The Quito Papers and the New Urban Agenda

Un-Habitat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351216043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The future is urban. Indeed, the battle for sustainable development will be won or lost in cities. Not a moment too soon, then, that urbanization is suddenly at the centre of global policy making. In 2015 the governments of the UN adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and in 2016 they adopted the New Urban Agenda. However, the question of how these Agendas will be pursued concretely remains. Unfortunately, the prevailing model is rigidly technocratic Charter of Athens from 1933—the strict functionalist separation of activities that it prescribes still dominates planning practices worldwide.

The purpose of The Quito Papers and the New Urban Agenda is to start a discussion that both challenges this status quo and opens up new lines of enquiry. It intentionally does not propose a manifesto made up of simplistic slogans and recommendations as cities in the 21st century are more fragile and complex. Its content, therefore, is intentionally broad, ranging from architecture, planning and urban design, to land ownership and regulation, water management and environmental philosophy. This multifaceted assembly of perspectives critiques the tenets of the Charter of Athens, identify new trends and propose new insights on contemporary urbanization.

Part One outlines the overall challenges facing cities in the 21st century and Part Two offers a number of conceptual frameworks and approaches for dealing with those challenges. Each Part is also composed of a body of illustrated arguments, synthesized from selectively-abridged background papers from over 15 commissioned authors, interspersed with in-depth papers.

1

FORCES SHAPING 21ST CENTURY URBANIZATION

INTRODUCTION

Population dynamics have enormous impacts on national and global development and pose particular challenges to urbanization now and in the future. There is an unprecedented diversity of demographic structures across the world, including age distribution and population growth. The growing differences between Europe, Japan and the Land-Rich Developed Countries and Sub-Saharan Africa require focus- and speed-differentiated approaches to good urbanization.

At the same time the world faces new challenges related to emerging and accelerated streams of migration, new geographies of control over rural and urban land and a stressed relationship with water, representing a ‘new’ history in the making. They have the potential to reshape the urban world as they will surely alter its ongoing trajectory. And as these challenges are supranational in nature, they will require a shared vision and responses that are more flexible than they have been in the past.

A massive loss of habitat is accelerating and driving new flows of migration. Emerging flows of migration point to structural changes in the areas of origin. A sharp increase in rural land acquisitions is feeding the loss of habitat, with debt servicing part of the logic of extraction. These represent a new phase of advanced capitalism. As a consequence, new and emergent flows of migrants in search of a bare life rarely have an option of return.

Another accelerating phenomenon is large-scale urban land acquisitions which are already de-urbanizing cities and undermining public control. In particular, the corporate buying of urban properties and land is taking on worrying new features.

Water is the last substantive commons on the planet. All the same, the risks caused by an excess of water require a rethinking as much as the lack of access to water. There is at the same time too little and too much water. Urban development can no longer just assume that water can be simply extracted from the ground and moved to where it is needed. There seems to be a paradoxical relationship between water-stressed cities and availability of rain, which should be recognized as a resource. But time is running out fast—radical transformative innovation is needed to fend off disaster.

The reach of human activity is now pervasive, challenging traditional notions of liberal democracy. Clearly democracy needs to evolve if it is to survive; however, new agents and non-agents are complicating the cooperation that would be required for this evolution. They are also making responsibility increasingly difficult to assign and creating a preponderance of ‘veto players’, all of which are leading to governance gridlock. Ultimately this means that liberal democracies the world over are experiencing a crisis of legitimacy. If they are to survive it, states will have to muster the internal coherence to resist populism and the external coherence to be more cooperative.

This section extracts from and synthesizes recent work by Alka Dev, Saskia Sassen, Jane Harrison, Henk Ovink, Dale Jamieson and Marcello Di Paola.

Fig 4: The universe of cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants

© UN-Habitat / Shlomo Angel, NYU

The UN Population Division divides the world into two mega-regions: More Developed Countries and Less Developed Countries. The classifications that appear above and throughout this book subdivide the mega-region of the More Developed Countries into two (Land-Rich Developed Countries and Europe and Japan), to create groupings with similar land availability, and the mega-region of the Less Developed Countries into six. The relatively similar urbanization patterns of the resulting eight world regions of the sample facilitate monitoring and reporting.

1.1 Growing differences in population dynamics require focus- and speed-differentiated approaches to good urbanization

Population dynamics are closely linked to development challenges, including urbanization

While the total number of people in the world is growing more slowly than in past decades, future population growth will be older and almost entirely urban. In 2016, there were 7.4 billion people in the world, having grown by 2 billion since 1990. According to the United Nations projections, the world’s population could reach 9.7 billion by 2050.

Alka Dev notes that, overall, both education and life expectancy have improved on average; people lived up to 70 years during 2010–2015, which was five years longer than two decades earlier. Increasing longevity and declining fertility have also led to an aging population. In 1990, people over 60 years of age comprised 9% of the world’s population; in 2016, they comprised 12% and by 2050 they are projected to reach nearly 22%.

The world will also certainly become more urban. Nearly all of the future growth of the world’s population will take place in urban areas. In 2016, more than half of the world’s population resided in urban areas, compared to 43% in 1990. By 2050, over two-thirds of the world’s population will be urban. Essentially all population growth in the future will be in cities: the urban population is projected to grow to 6.4 billion by 2050 while the rural population will remain around 3.3 billion. The largest increases will occur in less developed countries in Asia and Africa.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), in particular, will experience the most rapid growth in terms of its total population (and, by extension, its urban population) posing huge challenges to cities. Between 2016 and 2050 in SSA, the urban population will grow 45% faster than the total population; 3.25% per year as compared to 2.25% per year. Translating these average rates to doubling time equates to the urban population of SSA doubling in just 21 years, compared to 31 years for the total population.

The next largest rate of change in total population growth will be in the countries of Western Asia and Northern Africa (WANA) which will add 1.28% more people to its overall population each year while growing moderately more urban. However, in the countries of South and Central Asia (SCA) and Southeast Asia (SEA), the urban populations will grow more than twice as fast as the total population. In contrast, in Europe and Japan (E&J), the total population is projected to shrink modestly by 2050, but the urban population of the region is projected to grow, albeit at a very slow rate. A similar pattern is predicted for China. Land-Rich Developed Countries (LRDC) and Latin American Countries (LAC) will also grow moderately more urban while adding to the total population.

Fig 5: Canaan in Croix-des-Bouquets and Thomazeau on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti Following the 2010 earthquake, the national government made land available 10 km outside of the capital for the emergency relocation of an urban camp at risk, though without having planned it beforehand. People invaded the area, which in four years mushroomed into an informal town of around 150,000 people.

© UN-Habitat

Fig 6: Aerial view of Jefferson Chalmers neighbourhood, Detroit Due to the weakening of its automobile industry, the city has suffered a major economic decline and lost 64% of its population between 1950 and 2013.

© Bing Maps (Microsoft Product Screenshot reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation)

The process of urbanization, or ‘urban transition’, describes a shift in a population from one that is dispersed across small rural settlements in which agriculture is the dominant economic activity towards one where the population is concentrated in larger, dense urban settlements characterized by industrial and service activities. Historically, the urban transition has been linked closely to economic development. In Europe and Northern America, rapid urbanization over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was observed to accompany the industrial revolution and rapid economic growth. A similar, although generally weaker, association between urbanization, industrialization and economic development has been observed more recently in many parts of Latin America and the Caribbean and Eastern Asia as well. The urban transition and economic growth have been linked in part because economic development fuels urbanization. People are drawn to cities that offer varied opportunities for education and employment, particularly in the industry and services sectors. Urbanization, in turn, generally has had a positive impact on economic development and poverty reduction.

Cities concentrate diverse pools of labour that businesses need in order to grow. Furthermore, the density of people and businesses in cities facilitates knowledge and information sharing, fostering new enterprises and technological innovation. As hubs of commerce, government, and transportation, cities provide crucial links with rural areas, between cities, and across international borders. Approximately 80 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) is generated in cities.

Fig 7: Cartogram showing projected annual rate of urban population growth

© UN-Habitat based on data from Yannick Savina

Recent trends in developing regions, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, have challenged long held notions about the association between urbanization and economic growth. While a dearth of data on urbanization in the region complicates any inference about trends, the available evidence suggests that the urbanization process continued in sub-Saharan Africa between the 1970s and 2000, despite economic contraction in the region over the same period. Demographers note that the urban transition observed in sub-Saharan Africa in recent decades, while not consistent with economic theories of urbanization, is consistent with the demographic transition experienced in the region.

The demographic theory of the urban transition posits a ‘pre-transition’ period characterized by high birth and death rates. During this period a given country’s (or region’s) population is mostly rural and mortality rates in urban areas tend to be much higher than those in rural areas owing to the heightened risk of death from infectious diseases that spread easily in densely populated areas that do not have good sanitation. Moreover, urban birth rates tend to be lower than urban death rates such that the urban population is sustained only by continuous replenishment through rural-to-urban migration. However, with improvements to public health, death rates begin to decline faster in urban areas than in rural ones and eventually the number of urban deaths falls below the number of urban births. This means that the urban population grows not only because of rural-to-urban migration, but due to natural increase as well. In most regions, including in sub-Saharan Africa, the process of urbanization has tended to occur in tandem with the declining mortality and fertility rates that characterize the demographic transition, lending support to the notion that the urban transition is better explained as a demographic phenomenon than strictly as an economic one.

The consequences of the rapid pace of urban growth present many development challenges as they are projected to result in disorganized cities with large proportions of people living in unplanned and illegal settlements. Countries in SSA—and to a slightly less extent in SCA and SEA—are poised to bear the brunt of urban demands. The lack of basic public infrastructure and housing tenure or land rights combined with substandard living conditions may become one of the biggest public health disasters of the century. Not only can this phenomenon eliminate the urban opportunities that drive development and economic growth, they can also create extremely inaccessible pockets of poverty where people live in far worse conditions than rural areas.

Fig 8: Population pyramids 2016–2050

© UN-Habitat based on Data from UN DESA
Population pyramids visualize the most fundamental demographic characteristics of human populations: age and sex....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Haft Title
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Why The Quito Papers?
• Introduction
• 1 Forces Shaping 21st Century Urbanization
• 2 The Science of Urbanization and the Open City
• Bibliography
• Index