Processes Affecting the Spatial Pattern of Rural-Urban Development in Kenya

Development does not occur at the same rate everywhere. The resultant unequal distribution of development concerns planners throughout the world. A variety of spatial investment strategies which affect the development pattern have been proposed. They range from the dispersed, equality oriented investment of Tanzania's ujamaa to the primate city concentration of Ivory Coast's efficiency oriented “African Riviera” project in Abidjan. Most countries throughout the world have sought a middle course—one of “deconcentrated concentration”—in an attempt to balance efficiency and equality considerations. Specifically they have chosen to invest their development capital in “growth centers”—urban areas that have a high potential for generating development in their immediate area and throughout their region. This policy prescription is based on the optimistic belief that development generated in the urban center will spread to the hinterlands of the region. Kenya has explicitly incorporated a policy of growth centers into their Development Plans. That the country's planners subscribe to the belief of positive spread effects is evident in the following Plan statements: The interdependence between rural and urban areas grows in the process of development and with it comes the enhancement of the role of the town as the producer of goods and services and the consumer of agricultural production. This interaction leads to cumulative self-sustaining growth (Kenya, 1974a: 114). Rural life cannot be complete without towns any more than towns can be complete without access to the countryside, and it will be an objective of Government policy to promote the growth of a number of towns to a size where they are large enough to provide the people of the surrounding districts with many of the facilities and amenities available in a modern city (Kenya, 1969: 15).