Illinois Global Review

Rapid urbanization is transforming cities across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Urbanization can provide economic opportunities, but many governments in the Global South do not have the resources to keep up with the rapid rise of urban populations when it comes to housing, infrastructure, and climate risk. This article discusses whether public institutions can keep up with the rapid urbanization in the Global South.

Urbanization is one of the defining global shifts of the twenty-first century. According to the United Nations, 55 percent of the world’s population currently lives in urban areas, a figure that is projected to rise to 68 percent by 2050. More significantly, the United Nations reports that close to 90 percent of the increase in the global urban population by 2050 will take place in Asia and Africa. As a result, the future of urban development will be shaped largely in the Global South.

Cities can serve as centers of innovation, productivity, and social mobility. When supported by effective governance, they can improve access to employment, education, healthcare, and infrastructure. The problem emerges when population expansion surpasses the capacity of governments to plan and prepare for it. In many rapidly expanding cities, institutions are expected to manage land use, transportation, housing, sanitation, and climate resilience without sufficient funding, administrative coordination, or enforcement power.

This is where institutional capacity becomes critical. Institutional capacity refers to the ability of public institutions to design policy, enforce regulation, coordinate infrastructure, and respond to long-term urban pressures. This means having planning systems that can anticipate growth, municipal governments that can finance public services, and regulatory structures that can shape urban expansion. Without that capacity, rapid urbanization often produces inequality, informality, and infrastructure strain.

One of the clearest impacts of weak institutional capacity is the growth of informal settlements. These settlements are residential areas that develop outside formal planning and regulatory systems, often lacking legal land tenure and access to basic infrastructure such as sanitation, electricity, and transportation. According to UN-Habitat, over 1.1 billion people globally live in slums or informal settlements. These communities are often treated as evidence of poverty alone, but they also reveal failures in governance. When governments cannot provide affordable housing, regulate land markets effectively, or extend basic services quickly enough, informal development becomes one of the few available options for millions of urban residents. In that sense, informality is both a social condition and a policy outcome.

Infrastructure pressures reveal a similar pattern. Transportation networks, drainage systems, utilities, and public services frequently lag behind population growth. According to the World Bank, investing in urban infrastructure and services is essential to helping cities become more livable, sustainable, and resilient. Infrastructure deficits are often governance problems: fragmented institutions, limited local revenue, weak planning coordination, and delayed implementation. When institutions cannot keep up, even economically important cities can become characterized by congestion, unreliable service delivery, and environmental stress.

Adding climate change to the equation intensifies the urgency of the issue. Many of the fastest-growing cities in the Global South are also among the most climate-vulnerable. Flooding, extreme heat, water stress, and sea-level rise place additional pressure on urban systems that are already under strain. According to the IPCC, the most rapid growth in urban vulnerability and exposure has occurred in cities and settlements where adaptive capacity is limited. The same assessment notes that more than 90 percent of urban population growth between 2015 and 2020 took place in less developed regions. This creates a dangerous overlap: the regions urbanizing the fastest are often the same ones least equipped to manage intensifying climate risks.

According to the World Bank, well-managed cities can become powerful engines of development, lifting people out of poverty and supporting long-term economic growth. The difference lies in how governments approach urbanization as a process that requires active governance. It is important to build more physical infrastructure, but it is equally important to have strong planning institutions, municipal finance, clearer land governance, and coordination between national and local governments.

Discussions about urban growth focus only on visible expansion: more construction, more migration, and more density. But the deeper question is whether institutions are growing as well. In the coming decades, the most important urban divide may be between cities whose institutions can manage growth and those whose institutions cannot. For a lot of the Global South, the future of urban life will depend on whether governments can build the capacity to make those cities livable, equitable, and resilient.

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