The new global frontier : urbanization, poverty and the environment in the 21st century / edited by George Martine. However, the magnitude of the expected impacts of urban growth in the developing world has not yet sunk in.
First fallacy: All developing countries and regions are going through the same urban transition
The coming growth of cities could, under the right policy framework, lead to progress in all these areas. A new vision and improved management based on a better understanding of urban growth processes; better information;.
Second fallacy: Most urban growth is occurring in mega-cities
Third fallacy: The poor are a marginal minority in urban centres
This neglect of the needs of the poor is at the root of the dire housing situation faced by slum dwellers in the developing world. The neglect of the poor also makes it harder for the city to compete for productive investments, to generate a tax base, to create jobs and income, and thus to improve the overall quality of life.
Fourth fallacy: The poor are a drain on the urban economy
Their needs are rarely prioritized in urban planning – which tends to focus on making the city more functional for economic activity and the needs of the middle and upper classes – and they fall through the cracks of formal real estate markets. The lack of good shelter makes it much more difficult for poor people to take advantage of what the city has to offer.
Fifth fallacy: Urbanization leads to environmental degradation
Sixth fallacy: Governments should try to control rural–urban migration
The best-known policies that have successfully controlled rural-urban migration have had to be very harsh. The first part reviews the demographics of the urban transition and the importance of rural-urban relations.
Urban transitions
This book is divided into five parts, each examining a specific aspect of the urban challenge and containing between three and six chapters. These challenges must be met in changing demographic and social conditions, and the fourth part addresses several of the most significant of these changes.
Shelter and urban poverty
The four chapters in this volume explore the experiences of the past and draw lessons for the future. Special attention is given to relationships between organizations of the urban poor and their local governments, and to proactive planning for urban growth and expansion.
Urban growth and its challenge for sustainability
While there have been many failed attempts to address the problems of urban housing and poverty, there have also been notable successes.
The changing face of urban demography and its potentialities
However, the extent of poverty in cities and even in the world will largely depend on urban policies and development strategies.
Regional patterns of urbanization and linkages to development
Urban Transitions
In Chapter 3, Skeldon again situates the urban transition in the broader context of demographic transition. In its program, the United Nations also documents trends in the percentage of urban population in national totals.
Improving the cities database
However, the error for South Asia remains 19.7 points too high even in the case of the next decade. The UN Population Division has long treated its forecasting efforts in the most cautious terms and has made clear its reservations about the proper scope of the effort.
Exploiting new data
There are more than 1600 cities in the dataset, and it is obviously impossible to accurately predict the demographic future of most of them. Although it is also statistically significant and in the expected direction, the effect of infant mortality on urban growth is significantly weaker.
Adding spatial content
This highlights the importance of rural safety nets for a segment of the urban poor. Rural-urban migration is therefore part of the solution to reducing both rural and urban poverty, rather than a poverty problem.
The transitions in developed societies of destination
However, the nature of the migration process leading to urbanization is also changing, and it is perhaps appropriate to think of a 'second urban transition' as well. This transition is the urban counterpart of the 'migration reversal', in which countries shift from economies of net emigration to economies of net immigration (Abella, 1994). The city is central to this process: it is the channel, and very often the origin, of much of the emigration; it, or its immediate surrounding areas, is also the primary destination of the immigration to be expected in the second urban transition.
In the context of skilled migration, for example, many skills did not exist in the past and cannot currently be acquired locally. Thus, the idea of a second urban transition can convey a more vivid idea of the spatial processes involved.
The transitions in developing countries of origin
Urban populations are therefore likely to continue to decline in the context of low fertility and the depletion of local sources of migrants. Thus, many towns on the periphery of the developing world in the second urban transition may short-circuit their hinterland and enter a period of stagnant growth. Significant shifts in the pattern of the leading components of urban growth, fertility and migration occur throughout the transition, to the extent that a distinction between a first and a second urban transition seems warranted.
As the birth rate declines, the most developed parts of the world are gradually shifting from national to international sources of labor. The current course of development may be unsustainable, and global warming will cause sea levels to rise, threatening most of the world's global cities.
Shelter and Urban Poverty
There are inspiring examples of approaches, many of which are based on Organizations of the Urban Poor (OUP), which have succeeded in overcoming barriers to addressing the lack of basic shelter and services. Pressure to reduce the role of government extended to urban services that helped justify the expansion of the state in the 19th century. 1 The urban poor are often marginalized (spatially, legally and politically) by spatial planning designed and implemented in the name of public interest.
2 Affluent groups often reap the benefits of public programs designed on behalf of the urban poor. But while urban elites undoubtedly distort policy, their interests only sometimes overlap with those of the urban poor.
Upgrading the property rights of the urban poor
Before explicitly addressing issues surrounding the organization of civil society, the next section discusses strategies for improving the property rights of the urban poor and increasing their access to finance. Where land tenure issues prevent informal settlements from receiving public services, land regularization will boost public investment. Until 2002, only 17,324 families in Peru who obtained title deeds under the new policy had accessed mortgage loans, representing only 1.3 percent of the total title deeds assigned during the process (Calderón, 2004).
In short, the relationship between land regulation and investment must be understood locally, not assumed internationally. In some cases, land regulation has been part of a more integrated program to meet the shelter needs of the urban poor.
Improving access to fi nancing for shelter
Households without formal tenure may invest because de facto tenure is already secure, or in the belief that investment will actually increase their security by creating a legitimate neighborhood that is politically and physically harder to destroy. Originally founded in Bangladesh in the mid-1970s and now active in more than 40 countries, Grameen Bank has an extensive housing loan program with more than half a million loans to basic units. In El Salvador, for example, low-cost subdivision regulations put in place in the early 1990s helped stimulate a low-income land construction industry of 200 companies (Ferguson and Navarrete, 2003).
The most important reforms here were not so much in the financial regulations as in the regulation of development. In the Philippines, the Community Mortgage Program offers residents of low-income neighborhoods facing eviction access to low-interest loans for the purchase of land where upgrading takes place over an extended period.
Organizing civil society
Therefore, in the Philippines, a group of NGOs is working with communities that are receiving Community Mortgage Program loans. Looking ahead, it is essential to improve the political basis for negotiations between organizations of the urban poor and local governments. A recent World Bank study (Angel et al, 2005) focused on the declining density of built-up area in cities and the wider implications of this in the face of continued urban growth.
The distribution of the urban population in Ecuador is very skewed towards the larger cities. All the cities studied, with the possible exception of Riobamba, have large haciendas on the urban periphery. This is very much the case where the work of organizations of the urban poor (OUPs) is concerned.
Located outside Johannesburg, in the eastern part of the Witwatersrand region, Wattville is an old, extremely overpopulated African township.
The Social and Sustainable Use of Space
This chapter seeks to contribute to an integrated multidimensional vision of urban sustainability and to a better understanding of the interactions between urbanization and global environmental change (GEC). One of the most obvious negative consequences of extreme climate events is the growing number and magnitude of climate-related disasters in urban areas during the last few decades. As mentioned above, one of the worrying prospects of climate change is its impact on sea level rise and the potential consequences for urban coastal areas (McGranahan et al, 2007).
The discussion above illustrates some of the challenges of urban growth, especially in poor countries. Scholars emphasize the importance of addressing equity concerns in the study of climate change risks and their relationship to development challenges, particularly in poor countries (Tol et al, 2004; Thomas and Twyman, 2005; Paavola and Adger, 2006).
Coastal locations and human settlement
Environmental damage and climate-related risks
Poorly managed urban development
Climate change exacerbates coastal risks
Economic incentives and the environmental risks of coastal settlement
Early action is critical
Therefore, timely measures to prevent urban development in dangerous places are critical, especially since adapting infrastructure to existing settlements is extremely expensive if it has to be undertaken quickly.
Migration can be an effective response to climate change
Effective adaptation of existing coastal settlements is inherently local
National and international support and information for local adaptation
Estimating the urban and rural land areas and populations in LECZs This study integrates recently developed spatial databases of (1) finely resolved global population distribution, (2) urban extent and (3) elevation data to produce country-level estimates of urban land area and population in LECZs. Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data were used to delineate the LECZs, including the land area adjacent to the coast up to 10 meters in height. Urban extent was taken from the Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP) of Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network.
Population and land area are also obtained from GRUMP, which provides these data as gridded areas based on geo-referenced census data. The population is divided into rural areas or, in the case of the urban population, its identified urban extent.
Regional differences
The LDC group has a particularly high share of both its total population and urban population in the LECZ (14 and 21 percent respectively), despite a relatively modest land share (1.2 percent). The countries that rank highest in the size of their urban population in the LECZ (see Table 9.3) are mostly countries that also rank high in their overall urban population. Indonesia also ranks high: with the fourth largest urban population in the LECZ, it has the eighth largest urban population overall.
However, as illustrated in Figure 9.2 and Table 9.4, the share of population in the zone increases more gradually, while the share of settlements crossing the LECZ increases sharply with settlement size. In contrast, over the same period the share of the population living in the LECZ only increased from 7 to 21 percent.
