I guess it varies by location. Per capita electricity usage has been falling in the west for decades, and surface parking lots, roads, parks, playgrounds, and even some farmer's fields have proven happy places for solar panels if only they could be built cheaply enough to break even quickly (...without extraordinary subsidies). Maybe in the developing world there are fewer and less-suitable places, but I do notice that cloth tents work on all sorts of terrain with very little preparation... if such solar cloth were a few cents per yard and lasted a few years then I bet we'd see it all over the place in short order.