Preface

-Christopher Flavin, President, Worldwatch Institute

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Sometime in 2008, the world will cross an invisible but momentous milestone: the point at which more than half the people on the planet—roughly 3.2 billion human beings— live in cities. The combined impact of a growing population and an unprecedented wave of migration from the countryside means that over 50 million people—equivalent to the population of France—are now added to the world’s cities and suburbs each year. More than at any time in history, the future of humanity, our economy, and the planet that supports us will be determined in the world’s cities.

Urban centers are hubs simultaneously of breathtaking artistic innovation and some of the world’s most abject and disgraceful poverty. They are the dynamos of the world economy but also the breeding grounds for alienation, religious extremism, and other sources of local and global insecurity. Cities are now both pioneers of groundbreaking environmental policies and the direct or indirect source of most of the world’s resource destruction and pollution.

This modern “tale of two cities,” to borrow the title of Charles Dickens’ famously grim book about nineteenth-century London, is something that every policymaker and citizen needs to understand. The battles against our greatest global problems, from unemployment and HIV infections to water shortages, terrorism, and climate change, will be largely won—or lost—in the world’s cities.

Although our species existed for over 100,000 years before the first small cities were built between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers around 4000 BC, the growing dominance of cities is one of the most dramatic changes we have experienced and one for which we are poorly equipped. As recently as the early twentieth century, the vast majority of the world’s people lived in the countryside and practiced subsistence farming. Even today, the electoral systems of many predominantly urban countries—Japan is a good example— give disproportionate political influence to rural citizens. And the international development community often neglects cities when allocating its aid.

In 1950, only New York and Tokyo had populations of more than 10 million. Today there are 20 of these so-called megacities, the bulk of them in Asia and Latin America. But most of the growth in the decades ahead will come in smaller cities. By 2015, demographers project there will be 59 cities with populations between 1 million and 5 million in Africa, 65 such cities in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 253 in Asia. As early as 2030, four out of five of the world’s urban residents will be in what we now call the “developing” world.

The demographic and political impacts of this transformation will test us. In China, for example, millions of people are moving to cities each year, and while that nation has done better than most in meeting the needs of new urban residents, the social strains are showing. And Africa, the least urban continent today, is the area that is urbanizing the fastest—a trend that will undoubtedly put additional social, economic, and political pressure on this already stressed part of the world.

The great majority of the population growth in the new urban centers of Africa and Asia is in the unplanned and underserved settlements commonly known as slums. Over one quarter of urban residents in the developing world—more than half a billion people— lack clean water and sanitation, and 1.6 million die each year as a result. The face of twenty-first century cities is often that of a small, malnourished child living in a vast slum in a city such as Abidjan, Kolkata, or Mexico City, not far from the newly built opera houses, gleaming office buildings, and automobile- choked highways that are now common even in poor countries.

This child frequently lacks electricity, clean water, or even a nearby toilet. While air quality has improved markedly in many European and American cities in recent years, it has become far worse in most cities in the developing world; China alone has 16 of the world’s most polluted cities. For that child in the slum, pollution-related sickness and violence are daily threats, while education and health care are a distant hope.

Our ability to meet the needs of the urban poor is one of the greatest humanitarian challenges of this century. It is also going to shape key global developments—from the security of those who live in nearby luxury apartments to the stability of Arctic ice sheets near the planet’s poles. It is particularly ironic that the battle to save the world’s remaining healthy ecosystems will be won or lost not in the tropical forests or coral reefs that are threatened but on the streets of the most unnatural landscapes on the planet.

At stake is the ability of those ecosystems to provide the food, fiber, fresh water, and climate stability that all cities depend on. Nearly two thirds of these “ecosystem services” have already been degraded, according to the latest scientific estimates. Our challenge is to avoid the fate of the great Mayan cities that lie in ruins in the jungles of southern Mexico and Guatemala—cities that were abandoned not just because of forces at work within their borders but because of the collapse of the surrounding agricultural lands and water resources after centuries of overexploitation.

The task of saving the world’s modern cities might seem equally hopeless—except that it is already happening. This book documents the problems facing the world’s cities, but also a remarkable array of promising advances that have begun to mushroom over the past few years. Particularly striking is the self-reliance being demonstrated by both rich and poor communities that have stepped in to fill gaps left by governments. Even necessities such as food and energy are increasingly being produced by urban pioneers inside city limits.

In Accra, at least 1,000 urban farmers grow food in backyard plots, in empty lots, along roadsides, and in abandoned dumps, fertilizing their crops with “greywater” from kitchens and bathrooms. In Barcelona, over half the new and refurbished buildings now have solar hot water. In Karachi, the urban poor have organized themselves to provide sewer services by having the inhabitants take responsibility for planning, building, and managing the local piping system. In Bogotá, many residents move easily around on the spiffy new bus rapid transit system. On an island in the Yangtze River near Shanghai, a new ecological city is being built from scratch. And in Johannesburg, cooperative businesses have been formed to sell eco-friendly construction materials while creating hundreds of new jobs for city residents.

As these examples suggest, State of the World 2007 covers a topically and geographically diverse urban landscape as we explore the many ways in which cities are key to both human progress and ecological sustainability. My colleague Molly O’Meara Sheehan, who directed this year’s State of the World project, has assembled an inspired team of Institute researchers and outside experts to write this volume. It includes indepth discussions of many of the challenges facing today’s cities as well as exciting stories about the innovators who are finding new ways to address these problems, often in the poorest corners of the developing world. The short “Cityscape” stories that appear between the chapters were prepared by people who know firsthand what is happening in these cities.

We are particularly pleased that two of the world’s great leaders on urban issues—both from the global South—have written eloquent Forewords to State of the World 2007. Anna Tibaijuka, Executive Director of UN-HABITAT, the U.N. body devoted to the well-being of human settlements, has brought the plight of urban slum dwellers to the attention of world leaders. As a woman who grew up in rural Tanzania and studied agricultural economics at university, Anna Tibaijuka provides the perspective of a person who has professionally and personally straddled the rural-urban divide.

Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba in Brazil and former governor of Paraná, who developed the bus rapid transit system that inspired Bogotá’s system and is now being replicated in cities such as Los Angeles and Beijing, wrote our second Foreword. In contrast to those who portray today’s cities as hopeless and apocalyptic places, Jaime Lerner views cities as exciting laboratories of change. That sense of optimism is central to the future of cities—and the world itself.

Foreword - Anna Tibaijuka

-Anna Tibaijuka, Executive Director, UN-HABITAT

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When I first came to UN-HABITAT with a background in agricultural economics and international trade negotiations, I brought my own set of professional and personal prejudices. Like many other development theorists, I felt that although urban development was important, rural development was the first priority. Like many people of my generation in Africa and around the world, I thought of urban areas as a necessary evil. Though they were economic centers, cities led to overcrowding, pollution, and, inevitably, slums.

I had given little thought to the possibilities, even less to the problems and process of urbanization. However, in the years since I became Executive Director of UN-HABITAT I have traveled far and wide. I have experienced firsthand the appalling results of rapid chaotic urbanization.

In city after city, I have been stranded in traffic jams; I have visited men in hospitals suffering from preventable diseases caused by industrial pollution; I have seen slum dwellers living in conditions that do not bear describing and met young women who were raped on their way to the closest public toilet shared by over 500 people; I have walked through flattened terrain that once housed whole communities destroyed by floods and other natural disasters. Whereas in 1950 New York and Tokyo were the only cities with more than 10 million people, today there are 20 megacities, most of which are in the developing world. As cities sprawl, turning into unmanageable megalopolises, their expanding footprint can be seen from space. These hotbeds of pollution are a major contributor to climate change.

Though urbanization has stabilized in the Americas and Europe, with about 75 percent of the population living in urban areas, Africa and Asia are in for major demographic shifts. Only about 35 percent of their populations are urban, but it is predicted that this figure will jump to 50 percent by 2030. The result is already there for all to see: chaotic cities surrounded by slums and squatter settlements.

Of the 3 billion urban dwellers today, it is estimated that 1 billion are slum dwellers. What is worse, if we continue with business as usual that figure is set to double by 2030. If ever there was a time to act, it is now.

Though cities are important engines of growth and provide economies of scale in the provision of services, most of them are environmentally unsustainable. In addition, in this age of increasing insecurity, with more than 50 percent of their residents living in slums without adequate shelter or basic services, many cities are rapidly becoming socially unsustainable.

The U.N. General Assembly first explicitly cited its concern at the “deplorable world housing situation” in 1969, and it declared human settlements a priority for the twentyxvii fifth anniversary of the United Nations in 1971. The next year, the first U.N. conference on the human environment, in Stockholm, marked a conceptual shift from global environmental degradation to its causes— largely urbanization and the impact of human settlements.

In 1977, the Secretary-General of the first U.N. Human Settlements Conference (Habitat I), Enrique Peñalosa, asked “whether urban growth would continue to be a spontaneous chaotic process or be planned to meet the needs of the community.” Yet the urban agenda never received the full attention it deserved. For decades now, donors have given priority to rural development. The Human Settlements Foundation, established at the same time as UN-HABITAT to fund slum upgrading, was never financed. Perhaps this was because in 1977, only one third of the world lived in urban areas.

Today, urbanization is being taken increasingly seriously. In 1996, at Habitat II, 171 countries signed the Habitat Agenda, a comprehensive guide to inclusive and participatory urban development. In 2000, concerned about the number of people who were being marginalized by the rapidly globalizing economy, world leaders committed themselves to the Millennium Development Goals. Many of these address the living conditions of the urban poor, in particular Targets 9 and 11 within Goal 7 on environmental sustainability.

In 2001, the General Assembly passed a resolution that promoted UN-HABITAT from a center into a full-fledged U.N. program and called on UN-HABITAT to establish the World Urban Forum as a think tank on all things urban.

With more than 10,000 delegates, the third session of the World Urban Forum, in Vancouver in 2006, proved that people are increasingly concerned about the future of human settlements. Ministers and mayors, industrialists and slum dwellers, all recognized that their combined efforts are required to overcome the urban crisis.

As we struggle to change our cities, authors and journalists are ever more critical. Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Jacob Riis, and Edward Mayhew were instrumental in improving the urban policies of their day. Today, researchers and authors of reports like this State of the World 2007 help sensitize the larger public to the major issues of our time.

Surprisingly, there was no commonly agreed-upon definition of slums until 2003, when the United Nations published Global Report on Human Settlements: The Challenge of Slums. Where there was a lack of information about urban indicators, there is now a network of Global Urban Observatories. The World Bank, with UN-HABITAT, has established the Cities Alliance that coordinates donor activity in urban areas, particularly in slum upgrading. The United Nations has also launched major campaigns to promote security of tenure and better urban governance.

The political machinery is finally beginning to recognize urbanization. In 2006, the United States Senate held it first hearing on African urbanization, while the British Parliament held its first debate on urbanization in developing countries. United Cities and Local Governments, founded in 2004, has become a legitimate partner in the international arena.

These kinds of international, regional, and local political institutions help create legitimacy for change; more important, they provide a locus for interventions. If our campaigns of advocacy and awareness do not translate into action, we will have failed.

There are signs of hope. There are more and more best practices showing what measures can be taken to improve housing conditions for the urban poor while enforcing environmental laws. Many cities in Southeast and South Asia, in particular, are beginning to reduce the share of their people living in urban poverty. Though all Habitat Agenda partners have contributed to this improvement, it has been spearheaded by central governments and local authorities. Their political will has spurred increased investment in making cities and towns sustainable.

As an African, living in the world’s fastest urbanizing continent, I am aware that we need to persuade everyone—from presidents to ordinary policymakers—of the urgency of urban issues. The Commission for Africa, of which I was a member, highlighted urbanization as the second greatest challenge confronting the continent after HIV/AIDS. As we move into the urban age, we have to change how we see the world, how we describe it, and how we act in it.

Fortunately, the leaders of Africa have taken note. At the Maputo Summit in 2003, the African Heads of State adopted Decision 29 reiterating their commitment to sustainable urbanization, an agenda that was subsequently encouraged by Joaquim Chissano during his term as President of the African Union. In Nigeria, concerned about the country’s urban problems, President Olusegun Obasanjo personally set up the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development.

In his inaugural address in 2006, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania emphasized the need for well-managed cities as a basis for national development. To coordinate urban issues at the regional level, African ministers recently established the African Ministerial Conference on Housing and Development. At the same time, AFRICITIES has been at the forefront of organizing local authorities on the continent.

This is just the beginning. As I walk through the slums of Africa, I find it hard to witness children suffering under what can only be described as an urban penalty. I am astonished at how women manage to raise their families under such appalling circumstances, without water or a decent toilet. The promise of independence has given way to the harsh realities of urban living mainly because too many of us were ill prepared for our urban future. Many cities are confronting not only the problems of urban poverty, but the very worst of environmental pollution. From Banda Aceh to New Orleans, whole communities are being wiped out through no fault of the innocent victims.

We will, all of us, bear the responsibility of a world gone wrong. If we continue as usual, a disastrous future beckons: whole cities swamped by slums, whole societies destroyed by climate change.

Working at UN-HABITAT and with other agencies worldwide, I hope that together we can correct the past failures of urban planning. I hope that the work of organizations like the Worldwatch Institute will motivate more people to take up the cause of environmentally and socially sustainable cities. We are warned, it cannot be business as usual.

Foreword - The Honorable Jaime Lerner

-The Honorable Jaime Lerner, Former Governor of Paraná, Brazil, and former Mayor of Curitiba

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The twentieth century was, par excellence, the century of urbanization. Around the world the supremacy of rural populations over urban ones was reversed and cities experienced an accelerated growth, often beyond the desirable. They have been through unthinkable transformations, which left a fantastic array of challenges and possibilities as a legacy.

If the last century was the century of urbanization, the twenty-first will be the century of cities. It is in the cities that decisive battles for the quality of life will be fought, and their outcomes will have a defining effect on the planet’s environment and on human relations.

Therefore, what can we expect from an urban planet? What will the cities of the future be like? There are those who portray an urban world in apocalyptic colors, who depict cities as hopeless places where a person cannot breathe, move, or live properly due to excess population and automobiles. I, however, do not share these views. My professional experience has taught me that cities are not problems, they are solutions. So I can face an urban world only with optimism.

My strongest hope resides in the speed of transformation. For instance, the demographic projections based on the high birth rates of 20–30 years ago have not been confirmed, allowing us a more encouraging view on the growth of cities for the next years and decades. Renewable energy sources, less-polluting automobiles, new forms of public transportation, and communication technologies that reduce the need for travel are all pushing away the chaos that was predicted for large urban centers. The evolution of technology and its democratization are presenting new perspectives for cities of all sizes and shapes.

In terms of physical configuration, the cities of the future will not differ significantly from the ones of yesterday and today. What will differentiate the good city will be its capacity for reconciling its residents with nature. Socially just and environmentally sound cities—that is the quest!

By having to deal directly with economic and environmental issues, this quest will foster an increasingly positive synergy between cities, regions, and countries. As a consequence, it will motivate new planetary pacts focused on human development.

Still, a certain sense of urgency is vital to positively transform our cities. The idea that action should only be taken after having all the answers and all the resources is a sure recipe for paralysis. The lack of resources cannot be an excuse not to act. The planning of a city is a process that allows for corrections, always. It is supremely arrogant to believe that planning can be done only after figuring out every possible variable.

To innovate is to start! Hence, it is necessary to begin the process. Imagine the ideal, but do what is possible today. Solutions for 20, 30 years ahead are pointless, because by then the problems will probably be different. Therefore we need urban policies that can generate change beginning now, that will not need decades to show results. The present belongs to us and it is our responsibility to open paths.

In the roots of a big transformation there is a small transformation. Start creating from simple elements, easy to be implemented, and those will be the embryos of a more complex system in the future. Although we are living a phase of our history when events happen at a galloping pace, and information travels in the blink of an eye, the decisions regarding urban problems are postponed due to a systematic lack of synchrony with the speed of the events.

The world demands increasingly fast solutions, and it is the local level that can provide the quickest replies. But it is necessary to plan to make it happen. Plan for the people and not for centralized and centralizing bureaucratic structures.

Those responsible for managing this urban world must have their eyes on the future, but their feet firmly on the ground in the present. Those who only focus on the daily needs of people will jeopardize the future of their city. On the other hand, those who think only about the future, disregarding the daily demands, will lose the essential support of their constituents and will not accomplish anything.

It is necessary then not to lose track of the essence of things; to discern within the amazing variety of today’s available information what is fundamental and what is important, the strategic from the daily demands. A clear perspective on future objectives is the best guide for present action—that is, to bind the present with a future idea.

There are three crucial issues that need to be addressed: mobility, sustainability, and identity.

For mobility, the future is on the surface. Entire generations cannot be sacrificed waiting for a subway line while in less than two years complete networks of surface transportation can be set up. In Curitiba, starting in 1974 we gave priority to public buses carrying 25,000 passengers a day in exclusive lanes on a north-south axis. Today, the network carries 2 million passengers throughout the metro area with a single fare.

The key to mobility is the combination and integration of all systems: subway, bus, taxi, cars, and bikes. But these systems cannot compete in the same space. People will select the most convenient combination according to their own needs and travel with a “mobility card.” Operators of each transportation mode will be partners in the system.

Regarding sustainability, the main idea is to focus on what we know instead of what we don’t know. And, above all, to transfer this knowledge to the children, who will then teach their parents. Curitiba’s Garbage That Is Not Garbage Program encouraged separation of recyclable waste in households; children learned about the program at school and helped mobilize their parents.

Simple things from the day-by-day routine of cities can be decoded for children: for instance, how each person can help by reducing the use of the automobile, living closer to work or bringing the work closer to home, giving multiple functions during the 24 hours of the day to urban infrastructure, saving the maximum and wasting the minimum.

Sustainability is an equation between what is saved and what is wasted. Therefore, if sustainability= saving/wasting, when wasting is “zero,” sustainability tends to infinity. Waste is the most abundant source of energy.

A sustainable city cannot afford the luxury of leaving districts and streets with good infrastructure and services vacant. Its downtown area cannot remain idle during great portions of the day. It is necessary to fill it up with the functions that are missing. The “24 hours city” and multiple-use equipment are essential for sustainability.

Finally, identity. Identity is a major factor in the quality of life; it represents the synthesis of the relationship between the individual and his or her city. Identity, self-esteem, a feeling of belonging—all of them are closely connected to the points of reference that people have about their own city.

Rivers, for instance, are important references. Instead of hiding them from view or burying them in concrete, cities should establish riverbanks as valuable territories. By respecting the natural drainage characteristics, cities can make sure the preserved areas provide necessary episodic flooding relief channels and are still used most of the time for recreation in an economic and environmentally friendly way. Parks can work within a similar logic, providing areas that people can relate to and interact with.

Historic districts are also major reference points, closely related to each city since its inception. But these areas often suffer a process of devaluation and degradation. Finding ways to keep these districts alive by connecting identity elements, recycling outdated uses, and hosting a mix of functions is vital.

In Curitiba, a deactivated gunpowder storage facility was transformed into one of the city’s most cherished theaters—Teatro do Paiol. A city is a collective dream. To build this dream is vital. Without it, there will not be the essential involvement of its inhabitants. Therefore, those responsible for the destinies of the city need to draw scenarios clearly—scenarios that are desired by the majority, capable of motivating the efforts of an entire generation.

A city is a structure of change even more than it is a model of planning, an instrument of economic policies, a nucleus of social polarization. The soul of a city—the strength that makes it breathe, exist, and progress—resides in each one of its residents.

Cities are the refuge of solidarity. They can be the safeguards of the inhumane consequences of the globalization process. They can defend us from extraterritoriality and the lack of identity.

On the other hand, the fiercest wars are happening in cities, in their marginalized peripheries, in the clash between wealthy enclaves and deprived ghettos. The heaviest environmental burdens are being generated there too, due to our lack of empathy for present and future generations. And this is exactly why it is in our cities that we can make the most progress toward a more peaceful and balanced planet, so we can look at an urban world with optimism instead of fear.

Chapter 1: An Urbanizing World

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-Kai N. Lee

Thanks to rapid urban growth not just in China but elsewhere in Asia and Africa, some time in the coming year or so the population of the world will become mostly urban. By 2005, the world’s urban population of 3.18 billion people constituted 49 percent of the total population of 6.46 billion. Very soon, and for the first time in the history of our species, more humans will live in urban areas than rural places.

In parallel, human activity has emerged as an environmental force of planetary proportions, replumbing watercourses, exterminating species, and altering the global climate. These changes have brought unprecedented material gains to our species, particularly in the high-income nations. Whether these gains can be shared with all of humanity, and whether they can be sustained, are questions that now seem increasingly urgent, as the impact of humans on the natural world can no longer be considered negligible.

At first sight, cities seem to be the problem rather than the solution: the number of people living in slums has steadily increased, and industrial pollution in rapidly growing economies fouls water and air. Yet the flow of people toward cities seems unlikely to stop or even slow, in part because life chances and economic opportunities are often better in cities, even for many of the poor. From that perspective, urbanization provides a crucial opportunity: to create living patterns harmonized with nature’s rhythms as people continue to create urban habitat.

Kai N. Lee is Rosenburg Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Chapter 2: Providing Clean Water and Sanitation

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-David Satterthwaite and Gordon McGranahan

Clean, convenient water supplies for drinking and bathing and convenient toilets became routine only in the last 100–150 years. I n the 19th century, cities of the industrializing world were notorious for being far less healthy than their rural surrounds, until the sanitary revolution provided them with piped water and sewerage systems. Today, about 1 billion urban dwellers are still waiting for their sanitary revolution.

The health costs of inadequate sanitation are very large. One million or more infants and children still die each year from diseases related directly to inadequate provision of water and sanitation, and hundreds of millions are debilitated by illness, pain, and discomfort.

Most examples of improved water and sanitation are underpinned by government recognition of the legitimacy of the needs of unserved groups, including those who live in illegal settlements. Organizations of the urban poor and other local nongovernmental groups also play an important role in turning the sanitation situation around, demonstrating to governments the possibilities of improved provision and the benefits of working together toward that end.

David Satterthwaite is a Senior Fellow at the Human Settlements Group and Gordon McGranahan is Director of the Human Settlements Group at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London.

Chapter 3: Farming the Cities

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-Brian Halweil and Danielle Nierenberg

Growing food and raising fish and livestock in cities is nothing new. In some ways, cities are responding to the same challenges that urban gardeners have faced for millennia. The hanging gardens in Babylon, for instance, were an example of urban agriculture, while residents of the first cities of ancient Iran, Syria, and Iraq produced vegetables in home gardens. This is partly because cities have traditionally sprung up on the best farmland: the same flat land that is good for farming is also easiest for constructing office buildings, condominiums, and factories . The masses of urban dwellers also create a perfect market for fresh fruits and vegetables.  

Despite all that farming can do for the city landscape and the urban soul, politicians, businesses, and planners continue to regard food as a rural issue that does not demand the same attention as housing, crime, or transportation. Policymakers would be wise to realize the nutritional, social, ecological, and economic benefits of reversing this mindset and putting programs in place to encourage cities to feed themselves. Fortunately, urban politicians, businesses, and planners are beginning to regard urban agriculture as a tool to help cities cope with a range of ecological, social, and nutritional challenges—from sprawl and malnutrition to swelling landfills and the threat of attacks on the food chain.   

Brian Halweil is a Senior Researcher and Danielle Nierenberg is a Research Associate at the Worldwatch Institute.

Chapter 4: Greening Urban Transportation

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-Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy

While each city has its own transportation story, the past 30 years have seen an explosion in the growth of cars in cities worldwide. In 1970, there were 200 million cars in the world, but by 2006 this had grown to more than 850 million—and the number is expected to double by 2030. Heavily marketed and the symbol of success for any aspiring person from Boston to Belgrade to Beijing, the car seems unstoppable.

A city needs a variety of transportation and land use options, not just one . Providing a wide range of options can build resilience into an urban area, especially when it faces crises like climate change and the peaking of world oil production, as well as the need to address a wide range of economic and social functions through transportation . On average, urban car travel uses nearly twice as much energy as urban bus travel, 3.7 times more than light rail or tram travel, and 6.6 times more than electric train travel.

In the past, transportation priorities have generally been set by engineers, not the public. Cities need visions for how they can be transformed from car dependence and car saturation to greener modes of transport. And they need political leaders who can overcome the various barriers that prevent these visions from coming true.

Peter Newman is Professor of City Policy and Director of the Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy, and Jeff Kenworthy is Associate Professor in Sustainable Settlements at the Institute, at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia.

Chapter 5: Energizing Cities

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-Janet L. Sawin and Kristen Hughes

The Industrial Revolution happened in the blink of an eye. In the span of a few generations, cities were transformed from dense areas of narrow streets with small, low dwellings to skyscrapers and sprawling suburbs. Energy use surged as well, and the advent of the fossil fuel age, which provided power for elevators, electric lights, and motor vehicles, enabled cities to become what they are today.

Cities require energy to build infrastructure, to manufacture goods, to transport people, to prepare food, and to light, heat, and cool buildings. The infrastructure itself, including streets, buildings, bridges, and other urban features, represents large quantities of embodied energy—the energy invested in these structures during their lifetimes from the cradle of raw materials, to city block, to eventual grave. Urban residents also consume large amounts of energy indirectly in the food and other goods they import.

Today, cities have an unprecedented opportunity to change the way they supply and use energy. New eco-cities such as Dongtan in China may show the way, even as existing cities turn to technologies rooted in the past—from adobe architecture to passive solar heating. When complemented by conservation, more-efficient technologies, and new decentralized, small-scale energy services, these efforts can help cities confidently navigate the forthcoming peak of cheap oil and natural gas production while reducing the impacts of climate change.

Janet Sawin is a Senior Researcher and Director of the Energy and Climate Change Program at the Worldwatch Institute. Kristen Hughes is a research associate and doctoral candidate at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy, University of Delaware.

Chapter 6: Reducing Natural Disaster Risk in Cities

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-Zoë Chafe

Large natural disasters, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunamis, garner media attention, inspire action, and remain emblazoned in our memories. But the suffering caused by chronic small-scale urban disasters— such as local flooding, water contamination, and landslides— often escapes the limelight. While cities are increasingly home to both types of disaster, they also serve as great places for tackling the underlying issues that leave people vulnerable to these threats .

Although natural disasters are often presented as rare and unexpected tragedies, the reality is that they now occur more frequently, affect more people, and cause higher economic damages than ever before. Urban disaster risk reduction goes hand-in-hand with the aims of poverty reduction, and it can easily be linked to international efforts to achieve a better standard of living for the growing number of urban dwellers struggling to make ends meet.

Already w e are seeing hints of the ways that climate change will affect cities by amplifying natural hazards, including sea- level rise. Of the 33 cities projected to have at least 8 million residents each by 2015, some 21 are coastal cities that will have to contend with the impacts of rising seas , however severe they may be.

Effective urban disaster risk management hinges on advocacy for risk awareness, good governance, proper technical and communication infrastructure, and the empowerment of all those who are at risk.

Zoë Chafe is a Staff Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute.

Chapter 7: Charting a New Course for Urban Public Health

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-Carolyn Stephens and Peter Stair

For millions of people around the world, cities are places of hope and growth, but also despair and death. For a tiny minority, cities and towns are meccas of long life, health, and even luxury. F or the majority of urban residents, however, they offer  the hope of opportunity but are often only home to pollution, disease, and insecurity.

As people move into low-income settlements that are vaster and denser than ever before, they are struggling to prosper in environments at least as challenging as the cities of Victorian Europe. These are places unable to draw in enough fresh water or to channel excrement away safely. Residents live in dilapidated, intensely crowded homes. They have little access to health services, and few are able to get the education or jobs that could raise them out of their situation. Although cities have gained a reputation as healthy places to live, the urban poor often have higher rates of infant deaths and under-five mortality than their rural counterparts.

Our urban future needs creative new solutions. Equity is perhaps the key to the more complex social problems of cities—and it also can lead toward sustainability. A city where all residents live together in peace, sharing the same spaces and the same resources, is far from today’s urban reality. A city where people think of the next generation and the planet as a whole is also far from this reality. But neither vision is impossible—either to imagine or to achieve.

Carolyn Stephens is a senior lecturer in environment and health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a visiting professor in the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil. Peter Stair, a former MAP Fellow at Worldwatch Institute, is a Master’s candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California–Berkeley.

Chapter 8: Strengthening Local Economies

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-Mark Roseland with Lena Soots

The wealth of a nation depends in large measure on the economic health of its cities. Strong local economies are the foundation of strong communities that can grow and withstand the pressures created by an increasingly urbanized world. And strong communities require a holistic approach that not only provides the traditional deliverables of economic development—jobs, income, wealth, security—but also protects the environment, improves community infrastructure, increases and develops local skills and capacity, strengthens the social fabric, and respects heritage and cultural identity.

While individual actions and lifestyle choices, such as buying organic produce, are important personal contributions, strengthening local economies requires a collective shift in individual actions and political choices. The cooperative economy of Emilia Romagna in northern Italy, the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, Vancity Credit Union in Vancouver, the Women’s International Sewing Cooperatives of Nueva Vida, and the campaigns for local trade across North America are all examples of the potential of community mobilization to help strengthen local economies.

Strong local economies give communities the capacity and resources to address specific and immediate problems such as the provision of health care, adequate housing, clean water and sanitation, and disaster prevention and response. Human settlements—large and small, rich and poor—need strong local economies to withstand the pressures created by an increasingly urbanized world.

Mark Roseland is Director of the Centre for Sustainable Community Development (CSCD) and a professor in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Lena Soots is a researcher at the CSCD.

Chapter 9: Fighting Poverty and Injustice in Cities

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-Janice E. Perlman with Molly O’Meara Sheehan

Poor urban neighborhoods face the worst of two worlds: the environmental health hazards of underdevelopment, such as lack of clean drinking water, and of industrialization, such as toxic wastes. Yet their residents tread lightly on the planet, using few resources and generating low levels of waste in comparison with their wealthier neighbors. The gap between rich and poor in cities from Nairobi to New York means that those with the fewest resources suffer most from pollution generated by the wealthiest.

What can be done to make our urban future a desirable and sustainable one? What kinds of cities foster conviviality and creativity? How can poverty and environmental degradation be alleviated and a voice for the disenfranchised be ensured?

There is no magic bullet for creating sustainable, equitable, and peaceful cities. But there are some necessary if not sufficient conditions for such transformations: transparent governance, decent work or a basic income, innovative infrastructure to conserve the environment, intelligent land use with integrated community development, and social cohesion along with cultural diversity. Bridging divides will require a new mindset. Unless— and until— we are ready to expand our conception of “we” from “me and my family” to my community, city, country, and planet, the gap will continue to grow.

Janice E. Perlman, a Guggenheim Award recipient, is the founder and President of the Mega-Cities Project, an international nonprofit, and a former professor of city and regional planning who consults widely on urban poverty and environmental justice issues. Molly O’Meara Sheehan is a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute and Project Director for State of the World 2007.