SUSTAINABLE CITIES

In 2008 for the first time there were more people living in the world’s cities than in rural areas, which amounts to 3.3 billion people. There are currently almost 30 cities with populations over 10 million, the largest being Tokyo with 33.8 million residents. As urban populations continue to grow, the issue of creating sustainable cities becomes ever more pressing.

The World Urban Forum will be meeting in Rio de Janeiro (population 12.5 million) from 22-26 March this year to discuss pressing issues such as providing basic facilities to urban poor, creating more integrated, functional cities, and reducing urban pollution. Since the inception of the World Urban Forum in 2002 it has quickly become the premier conference on cities. The Forum brings together government leaders, ministers, mayors, members of national, regional and international associations of local governments, non-governmental and community organizations,

academics, grassroots women's organizations, youth and slum dwellers groups as partners working for better cities.

A particular concern for policy makers and government officials is the rapid growth of urban slums in developing countries. Chii Akporji from the Cities Alliance, a coalition of cities and development partners including the UN and World Bank, explains “Poverty is increasingly an urban phenomenon. Cities are under tremendous pressure as people arrive from rural areas or other countries for economic and cultural reasons, or because of natural disasters or conflict. A lot of developing countries are unable to handle these masses of people coming in. That’s why you have a deficit of infrastructure, a deficit of finance, and a deficit in so many key areas, which only exacerbates an already bad situation.”

The UN-HABITAT State of the World’s Cities 2008/09 report revealed that one out of every three people living in cities in the developing world lives in a slum. The report used five measures of shelter deprivation to define slum conditions - lack of access to improved water, lack of access to sanitation, non-durable housing, insufficient living area, and security of tenure. According to this measure, the proportion of people living in slum conditions in urban areas is highest in sub-Saharan Africa, where 62% of the region’s urban population lives in a slum or suffers from one or more of the five shelter deprivations that define a slum. Slum concentrations throughout Asia vary widely,

from an average of 43 per cent in Southern Asia and 37 per cent in Eastern Asia, to 24 per cent in Western Asia and 28 per cent in South-Eastern Asia.

While the “green agenda” has received increasing attention in recent years, policymakers working on matters related to sustainable cities tend to focus on the “brown agenda” – these are localized, immediate and health-threatening environmental issues that are associated with the prevalence of slums in the urban environments of developing countries, such as lack of safe water, inadequate sanitation and poor waste management.

Anna Tibaijuka, Executive Director of UN-HABITAT, points out that urban inequality has a direct impact on all aspects of human development, including health, nutrition, gender equality and education. “In cities where spatial and social divisions are stark or extreme, lack of social mobility tends to reduce people’s participation in the formal sector of the economy and their integration in society. This exacerbates insecurity and social unrest which, in turn, diverts public and private resources from social services and productive investments to expenditures for safety and security. Pro-poor social programmes, equitable distribution of public resources and balanced spatial and territorial development, particularly through investments in urban and inter-urban infrastructure and services, are among the most effective means for mitigating or reversing the negative consequences of urban inequality.”