Enhancing Urban Safety and Security

Global Report on Human Settlements 2007

Un-Habitat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136567070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Enhancing Urban Safety and Security addresses three major threats to the safety and security of cities: crime and violence; insecurity of tenure and forced evictions; and natural and human-made disasters. It analyses worldwide trends with respect to each of these threats, paying particular attention to their underlying causes and impacts, as well as to the good policies and best practices that have been adopted at the city, national and international levels in order to address these threats. The report adopts a human security perspective, concerned with the safety and security of people rather than of states, and highlights issues that can be addressed through appropriate urban policy, planning, design and governance.

PART I

UNDERSTANDING URBAN SAFETY AND SECURITY

This Global Report on Human Settlements examines some of today’s major threats to urban safety and security within the broader frame of rapid urban growth, uneven socioeconomic development and the quest for human security.¹ It seeks to review the growing concern about the safety and security of people, rather than states, linking this to the risks and opportunities that accompany increasing social and economic complexity, which is itself a result of growth and development.

In the last decade or so, the world has witnessed increasing numbers of threats to urban safety and security. While some of these threats have taken the form of dramatic events, many have been manifestations of the nexus of urban poverty and inequality with the physical, economic, social and institutional conditions of slums. Urban crime and violence in countries in all regions, regardless of level of development, have led to increasing debate about how to address its origins and impacts. Gang violence in Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, South Africa and Kenya has affected many people. Dramatic violence in Paris and throughout urban France has demonstrated that such violence could also occur in cities in high-income countries with large disparities in income and opportunity. Many households have faced the threat of insecure tenure and the likelihood of forced evictions. These problems have been evident in cities in Nigeria, Turkey and Zimbabwe, with the case of Harare receiving the most global attention during the last three years. There have also been dramatic impacts of so-called natural disasters, with significant global attention being focused on the Indian Ocean Tsunami affecting Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and India; monsoon flooding in Mumbai; Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, US; and earthquakes in Pakistan and Java, Indonesia.

While these ‘events’ receive media coverage, they are, in fact, symptomatic of deeper and more pervasive processes that affect these cities. While crime and violence are, perhaps, the most obvious of these processes, insecurity of tenure and disasters are also the results of deeper processes and institutional failure. This report seeks to describe these phenomena, to provide a framework for analysis of their causes and impacts, and to suggest a set of recommendations for policy and action that can help to reduce urban insecurity and increase safety.

Growing numbers of urban residents living at increasing densities in horizontal and vertical space necessarily increase opportunities for productive employment and social interaction; but in some situations, particularly in slums, they also increase vulnerability to the harmful consequences of development. In rapidly growing cities, more people need food, housing, water supply, sanitation and employment to generate incomes to buy basic services. This demand, in turn, generates many opportunities for productive, as well as criminal, responses to ever more stimulating and demanding social environments. With opportunities, however, come risks. The social imperative for urban residents to adjust to urban life brings many forms of disequilibria, shortages and, necessarily, differences between the abilities of individuals and households to satisfy their needs and ambitions. Inequalities in opportunities lead to differences in outcomes, perspectives and willingness to live within rules that may appear (particularly for growing numbers of the urban poor) manifestly unjust.

This process of urban social and economic differentiation interacts closely with the physical location and ecological features of cities: their geography, landscape, natural environment and access to specific natural resources, particularly water. Cities historically developed near sources of water supply and water for transport or energy, such as Manchester and Chicago, or on coasts with harbours and colonial entrepots.² Cities sit on an ecological edge, between solid ground and watersheds. Over time, these historical origins also brought risks such as periodic flooding. Now, there is growing global public awareness that nature itself is no longer inherently stable, but is, rather, at any one time, an outcome of dynamic forces such as climate change or other human-induced pollution or disruption. The physical sites of cities, whether Mumbai or New Orleans, are recognized as dynamic landscapes that can no longer be assumed as benign or as given. The individual circumstances of particular cities fit into a global pattern where 70 per cent of the world’s population lives within 80 kilometres of the coast. Land and ocean are thus brought closer together, increasing human vulnerability to the environmental hazards associated with rising sea level.

Within this broader ecological context, cities have always been spaces where many individuals and households have been successful in generating incomes and opportunities for themselves and their families. The differentials between urban and rural incomes explain most of rural to urban migration over the past 50 years. Not surprisingly, successful individuals and households tend to protect their interests in maintaining these prerogatives in the face of the many who have not. History has shown that private interests have public consequences, largely expressed through politics and the resulting public policies and the behaviours of public institutions. If the purpose of government is to provide a set of rules within which individual liberty and private interests can be balanced with the social objectives of enhancing public welfare and equity, it is apparent that the institutional performance of government has frequently been disappointing. What were previously described as growing urban inequalities and differences have now become intergenerational forms of exclusion.

While it is not surprising that urban policies reflect interests, the degree of difference in welfare and opportunities within cities at this time is a matter of growing concern, even at the macro-economic level. Fifty years of efforts by countries and the international community to improve human welfare since the beginning of the United Nations Development Decade of the 1960s have resulted in major improvements in longevity, infant mortality, literacy and income levels in most countries. However, the growing urbanization of poverty, particularly in developing countries, has created a paradox where cities are both the engines of growth in national economies, but also significant loci of poverty and deprivation. If the worst levels of absolute poverty have been somewhat alleviated in some regions, there has been growing evidence of relative poverty or inequality in most countries, particularly in cities. Inequality has become increasingly recognized as an important inhibiting factor to economic growth.³ It is a significant underlying factor in understanding the mechanisms and processes generating urban insecurity in cities such as São Paulo, Nairobi or Paris. At a more general level, poverty is perhaps the most notable factor in explaining the levels of vulnerability to the urban safety and security threats examined in this Global Report.

The level of urban inequality is not solely the responsibility of national or local governments, but rather is also a result of the interaction of global economic forces and national economies. The mobility of capital, labour and technology has resulted in massive deindustrialization in some countries and the relocation of employment opportunities to other countries where labour costs are lower or factors affecting profitability are more favourable. Debates continue about the costs and benefits of ‘free trade’, and whether rich countries actually followed the free trade policies they now espouse.⁴ But the fact remains that many businesses have voted with their feet, with some relocating, for example, from cities in the US to maquiladoras in northern Mexico, and then later leaving for China in pursuit of lower labour costs and less costly environmental regulations. These global shifts have generated additional uncertainty and insecurity in the lives of many urban income earners. Reduced opportunities for formal employment have also resulted in higher degrees of informality in economies and less application of rules and regulations.

The nature of economic growth itself has therefore changed. Countries which initiated their economic and social transformations during the 1960s on the basis of agriculture and the export of primary commodities have been subject to sharp fluctuations in global commodity prices. The volatility of global markets and, particularly, energy prices has direct impacts on the costs of inputs, prices and market share of local enterprises. Producers of textiles and machinery in many countries have closed down in the face of the higher productivity and lower costs of their Chinese competitors.

There has also been a shift in the definition of wealth during the last 50 years, away from commodities towards information, knowledge, technology and finance. This is a global phenomenon with local consequences. In the midst of the Argentine economic collapse of 2001 to 2002, a Swedish newspaper noted that Argentina had held on to a 19thcentury definition of wealth, focused on agricultural commodities and livestock, and had not adjusted to the global economic dynamics of the 21st century.⁵ Entering the global markets and building capacity in knowledge-intensive industries is not a short-term venture. It is further complicated by the fact that each of these factors of production is also not evenly distributed across the world; in fact, each is marked by a high degree of centralization and localization in specific countries and cities. Indeed, these patterns of centralization of finance, technology and information are congruent and self-reinforcing. Patterns of income and wealth, therefore, in the 21st century have accentuated the economic vulnerability of developing countries and their populations.

One important consequence of these global forces has been the relative weakening of national and local institutional capacities through the changing distribution of power and authority of public institutions. This has occurred partly through privatization of public services such as water supply, transport, electricity, prison management and many others. In many countries, this has taken place within an overall shrinking of the public sector, mainly on fiscal and institutional grounds. At a time when urban populations are growing and uncertainties have increased, the capacities of these governments to solve specific problems, ensure the security of their populations and control their jurisdictions is considerably less than in previous times in some countries. This reduced capacity of the public sector also contributes significantly to a sense of urban insecurity. It is remarkable that as the process of urbanization continues to grow in scale and importance, the world recognizes few cities in either rich or poor countries as truly replicable examples of ‘good practice’.

Within this global and macro-context, this report examines three specific threats to urban safety and security that have become increasingly serious during recent years: crime and violence, insecurity of tenure and evictions, and natural and human-made disasters. While these three phenomena do not account for all of the problems of security and safety facing urban populations, they represent an important share of the public concerns that have been addressed by researchers and practitioners in the human settlements field. When considered within the context introduced above, these threats should not be regarded as ‘events’, but rather as ‘processes’ that are tied to underlying social and economic conditions within cities and countries. This rooting in local socio-economic realities is helpful in both understanding them and also finding measures that can help to alleviate their worst consequences.

Threats to urban safety and security are also popularly understood by ‘conventional wisdom’ in ways that do not readily lead to solutions or assignment of responsibility for them. Upon greater examination...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Figures, Boxes and Tables
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Key Findings and Messages
• Part I Understanding Urban Safety and Security
• Part II Urban Crime and Violence
• Part III Security of Tenure
• Part IV Natural and Human-Made Disasters
• Part V Towards Safer and More Secure Cities
• Part VI Summary of Case Studies
• Part VII Statistical Annex
• References
• Index