The big, bad city: mega-city myth?

This paper raises the question of whether or not the virtues of big city size were exaggerated in the literature which appeared in the 1970s with respect to developing country megacities. It examines negative externalities (especially pollution), the capital costs associated with megacity growth, the productivity advantages of large cities, the role of spatial restructuring towards a policentric pattern as a relief to core city congestion, and the problems of metropolitan management (including the appropriate institutional framework). The adoption of constructive policy actions could handle the following problems: that the declining rates of megacity growth may reflect declining productivity advantages; that capital costs of urbanization increase strongly with city size; that there are diseconomies of scale in urban management; that negative externalities may be more severe in developing country megacities in physical but not in imputed monetary damage terms; and that policentric evolution may be hampered by the wrong type of government intervention.