Despite cities acting as platforms for the notable accomplishments of modernity, urbanization's picture is not all rosy. Urban centers are plagued by many social problems. These problems are most vivid in the developing world, where millions of people are concentrated in few cities. Unprecedented urban growth in these countries is caused by natural population increase and the migration of people from rural to urban areas. In the developing world, more than 70 percent of the urban population lives in poverty; yet rural residents flock to metropolitan areas, attempting to flee from the pulverizing impact of poverty in their own areas. The migration is also, in part, the function of an uneven policy of development that buttresses urban growth at the expense of the agricultural sector.

As a result, cities in the developing world must deal with daunting social problems that become increasingly difficult to overcome. Most of these problems are associated with employment, pollution, and housing, just to mention a few. Due to the availability of "surplus labor," many people in the cities of the developing world are not only unemployed but underemployed and "misemployed" (engaged in undignified activities such as prostitution) as well.

Where attempts to resolve the problems of urban unemployment take place, the result has been the unintended consequences of industrialization and urbanization, with pollution the most salient one. Cities of the developing world are noisier and more polluted than cities of the developed world. Despite the fact that quality of life in urban areas has qualitatively improved compared with quality of life in rural areas, inadequate housing is one of the chronic problems in developing world cities. More than 75 percent of the urban population in these cities lives in overcrowded slums, squatter settlements, and shantytowns where life is extremely precarious. Consequently, as the problem of cities of the developing world is the presence of too many problems without the accompanying social means of prevailing over them, many social scientists fear that the breakdown of urban giants of the developing world may take place unless a social miracle of sorts comes to pass.

In spite of the colossal number of resources at their disposal, highly industrialized nations have not spared themselves from urban problems either. Although the types of chronic problems that Friedrich Engels described in his ethnographic work on Manchester do not exist today, cities of the highly industrialized nations still suffer from "old" (poverty, violence) and "new" (pollution, traffic congestion) social problems.

In the United States, for instance, poverty--mainly caused by the loss of manufacturing jobs due to globalization processes, the migration of white-collar corporations and manufacturing firms to the suburbs, and the retraction of investment from inner cities--is one of the "old" problems that afflict urban dwellers, especially inhabitants of the inner city, a significant number of whom fall under the social category of the underclass. Members of the underclass are not just at the bottom of social hierarchy, but they are beneath the class structure. Consisting of single mothers on welfare, teenagers, and the homeless, the underclass have virtually no social and economic capital and are trapped in a cycle of poverty from which they are incapable of escaping.

References:

1) Gottdiener, Mark and Ray Hutchison. 2006. The New Urban Sociology. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview.

2) Macionis, John J. and Vincent N. Parrillo. 2007. Cities and Urban Life. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

3) Parker, Simon. 2004. Urban Theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the City. New York: Routledge.

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