Simply put, rural areas with strong development potential and comparatively superior conditions would certainly receive priority attention, so that limited resources could be put to the fullest possible use.
During the First and Second Five-Year Plans, although East Africa emphasized balanced development, it could not avoid the enormous advantages East African cities, especially major cities, possessed in industrialization. Their development was clearly faster than that of other regions.
This was actually also a problem the Soviet Union had faced in Ernst's previous life. Although the Soviet Union's early urban development policies emphasized restraining the growth of large cities, decades of time proved that they had achieved almost no significant effect.
Ernst had once imagined East Africa developing according to the German urban model, but decades of practice proved that this was not feasible.
Judging solely from population and land area, it was unrealistic. Take present-day Germany: its territory was less than 650,000 square kilometers, only one-twentieth of East Africa's, yet Germany's population exceeded sixty million, a little more than half of East Africa's.
Thus, Germany's population density and terrain supported its urban development model, but it did not suit East Africa. For East Africa to emulate the German model, its population would have to increase by at least threefold, because East Africa was even slightly larger than all of Europe, while its population was far smaller than Europe's as a whole.
East Africa's current urban development model was mainly based on regional blocs. Especially in the three major blocs of the central, eastern, and western regions, regional urban clusters had formed, and nationwide industrial production cooperation was achieved through the national transportation network. After all, a single East African province was basically equivalent in area to a medium-sized European country, while three or four provinces were roughly comparable in area