Sustainability the Environment and Urbanisation

Cedric Pugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134174539
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique publique en matière d'aménagement du territoire

The 1992 Rio Summit and subsequent literature and debate has focused on 'green' issues such as biodiversity, climate change and marine pollution. Much less has been written concerning the 'brown' agenda: factors such as poor sanitation and water quality, air pollution and housing problems which are particularly prevalent in Third World cities.

Sustainability, the Environment and Urbanisation provides a comprehensive overview of the brown agenda, with case studies and examples from a number of Southern countries. It looks at the broad economic context behind the problems and covers the conceptual issues of sustainability, infrastructure and health programmes, as well as assessing environmental appraisal methods.

Clearly written, with contributions from some of the leading experts in the field, the book will appeal to students on environmental and developmental courses, researchers, and all those concerned with the 'healthy cities' movement.

Chapter One

Sustainable Development and Cities

Diana Mitlin and David Satterthwaite¹

The term ‘sustainable development’ has become widely used to stress the need for the simultaneous achievement of development and environmental goals. As long as its meaning is kept this unspecific, few people disagree with it. But as governments or international agencies develop projects or programmes to implement it, so the disagreements surface as there are so many interpretations as to what is ‘development’ and how it should be achieved, what constitutes adequate attention to environmental aspects and what is to be ‘sustained’ by sustainable development. Among the proponents of sustainable development, there is a large gulf between those whose primary concern is conservation and those whose primary concern is meeting human needs (Adams, 1990). At present, the bias in most discussions on sustainable development is towards conservation. Even within ‘environmentalists’, there is the gulf between those whose primary concern is protecting the natural environment from destruction or degradation and those whose concerns include reducing environmental hazards for human populations and promoting environmental justice for those people lacking a healthy environment and adequate natural resource base for their livelihoods.

This primary concern of this chapter is how the unmet needs of city inhabitants, especially in the South, can be articulated and addressed, without imposing environmental costs on other people (including those living in areas around cities) or depleting environmental capital (which in effect imposes environmental costs on future generations). This requires considerable change for most city and municipal authorities as the citizens within their jurisdiction acquire more power to define their needs and influence how they are addressed. It also means expanding the responsibilities of city and municipal authorities, for the use of resources and generation of wastes within city boundaries have to take account of the needs and rights of others living elsewhere and of future generations. This chapter seeks to provide a framework for considering the multiple goals that are embedded within the term ‘sustainable development’ for cities and to consider the potential that cities have for meeting the priorities of their citizens while also reducing the degradation or depletion of environmental capital. Before presenting this framework, we consider what sustainable development is seeking to sustain.

WHAT IS TO BE SUSTAINED?

One of the main sources of disagreement within the debate about sustainable development is what is to be ‘sustained’. Some consider that it is natural or environmental capital that has to be sustained and that this commitment to sustaining environmental capital has to be combined with a commitment to ensuring that people’s needs are met; this is how it is understood in the rest of this chapter and in our previous work on sustainable development and cities. But for many people writing on sustainable development, it is different aspects of development or of human activities that have to be sustained – for instance sustaining economic growth or ‘human’ development or achieving social or political sustainability. Thus, a discussion of sustainable development might be discussing how to sustain a person’s livelihood, a development project, a policy, an institution, a business, a society or some subset of a society (for example a ‘community’), culture or economic growth (in general or for some specific country). It may also be focusing on sustaining a nation, a city or a region. Box 1.1 gives more details of the different meanings given to the ‘sustainable’ part of sustainable development.

Box 1.1 THE MEANING OF SUSTAINABILITY

There is considerable confusion as to what is to be ‘sustained’ by ‘sustainable development’. For instance, is it natural systems or human activities that are to be sustained and at what scale are they to be sustained (for example local projects, cities, nations, the sum of all activities globally).

The term ‘sustainable’ is most widely used in reference to ecological sustainability. But during preparations for the Earth Summit (held in 1992) and ever since, an increasing number of writers and international organizations began to include such concepts as ‘social sustainability’, ‘economic sustainability’, ‘community sustainability’ and even ‘cultural sustainability’ as part of sustainable development. Meanwhile, many aid/development assistance agencies were giving another meaning to the term sustainable development as this was the label given to ensuring that their development projects continued to operate and meet development objectives when these agencies’ external support was cut off at the ‘end of the project’. In this sense, ‘sustainability’ was far more about operation and maintenance (or ‘institutional and managerial sustainability’) than about any concept of ecological sustainability. A concern for project sustainability may give little or no consideration as to whether the sum of all the ‘sustainable’ projects would prove sustainable in an ecological sense.

Some of the literature about sustainable development discusses ‘social sustainability’ although there is no consensus as to what this means. For instance, some consider social sustainability as the social preconditions for sustainable development while others imply that it is the need to sustain specific social relations, customs or structures. But it is difficult to equate ‘social sustainability’ with the goals of Our Common Future. When judged by the length of time for which they were sustained, some of the most ‘successful’ societies were also among the most exploitative, where the abuse of human rights was greatest. These are not societies we would want to ‘sustain’. Development includes strong and explicit social objectives and achieving the development goals within sustainable development demands social change, not ‘sustainability’ in the sense of ‘keeping them going continuously’. Indeed, the achievement of most of the social, economic and political goals which are part of ‘sustainable development’ requires fundamental changes to social structures including changes to government institutions and, in many instances, to the distribution of assets and income. This can hardly be equated with ‘social sustainability’.

Discussions on ‘social sustainability’ when defined as the social conditions necessary to support environmental sustainability are valuable in so far as they stress that natural resources are used within a social context and it is the rules and values associated with this context that determine both the distribution of resources within the present generation and between the future generations and the present. Discussions of ‘social sustainability’ that stress the value of social capital or the social conditions that allow or support the meeting of human needs are also valuable. Our avoidance of the term is both because it can invite confusion with the other interpretations and because it can imply that there is only one way to achieve ecological sustainability whereas there is generally a range of possible options.

There has also been some discussion of ‘cultural sustainability’ because of the need within human society to develop shared values, perceptions and attitudes which help to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development. It is clear that development should include as a critical component a respect for cultural patrimony. Culture implies knowledge and a vast wealth of traditional knowledge of relevance to sustainable natural resource use (and to development) is ignored or given scant attention in development plans. But the term ‘cultural sustainability’ seems rather imprecise for the need to recognize the importance of culture and respect it within development. Culture is never static; to argue that it should be sustained is to deny an important aspect, changing and developing nature.

(Hardoy et al, 1993)

In contrast to this work that discusses how to sustain some aspect of ‘development’, there is also a large literature on sustainable development where there is no ‘development’ component at all in the sense of better meeting human needs (Mitlin, 1992). In such literature, it is common to find the terms ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustainability’ used interchangeably with no recognition that the two mean or imply different things. A review of the literature on sustainable development (Mitlin, 1992:11) commented that:

Much of the writing, and many discussions, in the North concentrate primarily on ‘sustainability’ rather than sustainable development. These authors’ main focus is how present environmental constraints might be overcome and the standard of living maintained. The need for development, of ensuring that all people in the world might obtain the resources they need for survival and development is ignored or given little attention.

This is also true for much of the literature on sustainable development published since then. The exclusive concentration of many authors on ‘ecological sustainability’ as the only goal of sustainable development is one reason why it has often proved difficult to engage the interest of development practitioners in environmental issues. There is much discussion under the heading of ‘sustainable development’ about the actions needed to sustain the global resource base (soils, biodiversity, mineral resources, forests) and about limiting the disruption to global cycles as a result of human activities – especially greenhouse gas emissions and the depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. Such discussion tends to forget three other critical environmental issues or to downplay their importance. The first is the hundreds of millions of people in both rural and urban areas who lack access to safe and convenient supply of water for drinking and domestic use.² The second is the hundreds of millions of households who depend for part or all of their livelihood on raising crops or livestock. Their poverty (and the malnutrition and ill-health that generally accompanies it) are the result of inadequate access to water and fertile land. This lack of access to land and water for crop cultivation or livestock underlies the poverty of around a fifth of the world’s population (see for instance, Jazairy et al, 1992). Yet many discussions about ‘sustainability’ with regard to soil erosion and deforestation give little or no consideration to the needs of these people and may indeed portray these people as ‘the problem’.

The third environmental issue whose importance is often downplayed (or not even mentioned) is the ill-health and premature death caused by pathogens in the human environment – in water, food, air and soil. Each year, these contribute to the premature death of millions of people (mostly infants and children) and to the ill health or disability of hundreds of millions more. As the World Health Organization (WHO, 1992a) points out, this includes:

• the three million infants or children who die each year from diarrhoeal diseases and the hundreds of millions whose physical and mental development is impaired by repeated attacks of diarrhoea – largely as a result of contaminated food or water.

• the two million people who die from malaria each year, three quarters of whom are children under five; in Africa alone, an estimated 800,000 children died from malaria in 1991 (WHO, 1992b). Tens of millions of people suffer prolonged or repeated bouts of malaria each year.

• the hundreds of millions of people of all ages who suffer from debilitating intestinal parasitic infestations caused by pathogens in the soil, water or food, and from respiratory and other diseases caused or exacerbated by pathogens in the air, both indoors and outdoors.

The proportion of infants who die from infectious and parasitic diseases among households living in the poorest quality housing in Africa, Asia and Latin America is several hundred times higher than for households in west Europe or North America; all such diseases are transmitted by airborne, waterborne or foodborne pathogens or by disease vectors such as insects or snails. Of the 12.2 million children under the age of five who die each year in the South, 97 per cent of these deaths would not have occurred if these children had been born and lived in the countries with the best health and social conditions (WHO, 1995). One estimate suggested that in cities in the South, at least 600 million people live in homes and neighbourhoods in which the shelters are of such poor quality and so overcrowded and with such inadequacies in provision for piped water, sanitation, drainage and health care that their health and indeed their lives are constantly threatened (Cairncross et al, 1990:1–24).³ This is more than the total urban population of the South just 30 years ago. Thus, much of the literature on sustainable development tends to ‘marginalize the primary environmental concerns of the poor, even as they claim to incorporate them’ (see Chapter 4 of this volume).

As soon as ‘sustainable development’ comes to include a concern for meeting human needs, so it must consider why so many people’s needs are not currently met – and this means considering the underlying economic, social and political causes of poverty and deprivation. Most of the literature on sustainable development does not do so. It does not question the current distribution of power and the ownership of resources except where these are considered a factor in ‘unsustainable practices’. It assumes that national conservation plans or national sustainable development plans can be implemented within existing social and political structures. Much of the literature assumes that the integration of conservation and development will meet people’s needs which, as Adams (1990) points out, is disastrously naive.

However, those whose primary concern within sustainable development is conservation or environmental protection can point to the fact that the most powerful government agencies or ministries concerned with ‘development’ and the largest and most powerful international development agencies also failed to consider the environmental implications of their projects or the sum of the environmental impacts of their projects on global problems. Development projects have often been a cause of environmental degradation rather than a solution to environmental problems (Adams, 1990). Although the debate about sustainable development has helped make such agencies more aware of environmental issues, this certainly does not mean that most international agencies and most governments in the South are taking these aspects seriously. For example, many development assistance agencies have never funded a public transport project and many may still not have considered the long-term implications for greenhouse gas emissions of the support they give to transport and energy.

While wanting to encourage greater attention in discussions about sustainable development to the needs, rights and priorities of low income groups, or of other groups whose needs and priorities are ignored, we do not think it appropriate to discuss this under ‘sustainability’. We choose to use the concept of sustainability only with regard to natural capital, both because of the lack of consensus as to what sustainability might mean when applied to human activities and institutions and because we believe the term has been inappropriately applied. Ensuring that human rights are respected and that people have the right to express their own needs and to influence the ways in which they are fulfilled fall more clearly within the ‘development’ component of sustainable development.

This means that for governments and international ‘development’ agencies who wish to move from a concern with development to a concern with sustainable development, they have to add on to existing development goals the requirement that their achievement minimizes the depletion of natural capital – for instance the degradation of renewable resources such as soil and the depletion of scarce nonrenewable resources and/or the degradation of ecosystems. This allows one to avoid the confusions inherent in such concepts as social sustainability or cultural sustainability. Thus, desirable social, economic or political goals at community, city, regional or national level are best understood as being within the ‘development’ part of sustainable development, while the ‘sustainable’ component is with regard to ecological sustainability. It also required a consideration of the environmental implications of development initiatives that are not only concerned with their environmental impacts on their surrounds but also on their contribution to global environmental problems.

A FRAMEWORK FOR CONSIDERING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND CITIES

Most of the literature on sustainable development does not mention cities. As one paper commented (Houghton et al, 1994), this reluctance to discuss sustainable development and cities is probably because many of those who write on environmental issues have long regarded cities with disdain, even if they live in cities. Among those who write about sustainable development, many probably consider cities as a key part of ‘the problem’. This has meant a rather poorly developed literature on sustainable development and cities, even though urban centres now inclu...