1]

 SQUATTER POPULATION IN SELECTED CITIES

 (IN PERCENTS, BASED ON VARIOUS STUDIES)

This chart gives a general idea of the percentages of squatters in various cities around the world. There is a pat­tern of gradual growth of the squatter areas from the 1940s when the first squatter areas began to appear. These fig­ures exclude the decaying slums of the older city, except in the final column, where they are included to give a more complete picture of the actual numbers of urban poor.
    When we include both slum and squatter figures for these Third World mega-cities, all have more than 6 per­cent of the population in slum and squatter areas. Bangkok has 6 percent. Sao Paulo, perhaps one of the world’s most productive cities, has a favela population of only 7 percent but another 17 percent live in corticos (decaying inner city buildings). In many cities, over 60 percent of the people live in slums or squatter areas.
    With an urban population in the Third World of 793 mil­lion in 1980 and a conservative overall estimate of 25 per­cent of these living in squatter areas, we are looking at a people group of 200 million. When one adds the slum areas and street people of the cities, 35 percent of the people in these cities are the urban poor—277 million people.  By 2001 this had risen to 43% in the slums or 870 million.
    This is in a world that is about 15 per­cent squatters by the year 2001—a bloc nearly the size of the Muslim or Hindu populations, doubling each decade. Squatters thus constitute an immense people group—a distinct entity deserving specific strategies for evangeliza­tion.
    If one includes the less reachable, decaying inner-city slums as well as the street people in these cities, a reason­able estimate of the urban poor by the year 2000 is one bil­lion people—50 percent of these cities or 16.8 percent of the world’s population.
    The urban poor as an entity can not, in contrast to the squatter communities, be generalized as a broad reachable bloc with cultural commonalities. They do not identify themselves as communities with shared characteristics nor do they have an affinity for other types of urban poor. The urban poor as a larger class are defined in contrast to the people of the city rather than as an entity in themselves.

Most responsive international cultural bloc

Not only do squatters share a common economic history and system, they also share universal religious characteris­tics—an animism that is far stronger than prevailing “high” religions. Also, cultural characteristics in the slums are as much universal as they are related to the prevalent cultures in each city. We may define squatters as a cultural bloc with as much ease as we define Muslims or Hindus, even though they span a broad range of ethnicity and cul­ture. Animists in general are more reachable than people who believe in high religion.

Socially, each squatter community of reasonable size perceives of itself as a distinct social entity, linked to the city, but with a life, society and subculture of its own. In any city the squatters have coping strategies independent of middle-class life, including middle-class religious life, to which they have little or no relationship. If you have ever been present when two squatter churches met, you under­stand the affinity evident between these people as a social class with similar occupations and patterns of residence.
    Language in the squatter areas tends to draw migrants together as all learn to speak the lingua franca of the city. Yet almost all realize they cannot read and write properly and, unlike the middle class, are uneducated. As a result, ethnic barriers are lower in the city, but a strong class bar­rier between the lower class and the middle class emerges.

Such communities are more responsive than the closed rural village or the isolated middle-class person. Poverty creates a positive responsiveness to the gospel, according to the apostle James (James 2:5). The changes migrants go through also create a responsiveness.

 Faced with high responsiveness in the international sub­culture of poverty in these squatter areas, we must develop specific missions and plans for evangelization.

Hence, while agreeing with Dr. Wilson about the need for a broader approach to the problems of the poor, these sta­tistics and trends would indicate the necessity of a specific plan for evangelization of the squatter communities, while not neglecting other urban poor.

Where did such growth come from?

Estimates of rates of growth of the squatter areas indi­cate they are growing faster than the cities at annual rates of about 6-12 percent. The squatter areas of Kuala Lum­pur, for example, grew at an average annual rate of 9.7 per­cent from 1974 to 1980. Much of this may be attributed to the growth rate of the cities. Worldwide urban growth has been pegged at 2.76 percent a year. At that rate, city popu­lations will double every twenty years. But the mission field among the squatters will double about every ten years. The following chart shows the worldwide urban growth rate per year.

AVERAGE URBAN ANNUAL GROWTH RATES (IN PERCENT)
 

The processes of urbanization are not new phenomena. They have been occurring since Nimrod and Babel. But there are historical differences occurring today that have resulted in the world rapidly becoming urban and more of the world’s people becoming the urban poor.

The vital and occasionally magnificent cities of the past existed as islands in an overwhelming rural sea. Less than 200 years ago, in the year 1800, the population of the world was still 97 percent rural. At that time only 1.7 per­cent of the world’s population resided in places of 5000 or larger.

 
 By the beginning of the twentieth century, the propor­tion of the world’s population in cities of 100,000 or more had increased to 5.5 percent. England was the first country to undergo an urban transformation. In the second half of the nineteenth century, it was the world’s only predomi­nantly urban country.

In 1975, by contrast, 24 percent of the world lived in large cities of 100,000 or more. By the year 2001, 48 percent was living in cities.

What is behind the mushrooming of the cities since the 1940s? Many assume that migration from the rural areas is the primary cause. But migration has always occurred. It is not the only cause of growth. The growth of cities is made up of both migration (called explosion growth) and natural increase within the cities (sometimes called implosion growth). Migration represents only some 30-50 percent of this urban increase. Causes of migration are described as push and pull factors.

Push factors behind migration

1.  Rural poverty
    The primary driving force behind migration is the rural economy. In a study on migrants in slums in Dhaka, 39.7 percent indicated the cause of their migration as poverty, 31.5 percent as unemployment, 23.3 percent as famine.⁴ There are other less significant factors that modify the primary driving forces to the city slums men­tioned above.
    In an increasingly cash economy, the same levels of ag­riculture provide a declining level of effective cash. It be­comes increasingly rational to migrate to the town, even if there is only a one in three or a one in two chance of getting a job.

2.  Political unrest and warfare
    Unrest in the provinces often creates an influx into the cities. Stable political government in the city acts like a magnet in such times. The partition of India and Bangladesh sent a million new urban poor to Calcutta. The subsequent war in 1971 between Pakistan and Bangladesh sent another wave.

3. Weather factors
    Weather also affects migration. Dwyer shows that urban migration in the Philippines is directly related to areas where productivity is constantly hampered by ty­phoons.⁵ In a study on Dhaka, 9.3 percent of migrants indicated they came because of river erosion and flood­ing.⁶ The diagram on the following page illustrates some of the structural factors involved in urban migration.

Pull factors behind migration

Throughout the centuries men and women have needed permanence, security, community and achievement. The city, good in its reflections of the godhead, in its communality, opportunity for creativity, and creation of order; and evil in its infiltration with the demonic components of abu­sive power, exploitation, and arrogant rejection of God, has always been the Mecca for such aspirations.
    Santos talks of a demonstration effect—when the im­pact of radio, television, films, magazines and newspapers results in rising expectations among the rural population. These, plus the new highways into the rural towns, open up a bewildering array of alternatives for people who for centu­ries have lived at subsistence levels. This is a prime reason why those who live in rural areas that are closer to centers of politics or economics migrate at a greater rate.

The desire for education and health are also factors. Rural schools often prepare people not for rural lives but for the modernizing influences of the city.

 The family I lived with in the favelas of Sao Paulo, Brazil, for five months was typical. The mother told me, through tears, that they had come from the hills, like most people in this favela. There, only two of her six children had sur­vived. There was no hospital, no doctor, and not enough sustenance in the food. In despair, they moved to the city, where for 15 years they had lived in the favela, and the father working long nights in a low-paid job. But life was infinitely better. Three more children had survived. The children went to school. They had a roof over their head and the possibility of a permanent piece of land.

Who are the migrants?

Cities are primarily for the young. Seventy-five percent of migrants are less than 24 years of age. By the year 2000, 666 million children under the age of 15 will live in third-world cities.

Interestingly, some cities are for men and some for women. For example, we may look at the city of Calcutta as a primarily male city, with a male/female ratio for the total population of 100/61, for Hindus, 100/65, and for Muslims, 100/40.⁸ In contrast, Latin cities are primarily fe­male. Data indicates the importance of specific targeting of male populations in New Guinea, part of Oceania.

Migrants come from diverse religious backgrounds into a melting pot of religions, as the figures on the previous page show for Calcutta (they also show the decline of Christian­ity within Calcutta).

The figures for Calcutta do not reveal the fact that most migrants into the city are more animistic and do not have a clear understanding of “purer” forms of Hinduism. The fig­ures do reveal, however, the possibility of significant Muslim conversions in a context of religious plurality.
    These figures also show the great decline of Christianity in this city since the British left. Anglo-Indians, who made up the bulk of the city churches, suddenly found they were no longer a privileged caste within Indian society. They began to integrate back into their Hindu culture. At the same time, the decline in economics cased a migration of middle-class people to other cities in India. The church contained many of these.

Migrants are generally illiterate. But cities facilitate in­creasing literacy. In India, about 30 percent of the popula­tion is literate. In Calcutta, about 67 percent are literate.
    There are also patterns as to where the migrants first find vacant land on which to live. Squatters may be found up the rivers in older townships that have been surrounded by the city, places where modern land titles have never been fully obtained. There is also land along the railways. Generally, a ring of squatters surrounds the city as it was in the early 1950s and another ring is emerging around the satellite cities. Swamps are commonly left for squatters, and along the coastline there may be houses built four-deep out into the sea.

 Implosion: natural urban growth

1.  More rural and urban natural increase

In ancient cities, the rate of in-migration plus birth rates in the cities nearly equaled the death rates. Cities had relatively stable populations. In English cities dur­ing the Industrial Revolution, cities grew almost entirely by migration. Life in the cities was grim. More people died than were born.

But natural increase has quickened since the late 1930s, with rapid technological and organizational ad­vance of modern medicine resulting in increased birth rates (more babies live) and longevity (more people live longer). Improved patterns of plumbing, modes of trans­portation, chlorination of water supplies and other inno­vations have also played a part.

Since many in these emerging cities are trapped in pov­erty, the reproductive rate is high because birth rates among the poor are higher than among the educated.

2.  Increased affluence

Because of modernization, incomes have risen in most areas of the world. The more rapidly incomes rise, the faster urbanization occurs.

3.  Technological development in agriculture

The faster productivity in agriculture increases, the faster people move out of the agricultural sector. This negates the fallacy that somehow we can reverse migra­tion to the cities by improving the lot of the agricultural areas. This is particularly true in nations with high birth rates, where increasing productivity requires fewer workers on a limited supply of land.

The historical context of underdevelopment
    The Industrial Revolution in England and Northern Eu­rope generated the first major wave of modern urbaniza­tion. Those countries had their slums. Theory based on historical analysis of this growth indicates that as industri­alization continued, the extent of urban poverty decreased.
    The development of Third World cities, however, is to­tally different from the development of Western cities both prior and during industrialization. The differences can be described in social, spatial, and economic terms.
    Today’s third-world mega-cities were established primar­ily as trading centers for colonial powers. Their industrial­ization, infrastructure, and legal systems were established in situations of dependency on Northern or Western cities. They were the exporters of their countries’ raw materials, and recipients of advanced technological processes and for­eign legal and bureaucratic systems.
    The economies of the advanced countries, on the other hand, had not been dependent on other nations. Their economies and politics were not distorted by dependency, but rather were integrated. These cities were the centers to which the goods of the world were delivered.
    As a result, contemporary urban growth in the Third World is characterized by fundamental differences from the growth of large cities like New York or London some genera­tions ago.

High urbanization vis-à-vis low industrialization

Third World cities are developing capital-intensive indus­try that provides few jobs for the influx of new people, whereas the European growth of cities drew people because of the massive new employment growth that outstripped the labor force.
    The industrialization of developed countries required rural labor to supplement inadequate urban supplies; in the Third World, the process of capital-intensive industrial­ization attracts far more labor than it can possibly absorb. Part of Hoselitz’ thesis that has been substantiated is that urbanization is outpacing industrialization in the Third World, in contrast with the relationship between the two that prevailed at earlier times in currently developed coun­tries. In short, more people enter the cities than jobs can be created for them.
    In most cities, industrial growth ranges from 1-4 percent per year in contrast with slum population growth, which ranges from 6-12 percent. Those unable to enter the indus­trial life of the city remain trapped in lives of service and patronage without ever acquiring the capacity to gain their own land or housing.

For example, to accommodate rising populations in Cen­tral America and Mexico, 1.2 million jobs need to be created a year. In contrast, the USA creates only 2 million jobs per year with an economy 15 times as large.

Today’s third-world tertiary sector (government bureau­crats and services such as insurance, banking and publish­ing) is numerically larger than the third-world manufacturing sector. In nineteenth-century Europe, levels of productivity were roughly similar between the two sec­tors.
    In Western urbanization, agricultural development led to industrial development. Industrial development directly fed back into the development of agriculture. Later came the increases of service industries and bureaucracy. In the Third World today, the primary growth of the cities is from agriculture to bureaucracy and services (such as car-wash­ing, hand-carrying letters across a city), supported by a weaker industrial sector.
    The infrastructure of skills, the value systems outlined by Max Weber and others, the legal structures, and city or­ganization that created an environment for entrepreneurial activity in Europe have been transplanted from the West, and in many contexts, fit poorly and malfunction badly.

As a result, some Third World cities are almost entirely non-industrial. Ray Bakke comments on Dhaka:

An Urbanologist would view Dhaka as a pre-industrial city, a kind of urban village. It does not have an urban structure or infrastructure like Western cities. It has a huge population and a rapidly grow­ing one.¹⁰

 The response
    Chapter two of this book presents an analysis of the need in slums and squatter areas. Chapter three to five are a discussion of the nature of these squatter areas and causes of their poverty. In chapter six, the extent of the church within them is analyzed. Chapter six tells of our personal and organizational response to these needs. Chap­ters nine on, by means of case studies and analysis of an­thropology, economics and theology seek to define what the church in such contexts will look like.
    The argument in the following pages is that at the core of any response to these processes is the development of the kingdom of God in these slums; that movements at the grassroots are a key to long-term change; that as the church has done through history, we must reach the vic­tims of oppression and in the process we will generate life that will transform the oppression itself.
    The church in the city must therefore attack the issue of evangelizing the urban poor at several levels:

1.Establishing movements of churches among the poor that are genuinely  churches of and by the people, expressing their leadership, style of worship and addressing their
needs.

2.Establishing movements of disciples among the educated elite, or non-poor, who have a biblical theology of justice, economics and society. These probably will come from student ministries where students are exposed to ministry among the poor and forced to develop a strong biblical basis for dealing with the issues of such a ministry.

3.Seeking to mobilize the affluent church to open its doors to the poor and become directly involved in confronting the international issues of unjust economic structures by speaking the word of God into these arenas.

4.Developing a holistic kingdom-oriented theology, with a strong emphasis on Christology—Christ’s incarnation, his miracles, his chosen suffering on the cross, his Great Commission and his kingdom.
    This book will concentrate on the neglected first aspect—establishing movements among the poor—while not ne­glecting the others. These are being addressed by other mission strategists and authors.

Notes

     1.Wilson, Samuel, Unreached Peoples 1982, Monrovia, California: MARC, World Vision International, 1982.
2.Pornchokchai, Sopon, 1020 Bangkok Slums: Evidence, Analysis, Critics, Urban Community Research and Actions School, 688/56 Jaransanitwong 68, Bangplad, Bangkok, 1985
3.Extensive references to sources are available in a manuscript copy of this book and the Urban Leadership Cities Database, P.O. Box 68-244, Newton, Auckland, New Zealand.
4.Center for Urban Studies, Slums in Dhaka City, Center of Urban Studies, Dept. of Geography, University of Dhaka, 1983.
5.Dwyer, D.J., The City as Centre of Change in Asia, Hong Kong University Press, 1991.
6.Center for Urban Studies, op. cit.
7.U.N. Population Division, 1980 statistics.
8.Siddiqui, M.K.A., editor, Aspects of Society and Culture in Calcutta, Anthropological Society of India, 1982.
9.Hoselitz, Bert F., “Urbanization and Economic Growth in Asia,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 6, Oct. 1957.
10.Bakke, Ray, “Evangelizing the World Class Cities,” Together, Jan-March 1984.

© Viv Grigg & Urban Leadership Foundationand other materials © by various contributors & Urban Leadership Foundation,  for The Encarnacao Training Commission.  Last modified: July 2010