| For half her life, ten-year-old Bilkish has lived in a
hut of black plastic on a sidewalk in central Bombay. It's a small space, about three by
four metres, and too low for an adult to stand in. Nine people live there: Bilkish and her
five brothers and sisters, her parents and her father's brother. The hut's only opening is
the "door," a dirty quilt draped over a rope. There is no other ventilation or
source of light, and even in the breezy Bombay winters black plastic makes a hot, dark and
airless home. Every morning at five o'clock, Bilkish and her
sisters line up at a communal water-tap several blocks away. After waiting more than an
hour, they stagger home with sloshing pails of water on their heads: a day's supply for
bathing, washing, cooking, drinking and making tea. There is also a public toilet several
blocks away, but using it costs more money than the family can afford.
The family moved to Bombay from a dusty, sleepy village in eastern
India five years ago. Bilkish's mother now works as a servant whenever her frail health
permits, which is not often. The child's father works as a day-labourer on construction
sites, but he suffers from tuberculosis, a common complaint among slum dwellers the world
over. His working days are numbered, so to make ends meet, the children are sent out into
traffic to beg. Soon Bilkish will start working as a servant. She has never been to
school.
This family's situation is multiplied by hundreds of millions in
cities throughout the developing world, from Rio de Janeiro to Nairobi to Manila.
Urban crush
A hundred years ago, roughly five percent of the world's people
lived in cities with populations over 100,000. Today, an estimated 45 percent--about 2.5
billion people live in urban areas. In recent years, the most explosive growth has been in
the developing world, where urban populations have tripled in the last 30 years. Between
1950 and 1995, the number of cities in the developed countries with populations of more
than one million doubled, from 49 to 112; in that same period, cities of more than one
million people in the Third World increased sixfold, from 34 to 213.
There is little room for more families on the sidewalks and in the
slums of such cities, yet they keep coming. There are few jobs to sustain them. The basic
infrastructure they require--housing, clean water, waste disposal, electricity,
transport--seems beyond the capacities of many cities to provide, yet the families pour
in, convinced that the city will offer them a better life.
In terms of sheer numbers, urban concentrations are greatest in
Asia, where cities are home to over one billion people, roughly one-third of the region's
population. In Africa, urbanization is a relatively recent phenomenon; still, more than a
third of the population already lives in cities, and the rates of urban migration are
increasing. In Latin America, on the other hand, 74 percent of the population is already
urbanized--a scenario that could very well represent the future for the rest of the
developing world.
And for many observers it is not the growth of cities that is
disturbing, it is the glaring disparities between the lives of the poor and those who are
better off. "These are two different worlds," says Akhtar Badshah, director of
programs at Mega-Cities, a New York-based organization that promotes replicable solutions
to urban problems. "The conditions of the poor are getting worse and worse, because
governments are simply unable to keep pace with the level of services that is needed. As a
result, the ill effects of city life are concentrated among the poor." He cites as an
example the appalling environmental conditions in many cities that cause harm to the poor.
They lack the luxury of air-conditioners or even the option of closing windows against the
miasma of leaded-fuel emissions, smoke and dust that passes for air in many cities. Nor
can the poor stay healthy by buying bottled water or maintaining hygienic conditions in
their homes.
"The gap is widening dramatically," says Badshah.
"For example, the poor are often pushed farther and farther onto the fringes of
cities where there is industrial pollution. Yet transport is not keeping pace with the
needs, so the poor often take longer and longer to get to work, if they can get there at
all, or if they can find work in the first place." Indeed, services in cities today
are a problem for all levels of society. But the list of basic services to which the poor
have little or no access in the over-stretched cities of the developing world is virtually
endless. They suffer disproportionately from a lack of basics, such as health care,
schools, job opportunities, food, transport, training, adequate housing, security,
information and access to the justice system and the rule of law.
Equity, participation, decentralization
These inequities represent not only a moral crisis of staggering
portions, but the potential for political chaos and large economic losses. "If cities
don't function properly, the productivity of an entire country is negatively
affected," says Shabbir Cheema, director of the management, development and
governance division at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), pointing out that
cities are the major engines of economic growth in developing countries. "And if the
poor are deprived of services, this can have a negative effect on political
stability."
The dangers are so acute, in fact, that they are forcing new
thinking about the problems of cities, and new approaches to development in general. More
and more development professionals agree that lack of equity is the core problem of urban
poverty, and that traditional, hierarchical systems of city management cannot meet the
needs of cities today and in the future.
Development planners insist that political decentralization is
essential to ensure that those in power are accountable to citizens at every level of
society and responsive to their needs. "How do we create cities that work for
everybody?" asks Robertson Work, a senior programme officer at UNDP. "It is
possible. But it's got to be neighborhood by neighborhood, community by community. You
can't stand at the top and order change."
Indeed, the very crisis of overcrowding, poverty and environmental
decay that is driving cities to the brink of disaster also provides the incentive for
those in power to get their house in order, to try new solutions to complex problems and
to begin to share responsibility--and decision-making power--with city dwellers
themselves.
One of the most innovative aspects of this new approach is the
concept that all sectors--even traditional "enemies" such as slum-dwellers and
real estate speculators--can, and must, learn to identify common goals and work together
to achieve them. Many development strategies today, including those supported by UNDP,
take as their starting point the building of partnerships among diverse groups--officials
from national and municipal governments, the business community and community-based
organizations--to help define problems and bring about solutions. Usually an outside
mediator, an "honest broker" trusted by all parties, is needed to establish an
atmosphere of collaboration rather than suspicion, and to encourage all parties to put
aside traditional rivalries and get on with the task of meeting urban need.
Juan Manuel Salazar, a UNDP programme officer based in New York,
recalls a situation in which just such an approach was taken, with rather dramatic
results. In the 1980s, Salazar was an advisor to the mayor of Bogota, Colombia, a city of
seven million people, more than one million of them slum-dwellers living in extreme
poverty. He explains that in the area of urban development and poverty alleviation,
bureaucrats and planners at all levels felt a profound sense of frustration. The city
administration, he says, was blocked from being responsive to the concrete needs of the
people by bureaucratic traditions and abstract, theoretical thinking. Yet the necessary
resources were there--in the private sector as well as in the public coffers--if only they
could be harnessed to accomplish specific, concrete goals.
With UNDP support, the mayor of Bogota convened work sessions among
city officials, the business community, voluntary organizations and mothers from slum
areas, who were responsible for the welfare--often the very survival--of their families.
To further promote a sense of trust, UNDP suggested the mayor draw up a "social
contract" with the people, signed by all parties, and committing both public and
private institutions to take specific steps to respond to the needs of the people.
"There used to be a theory that you join the highest person from the community with
the lowest person in the administration," says Salazar, "but that's a mistake.
Our strategy was to link people from the lowest level in the community with the highest
level of authority."
"The most felt need was for child care," he says, because
when women went out to work, often children were left home alone. "That was the hook
that started the whole thing," he adds. Although there were many non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and private businesses ready to participate in providing child care,
the perception was that buildings to accommodate the children had to be constructed first,
and that this would take two years. So UNDP procured a number of military tents from
Israel to be used on a temporary basis. At the same time, it called on 50 mothers from the
community to come for training, and engaged the services of public institutions to train
the mothers and provide equipment for the centres. A foundation donated tables and chairs.
The day-care centres--a network of tents, each sheltering 50 children--were functioning
within one week. One year later, in half the time anticipated, the children moved from the
tents into new buildings.
"The buildings were constructed through this same participatory
process," says Salazar. "Eventually this became a national programme serving
hundreds of thousands of children."
The need had existed for years before, and many promises had been
made, but nothing had been accomplished under the old hierarchical system, in which
bureaucracy and political maneuvering had made collaboration impossible. To be effective,
says UNDP's Robertson Work, urban management must be "a self-organizing system, where
everyone is responsible, everyone is a player."
Initiatives for change are as diverse as the cities that are
spawning them, yet they all point to a global trend toward equity, participation and
democracy. Increasingly it is recognized that the role of outsiders, including
international organizations, is not to impose solutions. Rather it is to promote dialogue
and cooperation to bring to the attention of local actors a menu of examples of success
from which they can shape their own, home-grown strategies for renewal. One positive
change, says Mega Cities' Akhtar Badshah, is that development thinkers are beginning to
turn away from the old paradigm of studying problems, to studying solutions instead.
"Traditional research tries to figure out what is not working and what the problems
are," he says. "Instead, we need to look at what is working--to value strengths,
to envision what might be."
Source: Excerpted from Choices: The Human Development Magazine.
United Nations Development Programme, New York, Vol.5, No. 1. |