State of the World 2003: Uniting Divided Cities

Worldwatch Live Online Discussion

Molly O'Meara Sheehan: Senior Researcher

February 28, 2003 - 1:00pm EDT

Unable to afford “formal” dwellings, as many as 1 billion people worldwide seek shelter in “informal” settlements, often in the most precarious places—on steep hillsides or floodplains, in garbage dumps, or downstream from industrial polluters—living not only with the constant threat of possible eviction, but also the risks of natural disasters, and disease from lack of water and toilets.

As megacities in the global south shoot up, Sheehan explores what governments, and slum residents themselves can do and are doing to help citizens feel secure in their own homes, make a living, and improve their environment.

Steve Conklin, Worldwatch Institute: Welcome to this week's State of the World 2003 online discussion. Today we welcome Worldwatch Senior Researcher Molly O'Meara Sheehan. Molly will be answering questions related to her State of the World 2003 chapter, Uniting Divided Cities. Welcome, Molly.

Molly O'Meara Sheehan: Thank you, Steve. I'm looking forward to the chat.

Minneapolis, MN: Hi, Molly. I am aware of the UN HABITAT's Sustainable Urbanization program. Are there similar programs at the international or US level? Are any being actively adopted by city (or other) governments?

Molly O'Meara Sheehan: Are you familiar with the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI)? It’s a group of local authorities from around the world who have been very active in negotiations of the climate treaty and other international agareements.

ICLEI has been working with local governments to draft local versions of the Agenda 21 for environment and development that was agreed on at the Eart Summit in Rio in 1992.

To draft a Local Agenda 21, each city government must consult extensively with citizens to survey existing social, economic, and environmental conditions and to draft a list of local priorities.

By 1996, some 2,000 municipalities worldwide had introduced some version of a Local Agenda 21, and by 2002 the figure reached 6,416 local governments in 113 countries.

Mayors in mostly northern countries initially dominated the effort, with Leicester in the United Kingdom and Hamilton-Wentworth in Canada being early pioneers, but southern cities are now emerging as strong leaders.

For example, once citizens became engaged in participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the city revamped its environmental planning to include greater citizen involvement. Manizales, Colombia and Nakuru, Kenya are also showing the way.

stamford, ct: I find that fact that enormous populations of people reside in these 'slum' cities horrifying, and amazing. What can be done to transition these populations into a more humane living environment--within the bounds of their social and financial restrictions?

Molly O'Meara Sheehan: Thanks for the question. Slum dwellers themselves have been showing the way in recent years. In 1996 India’s National Slum Dwellers Federation and partner NGOs teamed with counterparts in South Africa to create Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI). Today, SDI has members from around the world: Argentina, Cambodia, Colombia, India, Kenya, Madagascar, Namibia, Nepal, the Philippines, South, Africa, Swaziland, Thailand, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Using the SDI approach, communities conduct their own censuses, set up savings accounts that can be turned into revolving loan funds for starting up small businesses, and negotiate with officials to change policies in their favor. Activists exchange information and learn from each other. In South Africa, for instance, slum communities that have joined the South African Homeless People’s Federation have established savings groups. They pooled their savings to start a revolving loan fund, which opened for business in 1995 and attracted the support of the South African government.

In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to take another example, poor people formed the Solidarity and Urban Poor Federation in 1994 to save money and convince the municipal government to stop evicting people from informal settlements. Through SDI, sidewalk slum dwellers from Mumbai helped Phomn Penh’s poor start their first savings groups. Pooling $5,000 in savings that attracted matching funds from aid agencies, the Cambodians opened a fund that provides loans for housing and small businesses in 1998 that has served 1,500 families so far. Today, the government has stopped evictions and works with the federation to secure alternative land for families displaced by development projects.

Washington, D.C.: Hi. I was wondering if you could comment on the current state of the sustainable urban agenda and why it is important for local communities to be working on global issues?

Molly O'Meara Sheehan: Late last year, the UN held the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. After 3 decades of international meetings and treaties since the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the challenge remains to improve the welfare of billions of people without further endangering Earth’s ecosystems. As the human environment is increasingly an urban one, urban governance and design offer opportunities to meet this challenge. Most of the 2 billion people that the UN estimates will be added to world population in the next thirty years will be in urban areas -- specifically, urban areas of the developing world.

It's important for local communities to tackle global issues because we all share the same planet. And human activities have pushed the Earth's support systems to their limits. One group of scientists has estimated that people have transformed half of Earth’s land surface through agriculture, forestry, and urbanization; contributed to a 30-percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; and today use more than half of all available surface fresh water.

Research Triangle Park, NC: Where do you see the strengths and weaknesses of US foreign policy in regards to this issue? More specifically along the lines of economic policies such as subsidies and loans.

Molly O'Meara Sheehan: Thanks, I don't know how to answer such a huge question in a small space, but I'll try. Some dedicated people at the US Agency for International Development (US AID) have been trying to raise the profile of urban issues, but have encountered some difficulty. In general, the idea that poverty reduction efforts must be targeted at rural areas is a myth that persists in aid circles.
U.S. support for family planning also took a hit early in the current administration. Slums generally take root when governments cannot meet the needs of large populations of poor people. Expanding access to education, reproductive health care, and family planning, are therefore criticial.
The U.S. could do more in many other areas as well. Take trade rules, for example. Poor nations get foreign currency to repay loans through trade, relying heavily on exports of agriculture and textiles, which remain protected in rich nations. The average person in a developing country selling into world markets confronts barriers that are roughly twice as high as those faced by counterparts in industrial nations. OECD nations spent some $300 billion in subsidies to their own farmers last year. The U.S. Farm Bill makes it even harder for farmers in developing nations to make a living. In 2002, the United Nations Development Programme called on the World Trade Organization to open up its meetings to counter the back-room deals made by a handful of wealthy nations that effectively limit the power of developing nations in setting trade rules.

Wilton, CT: Hi, Molly! Thanks for taking the time for this chat. When I saw the statistic that 1 billion people are living in these "slums", I was horrified. It's so easy for people to stay in their own comfortable worlds and look the other way. My question is that while conducting your research, have you noticed that governments both in the U.S. and internationally are truly dedicated to helping these people or are promises made but not really kept? I'm just wondering how often these people are overlooked and seen as more of a burden. Thanks!

Molly O'Meara Sheehan: Thanks for the question. I think there are many dedicated people in governments int the U.S. and around the world who have committed entire lifetimes to working on issues related to urban development. But you're nonetheless correct that poor people are often overlooked when it comes to policymaking. Money does talk, and many poor people are left without voices in political arenas.

Those urban slum population statistics are helpful in this regard. Slums are generally understood to be urban areas with miserable living conditions; they vary dramatically from place to place and defy easy definition. Surveys and census data are often incomplete, and may miss entire neighborhoods. Nonetheless, the UN estimates that between 830 million and 1 billion people worldwide live in slums, with slum dwellers accounting for 56% of the urban population in Africa, 37% in Asia, 26% in Latin America.

These attempts to count people are one small step towards greater political power.

Hilo, Hawaii: "Slums" aren't limited to poor nations or to urban settings. Here in Hawaii, we have many people living in "affordable bedroom communities" without access to "safe" potable water or easy access to other basic public services and facilities. Many live in "informal" structures. These neighborhoods were made possible by heavy dependence on automobiles and relatively inexpensive fuel. What would extended periods of high fuel prices do to these satelite neighborhoods and their nuclear community?

Molly O'Meara Sheehan: Thanks for writing in despite the big time difference. I'm not familiar with the situation in Hilo. Are you referring to a situation in which people rely on private automobiles to drive to work? If so, I'd imagine that carpools, buses, and other sorts of transportation switches might be needed if fuel prices were to rise. If these neighborhoods could organize politically, they might be able to put pressure on governments to extend public transportation services.

Hilo, Hawaii: A major component of "affordable housing" is overall living costs. Many people are moving farther out in search of "affordable" homes, only to pay high transportation costs. Transportation is too often seen as a separate and independent issue in plannig for "affordable housing". What are the most basic requirements in community planning for affordable transportation? What are the levels of density required to provide affordable transportation practical?

Molly O'Meara Sheehan: Yes, you're right that affordable transporation and affordable housing are not treated as a whole. To put this in historical context, the transportation engineers who sited U.S. highways often made their decisions in isolation from the planners who zoned land as residential, agricultural, or rural, and decided on such matters as the height of buildings and width of sidewalks. The planners themselves did not foresee the power of the roads to transform their plans. But when highway engineers ran highways through cities and placed intersections near cities on land zoned for ?agriculture,? they ensured that pressure would build for that land to be rezoned for urban uses.
As for your questions on transportation and density levels, some of the best research I know of on this issue has been done by researchers at Murdoch University in Australia. They've identified a critical threshold of 30 people per hectare below which public transit is not viable. The U.S. cities they studied had, on average 14 people per hectare, whereas the European cities they surveyed had 50.

Steve Conklin, Worldwatch Institute: Thank you for joining us today Molly, and thanks to all the visitors that participated in the discussion. Join us next week as Gary Gardner talks about his State of the World 2003 chapter, Engaging Religion in the Quest for Sustainability.

Molly O'Meara Sheehan: Thank you very much. I apologize for any and all typos, and I look forward to doing this again.