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Guest Editorial - David Westendorff (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD)
This double issue of Development in Practice comprises approximately half of the papers initially prepared for presentation at the European Science Foundations annual N-AERUS Workshop, held in Geneva from 3 to 5 May 2000.1 Its title, Cities of the South: Sustainable for Whom?, reflects concern within the N-AERUS and the host institutionsUNRISD and IREC-EPFLthat urban development processes in many cities of the North and South are being guided by superficial or misleading conceptions of sustainable development in the urban context. As will be seen in the articles in this issue, the aims of different groups proposing strategies for the sustainable development of cities tend to skew their arguments about what this means and how to achieve it. Environmentalists who see the pollution-free city as the only sustainable one may be willing to sacrifice the only affordable form of mass transport for the poor, or dirty low-tech jobs that provide them their meagre living. Those pursuing the globally competitive city may succeed in attracting foreign and domestic investments that boost economic growth and productivity, but which concentrate the benefits of growth very narrowly, leaving an increasingly large majority to live in penury at the foot of glass skyscrapers. Beleaguered bureaucrats attempting to improve or extend public infrastructure may adopt financing mechanisms that weaken poorer groups capacity to benefit from the newly installed infrastructure, even though they bear a disproportionate share of the costs of paying for it. International organisations seeking to promote more effective governance of cities may encourage decentralisation processes that fragment responsibility in the absence of legal, administrative, and institutional frameworks to organise and finance governmental responsibilities at the local level. Such a vacuum may be filled by local bosses or other power brokers who have little interest in seeing to the common good. In different ways, our various contributors focus on these contradictions.
The articles are grouped into four partially overlapping categories. The first set comments on different aspects of the international challenges to achieving sustainable cities. In the second group, researcher-practitioners from Asia, Africa, and Latin America offer their understanding of the principles that would have to be followed in order to achieve sustainable development in their cities, and the current set of constraints against doing so. These articles necessarily touch on the contested roles of international agencies and bilateral donors in shaping national strategies for urban sustainable development. The next set of five articles discusses issues of housing and land-use management in cities of developing countries. The next group, comprising two articles, provides updates on new information technologies that may play important roles in planning for sustainable development, whether in cities, their regions or countries. This collection ends with a salutary reminder from Hélčne Rivičre dArc that planners solutions to the problems of poor people have long been formed by a technocratic vision and expressed in a technocratic language. These rarely reflect the language or the approaches to the problems the marginalised groups themselves elect to use. The misapprehension of the meaning and role of community remains a crucial dis-connect for many planners and urban officials.
In the first of the two articles on the international context for urban sustainable development, Adriana Allen chronicles the impact of the increasing internationalisation of Argentinas fishing industry on the city of Mar del Plata. This process included the transition from local, small-scale producers catering for local markets to larger highly capitalised international fishing enterprises producing for export markets. As neo-liberal policies of deregulation pushed catches to unsustainable levels in the 1990s, Mar del Platas native fishing and canning industries became progressively sidelined by foreign competitors operating in Argentinian waters. Over time, Mar del Platas unions could provide less and less protection to workers, enterprises cut back on investments in plant and equipment, and the citys tax revenues began to deteriorate, affecting its ability to provide infrastructure and enforce environmental standards in the port area, etc. Today, the prospects for sustaining decent livelihoods and living conditions for Mar del Platas residents are as uncertain as the fate of the fish upon which it has drawn its sustenance for decades. In the second of these opening articles, Amitabh Kundu reviews the recent experience of a number of large Indian cities to finance infrastructure through domestic and international capital markets since the imposition of structural adjustment policies in the early 1990s. One of the authors major concerns is that the kinds of stringent mechanisms for assuring repayment of loans increasingly take decision making about the design and implementation of infrastructure out of the hands of local governments and place it with entities whose chief concern is an adequate rate of return to investors in the short run. This transfer of decision making is modelled largely on the experience of the USA and is being promoted through international institutions such as the World Bank and regional development banks, and with the support of like-minded bilateral donors. Its suitability to the Indian context is challenged because it appears to exacerbate intra- and interregional disparities in infrastructure and service delivery, thus solidifying already unacceptably high levels of social segmentation.
The first of the six articles discussing regional experiences in achieving sustainable cities is the review by Wilbard J. Kombe of efforts to revitalise urban planning and management in Dar es Salaam City, Tanzania, during the 1990s by means of the Environmental Planning and Management (EPM) promoted by Habitat (UNHCS) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The Sustainable Dar es Salaam Project was established in 1992 as the vehicle for guiding this effort. The article focuses on the functioning of two of the nine Working Groups established to propose solutions to the most pressing habitat problems in the city and to facilitate and monitor their implementation. The Working Groups were an important innovation in that they were designed to include all the parties that could materially affect the success of the proposed solutions. While both Working Groups appear to have mobilised new collective forms of problem solving, their most important proposals could not be implemented. Vested interests among stakeholders, institutional inertia, bureaucratic in-fighting, and a lack of political will at the central level all stood in the way. Diego Carrión then paints in broad strokes how Latin American geo-political processes of democratisation, structural adjustment, liberalisation of economies via privatisation, state reformincluding decentralisationetc. are bringing about a sea-change in the way cities are governed. This transforms the processes for deciding how to proceed towards sustainable urban development. The authors particular concern is that civil society organisations, and especially those at the grassroots, and local authorities are taking over many of the responsibilities for sustaining society and its habitat. To move in this direction requires that local authorities facilitate community participation in ways that have rarely been adopted before. Carrión proposes six principles to guide local authorities efforts to include CSOs in the planning and implementation of new development strategies.
Jaime Joseph prefers the term sustainable human development when discussing a better future for the residents of Limas vast informal settlements. In this megacity, most structures are constructed by those who live in them. These same residents have often provided themselves with the infrastructure necessary to sustain life, even if only at subsistence levels. Repeated waves of structural adjustment in recent decades have made this a way of life for many. This fact must therefore be a premise for efforts to achieve sustainable development in the city, i.e. they must take a decentralised approach, relying on grassroots organisations, their supporters in civil society, and the local authorities. But sustainable improvements in material and social life must be built upon a culture of development and democracy. This is being nurtured in Limas public spaces, informal opportunities in which community organisations, NGOs, and sometimes local authorities, join in open debate about how to develop their neighbourhoods and districts. If properly supported with information, ethical practices in debate and decision making, and legislative support, the nascent process of political development will take root and flower. The environment for this is not optimal, however, as the Peruvian economy, weakened by structural adjustment and civil strife in the 1990s, is today further threatened by imports from a global economy that undercut employment opportunities for the poor in Lima and the rest of the country. Without a respite from this desperate competition, positive change may be stymied.
Karina Constantino-Davids intimate experience of attempting to bring decent housing and habitat to Manilas poor leads her to frame sustainable development in cities as a question of achieving sustainable improvements in the quality of life. Standing in the way of this aim in the Philippines is the countrys current model of parasitic developmentthe blind pursuit of economic growth through global competitiveness and foreign investment. This process is driving the deteriorating quality of life in Filipino cities. Five distinct but overlapping power groupsthe state, business, the dominant church, the media, and international aid agenciesshare responsibility for this. In Constantino-Davids opinion, the only way to find a path out of this morass is by paying more attention to the earths carrying and caring capacity. She furthermore highlights the often negative role that foreign assistance plays in curtailing attention to these issues in the Philippines.
Darshini Mahadevia reviews the range of initiatives taken in India over the past decade to improve either urban development or the urban environment or the conditions of life for the cities poor. These are a disparate group of initiatives undertaken by central and local governments, civil society organisations, or the judicial system. Sometimes external assistance is involved, sometimes not. But these efforts are rarely conceived with a view to the possibilities of mutual reinforcement or synergetic interaction. Nor do they attempt to take a people-centred approach in which the concerns of the poor take centre stage in a model that relates all development concerns in a holistic manner. In his article on the growing urban crisis in India, P. G. Dhar Chakrabarti identifies several of the most important causes behind the failure of sub-national governments to halt the decay of living conditions in the countrys cities. More important than the absence of funds for upgrading urban infrastructure and services is the lack of capacity of government agencies and authorities to use the resources available for this purpose. This absence of capacity continues despite constitutional amendments of 1992 giving, in theory, local authorities far greater powers to administer and finance their own affairs. Indeed, the kinds of reforms and improvements in local government capacity that were expected to follow the constitutional amendments have been abysmally slow. The author cites the failure of local authorities to take up highly effective and affordable technologies for rainwater collection, sanitation, and building materials as evidence of their continuing weakness. He calls for a reform of the reform process as a first step in the right direction.
At the mid-way point of this issue, Adrian Atkinson surveys the evolution of external assistance agencies (bilateral and multilateral donors, UN agencies, the development banks and foundations, and international NGOs involved in development activities) support to programmes and projects in cities of the South. These agencies have only very recently taken on an explicit concern for urban sustainable development, but tend to reflect variable and often specious understandings of what the concept means. The main international urban cooperation programmes, such as in transport, sanitation, and water supply, have been fragmented and often politically, socially, and technologically unsustainable, even in the short term. New forms and approaches to external assistance are emerging, albeit slowly, tentatively, and on a small scale. The author highlights some of the most pertinent of these to urban sustainable development, but notes that they are being attempted in a particularly adverse international environment. For example, programmes and projects to alleviate poverty within cities may be implemented within a political and ideological framework that tends to generate more poverty.
In the first of five articles concerned with urban housing and habitat, Erhard Berner argues that because the large majority of housing in cities in developing countries is self-constructed, government-run schemes to provide adequate housing are too small scale to serve the growing demand, and its products too expensive to be affordable for low-income groups. He then presents two brief case studies of efforts to integrate practices of informal housing marketsparticularly incremental structural upgrading by the residentinto government programmes. These were aimed at making the housing provided under government programmes more affordable. In the case of the Community Mortgage Programme in the Philippines, the programme succeeded for about two thirds of the residents in upgraded slums. The poorest third tended to be forced out, however, because they were eventually obliged to pay a rent in the upgraded neighbourhood that they could not afford. In a different approach attempted in Hyderabad, Pakistan, the scheme worked well economically, but failed for other reasons: namely, stiff resistance from those accustomed to profiting from informal and formal land markets.
Geoffrey Payne approaches the question of the costs of formality from a different angle. In many countries, some even within the European Union (EU), a large proportion of housing is constructed outside formal regulatory frameworks, i.e. the dwellings are illegal to some extent. This is done to avoid the costs of meeting official standards that are deemed unaffordable by homeowners. Often these standards are remnants of a colonial past and were never meant to be applied to the population as a whole. In other situations, standards and bureaucratic formalities persist because they yield formal (fees, service charges) and informal (graft) income to interested parties within the government. The author proposes that where standards are set artificially high, they should be lowered in order to help lower-income groups continue to provide and improve housing for themselves without threat of legal sanctions. Understanding what constitutes artificially or unnecessarily high standards in a given national context is a theme on which research is needed. In the following article, Alison Brown shows that the continuing impact of apartheid land-use planning and regulations in Harare impede convenient access by the poor to public spaces that provide both economic opportunity and affordable leisure activities. Planners need to recognise the limited alternatives available within the city for these groups and guide future changes in the urban fabric in a way that enhances opportunities for the poor to help themselves.
The last two articles in this group describe innovative partnerships to bring about better and more affordable housing to the residents of the cities of Cuba and Buenos Aires. In the first, Carlos García-Pleyán describes the process by which a consortium of Cuban architects, planners, and government administrators is attempting to assist in the transformation of low-income urban neighbourhoods and housing provision processes on the island. The group began developing its efforts in the 1990s as Cubas economic and technological support from Eastern Bloc countries disintegrated. This process stimulated new thinking about how to manage with existing resources the transitions needed in Cuban cities. For Habitat-Cuba this means doing things that have not been done before: mobilising residents of low-income areas to participate in the transformation of their neighbourhoods; establishing economic, cultural, and environmental sustainability of the proposed solutions to the problems of habitat; and stimulating both interaction and cooperation among all the social actors involved in the transformation processes. In Buenos Aires, Fernando Murillo says that the approach to government-sponsored low-income housing provision could not be more different: with the encouragement and technical assistance of the World Bank, the city of Buenos Aires developed a programme, Casa Propia, that would rely on a publicprivate sector partnership to finance new low-income housing. Indeed, the private sectors contribution was to be large: scarce land for construction, the design and construction of the apartments, and the bulk of the mortgages. The citys contribution was to identify qualified low-income buyers and to act as guarantor of their mortgages. In practice, the private developers of Casa Propia targeted the project to the top end of the low-income bracket, as higher-cost apartments would yield higher absolute profits than would lower-cost apartments. Indeed, most of the buyers tended to be at or slightly above the income barrier separating the eligible low-income groups and the ineligible lower-middle income groups. True low-income households could not afford the monthly mortgage payments for Casa Propia. And while low-income families could not gain entry into the programme, many living in the communities in the immediate vicinity of Casa Propia were forced to leave because of rising rents in the area. Other nearby low-income residents lost their local green spaces, and experienced greater traffic congestion and other environmental inconveniences. These and other less positive outcomes forced the city and its private partners to reconsider the validity of this form of partnership, and to halt the project after only approximately a third of the total apartments planned had been built.
The debate on Information Technologys capacity to help poor, marginalised, or isolated groups to leapfrog gaps in knowledge and hence development will continue for a long time to come. The two papers included on this subject discuss technologies that undoubtedly are of interest to the major actors in the sustainable development debate. From the perspective of both grassroots and formal sector urban planners and decision makers, Internet connectivity is proving a boon in the North, as Cesare Ottolini argues. However, the evidence of its use in developing countries is patchy and inconclusive, especially concerning urban grassroots actors in the housing and local development fields. New research should be undertaken, involving these actors, to find out how the technology may become more accessible and useful to them. Earth observation technologies, on the other hand, have by virtue of their development costs been limited to use by Northern countries and even then by the better resourced planning and development agencies in them. Carlo Lavalle et al. report on efforts by the European Commission (EC) Centre for Earth Observation of the ECs Directorate General Joint Research Centre to apply earth observation technologies to the understanding of urban development patterns and their consequences for sustainable development as defined by the European Union (EU). These efforts have recently been extended to the analysis of a number of cities in countries that will be joining the EU and megacities in several developing countries. The authors believe this technology will be useful and inexpensive for developing countries both because of its ease of use and the availability of EC funding for technology transfer.
While it is impossible to sum up the lessons to emerge in this double issue in a few short sentences, certain points have emerged repeatedly. The meaning of sustainable cities or sustainable urban development is frequently manipulated to meet the ends of the agencies/persons using the phrase. Yet most of the authors in this collection, and indeed attending the N-AERUS Workshop, tend to agree that the sustainable city is one
Less clear are the value of external assistance (foreign aid) in promoting sustainable development when the basic needs of the population remain grossly unmet; the promotion of partnerships for implementing sustainable development strategies and programmes in the absence of a willingness on the part of the most influential partners to share power and information with the least powerful partners; the decentralisation and privatisation of state responsibilities in the context of vacuums of power and capability at lower levels.
Acknowledgements
The N-AERUS Workshopfor which drafts of these and other papers not included here were preparedwas supported by grants from the European Science Foundation (ESF), the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the French Ministry of International Affairs, and UNRISD. Special thanks are owed to SDC for its grant to enable participants from developing countries to attend the Workshop, while the Institute for the Built Environment of the Federal Polytechnic of Lausanne and ESF also contributed intellectual and organisational support.
On a personal level, I would to thank my co-organisers, Alain Durand-Lasserve and Jean-Claude Bolay, for the collaboration, guidance, and collegiality they offered before and during the Workshop. I would also like to thank colleagues at UNRISD who facilitated many aspects of the Workshop and its follow-up: Wendy Salvo for her able handling of liaison with the United Nations Office in Geneva, where the meeting took place; Liliane Ursache for preparing multiple agendas, participant lists, and other essential documents, and for helping with logistical concerns; Janna Lehmann for administrative backup during and after the Workshop; and Rachael Mann who has assisted with the many aspects involved in preparing this issue. I would also like to thank Deborah Eade for allowing N-AERUS, through Development in Practice, to reach audiences whose contributions to promoting sustainable development in cities are increasingly crucial but who would not necessarily follow debates on the subject in more technically focused journals on urban planning or urban studies. Last, but not least, I would like to thank all the contributors to this issue for their willingness to undertake the multiple and sometimes substantial revisions requested by me in my role as guest editor.
Note
About David Westendorff
David Westendorff has been a research coordinator at UNRISD since 1991. His main areas of research cover the related themes of urban governance and civil society and social movements. His formal training in architecture in the mid-1970s and city and regional planning in the early 1980s allowed him to ignore these topics until real-world experience began to show him who the real builders and planners were.
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