Glossary of Terms
Chapter 2: Context review
2.1 Challenges of urbanisation
Managing the impacts of increasing urbanisation was recognised as one of the key concerns internationally over 20 years ago by the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development, and articulated by the former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland:
The future will be predominantly urban and the most immediate environmental concerns of most people will be urban ones (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987: 255).
Since Brundtland’s statements, there has been an escalation in urbanisation rates, particularly in the developing regions of the world; and in 2007 for the first time, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities; and this is seen as a threat to public health because the pace of urbanisation outstrips governments’ capacity to provide essential infrastructure (World Health Organisation 2010).
More than two thirds of the world’s population now live in Africa, Asia and Latin America and in these regions the urban population has grown more than fivefold since 1950. At the time of writing, there are 19 mega-cities in the world with over ten million inhabitants, totalling 275 million people, and a further 348 urban centres with a population over a million (UN-HABITAT 2003). The majority of these ‘million cities’ are in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Satterthwaite 2000a). New York was the first city to reach a population size over ten million people, during the early 1940s. In 2003, only four of the world’s mega-cities were in the developed world (New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Osaka) while the remainder were in Africa, Asia or Latin America (UN-HABITAT 2003).
In fact, as shown in Table 2-1, approximately three quarters of the population in Europe, Oceania and North America live in urban areas; while in Africa and Asia more than a third of the population live in urban areas (Pilgrim et al. 2004). According to population size predictions for 2030, the proportion of the population in urban areas in all regions is projected to increase;
with Africa and Asia predicted to have over half of their populations being urban based.
13 Table 2-1: Observed and predicted levels of urbanisation in major global regions
Region
Urban dwellers (%)
1950 1975 2000 2030
Oceania 61.6 72.2 74.1 77.3
Europe 52.4 67.3 73.4 80.5
Asia 17.4 24.7 37.5 54.1
Africa 14.7 25.2 37.2 52.9
Northern America 63.9 73.8 77.4 84.5
Source: United Nations 2002.
As highlighted by Chakrabarty, rapidly expanding populations compound the pressures of urban management issues such as: inadequate housing and urban services (water, sanitation, transport and so on); spiralling land prices and construction costs; proliferation of slums; and pollution and deterioration of the urban environment (2001: 331). Satterthwaite, focussing on less developed areas, however recognises a similar but slightly different set of interrelated deprivations for inhabitants of urban areas:
• Inadequate or unstable income (which translates into inadequate consumption);
• Inadequate, unstable or risky asset bases: including social, human, financial, physical (e.g.
capital goods, equipment, housing) and natural (for instance access to productive land and freshwater);
• Limited or no right to make demands within the political or legal system – often within a framework which does not guarantees civil and political rights – for instance the right to have representative government, the right to organise and to make demands and to get a fair response, the right to protection against forced eviction); [and]
• Poor quality/insecure housing and lack of basic services – with the very large health burden that this imposes and the high economic and other costs this also brings (Satterthwaite 2000b: 2).
14 It is noted that the references to water in this document (Satterthwaite 2000b) relate specifically to the lack of adequate water supply for sections of the community, and more generally to inadequate service provisions available to communities. In addition, Satterthwaite stresses the fundamental importance of institutional management as environmental shortcomings typically result from inadequate economic and political response.
It may be misleading to refer to many of the most pressing urban environmental problems as ‘environmental’ since they arise not from some particular shortage of an environmental resource (land or freshwater) but from economic or political factors which prevent poorer groups from obtaining them or from organising to demand them. The very inadequate access to freshwater supplies that so many of the urban poor face is a serious environmental problem for them but rarely is its cause environmental; in most cities, it is not a shortage of freshwater resources but governments’
refusal to give a higher priority to water supply (and the competent organisational structure its supply, maintenance and expansion requires) (2000b: 19).
In the most temporary and least developed areas of cities, such as slums, a clear link has been established between poverty and inadequate water supply and poor sanitation provision (UN- HABITAT 2003). Linked to the nexus of issues of water, environment, poverty and slums, there is a global political recognition of urban water and sanitation issues as stipulated in the seventh United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) (the MDGs are detailed in Appendix 1):
Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability
1. Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes;
reverse loss of environmental resources.
2. Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to drinking water.
15 3. Achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020
(United Nations 2000).
Despite decades of awareness and agreement of the importance of action needed to ‘ensure environmental sustainability’, there has been very limited progress towards this particular goal to date. A recent United Nations report argues that despite considerable attention given to water developments, little has been achieved on the ground and notes the following shortcomings (adapted from United Nations 2006b: 44-45):
• Worldwide, 1.1 billion people still lack access to safe drinking water;
• Good governance is essential for managing our increasingly stretched supplies of freshwater, and indispensable for tackling poverty but unfortunately the commitment to good governance is often poor;
• There is no blueprint for good water governance… but it is known that it must include adequate institutions – nationally, regionally and locally – strong effective legal frameworks and sufficient human and financial resources;
• Local participation, transparency and solutions that are suitable in the context of diverse local circumstances are needed;
• Many governments recognise the need to localise management but fail to delegate adequate powers and resources to make it work.
Whilst these issues are not confined to urban contexts, it is clear that constraints to progress relate specifically to insufficient governance and inadequacy of institutions. This resonates with observations by Satterthwaite (2000b) and Chakrabarty (2001).