Sustainable cities of the South: an introduction

David Westendorff

This Development in Practice Reader builds upon the May 2001 double issue of Development in Practice, which comprised approximately half of the papers initially prepared for presentation at the European Science Foundation's annual N-AERUS Workshop, held on 3–5 May 2000 in Geneva. Its title, 'Cities of the South: Sustainable for Whom?', reflects concern within the N-AERUS and the host institutions – UNRISD and IREC-EPFL – that urban development processes in many cities of the North and South are being guided by superficial or misleading conceptions of sustainable development in the urban context. As will be seen in the contributions to this Reader, the aims of different groups proposing strategies for the sustainable development of cities tend to skew their arguments about what this means and how to achieve it. Environmentalists who see the pollution-free city as the only sustainable one may be willing to sacrifice the only affordable form of mass transport for poor people, or dirty low-tech jobs that provide them their meagre living. Those pursuing the globally competitive city may succeed in attracting foreign and domestic investments that boost economic growth and productivity, but which concentrate the benefits of growth very narrowly, leaving an increasingly large majority to live in penury at the foot of glass skyscrapers. Beleaguered bureaucrats attempting to improve or extend public infrastructure may adopt financing mechanisms that weaken poorer groups' capacity to benefit from the newly installed infrastructure, even though they bear a disproportionate share of the costs of paying for it. International organisations seeking to promote more effective governance of cities may encourage decentralisation processes that fragment responsibility in the absence of legal, administrative, and institutional frameworks to organise and finance governmental responsibilities at the local level. Such a vacuum may be filled by local bosses or other power brokers who have little interest in the common good. In different ways, our various contributors focus on these contradictions.

The contributions are grouped into four partially overlapping categories. The first group comments on different aspects of the international challenges to achieving sustainable cities. In the second group, researcher-practitioners from Africa, Asia, and Latin America offer their understanding of the principles that would have to be followed in order to achieve sustainable development in their cities, and the current set of constraints against doing so. These chapters necessarily touch on the contested roles of international agencies and bilateral donors in shaping national strategies for urban sustainable development. The next five contributions discuss issues of housing and land-use management in cities of developing countries. The next group, comprising two contributions, provides updates on new information technologies that may play important roles in planning for sustainable development, whether in cities, their regions, or countries. This collection ends with a salutary reminder from Hélène Rivière d'Arc that planners' solutions to the problems of poor people have long been formed by a technocratic vision and expressed in a technocratic language. These rarely reflect the language or the approaches to the problems the marginalised groups themselves elect to use. The misapprehension of the meaning and role of 'community' remains a crucial 'dis-connect' for many planners and urban officials.

In the first of the two papers on the international context for urban sustainable development, Adriana Allen chronicles the impact of the increasing internationalisation of Argentina's fishing industry on the city of Mar del Plata. This process included the transition from small-scale producers catering for local markets to larger highly capitalised international fishing enterprises producing for export markets. As neo-liberal policies of deregulation pushed catches to unsustainable levels in the 1990s, Mar del Plata's native fishing and canning industries became progressively sidelined by foreign competitors operating in Argentinian waters. Over time, Mar del Plata's unions could provide less and less protection to workers, enterprises cut back on investments in plant and equipment, and the city's tax revenues began to fall, affecting its ability to provide infrastructure and enforce environmental standards in the port area, etc.. Today, the prospects for sustaining decent livelihoods and living conditions for Mar del Plata's residents are as uncertain as the fate of the fish from which it has drawn its sustenance for decades. In the second of these papers, Amitabh Kundu reviews the recent experience of a number of large Indian cities in financing infrastructure through domestic and international capital markets since the imposition of structural adjustment policies in the early 1990s. One of the author's major concerns is that the stringent mechanisms for assuring repayment of loans increasingly take decision making about the design and implementation of infrastructure out of the hands of local governments and place it with entities whose chief concern is an adequate rate of return to investors in the short run. This transfer of decision making is modelled largely on the experience of the USA and is being promoted through international institutions such as the World Bank and regional development banks, and with the support of like-minded bilateral donors. Its suitability to the Indian context is challenged because it appears to exacerbate intra- and inter-regional disparities in infrastructure and service delivery, thus reinforcing already unacceptably high levels of social segmentation.

The first of the six contributions discussing regional experiences in achieving sustainable cities is the review by Wilbard J. Kombe of efforts to revitalise urban planning and management in the Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam during the 1990s by means of the Environmental Planning and Management (EPM) promoted by Habitat (UNHCS) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The Sustainable Dar es Salaam Project was established in 1992 as the vehicle for guiding this effort. Kombe focuses on the functioning of two of the nine working groups established to propose solutions to the most pressing habitat problems in the city and to facilitate and monitor their implementation. The working groups were an important innovation in that they were designed to include all the parties that could materially affect the success of the proposed solutions. While both working groups appear to have mobilised new collective forms of problem solving, their most important proposals could not be implemented. Vested interests among stakeholders, institutional inertia, bureaucratic in-fighting, and a lack of political will at the central level all stood in the way. Diego Carrión then paints in broad brushstrokes how Latin American geo-political processes of democratisation, structural adjustment, state reform, including decentralisation, liberalisation of economies via privatisation, etc., are bringing about a sea-change in the way cities are governed. This transforms the processes for deciding how to proceed towards sustainable urban development. The author's particular concern is that civil society organisations (CSOs) – especially those at the grassroots – and local authorities are assuming many of the responsibilities for sustaining society and its habitat. To move in this direction requires that local authorities facilitate community participation in ways that have rarely been adopted before. Carrión proposes six principles to guide local authorities' efforts to include CSOs in the planning and implementation of new development strategies.

Jaime Joseph prefers the term 'sustainable human development' when discussing a better future for the residents of Lima's vast informal settlements. In this megacity, most housing is constructed by those who live in it. These same residents have often provided themselves with the necessary infrastructure to sustain their living conditions, even if only at subsistence levels. Repeated waves of structural adjustment in recent decades have made this a way of life for many. This must be a premise for efforts to achieve sustainable development in the city, i.e. they must take a decentralised approach, relying on grassroots organisations, their supporters in civil society, and the local authorities. But sustainable improvements in material and social life must be built upon a culture of development and democracy. This is being nurtured in Lima's 'public spaces', informal opportunities in which community organisations, NGOs, and sometimes local authorities, join in open debate about how to develop their neighbourhoods and districts. If properly supported with information, ethical practices in debate and decision making, and legislative support, the nascent process of political development will take root and flower. The environment for this is not optimal, however, as the Peruvian economy, weakened by structural adjustment and civil strife in the 1990s, is today further threatened by imports from a global economy that undercut employment opportunities for poor people in Lima and the rest of the country. Without a respite from this desperate competition, positive change may be stymied.

Karina Constantino-David's experience of attempting to bring decent housing and habitat to Manila's poor leads her to frame sustainable development in cities as a question of achieving 'sustainable improvements in the quality of life'. Standing in the way of this aim in the Philippines is the country's current model of 'parasitic' development – the blind pursuit of economic growth through global competitiveness and foreign investment. This process is driving the deterioration of the quality of life in Filipino cities. Five distinct but overlapping power groups – the state, business, the dominant church, the media, and international aid agencies – share responsibility for this. In Constantino-David's opinion, the only possible path out of this morass is to pay more attention to the earth's 'carrying' and 'caring' capacity. She furthermore highlights the often negative role that foreign assistance plays in curtailing attention to these issues in the Philippines.

Darshini Mahadevia reviews initiatives taken in India over the past decade to improve either urban development or the urban environment or the conditions of life for the cities' poor. These are a disparate range of initiatives undertaken by central and local government, civil society organisations, or the judicial system. Sometimes external assistance is involved, sometimes not. But these efforts are rarely conceived with a view to the possibilities of mutual reinforcement or synergetic interaction. Nor do they attempt to take a 'people-centred approach' in which the concerns of poor people take precedence in a model that relates all development concerns in a holistic manner. In his chapter on the growing urban crisis in India, P.G. Dhar Chakrabarti identifies several of the most important causes behind the failure of sub-national governments to halt the decay of living conditions in the country's cities. More important than the absence of funds for upgrading urban infrastructure and services is the lack of capacity of government agencies and authorities to use the resources available for this purpose. This absence of capacity continues despite constitutional amendments of 1992 which, in theory, give local authorities far greater powers to administer and finance their own affairs. Indeed, the kinds of reforms and improvements in local government capacity that were expected to follow the constitutional amendments have been abysmally slow. As evidence of their continuing weakness, the author cites the failure of local authorities to take up highly effective and affordable technologies for rainwater collection, sanitation, and building materials. He calls for a 'reform of the reform process' as a first step in the right direction.

At the mid-way point of this collection, Adrian Atkinson surveys the evolution of external assistance agencies' (bilateral and multilateral donors, UN agencies, the development banks and foundations, and international NGOs) support to programmes and projects in cities of the South. These agencies have only very recently taken on an explicit concern for 'urban sustainable development', and tend to reflect variable and often specious understandings of what the concept means. The main international urban co-operation programmes, such as in transport, sanitation, and water supply, have been fragmented and often politically, socially, and technologically unsustainable, even in the short term. New forms and approaches to external assistance are emerging, albeit slowly, tentatively, and on a small scale. The author highlights some of the most pertinent to urban sustainable development, but notes that they are being attempted in a particularly adverse international environment. For example, programmes and projects to alleviate poverty within cities may be being implemented within a political and ideological framework that tends to generate more poverty. Banashree Bannerjee's paper on the Andhra Pradesh Urban Services for the Poor (APUSP) project describes a state-of-the-art partnership between a bilateral donor and the state government of Andhra Pradesh to promote sustained improvements in living conditions for the urban poor. The project does not overtly promise to deliver the sustainable city in Andhra Pradesh, but it does acknowledge and require a series of inputs from other sectors of society that are necessary if not sufficient conditions for achieving this goal. The programme attempts to bring these inputs and conditions together by making explicit a framework for strengthening grassroots civil society and for creating incentives for municipal authorities to achieve the same. Indeed, AP-USP appears to have been formulated to address, among other concerns, the lack of planned synergy among existing anti-poverty and urban development programmes in India (see also Mahadevia in this volume), the weakness of local authorities in raising or using available resources and innovations to the benefit of urban residents (highlighted by Chakrabarti), the lack of effective grassroots participation in decision making, either because of weaknesses in CSOs themselves (referred to by Joseph and Constantino-David) or the failure of the process to be opened to representatives of low-income or marginalised groups (issues also raised by both Kombe and Brown).