[Reader-list] (fwd) Beyond the city limits

[sanjay ghosh]

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20040917/a29319ed/attachment.html 
-------------- next part --------------
  


Beyond the city limits 

Humanity is about to cross the line from rural to urban. John Vidal on what it means for us 

Thursday September 9, 2004
The Guardian 

Honufa came to Dhaka last year. Severe erosion on her family's patch of land on one of the islands in the mouth of the Ganges forced the young Bangladeshi woman to leave her village for the capital. She took a boat and then an overnight bus and ended up in a shantytown called Bari Badh, which sprawls on the slopes of a new flood embankment. 

Honufa was lucky to find work immediately. She gets about 40p a day breaking bricks with a hammer. A tenth of what she earns goes on fresh water, the same on transport, but almost a third is needed to pay the rent for the room which she shares with two other women and three young children. 

It's seven foot square, built of bamboo, rusty corrugated iron and cardboard and squats on stilts over a fetid lagoon. The monsoon-swollen water swirls just a few feet below the floor. A latrine at the end of a walkway empties straight into the water. Last month, the whole community of 5,000 people was flooded out. 

Bari Badh is not typical of Dhaka's slums, some of which are long established and reasonably secure with electricity and drainage. It appeared three years ago, as soon as the embankment was built and it will probably not exist in three years because businessmen are already filling in the lagoon with rubbish in advance of building more solid homes. 

When that happens, Honufa and the others will be moved on to new, equally vulnerable slums on a new edge of one of the world's most rapidly growing cities. Dhaka, growing more than 5% a year, will have exploded from fewer than 600,000 people in 1961 to a projected 22 million in 2030. 

Next week, the UN's world urban forum meets in Barcelona and world leaders and demographers will hear that the number of slum dwellers like Honufa could double within 25 years to more than two billion people, almost one in four of the world's projected population. Two days later, the United Nations population fund will release its annual state of the world report which will show that almost 95% of the expected 2.5 billion increase in global population expected over same period will be in African and Asian cities. By then, more than 80% of north America, Europe, Australia and Latin America, and half of Asia and Africa will probably be living in urban areas. 

Put the global population and poverty trends together and it's clear that the world is making a major transition at a breathtaking pace. Sometime in the next two years, humanity will cross, probably forever, the line from being a rural species to an urban one. It will mark a turning point, a revolution potentially as significant as the passage from the middle ages to the modern age, which will redefine culture, politics and the way we all live. 

The scale of the redistribution of people now taking place is vast. Just 100 years ago, only one in seven of the world lived in a town or city and there were 16 places thought to have more than one million people. Today there are more than 400 cities with over one million and in 15 years time, a further 150 are expected to join the club. The global urban population increased 36% in the 1990s alone. 

Contrary to popular imagination, however, the future is not expected to be a world of mega cities like Dhaka, Cairo, or Manila. According to a new book by a group of demographers working with the Washington-based US National Research Council (NRC), the lion's share of the world population increases over the next 25 years will be in towns and cities with fewer than one million people. They expect these places to account for 60% of the developing country urban population. Cities of from one to five million will house another 26%. 

The authors suggest that the largest cities, although stretched to the limit in poor countries to provide even minimal services for their inhabitants, will be well-placed to attract international money for housing, infrastructure and services. In 15 years, they expect 60 cities to have more than five million people. 

Of these, a premier league of about 30 "world cities" is developing, all of which are becoming dominant in their regions. The economic globalisation process, says the NRC team, is forcing them to compete more strongly with each other for events such as the Olympics, but also the world's financial markets and business centres. 

The authors fear, however, that the smaller cities will be increasingly left out and will be under-served by governments who will choose to funnel money into ever more dominant capitals. "The implications of globalisation for smaller cities are potentially disturbing. If capital is diverted from smaller cities toprepare larger cities for their global debuts, significant costs for many of the developing world's urban dwellers could result," the authors say. 

Massive urbanisation means hundreds of already near-bankrupt cities trying to cope in 20 years with the kind of problems London or New York only managed to address with difficulty in 150 years. The strains are showing in a growing global freshwater and sanitation water crisis, air pollution leading to continent-wide smogs and 48-hour traffic gridlocks, and reports of dwindling food reserves in many countries. 

According to the UN, hundreds of cities will be in real trouble within a decade. In China, where urbanisation has been extreme in the past 15 years, 400 out of the 670 biggest cities already have serious water deficits. Elsewhere, many cities are depleting underground stocks and finding that saltwater is getting into the aquifers. 

Competition for supplies is leading to increased conflicts between industry and agriculture, and, while better management could clearly improve supplies in many places, cities are often right up against their financial or physical limits. 

Dhaka is one of the most extreme. Dr Azhurul Haq, head of the city's water and sewerage authority, speaks for many rapidly growing cities. "The problem here is already so serious that it is hard to understand. Providing water is a nightmare. We need a minimum of 1.6bn litres of water a day. Our theoretical capacity is 1.35bn litres a day and our actual production is 1.26bn litres, which means that a lot of people cannot have water. Seventy per cent of people have no sewerage system at all and their waste finds its way to the rivers and lagoons; 90% of it is untreated. 

"We have 370 wells, but only 60% of them work. We need to replace 600km of water pipe out of the 2,000km we have. Some pipes are made of asbestos cement, which is very dangerous. We also get 97% of our water from deep underground, which is lowering the water table and is not sustainable." 

Dr Haq says it would cost at least $400m to get Dhaka's water supplies and sanitation up to a minimum standard. The prospect of having to provide for the eight million more people expected to flock to the city in the next 20 years is daunting. "We live from week to week," he says. "It's all we can do". 

What scares many governments, planners and policy makers is the very real prospect that the majority of cities in developing countries will become sprawling slums, with people living without piped water or sanitation, with poor standards of housing, and health and nutrition problems on a par with anything found in the most poverty-stricken rural areas today. 

Last year, the UN commissioned a 300-page report on the growth of slums. The authors found that slum dwellers account for an average 43% of the population of developing countries. In sub-saharan Africa the proportion of urban residents in slums is highest at 71.9%, while Oceania (Australasia and island groups of the South Pacific) had the lowest at 24.1%. South-central Asia accounted for 58%, east Asia 36.4%. 

They concluded that local authorities were already failing to keep up with the infrastructural problems posed by rapid urbanisation. More surprisingly, they suggested that the greatest underlying reason for the growth of slums was laissez-faire globalisation - the tearing down of trade barriers, the liberalisation and privatisation of national economies, structural adjustment programmes imposed on indebted countries by the IMF, and the lowering of tariffs promoted by the WTO. 

According to the authors, this "fundamental" economic restructuring of the world, which is seeing rich countries move away from manufacturing and poor countries industrialising, drove rapid urbanisation in the 1990s. In South Korea, cities have been flooded with new arrivals since world trade rules allowed cheap, subsidised rice and other food imports to flood into the market. Fishermen in Senegal, Mexico, Ghana and elsewhere had left the countryside because the global fishing fleets have not only denuded catches, but made it impossible for small operators to compete with big foreign fleets. 

The young of Burkina Faso and Mali had largely left for cities throughout west Africa in hope of work, rather than try to scrape a living off marginal land. It was seldom the process of globalisation alone that made people leave the land, the authors found, but often the expectation of work and fulfilment, fuelled by global TV networks. 

But the authors found that globalisation wasn't just one of the major causes of urbanisation, it was actually making life worse for the poor in cities. It may have offered unparalleled opportunities for entrepreneurs, but barely any of the benefits of increased trade were reaching the poor. Research in sub-saharan countries found conditions deteriorating throughout the 1990s in many cities. 

In the past decade - the period of the greatest wealth creation in history, as well as the largest recorded growth in cities - the rich had gained and the poor had lost. Some developing countries, the authors suggested, would have done better to stay out of the globalisation process altogether if they had the interests of their own people in mind. 

The situation may actually be worse than imagined. According to Diana Mitlin and David Satterthwaite of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London, the scale and depth of urban poverty is underestimated because of the way poverty is measured in poor countries. They suspect that the poorest half of the urban population may be as malnourished, ill and exploited as the poorest people in rural areas. If this is the case, it demands a different approach from governments and international charities who traditionally focus on rural areas. 

But is it possible to have cities free from slums? The consensus is yes, but only if countries help to prevent their cities being swamped by congestion, environmental degradation and social unrest. The onus will be on cities themselves, and particularly the self-organising slum dwellers, to find solutions. 

The solutions, says David Satterthwaite, may not be with global bodies or national governments but with local authorities and urban grassroots groups. He says large-scale self-help community groups are now working together and beginning to take over from traditional developers. 

"Poor people are becoming the world's most important builders and planners," he says. "All over the world slum dwellers are organising themselves. In India, the National Slum Dwellers federation, with 750,000 members, is working in 50 cities and has provided cheap, but good homes for more than 35,000 households. In Mumbai they have built toilets that serve 750,000 people. 

"A transnational movement of the urban poor and homeless with millions of member households is growing rapidly. The evidence from many nations that community-driven approaches are more effective and far more cost-effective that conventional government programmes." 

"It's easy to be pessimistic about the problems," says Ms Maitlin. "But the energy of people to improve their environments is enormous. People are investing a lot because it means so much to them. You can see real progress when people have a vision and get together with local government." Local government is critically important, she says. 

Molly Sheehan, of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute, says: "Cities are where most of the world's people will live and where an even greater share of the world's resources will be used in the future - from the vehicles' exhaust that pollutes and warms the atmosphere, to the urban demand for timber that denudes forests." 

She adds, more optimistically: "But they also hold enormous potential for environmental and social progress. Throughout history, higher levels of health and education come after periods of urbanisation." 

Further reading

· The Challenge of Slums, UN-Habitat report, ISBN 1844070379, Earthscan, £25 

· Cities Transformed, ed Mark Montgomery et al, ISBN 1844070905, £29.95 

· Squatter Citizen, ed Jorge E Hardoy and David Satterthwaite, ISBN 1853830208, Earthscan, £19.95 

· Sustainable Cities, ed David Satterthwaite, ISBN 185383601X, Earthscan, &#;163;16.95 

· UN population resources