Urban Development and Civil Society

The Role of Communities in Sustainable Cities

Michael Carley, Harry Smith, Paul Jenkins, Paul Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134200573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Local & Regional Planning Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The world's population is rapidly urbanizing but the affluence and development often associated with cities are far from equitably or sustainably distributed. Where it was once taken for granted that responsibility for urban development lay with the state, increasingly the emphasis has shifted to market-driven and public-private sector initiatives, which can marginalize the intended beneficiaries - the urban poor - from decision making and implementation. This text outlines the essential conditions for effective urban planning and management by placing bottom-up community initiatives at the heart of the push for equitable and sustainable development in cities. Crucially, the state must engage with both the market and civil society in pursuit of sustainable cities. Presenting a wide-ranging selection of case studies in rapidly urbanizing and transitional countries, from the poorest parts of Africa and Asia to the relatively developed United Kingdom, the authors describe and analyze innovations in how globally disadvantaged urban communities can be engaged in improving their living environments.

PART 1

INTRODUCTION: THE CHALLENGE OF A SUSTAINABLE URBAN FUTURE - THE ROLE OF INSTITUTIONS

1 TOP-DOWN AND BOTTOM-UP: THE CHALLENGE OF CITIES IN THE NEW CENTURY

Michael Carley

With more than 70 per cent of the world’s population destined to live in urban areas by the middle of the 21st century, the high quality governance of cities is essential to the sustainability of the planet, and to the economic prospects and quality of life of the majority of its residents. Because of their popularity as places to live and work, cities around the world are under a variety of pressures including rapid population growth; requirements to meet basic needs, such as for decent housing and clean water; an explosion in traffic congestion and rapid expansion of the city into surrounding agricultural land and pollution of every sort. Overall, there is a pressing need for effectiveness and democratic participation in the management of complex and unwieldy urban systems.

In turn, the quality of cities has a profound effect on national development patterns. This is true in terms of encouraging rural-urban population flows, or vice versa in developed countries, and in attracting international inward investment into urban areas by footloose capital. It is also the case in the allowing of unserviced, unhealthy shanty towns as the only choice of residence for the poor, while for richer residents, there is a self-defeating suburban sprawl as they attempt to reap the economic benefits of city life while escaping the negative social and environmental aspects of polluted and sometimes dangerous inner cities. To attempt to do so, development spreads further and further into the surrounding countryside, bringing traffic congestion and air pollution in its wake.

In terms of governance, in recent years across the world the monolithic role of the state in guiding urban development has been challenged by increasing emphasis on replacing public intervention with market-driven approaches, or attempting to combine the two. At best, three key sectors combine in urban development partnerships - state/local government, market/economy/business and civil society/communities/households - in a positive, mutually reinforcing manner. At worst, state and market ignore both long-term strategic needs for urban planning and management, and the needs of the growing numbers of urban poor, marginalized in disadvantaged communities, thus excluding an important sector of civil society from decision-making processes. Polarization between rich and poor creates conditions for future social and ecological upheaval in cities already beset with problems and challenges to their beneficial governance.

This book argues that the long-term strategic needs of the city for sustainable development and economic prosperity cannot be separated from the need to involve citizens at all levels of society in innovative ways of fashioning and participating in urban development processes. It makes the point that sustainable urban development is a political process, which involves both strategic objectives and enhanced democratic participation. It suggests practical ways to achieve this, by presenting eight case studies of the participation of civil society in urban development in countries as diverse as Costa Rica, the Philippines, Pakistan, Mozambique, Britain and others. It investigates these case studies by putting forward, in the next chapter and a concluding chapter, an analytical framework that suggests how state, market and civil society can combine forces to achieve the necessary objectives of urban development in this new century.

THE OBJECTIVES OF DEVELOPMENT

Most broadly, these development objectives were outlined in a speech by the President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki (2000), in a speech in Havana entitled ‘The North does not have all the answers’:

• the permanent elimination of poverty;

• sustained improvement in living standards;

• enhancement of human dignity;

• protection of the environment; and

• respect for culture and social cohesion.

In this speech, President Mbeki spoke of the need for ‘a strong spirit of communal, human solidarity’ as opposed to ‘the atomization of the family and the individual, driven by the entrenchment of the capitalist system’. This notion of solidarity gives a broad sense of the meaning of civil society, the opposite of a tendency to what has been termed the ‘excessive individualism’ of consumer societies (Carley and Christie, 2000).

But it is not enough to extol the virtues of democratic participation in general - people invariably want to participate in something tangible, in improving their lives and having the satisfaction of self-development, and the confidence it engenders. We will note below that capitalism, although more resilient than the failed socialist experiment, is itself failing in monumental ways, from a billion people living in poverty to a planet heating up its own atmosphere at an alarming rate (Carley and Spapens, 1998). Unless the 70 per cent of the world’s population living in cities are enlisted actively and practically in sustainable development processes, this situation is only likely to worsen.

The challenges are complicated by a number of factors. First, we all know that the consumer lifestyle emerging all over the world, however attractive it may be, is unsustainable because it is taking us past critical thresholds in the planet’s ability to absorb pollution, and in the use of scarce resources. But the real problem is that the seductiveness of consumption makes it difficult to take a critical but constructive view on the workings of the market economy and the international agencies, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), that condition its operation. The market economy as currently constituted is necessary, but not sufficient, for quality of life. One task of civil society at a global and local level ought to be to question the direction of capitalist development, to improve the prospects for daily life within capitalist systems, but also for civil society to protect itself through community development, so that the very factors of solidarity described by President Mbeki are not lost in the rush of the newly-industrializing countries to consumerism. A more balanced approach is required. There is a growing interest in the role of consumption in a sustainable world (Robins and Roberts, 1998).

The remainder of this introductory chapter suggests some broad challenges of urban management that need to be addressed. These include urban population growth; the challenge of poverty and basic needs; the need for eco-innovation; the problem of traffic, pollution and urban sprawl; and the challenges of democratic participation.

THE CHALLENGES OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT

Urban population growth and the occupation of land

While world population has increased fivefold in the past 200 years, the number of people living in urban areas has become 25 times higher in the same period. The implications of this process of global urbanization are outlined by Carley and Christie (2000):

Within a few years, half the world’s population will be living in cities, and during the twenty-first century urbanisation around the globe will tend toward the 75 per cent levels of urbanisation prevalent in industrialised countries. This implies a virtual reversal of the current ratio of urban to rural population in many developing countries.’

Urbanization in the 21st century is taking place particularly in the developing world. The proportion of the population in cities in Latin America rose from 41 per cent in 1950 to 73 per cent by 1995 and in Africa over the period since 1975 from 25 to 35 per cent. By 2015 nearly half the population of Africa and Asia will be urban. The growth of megacities is one indicator of this urbanization process: Mexico City at around 25 million people, Sao Paulo at 23 million, and both Mumbai and Shanghai at around 14 or 15 million are obvious examples. But urbanization is also occurring in smaller cities and in the countryside. For example, there are already 13 cities in Asia with more than ten million inhabitants, and China has no fewer than 32 cities with populations over one million.

In some hitherto rural areas, such as the island of Java in Indonesia, population density is growing to urban levels even outside the main megacity. These urbanized regions are characterized by an intense mixture of land use with industrial estates, cottage industry, agriculture and suburban development and other uses existing side by side, all linked by an intense movement of population dependent on cheap transport, such as motorcycles, buses and trucks. McGee (1992) argues that this is a new form of urbanization that challenges traditional notions of urban transition.

It should not be assumed, however, that the implications of population growth in cities need be negative: urban regions and megacities are often the sites of remarkable adaptations and ingenuity in making high-density urban living tolerable for even the poorest citizens. Cities can contribute to sustainable development by virtue of their concentration of people and services, making efficiency gains in energy and materials use particularly valuable and feasible because of the scale of their consumption. Finding innovative and transferable innovations in urban management will be crucial to environmental quality and public health in the new century.

The challenge of poverty and basic needs

The movement from the countryside to urban areas constitutes one of the great mass migrations in world history. Rural poverty is forcing many people, especially the unskilled and the landless, to seek employment in the larger cities. Lack of successful land reform, the extremes of rural poverty, the hope and often the reality of better chances for work and income in the city, and improved transport, encourage this movement.

But although city life is attractive and, for many, preferable to rural life, conditions of life can be difficult. For example, India’s big cities are growing by around two million people per decade. Nearly half of Mumbai’s population live in slums, in dwellings made of tin, bits of wood or old sacks, often adjoining a main road or railway track. About one million residents live on the streets. The strains on human services and physical infrastructure are severe, and air and water pollution, waste disposal problems and health problems are endemic. Mumbai’s population will grow to around 18 million, still smaller than Mexico City and Säo Paulo among the megacities of the South.

Overall on the planet, around a billion people - a fifth of the world’s population - are affected by poverty, malnourishment, and ill health caused by lack of access to clean water. The consumption rate of the poorest fifth of the world’s population has remained virtually unchanged since the Second World War, while the resource consumption of the richest fifth has increased four to sevenfold. Low income households are reliant on a diminishing resource base to meet basic needs as pollution added to watercourses in dense urban areas outstrips attempts to address the problem.

Even in a static situation, the poverty of a fifth of the world’s population is a fundamental challenge to sustainability. But the gap between rich and poor is growing, and this could heighten social tensions in cities. When the needs for day-to-day survival press so heavily, it is not surprising if vital, long-term environmental concerns receive scant attention from the poor or their political leaders. Countries and cities will increasingly see access to resources, particularly fresh water, as a matter of vital concern.

The challenge of eco-innovation

Because of their sheer scale and complexity, the problems of managing big cities and urban regions will be increasingly severe. In cities, the very fact of higher levels of economic activity means that people tend to consume more resources per capita and to produce more waste than their counterparts in rural areas. Many cities are now finding it very difficult to find anywhere to deposit the daily outpouring of rubbish, so a real need is not just for recycling but for a dematerialization of daily life (Carley and Spapens, 1998). Later, a case study in the Philippines describes a number of cases of community innovation in materials recycling.

Overall, the need for reducing global warming and global environmental degradation means it is essential to reduce daily contributions to pollution loads before problems become intractable. Unfortunately, the usual approach to managing the human-environment interaction is ‘too little, too late’ - economic growth means the volumes of pollution, and numbers of pollutants, increase faster than our ability to manage their cumulative impacts.

A key challenge therefore to urban sustainability is eco-innovation. For cities and towns, this has real implications for town planning: moving away from suburban patterns of development back towards dense, mixed use urban neighbourhoods with ‘win-win’ social and environmental effects: reduced materials consumption and increased recycling, closer linkage between jobs and residence, more use of public transport, walking and cycling, lower levels of car ownership and use, more support for local retailers as opposed to out-of-town shopping malls, and so on. However, many aspects of the urban lifestyle suggested by these objectives represent the opposite of current definitions of modernity.

Future requirements for eco-innovation will be more challenging still, requiring major reductions in the material and energy intensity of daily living, while at the same time tackling poverty and town planning issues and without any loss of current quality of life. Consumers in the developed world will need to reduce their current 80 per cent share of world wide resource consumption - to allow development in the South within the Earth’s carrying capacity (Carley and Spapens, 1998). This means questioning an understanding of the quality of life based on the consumption of more and more goods, and valuing public goods such as education and public transport, and social spaces such as parks. The opposite side of this coin is that where urban public services are poor, people will be forced to compensate for the lack of these with inefficient private consumption.

Although ecological innovation sounds a grand, global objective, it can only be politically and socially feasible if it is the result of a mass movement, beginning in the household and the neighbourhood. This book charts many examples of innovative community development at this level, and examines the need to expand networks to other levels of action.

South, North and the ecological backpack

The balance and direction of effort in sustainable urban management between cities North and South depends in part on existing patterns of consumption of the world’s finite resources, including the ‘sink capacity’ of the atmosphere to absorb C0₂ emissions. For example, it is worth noting that the average British urban resident consumes 14 times as much energy-inte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acronyms_and_Abbreviations
• List_of_Figures_Tables_and_Boxes
• Preface
• About_the_Authors
• Glossary
• PART 1 INTRODUCTION: THE CHALLENGE OF A SUSTAINABLE URBAN FUTURE - THE ROLE OF INSTITUTIONS
• 1. Top-down and bottom-up: the challenge of cities in the new century
• 2. The state, the market and community: an analytical framework for community self-development
• PART 2 CASE STUDIES: LESSONS FROM INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE IN KEY URBAN DEVELOPMENT ISSUES
• 3. The role of civil society in shelter at the periphery: the experience of peri-urban communities in Maputo, Mozambique
• 4. The state, business and the community: abating industrial nuisance in Lahore, Pakistan
• 5. Urban public transport: the development of a regulatory role for NGOs in Pakistan
• 6. Informal development in the market socialist city: the case of the floating population of Beijing
• 7. Urban management and community development in Metro Manila
• 8. When community development becomes a political bargaining tool: the case for structural change in low income housing provision in Costa Rica
• 9. Community-based organizations and the struggle for land and housing in South Africa: urban social movements in transition
• 10. Renegotiating places: the experience of low-demand housing in Salford, England
• PART 3 ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSIONS: STRENGTHENING THE CHANGING ROLE OF CIVIL SOCIETY
• 11. Relationships between the state and civil society and their importance for sustainable development
• 12. Civil society and new social movements
• Notes
• References
• Index