Inequalities between urban and rural Timor-Leste have been a persistent feature
of the social landscape from colonial times. Many of these disparities reflect the
asymmetric political and economic dynamics that distinguish urban centres of
power and financial influence, especially the capital Dili, from the scattered,
impoverished countryside where near subsistence agriculture and inevitably
limited state services prevail. Socially, too, under Portuguese rule, the old
status distinctions between assimilados (civilizados; assimilated)1
and indígenas
(natives) or worse (salvagem; savages) spoke to a perceived social gulf between
advanced and educated urban modernity over and against the primitive and
unenlightened rural hinterland (Roque 2012). If today these regimes of placemaking
between cidade (town) and foho (country) have been reworked and
revised under Indonesian occupation, and the subsequent achievement of
independence, echoes of these discriminatory spatial categories are, nevertheless,
reinscribed through differential access to economic opportunity and services of
state (Silva 2011).
These persistent inequalities can also be measured in statistical terms. In 2012,
for example, the population of Timor-Leste stood at 1,154,625, and 70.4 per cent
of citizens were classed as rural dwellers. They include a majority of thevulnerable 50 per cent of the population living on less than US$2 per day—most
of whom are highly dependent on the marked seasonal variations of the tropical
monsoon climate. By contrast, some 57.8 per cent of urbanites in Dili occupy the
highest wealth quintiles compared to just 8.7 per cent in rural areas (National
Statistics Directorate (Timor-Leste) 2010: 27–28). As a result, some 91 per cent
of urbanites enjoy safe drinking water, while just 57  per cent of their rural
counterparts receive a similar level of service (National Statistics Directorate
(Timor-Leste) 2010: xx). Rural areas have high rates of child mortality (8.7 per
cent of children under five years of age) and much lower literacy levels (44 per
cent of those >15 years) (National Statistics Directorate (Timor-Leste) 2010:
xvii). Children in urban areas are almost four times more likely to be enrolled at
secondary school than their peers in rural areas (National Statistics Directorate
2011).