This paper provides evidence from eight developing countries of an inverse relationship
between poverty and city size. Poverty is both more widespread and deeper in very small
and small towns than in large or very large cities. This basic pattern is generally robust to
choice of poverty line. The paper shows, further, that for all eight countries, a majority of
the urban poor live in medium, small, or very small towns. Moreover, it is shown that the
greater incidence and severity of consumption poverty in smaller towns is generally
compounded by similarly greater deprivation in terms of access to basic infrastructure
services, such as electricity, heating gas, sewerage, and solid waste disposal. The authors
illustrate for one country—Morocco—that inequality within large cities is not driven by a
severe dichotomy between slum dwellers and others. The notion of a single cleavage
between slum residents and well-to-do burghers as the driver of urban inequality in the
developing world thus appears to be unsubstantiated—at least in this case. Robustness
checks are performed to assess whether the findings in the paper are driven by price
variation across city-size categories, by the reliance on an income-based concept of wellbeing,
and by the application of small area estimation techniques for estimating poverty
rates at the town and city level.