Cities in a Globalizing World

Global Report on Human Settlements

Un-Habitat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136570018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

'The world has entered the urban millennium. Nearly half the world's people are now city dwellers, and the rapid increase in urban population is expected to continue, mainly in developing countries. This historic transition is being further propelled by the powerful forces of globalization. The central challenge for the international community is clear: to make both urbanization and globalization work for all people, instead of leaving billions behind or on the margins. Cities in a Globalizing World: Global Report on Human Settlements is a comprehensive review of conditions in the world's cities and the prospects for making them better, safer places to live in an age of globalization. I hope that it will provide all stakeholders - foremost among them the urban poor themselves - with reliable and timely information with which to set our policies right and get the machinery of urban life moving in a constructive direction.' From the Foreword by Kofi Annan, Secretary-General, United Nations.

Cities in a Globalizing World presents a comprehensive review of the world's cities and analyses the positive and negative impacts on human settlements of the global trends towards social and economic integration and the rapid changes in information and communication technologies. In this Global Report, the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat) draws on specially commissioned and contributed background papers from more than 80 leading international specialists. The report focuses on recent trends in human settlements and their implications for poverty, inequity and social polarization. It develops advance knowledge for urban planning and management policies in support and promotion of inclusive cities and good urban governance. This major and influential report is the most authoritative and up-to-date assessment of human settlements conditions and trends. Written in clear, non-technical language and supported by informative graphics, case studies and extensive statistical data, it should be an essential tool and reference for academics, researchers, planners, public authorities and civil society organizations around the world.

Part I

The Development Context:

Changes and Challenges

The Prologue of this report presented a view of globalization as a process with positive as well as negative implications. It stressed that the distribution of the benefits and costs of globalization is neither even nor random. Building on these observations, Chapter 1 offers a review of trends that are a cause of alarm in cities worldwide. It provides evidence for widespread and growing poverty and pervasive patterns of worsening inequality, producing trends of heightened polarization with wealth and access to resources becoming more concentrated. It also describes several ways in which modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) tend to deepen existing economic and social divisions. However, while ICTs are an essential element of globalization, they do not predetermine its goals. Later parts of this report include a variety of examples showing how ICTs can also be used for more beneficial results. The trends of growing poverty and polarization form an essential perspective for gaining a better understanding of the implications of globalization for urban settlements, which is the subject of Chapter 2. It is in urban centres that global interests focus their activities and whence their influences on surrounding regions originate. Therefore, the second chapter examines implications of globalization more specifically for cities.

Human settlements are not powerless in the face of globalization, but, through good governance and in effective partnerships, can play an important part in mediating and directing its consequences for economic and human development in positive ways. The challenge is to develop and implement policies that support not only the function of cities as engines of economic growth, but also their role as agents of social change.

During the 1990s, a series of World Conferences held under the aegis of the United Nations helped to galvanize support for goals of social justice and environmental sustainability. These summits led to Programmes of Action that stressed rights-based approaches and democratic decision-making processes, and which gave special attention to the situation of women, children, the elderly, people living in poverty, minorities and others at risk. Chapter 3 concludes Part I of this report with a brief overview and assessment of the human settlement aspects of these action plans, including the Habitat Agenda in particular.

These agendas provide the outlines of a normative framework to guide the implementation of development policies that take advantage of the potential of globalization to eradicate poverty, reduce inequality and improve the liveability of human settlements.

Chapter 1

Development Contrasts in Human Settlements

Highlights

Contrasts in Urbanization Patterns

The world population is becoming predominantly urban.¹ While the population of industrialized countries is already largely urban, urbanization processes are still acute in developing countries. Today, 40 per cent of the population of developing countries already lives in cities. By 2020, that figure will have risen to 52 per cent. Latin America and the Caribbean already has 75 per cent city dwellers, while in contrast, only one-third of the population of Africa and Asia live in urban areas. The greatest challenge will present itself in Africa and Asia, where an explosive demographic change is expected in the next quarter century. By 2015, 153 of the world’s 358 cities with more than one million inhabitants will be in Asia. Of the 27 ‘megacities’ with more than 10 million inhabitants, 15 will be in Asia. There are even indications of forthcoming megacities with 20 or even 30 million inhabitants; urban agglomerations of a size never known before in human history, most of which will be in the developing countries.

Currently, three-quarters of global population growth occurs in the urban areas of developing countries, causing hypergrowth in the cities least capable of catering for such growth. The present decade’s average annual population increase in developing countries’ cities is estimated at 64 million, or 175,000 persons per day. Half of this increase is caused by natural population growth within these cities. Additionally, urbanization processes in the South do not merely recapitulate the past experience of the developed nations. Contemporary urban growth and rural-urban shifts in the South are occurring in a context of far higher absolute population growth, at much lower income levels, with much less institutional and financial capacity, and with considerably fewer opportunities to expand into new frontiers, foreign or domestic.

Contrasts in the Wealth of Cities

The urbanization contrasts described above are accompanied by significant increases in the scale of poverty of urban populations. While urban poverty exists and is indeed growing in all cities of the world it characterizes aspects of the rapidly growing cities in the developing countries. There, urban poverty disproportionately affects women and children; fuels ethnic and racial tensions; and condemns large sections, and sometimes the majority, of urban dwellers to a downward spiral of marginalization, social and economic exclusion and unhealthy living environments. All of the above contribute directly or indirectly to increases in social unrest and urban violence. This situation also fuels aspirations to seek economic opportunity outside national borders. Thus, the urbanization of poverty’ is one of the most challenging problems facing the world today.

Contrasts in Competitiveness

As a result of fading distinctions between traditional political spheres and other components of society, human settlements, and large cities in particular, have come out as a considerable actor in the global political economy arena. In response to this change, shifts have taken place in attitudes to urban governance: cities are now increasingly viewed as a product to be marketed at a regional and global scale. Information and communication technology (ICT) allows for internationalization of footloose investment funding, resulting in vast increases in the volume and speed of international capital flows of all types; ranging from foreign direct investment (FDI) to short-term banking activities. In such an environment, cities often have no option but to compete on a global stage for these investments, exploiting whatever comparative advantages they may have; at times even to their own detriment. This development has created a downward spiral of increased subjugation of domestic, economic and social needs to international competitiveness; an often painful phase after the massive socio-economic transformations that characterized the entire 20th century.

Globalization has thus placed human settlements in a highly competitive framework of inter-city linkages and networks with a geographical context limited only by planetary boundaries. This new constellation of globally networked cities is sometimes referred to as ‘the urban archipelago’. It implies that a city may have more relations with some faraway place than with its hinterland and that such cities act as energy nodes in a global force field. These are processes with considerable potential, and the urban strategies of many governments are now gravitating towards providing an enabling environment for human settlements to compete on the international stage. Many cities now acknowledge that the current nature of funding flows and investment capital demands an international urban orientation over and above managing local issues. Since the supply of international investment funding is often driven by profit optimization through the identification of areas with lower labour costs and standards, and regulations that are more favourable for business, cities in the developing world risk becoming transient points of destination of predatory capital, with little or no prospects for a sustainable future.

Contrasts in Opportunities

Until recently, the success, decline and stagnation of cities and other settlements were strongly and often uniquely linked to territorial, geographic, resource or political features. This is the case of settlements at the intersection of important communication corridors, or facing waterways and harbours, or grown around the processing and/or commercialization of agricultural products or mining resources. In a globalizing economy, these factors are no longer the exclusive driving forces of urban economic growth. There are no classic locational factors that can explain the meteorical rise in prominence of ‘e-regions’ like Silicon Valley and Seattle in the United States, or Bangalore in India. The point is that location is not destiny. But an important corollary is that all booming regions require a minimum package of enabling conditions to develop and sustain themselves. These conditions, whether directly or indirectly, are shaped by the actions of central and local government. This mix will vary from place to place, but it is likely to contain incentives, tax expenditures, high-level educational facilities, research centres and universities, coupled with well-functioning infrastructure and urban services, availability of housing, excellent communications, and efficient transport systems. All these factors are, of course, the foundation, the essential purpose and the product of good governance.

Although the paradigm of the urban archipelago reflects a very real urban evolution at the global level, the relationships between rural and urban areas still include a host of factors that do not necessarily depend on the international level. It is not simply the linkage to faraway places that defines the nature of the urban archipelago, but rather individual cities’ ability to make efficient use of newly available links to resources and markets offered by networks of cities. Therefore, cities’ responses to globalization are not to control this global phenomenon, but rather to manage their own resources within a new global context, including traditional links with the hinterland. Thus, good governance is not simply a desirable goal; it is a key prerequisite for taking advantage of new economic unfolding for all cities and urban regions.

Contrasts in Local and Global Priorities

As indicated in the Prologue, globalization is the end of territorialism: the condition whereby socio-economic and political space is reducible solely to territorial coordinates. It has created an apparent paradox whereby polity – the condition of civil order – is simultaneously becoming more global and more local. This concept captures the notion that the economic and information features of globalization are penetrating even the remotest corners of Earth and that each locality is now forced to participate in the new globalized world, while, at the same time, local concerns increasingly spring to the foreground as major social and political issues.²

On a more positive note, the world is no longer only a community of states, but also an increasingly borderless network of interconnected cities where power is being shared more evenly and where governance is becoming more democratic. Promising partnerships are evolving between the public sector, the private sector and civil society. There is a growing awareness of the needs and rights of women, the indivisibility of human rights and the need for participation and for social, economic and environmental stewardship.

In many localities, people are overwhelmed by changes in their traditional cultural, spiritual and social values and norms and by the introduction of a cult of consumerism intrinsic to the process of globalization. In the rebound, many localities have rediscovered the ‘culture of place’ by stressing their own identity, their own roots, their own culture and values and the importance of their own neighbourhood, area, vicinity or town. In political terms this has translated into demands for self-government, for effective participation in decisions affecting the community, and in locally led initiatives...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• List of Boxes
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Key Issues and Messages
• Prologue: Human Settlements in a Globalizing World
• Part I: The Development Context: Changes and Challenges
• Part II: Emerging Approaches to Urban Governance and Politics
• Part III: Changes in Housing Finance and Shelter Delivery Systems
• Part IV: Developments in the Urban Environment and Infrastructure
• Part V: Ensuring Development Prospects
• Part VI: Building a Common Future
• Part VII: Statistical Annex
• Index