OXFAM RESEARCH REPORT Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Towards an Inclusive and Sustainable World Jo Beall and Sean Fox Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics A report by Oxfam GB Disclaimer This Oxfam Research Report was written as a background paper for the Oxfam Poverty Report (forthcoming). It is published in order to share widely the results of Oxfamcommissioned research. The views expressed in the report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect Oxfam’s views. © Oxfam GB July 2006 Oxfam GB is a member of Oxfam International. Registered charity no. 202918. This paper was written by Professor Jo Beall, Professor in Development Studies and Head of the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics (LSE), and Sean Fox, a Tutorial Fellow in the Development Studies Institute at LSE. The authors acknowledge the research assistance of Tom Goodfellow. Oxfam GB acknowledges the assistance of Duncan Green and Lea Borkenhagen in the production of the paper. It is part of a series of papers written to inform public debate on development and humanitarian policy issues. The text may be used free of charge for the purposes of advocacy, campaigning, education, and research, provided that the source is acknowledged in full. The copyright holder requests that all such use be registered with them for impact assessment purposes. For copying in any other circumstances, for re-use in other publications, or for translation or adaptation, permission must be secured and a fee may be charged. E-mail publish@oxfam.org.uk. For further information on the issues raised in this paper please e-mail enquiries@oxfam.org.uk or go to www.oxfam.org. Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 2 Contents Introduction Cities today Urban poverty and vulnerability Responding to urban poverty Urban poverty and global development Building inclusive and sustainable cities An agenda for research and action 4 5 6 10 14 16 20 Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 3 Introduction What will the world look like in 10 or 20 years’ time? There are few certainties when predicting the future but there is at least one: in 10 years’ time more people will be living in cities than ever before in human history. In fact, 2007 represents a turning point in the balance of human settlements. As of 2007, more people will live in cities than in rural areas, and this trend towards an urbanised world is set to continue (see Figure 1). By 2017, the world’s urban population will top four billion people, and by 2030 city dwellers will constitute 61 per cent of the world’s total population. 1 Figure 1: Urban and rural population trends Source: UNPD World Urbanization Prospects: The 2003 Revison This shift towards an urban world is being driven primarily by urbanisation in the South. In fact, the UN Population Division estimates that nearly all of the world’s population growth in the next 25 years will be absorbed by cities in the South, and that by 2030, 80 per cent of the world’s urban population will live in developing countries. 2 There are also dramatic differences in urban growth rates across regions. Africa will continue to lead the world in urban growth, followed by Asia (see Figure 2). The key contributing factors to this growth are the transformation of rural areas into urban locations, natural population growth within cities, and rural–urban migration. 3 In contrast to the conventional interpretation that urbanisation is primarily a product of rural–urban migration, it is increasingly apparent that rural transformation (i.e. small towns growing into small cities) and natural population growth within cities are equally important forces driving urbanisation today. 4 So when we – as students, policy makers, or development practitioners – ask ourselves what kind of world we want to live in 10 or 20 years from now, we must also ask ourselves what kind of cities we want to live in. If we want to live in a more peaceful, more equitable, and more environmentally stable world, we must consider the ways in which urban centres and urban lifestyles contribute to achieving these objectives. In other words, if we want to live in a sustainable and inclusive world, one in which diversity is embraced and opportunities for development are shared by all, then we must make a commitment to promoting the development of sustainable and inclusive cities. Figure 2: Urban growth rates across regions 5 4.5 1950-1975 1975-2000 2000-2030 4 Urban Growth (% change) 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 Africa Asia LAC North America Oceana Europe Source for data: UNPD World Urbanization Prospects: The 2003 Revison Cities today Cities are centres of production, exchange and accumulation, social ‘melting pots’, and seats of political power. They are engines of economic growth, theatres of conflict, and sites of innovation. Moreover, cities are ‘literally concrete manifestations of ideas on how society was, is and should be’. 5 What does the current state of the world’s cities tell us about world development thus far; what does it say about the values and priorities of our present society from a global perspective; and what does this shift towards an urbanised world tell us about our future as a global community? As the world’s urban population grows, so too does the population of the urban poor. Of the three billion urban residents in the world today, one billion live in slums, vulnerable to disease, violence, and social, political, and economic exclusion (see Figure 3). UNHabitat estimates that the world’s slum population will double in the next 30 years, outpacing the predicted rate of urbanisation. In other words, all new urban dwellers in the next 30 years will be living in slums, and millions of them will be living in the biggest cities the world has ever known. 6 Tokyo, New York, London, Shanghai, and Paris once dominated the global urban landscape, but in 2015 the largest cities in the world (apart from Tokyo, which will continue to hold the top spot) will be Mumbai, Delhi, Mexico City, and São Paulo. Indeed, 22 of the world’s 30 largest cities in 2015 will be in lessdeveloped regions, and most of them will be home to 10 million people or more. The sheer size of the urban population living in squalid conditions presents enormous challenges to municipal and national governments everywhere, and the previously unimaginable size of our contemporary cities is placing a huge strain on our environment. Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 5 Figure 3: Slum population by region 80 Average % of Urban Population Living in Slums 60 40 20 0 Western Europe North America East Asia & Pacific Latin Middle East America & & North Caribbean Africa Eastern Europe & Central Asia SubSaharan Africa South Asia Region Source for data: UN-Habitat 2003 While cities were once seen as ‘islands of privilege’, it is increasingly clear that they are becoming centres that also embrace poverty and despair. According to UN-Habitat, ‘the absolute number of poor and undernourished in urban areas is increasing, as is the share of urban areas in overall poverty and malnutrition’. However, a dearth of reliable data makes credible statements on the true breadth and depth of urban poverty difficult. Traditional income-based metrics used to assess the scope of poverty (such as population living on less than $1 or $2 a day) are inappropriate for measuring the extent of urban poverty, due to the high costs of living in cities. Calculating the size of slum populations, on which there has recently been some emphasis, is a crude measure, at best. In the past it was thought that addressing rural poverty would both target the poorest and prevent rural–urban migration. While neither assumption necessarily holds true, this strategy consumed most of the energy and resources of the development community. An admittedly unscientific experiment proves the point: ‘rural poverty’ returns over one million hits in a Google search, while ‘urban poverty’ returns just 568,000. However, the inexorable shift towards an increasingly urban world demands a concomitant shift of energies and resources towards urban poverty and urban development. Urban poverty and vulnerability In order to understand the scale of urban poverty, we must first identify its characteristics (see Box 1). Fortunately this is one area where research has progressed in recent years. It is important to see rural and urban poverty as related features of a common process of impoverishment, but the experience of urban poverty and vulnerability is unique in certain respects. Pervasive personal hazards and economic insecurity conspire to create a condition of relentless vulnerability for poor urban residents. In cities, people rely on a monetised economy to meet their basic needs, and most rely on the dynamic but insecure informal Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 6 economy. Poor-quality housing and insecurity of tenure take much of the comfort out of having a ‘home’ in the city, and limited access to basic services such as clean water and sanitation facilities exposes poor urban residents to disease. Forced to settle on marginal lands, many urban residents are vulnerable to environmental hazards, which further threaten the security of their homes and health, while the struggle to survive in cities can also lead to social fragmentation, creating a degree of frustration and desperation that can manifest itself in violence and crime. And finally, urban residents across the globe, rich and poor alike, are increasingly exposed to warfare and acts of terrorism. Together these factors create complex processes making for vulnerability and impoverishment in cities across the South. Box 1: Key characteristics of urban poverty and vulnerability • • • • • • • • • • Reliance on a monetised economy Reliance on the informal economy Inadequate housing Insecurity of tenure Lack of access to basic services Vulnerability to disease Environmental hazards Social fragmentation Exposure to violence and crime Increasing experience of warfare and terrorism Reliance on monetised and informal economy Urban residents rely primarily upon wage labour to provide them with money to pay for food, water, shelter, and clothing. 7 Primary reliance on a monetised economy constitutes one of the key differences between urban and rural poverty. A disruption in the flow of income for an urban household means an immediate disruption in the ability to eat, making wage labour (including in the informal economy) the centrepiece of urban livelihood strategies. Hence the ill health of the major bread-winner can send an urban household spiralling into poverty. Indeed the ill health of any family member or their care needs – such as in early childhood, old age or pregnancy – may also substantially affect labour force participation and thus household income. Formal employment opportunities are frequently limited in cities in the South, forcing most poor urban residents to rely upon the informal economy (also known as the second economy or shadow economy) to earn money. The informal economy has been characterised as a haven for illicit activity, a tax shelter for businesses, and as ‘the small scale, semi-legal, often low-productivity, frequently family-based, perhaps precapitalistic enterprise’ that represents a critical livelihood strategy for the bulk of the world’s poor urban residents. 8 Indeed, the informal sector accounts for 72 per cent of all non-agricultural employment in Africa, 65 per cent in Asia, and 51 per cent in Latin America (see Figure 4). 9 Both illicit activities and unregulated (but otherwise legal) production and exchange may be vital for the survival of vulnerable urban dwellers. However, unregulated work can be hazardous and a large informal sector makes it difficult for national and local governments to collect the necessary revenue for pursuing pro-poor urban and national development strategies. Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 7 Figure 4: Informal sector employment by region Informal Employment as % of non-agricultural employment 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Sub-Saharan Africa Latin America Asia Source for data: ILO 2002 Inadequate housing and insecure tenure Employment insecurity is paralleled by the physical and legal fragility of housing and tenure conditions experienced by poor people living in urban areas. A large proportion of urban dwellers in less-developed countries live in slums or informal settlements. For example, in India, Ghana, Cambodia, and Bolivia, more than 50 per cent of all urban residents live in informal settlements. 10 Housing in these areas generally consists of makeshift shelters of brick and zinc sheets, scavenged pieces of wood, and industrial scraps, and is rarely connected into the formal urban infrastructure (such as water mains, drainage, and sewerage systems). These tenuous shelters are frequently overcrowded and their inhabitants at high risk in the event of natural disasters. Such conditions emerge where formal housing markets and government housing programmes fail to keep pace with urban growth. Squatters usually occupy unused government or peripheral land and are seen by many as a scourge on the urban landscape. They are tolerated only so far as there is low demand for the land they have occupied. 11 Without legal titles, or legally binding rental/lease agreements, squatters and tenants remain vulnerable to expropriation by land speculators, developers, and government agents. When the interests of land developers or public agencies collide with those of informal settlement residents, they can be reclassified (from ‘informal’ to ‘illegal’), forcibly evicted, and their homes demolished – a process that often incites violent confrontations. 12 The vulnerability of tenants in the face of formal and informal landlords can be equally acute. More than 6.7 million people worldwide were evicted from their homes in 2001–2002 according to the Centre for Housing Rights and Evictions – most of them in urban areas. Across Africa, 4 million people were evicted from their homes in 2001–2002, and millions more continue to live with the threat of eviction. 13 Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 8 Lack of access to basic services The indifferent (and sometimes hostile) attitude that prevails toward slums and informal settlements contributes to the under-provision of basic services. While urban residents tend to have better access to such services than rural dwellers, there is reason to be wary of such comparisons. There is no universal standard of ‘adequate’ water and sanitation facilities, for example, so what may be recorded as adequate in China may be classified as inadequate in South Africa. Even when urban residents do have access to services, they are often more expensive than equivalent services in the rural sector. For example, it is not uncommon for poor people in urban areas to have to purchase water – one of life’s most basic necessities – at exorbitant rates. In Nairobi, residents living in under-serviced areas pay up to 11 times more for water sold by private vendors than those who have access to piped water, while in Dhaka the figure is closer to 25 times more. 14 Furthermore, although a smaller percentage of urban than rural residents may go without basic services, the consequences of limited provision can be more severe in cities, due to risks of accelerated disease transmission in densely populated areas. 15 Vulnerability to disease and environmental hazards Almost half of all urban residents in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are victims of diseases associated with poor water and sanitation facilities, such as diarrhoeal diseases and worm infections. Overcrowding in slums also facilitates the rapid transmission of communicable diseases such as meningitis, respiratory infections, and tuberculosis. This process is exacerbated by poor nutrition, which lowers the immune system’s ability to defend against disease. Poor sewerage and drainage also contribute to the transmission of malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever. 16 Approximately 5 million people die every year from diseases carried in contaminated water, 17 and 3 million of these deaths can be attributed to one of the world’s most easily treated ailments: diarrhoea. 18 The risk of contracting a debilitating illness is further aggravated by environmental hazards that expose poor urban residents to injury and health risks other than transmissible diseases. Informal urban settlements are, virtually by definition, located in environmentally hazardous areas – next to a chemical factory or perched on a hillside subject to landslides, for example. Poor urban residents settle on these lands that no one else wants or uses. HIV infection rates are on the rise in many cities in the South, while in others they are dropping fast. Rapid transmission of the disease in urban environments demands urgent attention. Where the threat has been taken seriously and addressed aggressively it is receding (such as Nairobi and Addis Ababa); where it has been insufficiently addressed by the public sector, infection rates are soaring (Botswana, South Africa, and Swaziland). These trends suggest that HIV and AIDS can be brought under better control through creative engagement with poor urban residents. 19 Lower HIV and AIDS rates mean fewer orphans, lower health costs, and a healthier work force – in other words, healthier cities. Social fragmentation Traditional forms of managing health risks, economic insecurity, and social tension, based for example on community and kinship ties, tend to break down in the ‘meltingpots’ of urban environments. In the face of social fragmentation, families struck by illness or a natural disaster may find themselves forced to sell what assets they may have, to scavenge in the street, or even to engage in criminal activity to survive. 20 Migrants and local communities are thrown together in densely populated areas and forced to compete for access to services and limited income-generating opportunities. Under conditions of armed conflict these conditions are exacerbated as displaced people flock to cities already under stress. 21 Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 9 Exposure to violence, crime, war, and terrorism Conflict and war have long been seen as constraints to development, with contemporary warfare and terrorism mostly affecting urban centres in developing and developed countries alike. 22 Moreover, violence in ‘non-conflict’ situations has been increasingly recognised as a core security and development priority, and this too is often an urban phenomenon. 23 Crime is significantly higher in African and South American cities than in North American, European, and Asian ones – particularly burglary, theft, and assault (see Table 1) – and is on the rise across the developing world and Eastern Europe. Violent crime can be symptomatic of the vulnerability and frustration experienced by poor urban residents in the context of an almost cruel juxtaposition of wealth and poverty that is characteristic of contemporary cities. Young men often have few prospects and those aged 15–25 are particularly vulnerable to street violence. A common response is to join youth gangs, in part to protect themselves and their neighbourhoods but also to engage in criminal activity in the absence of steady sources of employment and in the absence of effective social support mechanisms. 24 Table 1: Urban crime rates by region Source: F. Vanderschueren (1996) ‘From violence to justice and security in cities’, in Environment and Urbanization, 8 (1) April. The web of vulnerability created by these myriad forces has created not only individual or household deprivation but also spatial agglomerations of socially, politically, and economically marginalised populations in cities across the South. Are these the kinds of unequal and divided cities we want to live in? Responding to urban poverty Over much of the second half of the 20th century, policies to reduce urban poverty focused on investment in the rural sector. This constituted an attempt to discourage migration to cities, and in some cases to encourage out-migration from cities. The era of structural adjustment explicitly favoured rural development by encouraging agricultural exports and discouraging domestic industrial development by reducing subsidies to industry (an important source of employment for urban dwellers). Rising food prices, devalued currencies (due to financial liberalization) and fewer jobs drove up the price of living in the city, making life increasingly difficult for the urban poor. 25 Despite these policies, rural–urban migration continues, as does natural urban growth, and yet poverty reduction strategies astonishingly have failed to include urban poverty in their analysis or policy approaches. 26 Nevertheless, low-income households in many parts of the world pursue livelihoods that straddle the rural–urban divide. Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 10 Some national or state/provincial government competencies affect or are targeted at urban areas, such as infrastructure and transport – although it is difficult to assess how much investment in these sectors directly alleviates urban poverty. More direct attempts to address housing poverty often prove demanding, with political, financial, and technical constraints standing in the way of accurately targeting the poorest people. Policy makers have used various strategies to address this, such as reducing costs by lowering construction standards, or supporting self-help schemes with the provision of serviced plots, usually under the umbrella of ‘enabling shelter strategies’ and ‘slum upgrading’ (linking existing informal or low-grade shelter to basic service networks), all with varying degrees of success. 27 A recent trend, driven largely by civil society organisations or the agencies that fund them, is the development of community-managed service delivery schemes that link residents to municipal officials in co-operative partnerships. For example, water supply, sanitation, and solid waste management schemes have been implemented in cities in Asia and Africa with some success, when community representatives and local governments can come together on equitable terms (see Box 2). However, effective partnerships depend on a willingness and capacity on the part of governments and development agencies to engage on issues that affect poor people living in urban areas. They also require collective action, leadership, and a degree of technical knowledge on the part of low-income urban communities themselves, or the intermediary organisations with which they work. 28 Box 2: Laying pipes and building trust between communities and local government in Lusaka Zambia is one of Africa’s most urbanised countries, and yet its capital city, Lusaka, has suffered a dramatic rise in poverty. Between 1974 and 1998, poverty rates soared from 4 per cent to 56 per cent as a result of rapid urbanisation and economic downturn. Some 65 per cent of Lusaka’s residents rely on the informal economy, and water pollution has become a major problem in the city due to the combined effects of industrial pollution, poor sanitation facilities, and the absence of a city-wide waste-collection scheme. Water taps in poor settlements around the city had been out of operation for years and required significant maintenance, but the body in charge of maintaining the system was no longer functioning due to a lack of capacity. As a result, communities lost trust that the water fees they had been paying were being spent on local needs, so they stopped paying. In the end, everybody was worse off – communities and local government alike. The need to find a solution was urgent, but simply fixing the pipes would only have provided a temporary and costly solution. Instead, an international NGO helped the community and local-government officials to create a jointly managed committee for maintaining the system and collecting the water fees, out of which a renewed sense of trust emerged between the two groups. Women played a vital role in the committee: as the principal household members responsible for providing water for the family’s daily needs, their say in how and when water should be supplied, and what fees would be affordable, was critical to making the system work. This approach allowed both the community and the government to see the benefits of working together. People received the immediate benefit of improved water supply and the government now has a successful partnership model for water management that is being replicated elsewhere on their own initiative. Source: CARE International UK (2006) ‘Cities on the Brink: Urban Poverty in the 21st Century’. Another response to urban poverty and vulnerability is to formalise informal settlements by offering greater security of tenure to their residents. Proponents of this approach claim that by improving tenure security, poor people are able to unleash the hidden potential of their existing assets and invest their way into a better life. This idea, promoted most extensively by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, has gained much currency in policy circles recently but it is not without problems and has been challenged by many Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 11 practitioners on the ground. 29 At the local level, formal titling schemes can serve to reinforce existing imbalances of power by favouring the wealthy, well-educated, and well-connected members of society who can manipulate the process to seize land or extort money from the less fortunate. There is also a significant danger of marginalising women in places where women traditionally do not have the right to ‘own’ land or are without the knowledge or connections to take advantage of land-titling processes. UNHabitat’s policy paper on women and gender points to the importance of land, housing, and property rights for women’s livelihoods in cities. It draws attention to the important link between women’s poverty on the one hand and on the other, inadequate housing, exclusion from land ownership and inheritance, as well as lack of access to credit due to the absence of collateral. 30 The role of women Cities take shape around deeply embedded gender relations that reflect the role of women in a particular society. 31 For example, houses in Muslim neighbourhoods in some countries are purposely designed to allow women to observe purdah, secluded behind high walls at home and in semi-cloistered community parks. Nor are such images confined to Muslim societies. Consider Ebenezer Howard, founder of the ‘garden city’ movement, who saw women fulfilling their ‘natural’ role in the private sphere. Even Le Corbusier, who followed Howard as one of the most influential urban planners of the 20th century, and whose ideas informed the city plans of Brasilia and Chandigarh in India, conformed to the notion of a ‘standardised “modular man” whose dimensions were to be at the core of all design, from furniture to city’. 32 Despite these constraints, women have demonstrated unparalleled enterprise in addressing the challenges of urban poverty, providing some of the most creative grassroots initiatives to date, such as savings clubs, soup kitchens in Peru, and organised efforts to engage and co-operate with local authorities around access to services. The contribution of women to human settlements development, slum upgrading, and basic services delivery, whether in cash or in kind, has been considerable (see Box 3). They are often the first to find the user fees or provide community labour and are invariably the ones left with the maintenance associated with community management. There have been very positive outcomes when women are consulted. For example, in Norway, transport planners were better informed by local mothers as to where children played; and in Sudan women were able to tell those constructing refugee camps where to locate the female washing areas so as to ensure privacy for women, and that customary practices were not flouted. Hence it is not women’s involvement in community management that is in short supply but rather a shortage of those prepared to hear their voices. This in turn makes it difficult for women to participate in local politics. Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 12 Box 3: Women and the ‘quiet sanitation revolution’ in Mumbai Women suffer disproportionately from inadequate water and sanitation facilities. In Mumbai, not only do women bear the burden of collecting water from standpipes or vendors, often queuing as early as 3.30am to get just a fraction of their family’s daily need, but they suffer considerably more from deficient sanitation facilities. Women are often forced to defecate in the open and due to the stigma associated with this they have to wait until after dark, when they also face the risk of physical abuse. One local woman said of her experience in Mumbai’s slums that ‘we had to use the railway tracks. There were public lavatories, but they were some distance away – about half an hour walk. They used to be so dirty that we did not feel like using them. And there were such long queues! Instead of using those filthy lavatories, we used to go on the tracks after ten at night or early in the morning at four or five o'clock.’ 33 It is clear that the health and other risks associated with poor sanitation facilities are considerable for women in low-income areas, even where there are public toilets. However, in some parts of the city things have been improving since 2002, when a ‘quiet sanitation revolution’ was ushered in across some of Mumbai’s poorest slums, with local people taking part in a World Bank backed scheme to build and manage their own community toilet blocks. In many cases, such as in the Ganesh Murthy Nagar slum in the Colaba District of the city, it is women who have formed societies for the management of these toilet blocks. Padma Adhikari, a member of this community association, explained: ‘We had one small, smelly toilet for a population of 10,000. Women suffered the most because they had to relieve themselves in the open, and could do so only in the early mornings or after dark.’ Now, however, there are a number of two-storey toilet blocks with full-time caretakers who live with their families on the second storey, which extends on to a terrace providing space for community meetings. They are provided with water and electricity for 24 hours every day and ‘For the first time in the history of public toilets in India, there is a special section for small children.’ 34 The toilet blocks stand out amidst the squalor of the city’s slums, with Adhikari adding ‘It looks so grand that we are having a hard time convincing people that we are only building a toilet.’ 35 The programme covers around a quarter of the city’s slums. Urban governance There is a growing focus in international development on urban governance; a focus directly connected with the push towards decentralisation, particularly on the part of international development agencies. There is a strong assumption that women are better equipped to participate in local than in other tiers of government, and there are obvious reasons why. It is closer to home and thought to be easier to combine with the responsibilities of paid and domestic work. However, there are also huge constraints facing women who involve themselves in local politics and their participation cannot be taken for granted. 36 There is also conflicting evidence as to the effectiveness of decentralisation as a strategy for addressing urban poverty and vulnerability. The ‘good governance’ framework, of which decentralisation strategies are often a part, tends towards a somewhat myopic emphasis on corruption. However, the urban governance agenda has to go beyond this to draw useful attention to the relationship between citizens and state agents. Urban governance in this context implies the existence or promotion of mechanisms of voice and accountability, such that poor people in cities and towns have a forum for voicing their concerns, in a context where municipal officials are compelled to listen and engage. 37 International NGOs find their place in this new paradigm as catalysts for establishing or promoting these mechanisms as facilitators and intermediaries – not, as in the past, as service providers of last resort or representatives speaking on behalf of, rather than with, the local population. Current wisdom suggests that promoting urban governance will lead to innovative strategies that will provide the stimulus for effective multi-actor strategies for sustainable urban development and poverty reduction. 38 Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 13 Despite the efforts outlined above, the evidence still suggests that urban poverty is outpacing existing interventions. Our cities continue to grow, and to grow poorer while the development community stands by. The consequences of inaction in the light of these trends will reverberate far beyond the rapidly expanding slums of the developing world. Cities are critical spaces for managing development at the local and global levels alike. Urban poverty and global development Addressing urban poverty is not a zero-sum game that leaves the countryside neglected. Strategies aimed at improving the lives of poor urban residents need not be a drain on resources devoted to rural poverty alleviation. Rather, they can be incorporated into development strategies that address poverty across the spatial spectrum. For example, environmental issues such as climate change affect the global community as a whole but impact on cities and poor urban populations in particular ways. Cities, after all, are not isolated spaces; they come in many shapes and sizes and are integrally linked into their hinterlands. There has always been an important symbiosis between the city and countryside, the elements of which become obscured by an arbitrary, dualistic classification. 39 Cities also serve as hubs in a network that links diverse communities in the developing world to the global economy and to global civil society. Unpacking the dynamics of rural–urban and urban–global linkages in the contemporary, international context is an important task in designing integrated poverty reduction and development strategies. In other words, urban development strategies can be situated within a comprehensive and interconnected spatial network, designed to combat poverty and promote environmental sustainability across diverse spaces and dimensions. Trade For rural producers of agricultural goods, cities provide sources of demand for surplus production, sources of supply for inputs and non-agricultural commodities, as well as ‘infrastructure clusters’ that supply the necessary communication and transportation linkages to access global markets. Trade liberalisation has changed these dynamics significantly, particularly in the poorest countries, as cheap imports (agricultural and non-agricultural) displace urban demand and constrain local and national industrial development. Restoring domestic market linkages and effectively managing global ones can play an important role in revitalising the positive symbiosis between rural and urban areas. A critical issue in development today relates to the management of trade in a rapidly globalising economy. Campaigns to achieve trade that is fair often highlight the negative impact that farm subsidies in the developed world (coupled with demands for trade liberalisation in developing countries) have on the livelihood opportunities of poor farmers. However, the consequences of current non-agricultural market access (NAMA) negotiations at the WTO on industrial development strategies in the South should also be explored. The accepted wisdom of Western economists that infant-industry subsidies and import-substituting industrialisation strategies serve as brakes on development and sources of corruption defies historical evidence. Virtually all of the most successful developers have relied on preferential treatment for local producers in order to stimulate industrial development – one of the key sectors providing jobs for urban populations. 40 Campaigns promoting fairer trade that incorporate a call for differential treatment in NAMA negotiations can therefore promote poverty reduction in rural areas and cities in the South if governments are granted the right to pursue employment-generating (but trade-distorting) policies. Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 14 Environment Urbanisation and industrialisation are not without their negative side and can pose serious threats to urban dwellers in the form of environmental degradation and climate change. Vehicular emissions, wood fires for cooking and heating, trash fires, and the poorly regulated industrial activity produce hazardous quantities of pollutants and greenhouse gases. Dangerously high levels of air pollution, affecting some 1.5 billion urban residents worldwide, cause an estimated 400,000 deaths per year. 41 Cities can also consume unsustainable amounts of non-renewable energy. Although urban areas account for just two per cent of the land surface of the earth, they currently consume approximately 75 per cent of the natural resources used every year. The amount of land area (in hectares) that a city needs to sustain itself can be referred to as its ‘ecological footprint’. Scientists estimate that the world can sustain an ecological footprint of 1.8 hectares per person. The average footprint of a rural dweller in China is just 1.6 hectares; the average footprint for an American is about 9.7 hectares. 42 To effectively tackle climate change and minimise the ecological footprints of cities as urbanisation progresses, we need well-managed cities with comprehensive public transport systems, efficient water systems, solid waste management programmes based on reduced consumption and recycling, inclusive energy grids, and effective regulatory agencies. The longer-term impact of climate change poses its greatest threat to those with the least assets and resources to protect themselves from its effects – both rural and urban. Climate change has recently been identified as a factor in the severity of hurricanes, floods, droughts, and desertification across the world. Poor people living in urban areas are particularly vulnerable to natural disasters due to their often marginal location and generally poor state of housing, as demonstrated by recent hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and the earthquake in Pakistan. Improving the quality of urban housing, as well as basic infrastructure to service that housing (such as drainage networks, which are often missing and are critical for flood control) can go a long way towards reducing casualties in the event of natural disasters. 43 Migration Cities have an important role in intra-national and international migration flows, both as transitory spaces and as destinations. Effectively managing the rapid growth of cities in the South is in part a question of successfully managing migrant populations. Establishing formal institutions and organisations to help migrants assimilate into the social and economic fabric of the city is important to mitigate social fragmentation and personal economic insecurity where perceived opportunities exceed actual opportunities. While urban communities often provide informal mechanisms of migrant assistance, many individuals and families fall through the cracks. As with other dimensions of informality, migration requires careful policy response. To ignore the issue means to fail vulnerable migrant populations, but to over-regulate migration can equally have harmful effects. Informal economy The informal economy has long been a focus of analytical and policy attention in cities of the South. Indeed, in some contexts it is recognised as the ‘real economy’. Until fairly recently, it has been addressed mainly in terms of its relationship to national or border economies. However, the international dimensions of informal economic activities are critical, whether in terms of household incomes based on remittances or in terms of unregulated enterprises that operate across national boundaries. While informal economic activity provides a critical livelihood strategy for millions of people, it presents Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 15 a dilemma for local and national level governments, who already struggle to raise the fiscal resources needed to deliver necessary services. Policy responses that take into account the interests of poor people cannot seek to abolish the informal economy. Indeed, when this has been attempted it has simply pushed the informal economy underground and rendered it more illicit. Nonetheless, informal economic activities need to be sufficiently co-ordinated that the livelihood strategies of poor urban residents are not exploitative (for example by ensuring the oversight and regulation of child work) and that the city can benefit from and redistribute through resource collection (for example through licence fees and local taxes). Urban dwellers in turn need to see the benefits of revenue collection. If we are to live in inclusive and sustainable cities, urbanisation has to be seized as a dynamic and creative process that carries enormous potential for development – but it is also a process that must be consciously harnessed and guided towards our common objectives. Building inclusive and sustainable cities Historically speaking, cities have played a decisive role in social, political, and economic transformations. Economists, for example, have long been aware of the strong correlation between urbanisation and economic development (see Figure 5). On the one hand, urbanisation has positive effects on innovation and productivity; on the other, economic growth encourages the spatial consolidation of production and exchange activities. 44 Some authors have gone further, suggesting that urbanisation ‘focuses attention on the distribution of political power in society, so helping to bring about the rise of…democracy,’ as well as gender equality. 45 The potential for progressive changes in economic, political, and social relations in cities depends largely on the way cities are built, managed, and governed. ‘Open, lively public places can provide evidence of democracy at work. However, this is by no means automatic. The layout of modern towns and cities often gives the impression that people are less important than cars.’ 46 Figure 5: Correlation between urbanisation and economic development Source: Produced by the authors with data from World Development Indicators 2003. Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 16 Urban public space It is widely believed that recent decades have witnessed something of a crisis in urban public space. Changes brought about by globalisation and rapid urbanisation have in some respects blurred boundaries between cities and their hinterlands, while cities themselves are fragmenting in ways that are frequently detrimental to the physical space available for the healthy activity of civil society. Not only have the dividing lines between rich and poor areas become more marked in both cities of the global North and South, but processes of decentralisation, privatisation, and deregulation have changed the social fabric of urban spaces. Public places that formerly played an important role as sites of civic interaction are increasingly being privatised and commodified so that they are beyond the reach of all but the most privileged. Almost half a century ago Jane Jacobs perceived that attempts to compartmentalise cities into different functional zones was having immensely damaging effects on the life of the city. 47 And yet in many respects the problem has been exacerbated by the proliferation of gated communities, no-go ghettoes, and sanitised shopping malls, all devoid of civic spaces and often with the overriding priority on the part of city authorities or national governments of attracting investment and tourism. The quality of public space is often massively undervalued. As a result, public space is either disappearing or losing its civic importance in many cities. This is precisely at a time when it is increasingly vital, due to economic and social marginalisation in cities across the globe. In this respect, the loss of valuable public spaces is particularly damaging to poor people living in urban areas who already lack not only physical space but also voice and opportunities for influence in urban affairs. In much of the developing world, and particularly in Africa, the legacies of colonialism in relation to public space persist strongly to this day. While ‘African big cities are not so different from many other metropolises in the world’ 48 in many respects, the city spaces built by colonial powers systematically embedded social, ethnic, and class divisions in particularly rigid ways. Although South African cities provide the most obvious cases of all (see Box 4), cities such as Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Accra also provide striking examples. The often long-term and durable nature of changes made to urban buildings and places means that these spatial legacies have persisted long after the demise of apartheid and colonialism. Moreover, Beall, Crankshaw, and Parnell suggest that cities such as Johannesburg are the spectre of our urban future more generally, with cities of Europe and North America equally comprising different worlds divided by race, ethnicity, and wealth or poverty. 49 Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 17 Box 4: Remaking and reclaiming public space in downtown Johannesburg In many cities with a strong colonial history, it has only been in recent decades that marginalised poor communities have been able to work in or even enter the city centre. South African cities provide the starkest examples of downtown areas that were previously exclusively white central business districts. Today they are being rapidly reclaimed by the poor urban residents and new middle-class entrepreneurs. Lindsay Bremner describes how the streets of Johannesburg a decade after the end of apartheid were ‘crammed with unregulated informal activity – survivalist street trade, small-scale manufacturing, crossborder trade…The city had become more fragmented, more polarised and more diverse than ever before. On the other hand it had become a city for the first time.’ These changes have had a profound impact on the use of public space, ‘historically something to avoid in Johannesburg’. During apartheid the idea of public space was often declared undesirable, so it was minimised and sometimes erased. Since the end of white minority rule, however, public space is being remade as people reclaim the downtown areas of the city. Bremner found that in the years since South Africa’s democratic transition ‘streets and parks, pavements and intersections had been overrun by practices claiming space in messy and overlapping ways’. A parallel process has been that while many corporations and their employees fled to the ‘safer’ environment of the suburbs after apartheid, others have chosen to remain downtown and have dealt with being there simply by creating their own enclosed, walled world complete with everything their employees might need. ‘Simulating their suburban counterparts, these new monoliths have absorbed and privatised all the paraphernalia that usually make a city buzz – coffee shops, magazine stands, bookstalls, stationers, chemists, hairdressers. For those inside, the city has ceased to exist; for those outside, the city is a pretty desperate place.’ Hence Johannesburg city centre is now a combination of the better-off, cushioned by these privately managed and policed business and residential districts; the streets and food stores inhabited by hawkers and shopkeepers serving the city’s poor; as well as the ‘inbetweeners’: independent entrepreneurs and service providers inhabiting abandoned, dilapidated office space, for whom the inner-city is an awkward place. Ultimately this popular reclaiming and refashioning of downtown Johannesburg, in just a decade, has made it a vibrant African city that poses a real challenge to the enclosed corporate cocoons and the suburban commuters who hope never to have any contact with the life of the city itself. Indeed, as Bremner states, ‘What makes most cities in the world interesting is not those who move in and out of it, but those who live in it’. However, Bremner also notes in her introduction that even just 18 months after writing her stories about Johannesburg, the picture had significantly changed, as new zero-tolerance policing has reasserted itself and new laws and design schemes have been put in place. The city is continuing to evolve apace and what has unfortunately already passed, she feels, ‘is that moment of spontaneity, a space that allowed people to experiment with the city and to make it work in new ways’. Source: L. Bremner (2004) Johannesburg: One City Colliding Worlds, Johannesburg: STE. Reshaping and regenerating Space and place can be reshaped and reclaimed in powerful ways. Women moving to cities in Africa often did so to escape oppressive social relations in the villages, such as the tutelage of an oppressive chief. Young girls working in garment factories in the export-processing zones of Dhaka and Chittagong in Bangladesh, although paid low wages and sometimes working in difficult conditions, are also able to contribute to their families’ incomes and their own dowries, while at the same time gaining an element of respect and autonomy. 50 In many ways therefore, the battle to deny women access to public space has been lost, and in Bangladesh as elsewhere, rather than returning to the countryside, women are claiming the right to participate fully in the life of the cities. Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 18 Urban women’s claim over land, housing, and inheritance remains a matter of concern in many cities across the world. It is possible for large-scale projects to be undertaken in order to regenerate public space with the explicit aim of linking communities and encouraging local participation in urban development around the globe. For example, in 1994 a major programme in Rio de Janeiro, Favela-Bairro, was launched, aiming not only to improve infrastructure in the favelas but also to build parks on their edges ‘in the hope that these will help draw in outsiders to mix with favelas residents’. 51 Similarly, the Cato Manor urban upgrading project in Durban, South Africa, deliberately made available plots of land to women wishing to purchase housing with government subsidies, so that they not only had access to land but could be neighbours. 52 There is also a growing interest in designing cities and public space to reduce the ecological impact of urban lifestyles. An experimental project is underway in China embracing innovative technologies and planning tools to create a new satellite city for Shanghai, which currently has an eco-footprint of 7 hectares per person. The city, to be named Dongtan, will be home to half a million people and aims for an ecological footprint of only 2.2 hectares per person. It has been purposefully designed to make life difficult for cars and friendly for pedestrians and bikes, and planners boast that it will be ‘a zero-pollution, largely car-free, renewable-energy powered, sewage-recycling, greenfringed utopia’. 53 Ultimately, the creation of inclusive and sustainable cities has to be driven by thoughtful planning and inclusive governance. While Dongtan represents ambition and long-range vision, there are many areas of planning that are necessarily haphazard and responsive, as well as parts of the world where patterns of governance leave much to be desired. There is still, for example, a clear lack of capacity on the part of many local authorities to recognise and be sensitive to gender issues and social diversity in municipal planning and management, or to work effectively with networks and organisations representing the interests of poor, vulnerable, and marginalised urban dwellers. The danger of failing to create and protect civic spaces and of not encouraging diversity in cities is all too clear, as ‘global economic forces are putting pressure on cities to privatise and commodify urban spaces and to replace political citizenship with consumer citizenship’. 54 Thus there is a risk that cities become transformed into sites that work only for those individuals with money and resources, rather than places that are home to social and political communities that are concerned with civic life. Negotiations between the local state and civil-society organisations can redress this imbalance, and experience has shown that civic space can be reclaimed both in public and privately owned places. 55 As Mike Douglass points out, ‘there is theory and evidence suggesting that a city that provides spaces for civic life will also be a city that is better able to create its own capacities for innovation and economic sustainability’. 56 Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 19 An agenda for research and action The time is long overdue for those concerned with issues of poverty, inequality, and social exclusion to devote more energy, attention, and resources to engaging with issues of urban development. As a global development community we can no longer afford to overlook the poverty and deprivation on the doorsteps of our offices in cities in the North and especially in the South. It is not simply a matter of alleviating urban poverty although this is of course important; it is also a matter of tackling inequality, which is so grossly apparent in cities; as well as an issue of designing development strategies that integrate rural, urban, and global concerns to achieve our common goals. Every country needs functional cities to serve as engines of national economic growth, sites where social expenditure reaches economies of scale and where there is constructive political dialogue. Concentrations of human activity in urban and peri-urban areas present such opportunities and as trade flows increase and migration accelerates, cities become increasingly important arenas for managing the effects of globalisation. However, they also pose significant collective action challenges in what are often complex social and political environments: complex because they involve multiple and more diverse interest groups than are in evidence in rural areas, operating via both formal and informal institutional arrangements and social relationships. Nevertheless, building inclusive cities is a goal worth pursuing and can in addition contribute to the broader objective of building better governance and stronger states, equally essential in addressing poverty and inequality. Moreover, from a global perspective, committed and visionary urban planning and urban development policies could have a critical impact on the possibility of creating an environmentally stable global society. In outlining an agenda for action to reduce urban poverty and promote inclusive and sustainable cities, it is tempting to focus on specific, urgent issues such as clean water and sanitation facilities, employment generation, micro-finance, education, comprehensive social services, tenure reform and so on. These are of course important but effective engagement with urban development requires not simply a proliferation of more activities in conventional segregated urban sectors. Rather, urban development strategies need to link these initiatives with a coherent programmatic approach that addresses: 1. 2. 3. 4. Local interests, city-wide concerns, multi-sector partnerships and initiatives; Rural–urban linkages at the local and national level, including social, political, and economic dimensions; The role of cities in regional and global processes, and the way in which these operate in or against the interests of poor urban residents; The link between urban development and management strategies and environmental sustainability, particularly in relation to patterns of consumption and waste. What will our cities look like in 10 or 20 years time? In 1991, the World Bank (in an unusually prescient statement) warned that urban poverty would become the ‘most significant, and politically explosive, problem of the next century’. 57 The scale of the urban challenge was reiterated at the Third World Urban Forum held in Vancouver, Canada in June 2006. If current trends continue and the global development community fails to integrate urban development strategies into the global agenda, this prediction will likely become a reality as urban populations explode and our cities become socially fragmented, politically and economically polarised, and increasingly unsustainable. Policy makers usually turn their attention to urban poverty only when tensions spill over into violence and conflict. We do not have to wait for our cities to burn. With a determined effort on the part of civil society, national governments, the private sector Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 20 and the international development community we can harness the positives of urbanisation to create a more inclusive and sustainable global society. 1 UNPD World Urbanisation Prospects: The 2003 Revision. Although it is generally agreed that the balance of settlements will shift in 2007, there is some debate about the nature of the data used to make this claim. In much of Europe, for example, settlements with 5000 or more inhabitants are considered urban areas. In Africa and Asia, by contrast, the threshhold definition tends to be 20,000 or more inhabitants. The actual degree of urbanisation depends upon what definition is employed. See David Satterthwaite, ‘Outside the Large Cities’, Human Settlements Discussion Paper – Urban Change 3, available at www.iied.org. 2 3 4 5 Ibid. Ibid. D. Mehta (2000) ‘Urbanisation of Poverty’, Habitat Debate 6 (4). J. Beall (1997) ‘Valuing Difference and Working with Diversity’, in Beall (ed.) A City for All, London: Zed Books, p.3. UN-Habitat (2003) ‘Global Report on Human Settlements: The Challenge of Slums’. 6 7 In some areas urban agriculture provides a source of food and livelihood for urban residents. However, except in the case of periurban areas, there is significant debate as to whether or not urban agriculture is a practical and sustainable source of food and employment. For more information visit the following links: www.ruaf.org/ and www.idrc.ca/upe. W. Maloney (2003) ‘Informality Revisited’, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 2965. ILO (2002) ‘Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture’. 8 9 UN-HABITAT Global Urban Observatory data set: ‘Slum population as percentage of urban (secure tenure index) – Code 30019’. Available at http://ww2.unhabitat.org/programmes/guo/statistics.asp One official in the Ministry of Urbanism in Angola stated in an interview with Sean Fox that if he could have his way he would ‘clear them all away’ in Luanda and build a planned city. Slums in Luanda house over three million people; approximately 75 per cent of the urban population. The literature is replete with examples of forcible evictions and demolitions, and security of tenure is one of two key themes for UN-Habitat. Recent examples cited by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have included cases in Zimbabwe, Angola, Rwanda, and China. 13 12 11 10 Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (2003) ‘Global Survey on Forced Evictions: Violations of Human Rights’. 14 J. E. Hardoy, D. Mitlin, and D. Satterthwaite (2001) Environmental Problems in an Urbanizing World: Finding Solutions in Cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, London: Earthscan, p. 48. 15 For an extended discussion of these issues see D. Satterthwaite (1997) ‘Urban Poverty: Reconsidering its Scale and Nature’ in Urban Poverty: A New Research Agenda, IDS Bulletin 28 (2). See The Millennium Project, ‘The 21st century health challenge of slums and cities’, for a summary of the health risks of slums. Available at http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/documents/TheLancetSlums.pdf, last accessed November 2006. 16 Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 21 A.-M. Sacquet (2002) World Atlas of Sustainable Development, Paris: Autrement Editions. 18 19 20 17 This refers to rural and urban deaths. The Millennium Project, ibid. See J. Beall (2001) ‘Valuing Social Resources or Capitalising on Them? The Limits to Pro-poor Urban Governance in Nine Cities of the South’, International Planning Studies 6(4): 357–75; J. Beall, N. Kanji, and C.Tacoli (1999) ‘African Urban Livelihoods: Straddling the Rural–Urban Divide’, in S. Jones and N. Nelson (eds.) Urban Poverty in Africa, London: Intermediate Technology Publications, pp. 160–68; J. Beall (1995) ‘Social Security and Social Networks Among the Urban Poor in Pakistan’, Habitat International 19 (4): 427–55. See J. Beall and D. Esser (2005) ‘Shaping Urban Futures: Challenges to Governing and Managing Afghan Cities’, Kabul: Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit; J. Beall (2002) ‘Globalization and Social Exclusion in Cities: Framing the Debate with Lessons from Africa and Asia’, Environment and Urbanization 14(1): 41–52; J. Beall, N. Kanji, and C.Tacoli (1999), ibid.; J. Beall (1995), ibid. See J. Beall (2006) ‘Cities, Terrorism and Development’, Journal of International Development, Policy Arena on Terrorism and Development. C. Moser and D. Rodgers (2005) ‘Change, Violence and Insecurity in Non-Conflict Situations’, ODI Working Paper, London: Overseas Development Institute. For a good discussion of these issues see C. Moser (2004) ‘Urban violence and insecurity: An introductory roadmap’, editor’s introduction, Environment and Urbanization 16 (2): 3–16; D. Rodgers (2004) ‘Disembedding the City: Crime, Insecurity, and Spatial Organisation in Managua, Nicaragua’, Environment and Urbanization 16 (2): 113–24; F. Vanderschueren (1996) ‘From violence to justice and security in cities’, Environment and Urbanization 8 (1). 25 24 23 22 21 UN-Habitat (2003) ‘Global Report on Human Settlements: The Challenge of Slums’ p. 46. Commonwealth Action for Human Settlements has concluded, based on a review of 7 PRSPs from Commonwealth countries, that the PRSPs reviewed showed a general lack of focus on, and understanding of, urban poverty issues. 27 26 See J. Beall (2000) ‘Life in the cities’ in Poverty and Development in the 21st Century, Allen and Thomas (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. 28 See J. Beall (2995) Funding Local Governance: Small Grants for Democracy and Development, London: Intermediate Technology Publications; D. Satterthwaite, G. McGranahan, and D. Mitlin (2005) ‘Community-driven development for water and sanitation in urban areas: its contribution to meeting the Millennium Development Goal targets’, London: IIED and WSSCC; D. Mitlin and D. Satterthwaite (2004) Empowering Squatter Citizen, London: Earthscan. See de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital (2000) and Geoffrey Payne’s Urban Land Tenure and Property Rights in Developing Countries (1997), which represent each side of the debate. 30 29 UN-Habitat (2002) UN-Habitat’s Gender Policy, Nairobi: UN-Habitat. 31 See for example J. Beall (1997) A City for All: Valuing Difference and Working with Diversity, London: Zed Books; C. Greed (1994) Women and Planning: Creating Gendered Realities, London: Routledge; D. Massey (1994) Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity Press; L. McDowell (1983) ‘Towards an Understanding of the Gender Division of Urban Space’, Environment and Planning for Society and Space 1 (1): 57–70; C. Moser and L. Peake (1987) Women, Human Settlements and Housing, London: Tavistock; OECD (1995) Women in the City: Housing, Services and the Urban Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 22 Environment, Paris: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development; E. Wilson (1991) The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and Women, London: Virago. P. Healey (1995) ‘Integrating the Concept of Social Diversity into Public Policy’ in OECD, ibid., p. 51. 33 K. Sharma (2004)‘In a city like Mumbai’, Our Planet Magazine, United Nations Environment Programme, available at: http://www.ourplanet.com/imgversn/144/sharma.html, last accessed November 2006. 34 32 WHO (2002) Bulletin of the World Health Organization 80 (8), available at: http://whqlibdoc.who.int/bulletin/2002/Vol80-No8/bulletin_2002_80(8)_684-687.pdf, last accessed November 2006. 35http://www.infochangeindia.org/archives1.jsp?secno=2&monthname=June&year=2002& detail=T J. Beall (2005) ‘Decentralizing Government and De-centering Gender: Lessons from Local Government Reform in South Africa’, Politics and Society 33 (2): 253–76. N. Devas with P. Amis, J. Beall, U. Grant, D.Mitlin, F. Nunan, and C. Rakodi (2004) Urban Governance, Voice and Poverty in the Developing World, London: Earthscan. See N. Devas et. al. (2001) ‘Urban governance and poverty: lessons from a study of ten cities in the south, London: DFID. 39 See E. Wratten (1995) ‘Conceptualising urban poverty’, in Environment and Urbanization 7 (1). 38 37 36 See Ha-Joon Chang (2002) Kicking Away the Ladder: Policies and Institutions for Economic Development in Historical Perspective, London: Anthem Press. 41 40 D. Satterthwaite (2004) ‘Development in an urban context’,The Environment Times, available at: http://www.environmenttimes.net/article.cfm?pageID=7, last accessed November 2006. F. Pearce (2006) ‘Ecopolis Now’, New Scientist, June 17. UNEP (2005) ‘One Planet Many People: Atlas of Our Changing Environment’. 42 43 44 See E. L. Glaeser (2000) ‘The Future of Urban Research: Nonmarket Interactions’, Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs. T. Dyson (2001) ‘A Partial Theory of World Development: The Neglected Role of the Demographic Transition in the Shaping of Modern Society’, International Journal of Population Geography 7: 17. 46 45 The (South African) Star, May 25 2004, available at: http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=208879. 47 See J. Jacobs (1992 [1961]) The Death and Life of the Great American City, New York: Random House. 48 S. J. Salm and T. Falola (2005) African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective, University of Rochester Press, p. xxxvi. J. Beall, O. Crankshaw and S. Parnell (2004) Uniting a Divided City: Governance and Social Exclusion in Johannesburg, London: Earthscan. 50 49 N. Kabeer (2000) The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka, London: Verso. 51 A. Cardoso, P. Elias, and V. Pero (no date) ‘Urban Regeneration and Spatial discrimination: the case of Rio’s favelas’, available at: http://www.anpec.org.br/encontro2003/artigos/F41.pdf, last accessed November 2006. Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 23 J. Beall and A. Todes (2004) ‘Gender and integrated area development projects: lessons from Cato Manor, Durban’, Cities 21 (4): 301–10. 53 54 52 New Scientist, 17 June 2006. M. Douglass (2002) ‘Civic Spaces in a Global Age: An Agenda for Pacific Asia Cities’. Institute of Policy Studies, March, p. 14. Some US shopping malls have made efforts to create civic ‘free speech’ areas, see M. Douglas (2002), ibid. 56 57 55 Ibid., p. 18 World Bank (1991) ‘Urban Policy and Economic Development: An Agenda for the 1990s’, World Bank Policy Paper, Washington DC: World Bank. Urban Poverty and Development in the 21st Century Oxfam GB Research Report, January 2007 24