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DEVELOPMENT: From Slums to Sustainability

Jare Ajayi

VANCOUVER, Jun 16 2006 (IPS) - Keeping a promise made at the United Nations six years ago to dramatically improve the lives of at least 100 million poor city dwellers by the year 2020 will be a major focus of the World Urban Forum here from Jun. 19 to 23.

The third gathering of its kind since the forum was launched in 1998 by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, also called U.N.-Habitat, this year’s theme is “Sustainable Cities: Turning Ideas Into Action”. It is expected to draw more than 15,000 participants from non-governmental organisations, academia, and national and local governments.

Given the fact that about half the world’s population of 6.5 billion live in towns and cities (a proportion that will hit two-thirds by 2020, according to U.N.-Habitat), the Vancouver meeting is likely to be under pressure to ensure that governments make stronger commitments to solve the world’s decent housing shortage.

“Apart from those who became displaced due to war and natural disasters like tsunami, floods, etc., millions of people in countries like India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Senegal, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Brazil, to mention a few, are living in conditions that are appalling,” Eric Owl of the Indigenous Social and Education Forum told IPS.

In many cities, U.N.-Habitat says, particularly in developing countries, slum dwellers number more than half of the population and have little or no access to shelter, water, and sanitation, education or health services.

According to U.N.-Habitat’s annual “State of the World’s Cities Report 2006/7” released Friday, in Ethiopia, for example, child malnutrition in urban slums and rural areas is almost identical – 47 percent and 49 percent respectively – compared with 27 percent in non-slum urban areas. In Brazil and Cote d’Ivoire, child malnutrition is three to four times higher in slums than in non slum-areas.

“For a long time, we suspected that the optimistic picture of cities did not reflect the reality on the ground,” said Anna Tibaijuka, UN-Habitat’s executive director. “This report provides concrete evidence that there are two cities within one city – one part of the urban population that has all the benefits of urban living, and the other part, the slums and squatter settlements, where the poor often live under worse conditions than their rural relatives.”

Tibaijuka also notes that while cities account for an average of 60 percent of gross domestic product, a large number of people, particularly in Africa, still live in informal settlements and slums because municipal governments fail to provide adequate housing and basic services.

Development experts say that to genuinely tackle housing problems, the closely related issues of hunger and poverty must also be factored in. It is a universal axiom that poor people are often compelled to overexploit available resources – including even those materials upon which their own survival and livelihoods depend. As a result, many housing units and utilities are stretched to the limit too soon after occupation, leading to premature collapse and disuse.

According to the latest data from 2005, Asia accounts for nearly 60 percent of the world’s slum population with a total of 581 million slum dwellers. Sub-Saharan Africa had 199 million slum dwellers – 20 percent of the world’s total – while Latin America had 134 million, making up 14 percent of the total.

The Vancouver forum will address three broad themes – “Achieving the MDGs: Slum Upgrading and Affordable Housing”, “Public Engagement: The Inclusive Approach”, and “Water, Sanitation and Human Settlement”.

The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), approved at a U.N. summit of 189 world leaders in September 2000, are aimed primarily at fighting extreme poverty, hunger, illiteracy and disease.

The seventh MDG vows to “improve the lives of at least 100 million urban dwellers by the year 2020” – a conservative figure considering that about two billion people around the world need proper housing.

At next week’s meeting, a number of non-governmental groups are preparing to showcase what they have been doing to confront these challenges, including youth from Latin America, Dakar, Senegal in West Africa, and the Middle East, who will be attending the parallel Environmental Youth Alliance, and Canadian urban dwellers who grow their own food crops and vegetables.

Isabelle Bourgeault-Tassé of the International Development Research Centre in Canada told IPS her organisation would be use the opportunity to discuss new trends in urban agriculture spearheaded by Dr. Luc Mougeot and which is already being embraced in Canada.

Another session examines how water management and urbanisation intersect – a model initiative led by Naser Faruqui, a 1999 honoree of the International Water Resources Association.

In 1978, when delegates from around the world first met here in Vancouver to discuss the emerging issue of rapid urbanisation, two-thirds of the population was still living in rural areas. But within a decade, this began to shift, due to reasons ranging from economic and social to disaster and war. By 1996, when the second meeting took place in Istanbul, Turkey, known as Habitat II, nearly half of humanity was found in urban centres.

At that forum, 171 countries adopted the Habitat Agenda, containing 100 commitments and 600 recommendations that pinned down stakeholders, especially governments, to start taking steps toward putting roofs over the heads of their people and ensuring that urban dwellers lived in a healthy environment.

But a decade later, even more people are enduring terrible living conditions than when those commitments were made. Over the last 15 years, 283 million new slum dwellers have joined the global urban population. Experts say it is a situation in which acute poverty – including the type previously associated with rural areas – is now becoming rife in urban centres.

According to Tibaijuka, with one billion people living in slums, and thousands joining them every day, “We are indeed sitting on a social time bomb that is ticking away quietly in many overcrowded, poverty-stricken corners of a geopolitical chessboard already fraught with new problems in the wake of the Cold War.”

“How we manage this situation is arguably the biggest problem confronting humanity in the 21st century, and the essence of the talks in Vancouver next week. As more and more governments recognise this, the United Nations needs to galvanise its strength as never before in the quest for sustainable urbanisation,” she said.

Vancouver is again providing the opportunity to take a fresh look at the approaches taken so far and fashioning a better means of housing humanity, providing necessary facilities and ensuring a conducive atmosphere for billions of people living in urban centres.

The first session of the urban forum took place in Nairobi 2002, while the second was held in Barcelona in 2004. Nanjing, China is already slated for the fourth session to be held in 2008.