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A review essay on books by: Nigel Harris (Ed), Cities in the 1990s; The Challenge for Developing Countries (London: UCL Press, 1992); Robert-Jan Baken & Jan van der Linden, Land Delivery for Low Income Groups in Third World Cities (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992); & Rajesh Chandra, Industrialization and Development in the Third World (London & New York: Routledge, 1992 [see listings in IRPSPPD No. 28]). These three books reflect the resurgence of interest in urban industrialization & economic development in the Third World. Harris offers a collection of papers presented at a workshop sponsored by the British Overseas Development Administration in Nov 1991 to bring together, in an informal setting, officials of the World Bank & the UN Development Program. Despite its lack of balance, the volume presents an illuminating view of urban challenges. Baken & van der Linden focus on urban land markets & delivery systems. Unfortunately, their coverage is sparse in some areas & repetitive in others, particularly that of urban poverty. Chandra's book is well organized, outlining the history of Third World development & offering surveys of specific aspects, eg, the level & structure, organization, & location of industries. Despite some weak areas, this work, by an authority on the Third World, provides much valuable insight on the subject. J. W. Stanton

Urbanization of the Countryside.
The urbanization of the countryside or the integration of rural inhabitants into new economic and social relations with town-dwellers, can be interpreted either as the obliteration of the countryside by the technical progress of the town, or as the cooperation of rural and urban inhabitants, resulting in the disappearance of the town/country dichotomy. The essential problem is whether or not a new "urbanized" rural society can develop and create a new balance between natural conditions and technological possibilities. Urban/ rural relations can take three forms: the town, as a colonizer or parasite, lives off the rural populations to whom it rents land; the town, or industrial complex, develops independently of its surroundings, "sterilizing" instead of "fertilizing" them; the town and the countryside work together in view of a generalized and common expansion.

We are living through a global urban transition, but the timing of this transition has varied significantly across countries and regions. This geographic variation in timing matters, both theoretically and substantively. Yet contemporary debates around urbanism hinge primarily on questions of universalism versus particularism, at the expense of attention to how history and geography collide to shape urban processes. Specifically, they neglect the critical fact that urbanization in many countries today is late within the context of the global urban transition. We argue that trajectories of contemporary urbanization must be understood in relation to a suite of conditions unique to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and partly shaped by early urbanization, including historically unprecedented demographic intensity, hyperglobalization, centripetal state politics and the spectre of environmental catastrophe in the late Anthropocene. These factors condition the range of possibilities for late urbanizers in ways that did not apply to early urbanizers yet can also produce diverse outcomes depending on local circumstances. We draw on a comparison between countries in sub-Saharan Africa and China to illustrate why the conditions of late urbanization matter, but also why they have produced highly variable outcomes and are not deterministic of urban futures.