CITIESshares of pollution, and their populations will be
more subject to negative feedbacks from human
impacts on the environment. O’Mera (1999, p.
137) estimates that populations of cities, while
occupying only two percent of the earth’s surface,
consume 75 percent of the earth’s resources. Cit-
ies are often sited on areas that contain prime
agricultural land; urban expansion then inhibits
and degrades crop production. Conversion of ru-
ral land to urban use intensifies natural hazards
including floods, forest and brush fires, and earth
slides. Further development concentrates and then
disburses to outlying locations such artificial haz-
ards as air pollution, land and water pollution, and
motor vehicle and air traffic noise. Cities are also
sited on the shorelines of oceans, thus increasing
numbers of city residents are subject to the im-
pacts of storm surges and erosion. Lowry (1992)
argues that environmental impacts attributed to
cities reflect population growth, industrialization
and prosperity rather than city growth itself.
Some of the aforementioned trends are appar-
ent, for example, in Los Angeles and Mexico City,
which ranked seventh and second in size, respec-
tively, among the world’s largest megacities in
- After World War II and until the 1970s, Los
Angeles’s industrial and population growth and
suburban sprawl made it a prototype for urban
development that brought with it many inner-city,
energy, suburban, environmental, state-manage-
ment, ethnic, and capital-accumulation problems.
Since the early 1970s, Los Angeles has become
a radically changed global megacity based on accu-
mulation of global capital, economic restructur-
ing, communications, and access to new interna-
tional markets. The reorganization of Los Angeles
has affected labor-force demands and the charac-
ter of both native and immigrant populations.
Immigration transformed Los Angeles into a
multicultural metropolis (Waldinger and Bozorgmehr
1996, pp. 3–37). The area’s economy emphasizes
high-income service-sector jobs and low-income
service-sector and industrial-sector jobs. Los Ange-
les has a great concentration of industrial tech-
nology and great international cultural impor-
tance, is dependent on the private automobile, has
environmental hazards (earthquakes, brush fires,
and air pollution), limited water supplies, housing
shortages, crime, and has experienced uncontrolled
intergroup conflicts in 1965 and 1992.
Mexico City, while not commanding the same
global economic stature as Los Angeles, is the
primate city of Mexico. Mexico City shares many
of Los Angeles’s problems, including environmen-
tal hazards (earthquakes, and air pollution), water
shortages, lack of housing and services, expansion
of low-income settlements, dependence on the
private automobile, lack of sufficient transporta-
tion, earthquakes, crime, and rising ethnic vio-
lence. Effects of policy responses to these prob-
lems have been dampened by economic reversals
(Ward 1998).These illustrations suggest that cities at some-
what similar levels of influence within their respec-
tive countries share similar characteristics, wheth-
er in the more developed or in the less developed
regions. This would support a view that determi-
nants of city development are rooted in the global
economy and are influenced by similar trends, but
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