Urban Sociology’s Approach to Underdevelopment

Cities are often described as engines of progress – centers of innovation, commerce, and opportunity. But for much of the developing world, urbanization tells a more complicated story. Cities in the Global South are growing faster than ever, yet millions of their residents live in overcrowded slums without reliable access to clean water, sanitation, or economic security. Why does urban growth so often coincide with persistent poverty and inequality in developing nations? Urban sociology tackles this question head-on, drawing on powerful theoretical frameworks – modernization, dependency, and world-systems theory – to explain how and why urbanization in the developing world differs so fundamentally from the experience of industrialized nations.

What underdevelopment means in an urban context 🔗

In everyday language, “underdevelopment” often conjures images of rural poverty. But in urban sociology, the concept cuts right to the heart of city life. Underdevelopment refers to the structural imbalances – inequality, lack of infrastructure, entrenched poverty – that emerge as cities in the Global South expand without the economic foundations to support that growth. More than half the world’s population now lives in cities, with the urban share in low- and middle-income countries rising from 31% in 1980 to around 47% by 2011. Yet this rapid urbanization has not automatically translated into improved living standards.

The World Bank estimates that over one billion people – roughly a quarter of the world’s urban population – currently live in slums or informal settlements. Urban sociology’s role is to understand the social, economic, and political forces driving this reality, and three major theoretical traditions have shaped how scholars approach it.

Modernization theory: cities as the path to progress 🔗

The oldest of the three frameworks, modernization theory, emerged in the mid-20th century with an optimistic premise: that all societies move through similar stages of development, and that urbanization is a central engine of that transition. The theory was most systematically laid out by economist Walt Rostow, whose “stages of growth” model identified five phases every society passes through – from traditional society to mass consumption. Modernization theorists argued that this transformation is both inevitable and linear, driven by the diffusion of modern economic institutions, technology, and cultural practices from developed to developing nations through foreign investment, education, and trade.

Applied to urbanization, the logic is straightforward: as developing countries industrialize, people move from rural areas to cities, where modern economic activity concentrates. Cities, in this view, are the agents of progress – they absorb surplus agricultural labor, generate productivity gains, and raise living standards over time. Rostow’s model assumed that inequality between nations would eventually disappear once each progressed along the same development timeline, sped up by contact with more modernized economies.

Why modernization theory falls short 🔗

The theory’s critics – and they are many – point out that it naturalizes underdevelopment as simply a stage that poor countries have not yet passed through, rather than examining why they remain underdeveloped. Underdevelopment theorists argued that this framing treated poverty as an inherent condition of traditional societies, blocking analysis of how underdevelopment was actively produced through colonialism and global capitalism. The theory also ignores external factors entirely – it assumes that if a developing country simply follows the right internal steps, development will follow. History has repeatedly shown otherwise.

Dependency theory: the global roots of urban poverty 🔗

Developed in the 1960s and 1970s largely by Latin American scholars, dependency theory offered a direct challenge to modernization’s optimism. Its central argument: the wealth of the developed world has been built, in part, on the systematic underdevelopment of poorer nations. Dependency theory rejected the view that underdeveloped countries are simply behind on the same path as developed ones. Instead, it argued that these nations have unique structures shaped by their historical subordination – and that they remain underdeveloped because of how they are integrated into the global capitalist system, not despite it.

The theory’s most influential voice was Andre Gunder Frank, who argued that the relationship between wealthy “metropoles” and poor “satellites” runs not just between nations, but within them – down to the most remote regions of Latin America. Frank contended that this chain of satellite underdevelopment was maintained historically through slavery, colonization, and Western domination of international trade, and persists today through multinational corporations and financial dependency. Foreign capital, under this view, was primarily interested in primary resource extraction, with profits repatriated to wealthy nations rather than reinvested locally.

Dependency theory and over-urbanization 🔗

Dependency theory has been particularly influential in explaining over-urbanization – a phenomenon where cities in developing countries grow far faster than their economies can absorb. Dependency theorists used the framework to explain why urbanization rates outpaced industrial growth in several developing countries: multinational firms set up operations in large cities, pulling workers from rural areas, but without creating enough stable employment to support the influx of migrants. Cities swell, but the economic base to sustain them does not.

The result, according to dependency scholars, is the development of modern enclaves catering to a small domestic elite and foreign expatriates, while the wider urban population expands into slums as part of an ever-growing reserve of cheap labor. This dynamic – impressive modern infrastructure sitting alongside entrenched urban poverty – is visible across cities from Lagos to Manila to Lima.

World-systems theory: cities in a global hierarchy 🔗

American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein built on dependency theory in the 1970s to produce a more comprehensive framework: world-systems theory. Where dependency theory focused on relationships between individual nations, Wallerstein argued that the proper unit of analysis is the world-system as a whole – the interconnected global economy that has operated since the rise of capitalism in the 16th century.

Wallerstein divided the world into three zones. Core countries – such as the United States, Germany, and Japan – are capital-intensive, highly industrialized, and technologically advanced; they dominate global trade and finance. Peripheral countries, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America, are economically dependent on the core, exporting raw materials and cheap labor. Between them sit semi-peripheral countries – nations like Brazil, India, South Africa, and Mexico – which resemble the core in terms of their urban centers but also contain vast areas of rural poverty typical of the periphery.

How world-systems theory explains urban inequality 🔗

For urban sociology, world-systems theory explains why cities in peripheral countries often grow rapidly but in ways that benefit core nations rather than local populations. Urban expansion in these cities is frequently driven by the needs of multinational corporations – assembling goods for export, extracting resources, supplying cheap labor – rather than by local development priorities. The world-systems approach treats cities not as isolated entities but as nodes within a global economic hierarchy, where their role and trajectory are shaped by their country’s position in the core-periphery structure.

World-systems theory also highlights that surplus extraction occurring between nations mirrors what happens within them – between urban elites and the urban poor. This means that inequality is not just a national problem but a structural feature of global capitalism reproduced at every level, from the international down to the neighborhood.

Over-urbanization and urban primacy: two defining challenges 🔗

These theories converge on two related phenomena that urban sociologists identify as defining features of underdevelopment in the Global South: over-urbanization and urban primacy.

Over-urbanization 🔗

Over-urbanization occurs when a city’s population grows faster than its economic and infrastructural capacity to accommodate it. Cities in the Global South, especially in East Asia, South Asia, and Africa, are projected to absorb 96% of an over three billion increase in urban population by 2050. In the absence of sufficient formal employment, housing, or public services, this growth generates severe social costs. Poverty is increasingly shifting from rural to urban areas, with women and children disproportionately affected. Unplanned expansion without basic infrastructure means residents face inadequate housing, limited access to clean water, and environmental degradation – all compounded by the effects of climate change.

Over-urbanization also strains transportation networks, waste management systems, and health services, making it progressively harder for city governments to function effectively. The context in the Global South has become more difficult over recent decades: countries struggle to diversify beyond commodity exports, new technologies mean manufacturing creates fewer jobs than it once did, and economic protectionism in wealthier nations complicates market access.

Urban primacy 🔗

Urban primacy refers to the tendency in many developing countries for a single city – typically the capital – to become disproportionately large and economically dominant compared to all other cities in the country. Research using satellite data shows that infrastructure inequality increases significantly in countries with substantial urban primacy, with the Global South seeing the largest projected increases in this gap through 2050. When investment, government services, and economic activity concentrate overwhelmingly in one city, smaller cities and rural areas are left without the infrastructure or capital to develop independently.

Countries like Indonesia, Nigeria, and Mexico demonstrate this pattern clearly: capital cities attract massive migration, leaving smaller cities and rural regions underdeveloped and neglected. The primate city itself then faces a secondary crisis, becoming overburdened with population growth it cannot adequately serve. Urban primacy is thus both a symptom and a reinforcing mechanism of underdevelopment – concentrating resources in one place while draining them from everywhere else.

Comparing urbanization in the Global North and Global South 🔗

One of urban sociology’s core insights is that urbanization in the developing world cannot be understood through the lens of Western historical experience. In Europe and North America, urbanization in the 19th century was driven by labor-intensive manufacturing that could absorb uneducated rural workers, supported by cheap raw materials from colonies, and accompanied by relatively constrained population growth due to high mortality rates. The result was a strong – if unequal – connection between urban growth and rising living standards.

The Global South’s experience is structurally different. Rapid urbanization there is occurring without the same industrial base, against a backdrop of accelerating population growth and in a global economy that is already dominated by established core nations. Urbanization trends in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific are overwhelming the formal sector, leading to expansive informal economies and unplanned settlements that distort inherited city plans. The result is a form of urban growth that does not fit neatly into modernization theory’s optimistic stages – but which dependency and world-systems perspectives help explain with considerably more precision.

What these theories tell us – and where they fall short 🔗

Each of the three frameworks contributes something distinct. Modernization theory, despite its limitations, correctly identifies urbanization and industrialization as drivers of economic transformation and shaped decades of development policy. Dependency theory shifted the focus from internal factors to external constraints, revealing how trade patterns, investment flows, and political pressures shape what development is even possible. World-systems theory went further, situating cities within a global economic hierarchy and showing how exploitation operates at multiple scales simultaneously.

Yet each theory also has blind spots. Modernization theory is rightly criticized as Eurocentric and deterministic, ignoring the structural legacies of colonialism. Dependency theory has been challenged for being economically reductive and overly pessimistic, offering little practical guidance for countries trying to improve their position. World-systems theory, while analytically powerful, has been critiqued for vague categories and for underweighting political, cultural, and environmental factors that shape development outcomes independently of economic position.

Together, though, these frameworks give urban sociologists a rich set of tools for understanding why cities in the Global South face the challenges they do – and why simple prescriptions for “catching up” with the developed world so often miss the mark.

What do you think? Does modernization theory’s idea that all societies follow the same development path seem credible given what we know about colonialism and global inequality? And if dependency and world-systems theories are right that underdevelopment is structurally produced by the global economy, what would genuinely transformative urban development policy in the Global South actually look like?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underdevelopment
2. https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization
3. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/urbandevelopment/overview
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6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_theory
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8. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/underdevelopment
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory
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11. https://revisesociology.com/2015/12/05/world-systems-theory/
12. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/world-systems-theory
13. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-cities/articles/10.3389/frsc.2021.692799/full
14. https://publications.wri.org/transformations-equitable-sustainable-cities/current-urbanization-global-south-realities
15. https://www.iied.org/rethinking-urbanisation-economic-development
16. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56539-w
17. https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/69045
18. https://urbanstudies.institute/urban-construct-development-dynamics/modernization-theories-strengths-weaknesses-alternatives/