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“Fighting Poverty and Environmental Injustice in Cities” from State of the World 2007: Our Urban Future (2007)

Janice E. Perlman with Molly O’Meara Sheehan

Editors’ Introduction

Widening global gaps between rich and poor societies and the concentration of tens of millions of people within the rapidly growing “mega-cities” of developing nations are two of the most pressing equity issues related to current development patterns. Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Lima, Lagos, Johannesburg, Cairo, Karachi, Tehran, Mumbai, Dhaka, Shanghai, Seoul, Jakarta, and Manila are among these metropolises with more than 10 million residents, many living in great poverty in “informal” housing created illegally on public or private land out of whatever materials are at hand.

For more than two decades Janice E. Perlman has run the Mega-Cities Project, a nonprofit organization that since 1987 has created research and action teams in 21 of the world’s largest cities, aiming to support innovative solutions to urban problems. In this selection she argues that ending environmental injustice in such mega-cities must become a core part of the sustainability agenda. Other related materials are available from the group’s website www.megacitiesproject.org/.

Many other organizations provide information on conditions and sustainable development opportunities in large cities of the developing world, including the United Nations’ Development Program (www.undp.org/) and the U.N.’s Human Settlements Program (www.unhabitat.org/). Excellent materials are also offered by The Worldwatch Institute (www.worldwatch.org/), from one of whose annual State of the World Reports this piece is excerpted, and the International Institute for Environment and Development (www.iied.org/), which publishes the journal Environment and Urbanization. Books on mega-cities include Aseem Inam’s Planning for the Unplanned: Recovering from Crises in Megacities (New York: Routledge, 2005), David Westendorff’s edited volume From Unsustainable to Inclusive Cities (Geneva: UN Research Institute for Social Development, 2004), and Megacities: The Politics of Urban Exclusion and Violence in the Global South (London: Zed Books, 2009), edited by Kees Koonings and Kirk Kruijt.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears,” wrote Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities. If so, our cit- ies range from daydreams to nightmares, depending on the city, the moment in time, and a person’s position within the social and physical landscape.

Cities, like regions and countries, have experienced uneven development exacerbated by govern- ment inability to offset the inequities produced by globalization. Within many cities, inequalities have deepened – between rich and poor, between

Wheeler, S. M., & Beatley, T. (Eds.). (2014). Sustainable urban development reader. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from asulib-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:48:15.

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included and excluded, and between the “formal” and the “informal” city.1

The informal city consists of squatter settle- ments, clandestine subdivisions, invaded residential and commercial buildings, provisional housing for refugees or migrant workers, and often degraded “social housing” complexes. These communities account for some 40 percent of the total urban population of the South, including 41 percent in Mumbai and 47 percent in Nairobi. Residents typically lack basic urban services (water and sanitation, electricity, paved roadways) and security of tenure, including official title to homes or land and freedom from eviction. Even where informal communities have urban infrastructure and de facto rights to use the land, they remain stigmatized spaces, while the low-cost labor of their residents helps sustain life’s daydream for the privileged in the formal city.2

As housing prices in the formal city are pro- hibitive for the poor, they have no choice but to live in the most dangerous areas: on the streets, as is common in India; in alleyways outside wealthy homes, as in many Asian cities; on hillsides too steep for conventional construction, as in the fave- las of Rio de Janeiro; on stilts in marshes, as in Bahia’s alagados; on floodplains, as in many of Jakarta’s kampungs; atop garbage dumps, as in Manila; or even in cemeteries, as in Cairo. Families often remain through several generations and up- grade their homes and communities over time. Even young people who manage to enter university often have no place to live outside these “marginalized” spaces.3

Poor urban neighborhoods face the worst of two worlds: the environmental health hazards of under- development, such as lack of clean drinking water, and of industrialization, such as toxic wastes. Yet their residents tread lightly on the planet, using few resources and generating low levels of waste in comparison with their wealthier neighbors. The gap between rich and poor in cities from Nairobi to New York means that those with the fewest resources suffer most from pollution generated by the wealthiest.

Those who advocate “sustainable develop- ment” – meeting the needs of people today without despoiling the planet for future generations – too often overlook the striking environmental injustice in our cities. The logical sequence linking global

sustainability to urban poverty is synthesized in what have become known as the Perlman Principles:

■ There can be no global environmental sustain- ability without urban environmental sustainabil- ity: Economies of scale in cities create energy and resource efficiencies.

■ Transforming the urban metabolism through circular rather than linear systems is the key to reversing global environmental deterioration.

■ There can be no urban environmental solution without alleviating urban poverty: The urban poor tend to occupy the most ecologically frag- ile areas of cities and often lack adequate water, sewage, or solid waste management systems.

■ There can be no solutions to poverty or envir- onmental degradation without building on bottom-up, community-based innovations, which are small in scale relative to the magnitude of the problems.

■ There can be no impact at the macro level with- out sharing what works among local leaders and scaling these programs up into public policy where circumstances permit.

■ There can be no urban transformation without changing the old incentive systems, the “rules of the game,” and the players at the table.

■ There can be no sustainable city in the twenty- first century without social justice and political participation as well as economic vitality and ecological regeneration.

A casual look at book titles throughout the 1960s and 1970s shows that the call for attention to the urbanizing world has been sounded for decades: The Urban Explosion in Latin America, The Exploding Cities, The Wretched of the Earth, Uncontrolled Urban Settlement. There may have been slightly more inter- est in urban poverty during the cold war due to fear that migrants and squatters might lead to leftist regimes. But once it was recognized that squatters were more interested in better opportunities for their children than in social protest, this interest fell off. It has only recently resurfaced in light of urban violence and security issues.4

Gradually, international agencies have begun to acknowledge the significance of cities and urban poverty. In 1999 the World Bank and UN-HABITAT formed the Cities Alliance to coordinate slum up- grading, in 2001 UN-HABITAT became a full-fledged

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United Nations program, in 2003 the international community agreed on a single definition of “slums,” and in 2004 United Cities and Local Governments was formed, giving formerly competing local author- ity networks a unified voice.

These recent milestones are important, but the pace of change remains too slow.

One of the UN Millennium Development Goals explicitly focuses on urban poverty: improve the living conditions of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020 (Target 11, which is part of Goal 7 on envi- ronmental sustainability). Even if achieved, this would make but a small dent, as it aims at just 10 percent of the existing slum population, and an additional 1 billion people will be living in urban areas of developing countries by 2020. Why are we always playing catch-up?5

BARRIERS TO EQUITABLE CITIES

Among the obstacles to reducing urban poverty and promoting environmental justice are inept and corrupt governance, violence, anti-urban bias, skewed development assistance, counterproductive incentives and resistance to change, and a lack of reliable city-level data necessary to benchmark progress.

Weak governance. The urban poor, generally excluded from decision making, are the greatest untapped source of ideas about improving their cities and lives. Over the last several decades, may- ors have been elected for the first time in many countries, arguably bringing the government closer to the people, but most poor people still do not have a voice in governance. Since decision makers tend to come from elite sections of society, they often have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Lawmakers in Kenya, for instance, who saw bicycles as toys for children rather than an important transportation mode, levied a luxury tax on bikes for years, keeping the cost too high for many low-income residents.6

Poor governance is reflected in uneven service delivery. World Bank Institute researchers have documented that people have less access to water, sewerage, and school-based Internet in cities that have a record of bribery in their utility companies, private firms that dictate local laws and regulations, and high levels of corruption nationwide. Ronald

MacLean-Abaroa discovered this reality after be- coming the first elected mayor of Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, in the mid-1980s: “Whenever I found prob- lems in service delivery or the prompt completion of public works or the collection of revenues, they happened not just to be associated with inefficient organization but almost always with corruption.”7

Corruption, clientelism, and cronyism – the “three Cs” that undermine democracy – worsen urban poverty. Corruption skews public spending toward sectors where bribing is easier, such as large public works construction, and generally away from education, health, and maintenance of existing in- frastructure. When people need to bribe officials to get needed services, those who can least afford the bribes suffer the most. A survey in Indonesia found that bribes required by police, schools, elec- tricity companies, and garbage collectors ate into the already tight budgets of the urban poor.8

Violence and stigma. The increase in urban violence that has accompanied the rise in drug and arms trafficking has created particularly high mortality rates among urban youth. When dealers purchase complicity from the police for their illegal activities, they can hold entire low-income neigh- borhoods hostage. The consequent association of the urban poor and violence only serves to deepen the stigma that already constrains life opportunities for these people.9

A multigenerational study of families in Rio con- firmed this trend. Fear of violence keeps people homebound, while job interviews end when the applicant’s address is identified as in a favela. Among people of equivalent educational levels, those who lived in favelas had less success finding jobs.10

Violent crime is a much greater threat in some places than others. Researchers have found the world’s lowest levels of robbery and assault in Asia and the highest levels in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.11

Anti-urban bias. Environmentalists and develop- ment specialists have long portrayed cities as threats to nature. Many policymakers still adhere to this old mind-set, pitting environmental concerns against economic growth and preventing further growth of cities, especially megacities. In 1986, a study commissioned by the UN Fund for Population Activities found that almost every nation had made some attempt to limit urban growth by investing

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in rural development, creating “growth poles” or “new towns,” forcing people to relocate to under- settled regions, moving their national capitals, or introducing closed-city policies.12

Countries spent a good deal of money and political capital in these efforts, but none succeeded in stemming the tide of migration. Investment in rural roads, electrification, education, health, and industrialization, while important for improving rural living standards, in many cases just increased the rate of migration to urban areas. As people became more aware, they used their new roads and skills to seek wider opportunities in the city.13

Even where freedom of movement was highly restricted – such as colonial governments, command- and-control economies, and police states – people nonetheless found ways to sneak into cities. The most “successful” efforts to prevent urban growth were in apartheid South Africa, which required passports for non-whites to enter cities; China, which used rice ration cards and a household reg- istration system; Russia, which used housing alloca- tions; and Cuba, where a national policy of keeping people in the countryside was backed by the use of force. Yet “floating populations” of migrants entered Chinese cities, Moscow apartments became crowded with friends and relatives trying to move to the city, and governments everywhere kept in- accurate records of city size to maintain the fiction of non-growth.14

As recently as 2005, scores of nations were still attempting to curb urbanization.

The United Nations Population Division recently analyzed migration policies of 164 countries and found that 70 percent aim to lower migration from rural to urban areas. This study confirmed that the impact on overall population distribution was “almost negligible.”15

The myth that people will stop coming to cities if public housing is not built and squatter settle- ments are removed is unfounded and hurts the poor. Miloon Kothari, UN Special Rapporteur on Housing Rights, estimated in 2006 that the number of forced evictions had risen worldwide since 2000. “Without human rights safeguards,” Kothari warns, “the commitment to the reduction of slums, including through the relevant MDGs, can easily become slum- eradication to the detriment of slum-dwellers.”16

Skewed international assistance. Although virtually all of the world’s population growth is expected in

the cities of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and most of this will be in low-income areas, develop- ment assistance has been reluctant to recognize the urbanization of poverty. From 1970 to 2000, all urban development assistance was estimated at $60 billion – just 4 percent of the total $1.5 trillion. Few bilateral aid agencies have any kind of urban housing program, or any serious urban program at all.17

The decisions of international development banks are important, even if aid is not the primary source of foreign investment in a given country. In recent years, aid has been roughly one-tenth the level of private capital flows in developing countries. Yet international aid agencies leverage additional funding and influence the research agendas and spending priorities of governments, universities, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).18

Aid that does flow to urban areas often misses the poor. The London-based International Institute for Environment and Development found that urban projects accounted for 20–30 percent of all lending at several agencies from 1981 to 1998. But housing, water, sanitation, and other services that improve conditions for the urban poor received just 11 per- cent of total lending at the World Bank, 8 percent at the Asian Development Bank, and 5 percent at Japan’s Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund.19

The World Bank reports that its lending and staff devoted to urban areas continue to lag behind the resources invested in the rural sector. All country- wide World Bank investments and most bilateral aid in developing countries are guided by Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers prepared by govern- ments in consultation with the World Bank Group. These documents tend to neglect urban areas.20

The international assistance community cut its teeth on rural development and is professionally and structurally geared toward assisting rural peas- ants, not to continuing assistance for them when they move to cities. Development experts seem to prefer “missions” to attractive agricultural areas, fishing villages, and environmental preserves over those in the polluted, overcrowded, and often dangerous urban slums.

Pressure to bring more attention to urban poverty within the international development community has met with strong resistance. Every Executive Director of UN-HABITAT since its founding in 1978 has urged that we must act now, and yet none has

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succeeded in receiving funding parity with other UN agencies. When UN-HABITAT was headquar- tered in Nairobi along with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) to assuage political pressures from African countries, it was no secret that these were considered the most expendable United Nations bodies. Although UNEP and UN-HABITAT have an impressive campus in Nairobi, both agen- cies remain politically and financially marginalized.

The voices for greater support for urban pro- grams often face derision from those who believe that government spending is already pro-urban. But rigorous economic studies find that wealth gener- ated in cities ends up subsidizing the countryside.21

On a more positive note, the World Bank is now considering subnational lending, which would allow loans to go directly to municipal governments, bypassing national Finance Ministries. This would help cities – particularly megacities – receive monies designated for them from international agencies that is now often held up by national governments that have imposed lending ceilings or that see po- litical advantages in withholding funds. For instance, national governments in Brazil and Mexico do not want the mayors of their major cities to appear successful because they are potential competitors for the presidency and often from opposition parties.22

Counterproductive incentives and fear of change. The incentive systems of aid agencies are at odds with contextually specific, community-based, anti- poverty initiatives. Development professionals are promoted based on the size and rapidity of loans “pushed out the door,” making one-size-fits-all approaches the best route to promotion, as opposed to smaller-scale projects where the priorities are set by local people. One analyst concluded that “the people whose needs justify the whole develop- ment industry are the people with the least power to influence development and to whom there is least accountability in terms of what is funded and who gets funded.”23

The public sector is generally risk-averse. Elected and appointed officials often feel safer sticking with “the way things have always been done,” even if results are suboptimal, rather than risk being fired or not re-elected for making a mistake. There is a high price to pay for an unsuccessful initiative – and little or no reward for innovation. As Alan Altshuler and Marc Zegans have noted, in the private sector the expectation that some ideas and initiatives will

not be successful is built into the process, and funds are set aside for R&D where the entire point is to experiment and innovate.24

Fragmentation and competition among public agencies and academic disciplines further limit cooperation in solving urban problems. Each area – water and sanitation, transportation, housing, land use planning, private-sector involvement, poverty alleviation – is in a separate department, often run by people who may compete for resources, atten- tion, or staff. Yet these issues are intertwined, so that an apparent solution to one may lead to new problems in another. Even when universities or international agencies have created interdisci- plinary structures, individuals still have the strong- est allegiances to their home department, where appointments, promotions, and payments are set.

Inadequate data for benchmarking. Lack of city- and neighborhood-level data makes it difficult to measure progress and hold governments account- able. Most statistics are only available at the national level, at best broken down between rural and urban, but not by specific cities. Where cities have man- aged to mobilize resources to collect their own data, they often exclude informal settlements and are rarely comparable with earlier studies or with data from other cities. The Global Urban Observatory created by UN-HABITAT in 1998 to address this problem has had little success in finding indicators comparable across cities, despite its Web-accessible database of 237 cities that covers measures of poverty, environment, infrastructure, urban services, shelter, and land.25

Apparently neutral questions such as what to measure, what indicators to use, how to collect reliable data on these indicators, how to make sense of the results, and how to disseminate the results are in fact value-based issues that have political and social implications. Answers to these urban indicators questions will be a major topic of debate at the next World Urban Forum in Nanjing, China, in 2008. . . .

PROMISING NEW DIRECTIONS

Our global future will be urban, like it or not. People in developing countries will continue to vote with their feet, moving to cities or the urban fringe. It will be many decades before cities of the global

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South reach a stable population. Although birth rates decline with urbanization, this happens more slowly with the urban poor.

What can be done to make our urban future a desirable and sustainable one? What kinds of cities foster conviviality and creativity? How can poverty and environmental degradation be alleviated and a voice for the disenfranchised be ensured?

There is no magic bullet for creating sustainable, equitable, and peaceful cities. But there are some necessary if not sufficient conditions for such trans- formations: transparent governance, decent work or a basic income, innovative infrastructure to conserve the environment, intelligent land use with integrated community development, and social cohesion along with cultural diversity.

Foster transparent governance. Effective gover- nance is essential to scale up promising innovations into public policies, to provide basic services equi- tably, and to forge partnerships with the private and voluntary sectors. Addressing the World Bank Board in Singapore in September 2006, Bank President Paul Wolfowitz emphasized this point: “Without [good] governance, all other reforms will have limited impact. . . . It is the view I have heard on sidewalks and in taxis – in the marbled halls of Ministries and in the rundown shacks of shantytowns.”26

Tackling the corruption that weakens govern- ance requires fostering competition so that govern- ments do not have monopoly power, reducing bureaucratic leeway, and increasing accountability. For instance, La Paz began to reduce bribery in construction permits by simplifying and publicizing the rules, contracting the permitting out to archi- tects, and reducing the city’s job to overseeing the contracts – a job that could be done by fewer municipal employees who could be paid more. Some promising efforts to foster transparent gov- ernance make government rules, purchases, and investments public knowledge by posting them on the Internet.27

Ensure decent work or a basic income. Jobs are a top priority for the urban poor. In 2001, the major- ity of interviewees in the multigenerational study of favela residents in Rio said that “the most important factor for a successful life” was a good job with a good salary. They want a chance to earn their livelihoods whether as employees or informal workers – that is the key to their dignity. What is

needed is both job creation and preparation of people within their communities for jobs that exist in market sectors that are growing.28

Job and skills training, mentoring, and help in finding a first job can play a major role if done correctly. There is no use building people’s capacity for jobs that no longer exist.

Savings and credit are key to job creation. Without access to these financial tools, would-be entrepreneurs cannot start small businesses. Many forms of microfinance, including community savings and credit funds as well as small loans to make improvements to housing, have been successful in urban settings.29

Larger companies can also play a role in streng- thening the economies of poor communities. In Guadalajara, Mexico, where a good share of the population lives in unplanned settlements, a large, multinational cement company, Cemex, developed a savings-and-credit scheme to allow households that earn $5–$15 a day (low-income families, but not the poorest of the poor) to buy materials to build and improve their housing. The program has since expanded to twenty-three cities in Mexico.30

In some cases, governments can help create local jobs by hiring the urban poor to help solve pressing environmental problems, as reforestation in Rio demonstrated. In low-income communities in Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania and Kampala in Uganda that were damaged in flooding, local gov- ernments used “community contracts” to get local labor for the necessary rebuilding.31

There is also a role for a “negative income tax” to help in periods between jobs or to supplement incomes too low to live on. Mexico and Brazil started innovative “conditional cash transfer pro- grams” in which the government directly deposits funds into personalized debit cards for low-income people as an incentive for desirable action. For example, a family gets a certain amount of cash for children as long as they attend school regularly, gets other funds upon proof of immunization against contagious diseases, and receives further aid if there are elderly or infirm people in the family. Such programs have led to higher school enrollment and better preventive health care, especially in Latin American cities, and New York’s mayor now plans to try the approach.32

Develop innovative infrastructure to conserve the environment. Cities that do not yet have full

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infrastructure have the chance to “leapfrog” over outmoded and wasteful systems created during the Industrial Revolution. They can take advantage of resource-conserving technologies, both low- and high-tech, to revolutionize the built environment. Examples include installing water-conserving toilets, separating drinking and gray water into different systems, using passive solar energy or biogas for heating, and adapting the recycling technologies developed by NASA for life in outer space. Architect William McDonough is working on low-cost housing projects in China that use biogas from wastewater for cooking, local compressed earth as building materials, and passive solar design for heating and cooling. These sorts of technologies are also being used in Johannesburg.33

One challenge in adopting low-impact or “alter- native” technologies is that they do not carry the prestige of “modernity” seen on televisions and in houses of the rich around the world. While cutting- edge neighborhoods in places like Stockholm show that eco-friendly design is compatible with a high standard of living, most people in developing coun- tries do not see these models and continue to aspire to the worst mistakes of the US and European systems.

Promote intelligent land use and integrated com- munity development. Urban planning is making a comeback after decades of being dismissed as the province of useless colored maps. Creative urban- ists have found new ways to involve communities in the trade-offs of physical planning decisions and to use old planning tools for progressive change. Zoning, building, and land use regulations have been adapted to foster mixed-use communities, with homes close to workplaces, commerce, and recreation. Incentives for development in areas with existing infrastructure have helped limit sprawl. “Areas of special interest” have been established to protect environmentally important areas, connect nature corridors, and allow the upgrading of infor- mal settlements in flexible ways. Comprehensive transportation planning has now included invest- ments in sidewalks, bicycle paths, and low-cost public transportation options with easy connections between local, regional, and longer-distance travel.

São Paulo has been among the leaders in advanc- ing urban planning tools to create a more inclusive city. One of the biggest steps there was taxing building developers to create a fund for investments

in the public interest, including public transporta- tion, housing, and environmental improvements.

Low-income housing options are so limited in most cities that new migrants end up living in the most dangerous places. A logical response would be to lay out small plots of land with connection to basic urban services, available for small sums or loans. This “sites and services” approach, first tested in Dakar, Senegal, in 1972, has been little used, as it does not offer politicians the chance for ribbon cuttings and photo opportunities. Yet it makes monetary and environmental sense: the costs of infrastructure are small compared with retrofitting a squatter community, and the new settlements help reduce the invasion of environ- mentally sensitive areas.

Cultivate social cohesion and cultural diversity. Diversity makes natural ecosystems and human economies more resilient, yet prejudice and mis- understanding between different groups of people often squander the potential of cultural diversity to strengthen cities. Solving the complex problems that our cities face will require the greatest diversity of cultures and value sets possible.34

As violent crime rips apart the urban fabric and further isolates the poor, there is a need to focus on controlling the sale of arms and drugs, reducing the corruption that permits violence with impunity, and mobilizing the society at large to find solutions to the problem. Promising initiatives include efforts at community policing in low-income neighbor- hoods and all varieties of arts, culture, and sports programs for young people at risk. Some programs of arms amnesty and prevention of small arms sales have also been tried, with varying degrees of success in lowering urban violence.35

OUR URBAN FUTURE

The directions in politics, economics, environmental policy, and society just described require at least three fundamental changes. The first is to revise the architecture for support to cities and the urban poor, giving cities their due and reversing the re- ward systems to promote innovation. As the global population shifts toward cities, the agendas of aid agencies, national governments, foundations, re- search centers, and nonprofit groups need to reflect this reality. All too often in the discourse on the

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future of cities, the focus remains exclusively on global or world cities in their role as centers of capital and information flows and as corporate headquarters rather than on the more numerous and populous cities of the developing world.

To bridge the divide between official sources of assistance and the urban poor, governments and aid agencies might channel their support to a local fund or community foundation in each city. The fund would be earmarked for use by community organizations, have transparent decision making, and make it easy for groups that receive assistance to exchange ideas with each other. The Thai gov- ernment’s Community Organizations Develop- ment Institute offers one example of how national governments could contribute to local funds. The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency has set up local organizations to run urban poverty programs in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. In Ecuador, the government reached agreements be- tween 1988 and 1993 with foreign governments to restructure commercial debt instruments and then channeled the funds through local NGOs to finance development projects throughout the country.36

Rethinking development assistance includes finding ways for federations of the urban poor and NGOs working with them to bypass official aid channels. Two former World Bank staff members have started a web site, www.globalgiving.com, that allows individuals and institutions to support pro- jects run by local people. Analyzing this initiative, former Bank economist William Easterly writes: “Think of the potential for creativity if thousands of potential donors, project proposers, technical advisers, and advocates for the poor were freed from the shackles of the large centralized bureau- cracy and could find solutions that worked on the ground. This is not a panacea for redesigning all of foreign aid; it is just one promising experiment in how aid could reach the poor.”37

A second change needed is to create systematic ways for benchmarking progress and measuring outcomes in cities. Without reliable, comparable indicators of poverty and environmental conditions, we will never know whether progress is being made or how to compare the impact of one set of prac- tices and policies with another. As international and national efforts have not yielded city-level indica- tors, the need for local benchmarking is clear. One possibility is for local governments to hire residents

to collect health, housing, income, and environ- mental data. Federations of the urban poor, from Mumbai to Nairobi, have shown how this can be done, organizing communities to perform their own censuses. Cities can hold information collection fairs that would motivate people to collect data on their own areas of interest and responsibility.

Exchange of information is especially essential among those who are most directly involved in fighting urban poverty and among the urban poor themselves. The journal Environment and Urbanization, produced by the International Institute for Environment and Development, offers one important forum for researchers, NGO staff, and others to exchange ideas. There is also a need for face-to-face discussions among community leaders.

Some new projects aim to collect and share information on urban poverty and the environment. The International Development Research Centre in Canada has launched a program to study inter- ventions in urban agriculture, water and sanitation, solid waste management, vulnerability to natural disasters, and land tenure as a cross-cutting theme in a handful of “focus cities” in developing countries. A new Urban Sustainability Initiative, supported by the Moore Foundation in the United States, is planning city partnership projects in China, Mexico, South Africa, and Tanzania, an exchange of ideas among cities, and a set of scientific and social indicators to gauge urban progress.38

In these and other initiatives it will be important to realize that rather than “best practices” and “competitive cities,” what is needed is “better prac- tices” and “collaborative cities.” The “best practice” model is flawed by its implication of one ideal way for all communities. As the MegaCities Project discovered, each new innovation gives rise to new problems and contradictions, which require yet further innovations and revised solutions. Another lesson was that a “best practice” in one place may be useless or detrimental in another. Each location needs to adapt solutions to its own history, culture, and local circumstances. The current system of nominating, judging, and rewarding “best practices” allows for self-nomination and self-promotion but leaves little room for neutral external evaluation.

Despite apparent differences in politics, econom- ics, and culture, cities in developing countries and the industrial world have many problems in com- mon, often more than they share with small towns

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or villages in their own countries. Nearly every wealthy city contains within it neighborhoods with high infant mortality, malnutrition, homelessness, joblessness, and low life expectancy. And nearly every city in the developing world contains within it a world of high finance, high technology, and high fashion. If cities are to be used as laboratories for urban innovation, they can harvest ideas to exchange from the South to the North, since low- income cities have a lighter ecological footprint and have more experience in reuse. It is time to move from NIMBY (not in my backyard) and NOPE (not on planet earth) to the recognition that all by-products of human activities end up in someone’s backyard and in the atmosphere that surrounds us.

The last basic shift needed is for people in positions of power to listen to the most vulnerable portions of the population, particularly young people and women. The cities of the future belong to the children of today. Unfortunately, a review of municipal efforts to incorporate children’s concerns in decision making found that “there is generally more interest in showcase projects” than in broader changes.39

Cities could scale up programs that expose young people to arts and sports and develop areas in which they can excel and feel part of something worthwhile. In Rio, one such program – Affro- Reggae, started in the favela Vigário Geral – has used drumming, dance, and song lyrics that expressed the community’s reality to attract youngsters, build solidarity, and develop a critical analysis of their situation. Its work, chronicled in the documentary Favela Rising, helped defuse a drug war with the adjacent favela and has spread to other communities.40

One of the most articulate explanations of the need to listen to the urban poor comes from Rose Molokoane of the South African Federation of the Urban Poor, or FED UP. She recently told an audi- ence that included development professionals: “We are fed up of being the subject of the agenda. We are fed up with you not listening to us. . . . We are poor, but not hopeless. We have money, but no chance to come to the bank and open an account because we have no address. If you give me secu- rity of tenure, then I have an address, and I will open an account. We will show you we can do it. . . . The only thing we are concentrating on is

how to organize ourselves. If communities are organized, they are a tool to address issues that are giving you double stress.”41

The gulf that Rose Molokoane identified between those who set “development goals” and those who are the target of that agenda is a subset of larger rifts between rich and poor, between the powerful and the powerless. Bridging these divides will require a new mind-set. Unless and until we are ready to expand our conception of “we” from “me and my family” to my community, city, coun- try, and planet, the gap will continue to grow. We may have come this far through competition and survival of the fittest, but if we are to make the leap to a sustainable world for the centuries ahead, we will need to be intelligent enough to do it through collaboration and inclusion. In the words of Australian aboriginal elder Lilla Watson: “If you’ve come to help me, you’re wasting your time. But if you’ve come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”42

NOTES

1 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1974); different types of inequality between countries in World Bank, World Development Report 2006 (Washington, DC: Oxford University Press and World Bank, 2006).

2 Urban population in slums in developing coun- tries from UN-HABITAT, State of the World’s Cities 2006/7 (London: Earthscan, 2006), pp. 16, 111; Mumbai and Nairobi from Gora Mboup, senior demographic and health expert, UN- HABITAT, Nairobi, e-mail to Molly Sheehan, 5 October 2006; Zuenir Ventura, Cidade Partida (São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1994).

3 Janice E. Perlman, “Marginality: From Myth to Reality in the Favelas in Rio de Janeiro 1969– 2002,” in Ananya Roy and Nezar AlSayyad, eds., Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004).

4 Glenn H. Beyer, ed., The Urban Explosion in Latin America: A Continent in Process of Modernization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967); Peter Wilsher and Rosemary Righter, The Exploding Cities (London: A. Deutsch, 1975); Franz Fanon,

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The Wretched of the Earth (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965); John F.C. Turner, Uncontrolled Urban Settlement: Problems and Policies (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966); squatters’ interest in better opportunities for children from Janice Perlman, The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), and from Joan M. Nelson, Access to Power: Politics and The Urban Poor in Developing Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

5 For Millennium Development Goals, see www.un.org/millenniumgoals; United Nations Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2005 Revision (New York, 2005).

6 Janice Perlman, “Re-democratization in Brazil: A View from Below, The Experience of Rio de Janeiro’s Favelados 1968–2005,” in Peter Kingstone and Timothy Power, eds., Democratic Brazil Revisited (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming); Kenya’s tax on bicycles from VNG uitgeverij, The Economic Significance of Cycling: A Study to Illustrate the Costs and Benefits of Cycling Policy (The Hague, 2000), and from Jeffrey Maganya, Intermediate Technology Development Group, Nairobi, Kenya, discussion with Molly Sheehan, 8 May 2001.

7 Daniel Kaufmann, Frannie Léautier, and Massimo Mastruzzi, “Globalization and Urban Performance,” in Frannie Léautier, ed., Cities in a Globalizing World: Governance, Performance and Sustainability (Washington, DC: World Bank Institute, 2006), pp. 38–49; Robert Klitgaard, Ronald MacLean-Abaroa, and H. Lindsey Parris, Corrupt Cities: A Practical Guide to Cure and Prevention (Oakland, CA: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 2000), p. 32.

8 Perlman, op. cit. note 6; T. Abed and Sanjeev Gupta, eds., Governance, Corruption, and Economic Performance (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund (IMF), 2002); Vito Tanzi and Hamid Davoodi, Corruption, Public Investment and Growth, Working Paper 97/139 (Washington, DC: IMF, 1997); Sanjeev Gupta, Hamid Davoodi, and Rosa Alonso-Terme, Does Corruption affect Income Inequality and Poverty? Working Paper 98/76 (Washington, DC: IMF, 1998); Ratih Hardjono and Stefanie

Teggeman, eds., The Poor Speak Up: Seventeen Stories of Corruption (Jakarta: Partnership for Governance Reform, 2002).

9 UN-HABITAT, The State of the World’s Cities, 2004/2005 (London: Earthscan, 2004), pp. 134–57.

10 Ignacio Cano et al., O impacto da violência no Rio de Janeiro, Working Paper (Rio de Janeiro: Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2004); levels of violence from Luke Dowdney, Children of the Drug Trade (Rio de Janeiro: Viveiros de Castro Editoria, 2003); police pro- voking violence from “Law Enforcers on the Rampage: Brazil’s Trigger-happy Police,” The Economist, 9 April 2005.

11 UN-HABITAT, op. cit. note 9, pp. 134–57; François Bourguignon, “Crime, Violence, and Inequitable Development,” paper prepared for the Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics, Washington, DC, 28–30 April 1999.

12 For traditional views of environmentalists and development specialists, see Eugene P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1971), and Michael Lipton, Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development (London: Temple Smith, 1977); Janice Perlman and Bruce Schearer, “Migration and Population Distribution Trends and Policies and the Urban Future,” International Conference on Population and the Urban Future, UN Fund for Population Activities, Barcelona, Spain, May 1986.

13 Perlman and Schearer, op. cit. note 12. 14 Ibid. 15 United Nations Population Division, World

Population Policies 2005, at www.un.org/esa/ population/publications/WPP2005/Publication_ index.htm.

16 United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Statement by Mr. Miloon Kothari, Special Rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, to the World Urban Forum III,” Vancouver, 20 June 2006.

17 Martin Ravallion, On the Urbanization of Poverty, Development Research Group Working Paper (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001); urban estimate comes from Michael Cohen, “Reframing Urban Assistance: Scale, Ambition,

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and Possibility,” Urban Update, Comparative Urban Studies Brief, Woodrow Wilson Interna- tional Center for Scholars, No. 5, February 2004, p. 1; total assistance from OECD/DAC figures in Worldwatch Institute, Worldwatch Global Trends, CD-ROM, July 2005; lack of urban housing programs from Daniel S. Coleman and Michael F. Shea, “Assessment of Bilateral and Multilateral Development Assistance and Housing Assistance in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East,” Interim Working Draft for the International Housing Coalition, 3 May 2006.

18 Aid from OECD/DAC, and private capital from UNCTAD, both in Worldwatch Institute, op. cit. note 17.

19 David Satterthwaite, “Reducing Urban Poverty: Constraints on the Effectiveness of Aid Agencies and Development Banks and some Suggestions for Change,” Environment and Urbanization, April 2001, pp. 137–57.

20 Urban area expenditures from Frannie Léautier, World Bank Institute, e-mail to Molly Sheehan, July 2006; urban dimension missing from Diana Mitlin, Understanding Urban Poverty: What the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers Tell Us (London: International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), 2004).

21 William Alonso, “The Economics of Urban Size,” Papers in Regional Science, December 1971, pp. 66–83; Rémy Prud’homme, “Antiurban Biases in the LDCs,” Megacities International Conference, New York University, 1988; Rémy Prud’homme, “Managing Megacities,” Le Courrier du CNRS, No. 82, 1996, pp. 174–76.

22 Alfredo Sirkis, Director of Urbanism, Rio de Janeiro, discussion with Janice Perlman, 25 August 2005.

23 Satterthwaite, op. cit. note 19, p. 140. 24 Alan Altshuler and Marc Zegans, “Innovation

and Creativity: Comparisons between Public Management and Private Enterprise,” Cities, February 1990, pp. 16–24.

25 UN-HABITAT, Global Urban Observatory, at hq/unhabitat.org/programmes/guo.

26 World Bank, Assessing Aid (Washington, DC: 1998); World Bank, The Role and Effectiveness of Development Assistance (Washington, DC: 2002); Paul Wolfowitz, President, World Bank Group, Address to Board of Governors of the

World Bank Group, Singapore, 19 September 2006.

27 Klitgaard, MacLean-Abaroa, and Parris, op. cit. note 7; Winthrop Carty, Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, “Citizen’s Charters: A Comparative Global Survey,” translation from Spanish of Cartas compromiso: experiencias internacionales, presented at the launch of the Mexican Citizen’s Charter Initiative, June 2004.

28 Philip Amis, “Municipal Government, Urban Economic Growth, and Poverty Reduction – Identifying the Transmission Mechanisms between Growth and Poverty,” in Carole Rakodi with Tony Lloyd-Jones, eds., Urban Livelihoods: A People-centered Approach to Reducing Poverty (London: Earthscan, 2002), pp. 97–111; Perlman, op. cit. note 10; Janice Perlman, “Violence as a Major Source of Vulnerability in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas,” Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, winter 2005.

29 A. Zaidi, “Assessing the Impact of a Micro- finance Programme: Orangi Pilot Project, Karachi, Pakistan,” in S. Coupe, L. Stevens, and D. Mitlin, eds., Confronting the Crisis in Urban Poverty: Making Integrated Approaches Work (Rugby, UK: Intermediate Technology Publications, 2006), pp. 171–88; Franck Daphnis and Bruce Fergus, eds., Housing Microfinance: A Guide to Practice (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2004).

30 C.K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2006); David L. Painter, TCG International, in collaboration with Regina Campa Sole and Lauren Moser, ShoreBank International, “Scaling up Slum Improvement: Engaging Slum Dwellers and the Private Sector to Finance a Better Future,” paper presented at the World Urban Forum, Vancouver, June 2006.

31 UN Millennium Project Task Force on Improving the Lives of Slum Dwellers, A Home in the City (London: Earthscan, 2005), pp. 55–56; Jane Tournée and Wilma van Esch, Community Contracts in Urban Infra-structure Works (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2001).

32 Bénédicte de la Brière and Laura B. Rawlings, Examining Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: A Role for Increased Social Inclusion, Social

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Protection Discussion Paper No. 06083 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006); SYDGM and World Bank, the Third International Conference on Conditional Cash Transfer, Istanbul, June 2006, at info.worldbank.org/ etools/icct06/welcome.asp; James Traub, “Pay for Good Behavior?” New York Times Magazine, 8 October 2006, pp. 15–16.

33 Janice Perlman, “Megacities and Innovative Technologies,” Cities, May 1987, pp. 128–36; William McDonough, “China as a Green Lab,” in Howard Gardner et al., “The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2006,” Harvard Business Review, February 2006, p. 35; Mara Hvistendahl, “Green Dawn: In China, Sustainable Cities Rise by Fiat,” Harper’s, February 2006, pp. 52–54.

34 Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities in the Twenty-first Century (London: Continuum, 2003).

35 Small Arms Survey, at www.smallarmssurvey.org; International Action Network on Small Arms, Reviewing Action on Small Arms (London: 2006), pp. 17–22.

36 Satterthwaite, op. cit. note 19, pp. 146, 148; Göran Tannerfeldt and Per Ljung, SIDA, More Urban, Less Poor: An Introduction to

Urban Development and Management (London: Earthscan, 2006); Esquel Foundation, at www. synergos.org/latinamerica/ecuador.htm.

37 William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), p. 378.

38 Urban Sustainability Initiative, at bie.berkeley. edu/usi.

39 UN Millennium Project Task Force, op. cit. note 57, p. 101; Yves Cabannes, “Children and Young People build Participatory Democracy in Latin American Cities,” Environment and Urbanization, April 2006, pp. 195–218; Sheridan Bartlett, “Integrating Children’s Rights into Municipal Action: A Review of Progress and Lessons Learned,” Children, Youth, and Environments, 15:2 (2005), pp. 18–40.

40 “YA! Youth Activism,” NACLA Report on the Americas, May/June 2004, p. 48.

41 Rose Molokoane, presentation at Future of the Cities panel, World Urban Forum, Vancouver, 23 June 2006.

42 Watson, quoted in Ernie Stringer, Action Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publica- tions, 1999).

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