The Relevance of John Walten's Article 1977 on Today's Urbanization and Development

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The article titled Accumulation and Comparative Urban Systems by John Walton was written in 1977. In the article, Walton seeks to “establish a common theoretical framework for comparative urban studies on development in cities in the less developed global South.” He starts the article by noting how discussions of topics such as urbanization and development tempt researchers into lamenting “the lack of progress in” a field. However, to him though, lamentations never get anyone closer to the understanding of a topic. He then talks of how complex and chaotic “the field of urbanization and development” is but also acknowledges the amount of information and research progress that has been made.
In the subsequent sections, he delves deep into how the understanding of urbanization and development in the underdeveloped has always been skewed. For example, he offers a response towards those whom he calls “Marxist or Neo-Marxist, structuralist, political economy, and dependent urbanism” and says “if this conception of the role of urban cities in capitalist economies provides a general orientation, by no means does it “explain everything” or foreclose on theoretical explanations of differentiated urban forms.” On the above, he simply discounts the political eco...