Over half the world to live in cities by next year
by Mark Turner at the United Nations, published:
June 15 2006 on www.ft.com
More than half the world’s population will live in a city by 2007, but for one in three people that will mean a crime-ridden slum with inadequate housing and services.
The United Nations’ State of the World’s Cities 2006-07 report says slum management presents one of the developing world’s greatest challenges, as poor countries brace for a rapid expansion in urbanisation.
Cities in the developing world will account for 95 per cent of urban growth over the next two decades. By 2030 they will be home to 80 per cent of the world’s city dwellers.
In many places, most of that growth will come from slums.
Habitat, the UN agency that compiled the report, concludes slum dwellers die earlier than the rural poor, are worse hit by natural disasters and have less access to education.
“Around the world the wealthy have created an architecture of fear by retreating behind fortified residential enclaves,” argues Habitat, which says the research is the first to separate data from slums and higher-income city neighbourhoods. It says “gated communities run counter to the fundamental principles of sustainable urban development”.
A new wave of megacities, with more than 10m inhabitants, and “metacities” – conurbations of more than 20m – are gaining ground across Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Habitat highlighted the difficulties faced by many poor immigrants in Paris. It warned that “for refugees from African slums, Paris offers little relief from the destitution at home”.
More than 200,000 people are homeless or living in temporary shelter in Paris and “some families languish in filthy provisional dwellings for 14 years”.
Action on cities ‘has done little for slums’ by
Mark Turner and Frances Williams, published: June 15 2006
Thirty years of attempts to tackle the problems of cities have largely failed to make any difference to the world’s fast-growing slums, the UN warns.
“Few interventions had an economic or social impact on urban poor populations”, says the UN’s Habitat agency in a survey, citing slums as the big unsolved problem of rapid urbanisation. “Getting urban poverty on the development agenda has been a struggle. Silence or neglect have characterised most policy responses.”
But the agency says that countries such as South Africa and Tunisia, with “highly centralised systems and structures of governance”, have been more successful at curbing slum growth, as central governments have more money and legislative power.
China’s cities are doing better than rural areas, largely as a result of economic reform policies that have a pro-urban focus. But that growth has led to growing urban disparities.
In 2000, for example, an estimated one-third of China’s urban population lacked adequate sanitation. But a policy of “equity grants” for people in sub-standard housing has led to the production of more than 20m homes in the last five years. Pollution remains a big challenge however, in a country that is home to 16 of the 20 most polluted cities on the planet.
“If China is to sustain its remarkable economic growth, it must also ensure that its cities are sustainable,” Habitat says.
Mumbai in India, with 18.3m people, is the fourth largest urban conglomeration in the world, but also boasts one of the world’s largest slum populations.
“More people live in Mumbai’s slums than in the entire country of Norway,” the report says. “There is a perception that [Mumbai’s] progress is being hampered by its image as a city of slum-dwellers, which severely erodes its ambitions to become the ‘Shanghai of India’.”
Slum-dwellers are also among those most affected by the combined health hazards associated with polluted water, inadequate sanitation, and air pollution outside and inside homes, the World Health Organisation reports today.
A quarter of global disease is caused by avoidable environmental problems that, if tackled, could save up to 13m lives a year. Thus, over 40 per cent of malaria cases and an estimated 94 per cent of sickness and death from diarrhoeal diseases – two of the biggest killers of children – are preventable.
The same goes for other diseases with a big environmental component, including lower respiratory infections, caused largely by pollution, and injuries related to accidents in the workplace.
“We know the type of interventions needed to reduce the disease burden,” says Maria Neira, WHO director of public health and environment.
Though WHO admits its recommendations would cost billions of dollars a year, it argues that many have a big pay-off.