P A R T
SHARPENING THE
GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT
AGENDA
The major concern of this report is the growing challenge of slums, in the context of unprecedented urban growth and increasing poverty and inequality. During the next 30 years, urban growth will bring a further 2 billion people into the cities of the developing world, doubling their size. This is largely because the world's rural population has essentially reached its peak, so that almost all further population growth will be absorbed by urban settlements. The main problem is that very few countries, cities or agencies have recognized this critical situation, and outside of a few rapidly advancing countries, very little development effort is going into providing jobs for these people, or planning for land, housing and services that these 2 billion people will need.
This first part of the Global Report on Human Settlements 2003 highlights the importance of the global agenda as a framework for human development, including improvement of the lives of slum dwellers. Definitions and means of enumerating slum dwellers are discussed in this part. It also considers the processes of formation of slums and the external and internal forces that lead to the segregation and deterioration of particular areas, especially market forces within cities, inappropriate government interventions and regulations, global economic changes and changes in the orientation of policy that have led to greater inequality and have inadvertently expanded the urban informal sector, while failing to deliver affordable, secure housing and urban services.
Chapter 1 begins by briefly covering the major issues â the urbanization crisis, the growth of urban poverty, failures of governance, including institutional and legal failure, and the way in which these conspire to exacerbate the situation of poor people. The Millennium Goals, the principal outcome of a series of major United Nations conferences of the 1990s, have included goals on slum improvement, and on water and sanitation supply.
The goal to improve significantly the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020 has prompted a close examination of the possible definitions of slums, from a historical and cultural perspective, and to develop means of measuring numbers of slum dwellers. The conclusion is that slums are a multidimensional concept involving aspects of poor housing, overcrowding, lack of services and insecure tenure, and that indicators relating to these can be combined in different ways to give thresholds that provide estimates of numbers of slum dwellers.
A recent estimate using a slum definition of this type is that about 924 million people lived in slums worldwide in 2001, or about 32 per cent of the global urban population. Slums are seen in practically all parts of the world but with higher concentration in the developing world cities â about 50 per cent of slum dwellers were in South-central and Eastern Asia combined, and 14 per cent in Latin America and 17 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa. The proportion in Africa is rising rapidly as populations increase and urban housing shortages continue, while it is falling in Latin America due to regularization and slum improvement. In Asia, where economic conditions improved overall during the 1990s, the proportion of slum dwellers appears to have fallen, although the absolute number has increased.
Chapter 2 is concerned with the forces shaping slums â brought about by global socio-economic trends and by internal forces within the city, generated by markets and governing institutions.
Theories of residential differentiation began with the Chicago School of the 1930s, which saw city growth as a colonization of different âquartersâ by different income and ethnic groups. Their successors, the neo-liberal urban economists, regarded slums as the natural response of the market in providing housing for poor people: the housing that they can afford. Poor people needed to live at high densities in poor quality dwellings in order to afford housing accessible to income earning opportunities. A number of other reasons have also been suggested as to why poor people are segregated in space: regulation; public spending; and separation of work places for the rich and poor.
Post-modern theories of urban spaces are seen to be more appropriate to the multi-centred and fragmented cities of the 21st century. Many cities are now divided by different occupation groups: the very rich; the affluent professionals, the suburban middle class; the unskilled workers; the informal workers; and the residual or marginalized âunderclassâ. Each has a clear part of the city to themselves, supported by housing and distribution networks, but overlaying each other rather than necessarily confined to clear âquartersâ. Methods of designating slum areas and measuring spatial disadvantage using factorial ecology indices, geographical information systems and other techniques can distinguish these groups in space.
The major challenges facing cities are urbanization and poverty. The world is entering a significant stage in a history of urbanization. During the next 30 years, the urban population in the developing world will double to about 4 billion people, at the rate of about 70 million people per year. Rural populations will barely increase and will begin to decline after 2020. Several regions â Europe and the Americas â are already 80 per cent urbanized. Ruralâurban migration has slowed but is still very significant, while international migration accounts for many of the most marginalized people in cities and is a major risk factor for slum formation. Oddly enough, depopulation of certain areas, particularly in Europe, is starting to be an important issue and may contribute to slum development in the future.
Poverty and slums are closely related and mutually reinforcing. As poverty reduction is now the major objective of development agencies, they have conducted considerable work in defining and measuring poverty. Poverty, like slums, is a multifaceted concept; but some simple income proxies have come into general use. Some 1.2 billion people globally live below the World Bank US$1-a-day extreme poverty line and about half the world's population lives below US$2 a day. Poverty increased very rapidly from 1975 to 1993, but since then the numbers have barely increased. This disguises considerable regional variation: the biggest changes in poverty during the 1990s were in the transitional countries following liberalization, where extreme poverty increased from 14 million to 168 million â countered by an equivalent fall in poverty in China and Southeast Asia. Global urban poverty estimates are not currently available, and it is very difficult to survive in cities on less than a dollar a day; but there is evidence that about one third of slum dwellers in South Asia and Africa live in extreme poverty.
Chapter 3 updates the subject of the previous issue of the Global Report series, Cities in a Globalizing World, but from the particular perspective of inequality and poverty, and their impacts on slum formation. Much of the economic and political environment in which globalization has accelerated over the last 20 years has been instituted under the guiding hand of a major change in economic paradigm â neo-liberalism, which is associated with the retreat of the national state, liberalization of trade, markets and financial systems and privatization of urban services. Globally, these neo-liberal policies have re-established a rather similar international regime to that which existed in the mercantilist period of the 19th century when economic booms and busts followed each other with monotonous regularity, when slums were at their worst in Western cities and colonialism held global sway.
This chapter also presents a brief history of inequality over the last two centuries. Since 1800, the ratio of gross domestic product (GDP) per person between the richest and the poorest countries has expanded from 3:1 to almost 100:1. Inequality within societies has also continued to increase, except for the period of 1945 to 1978, when governments intervened to redistribute income and maintain full employment and minimum wages. In the period of 1978 to 1993, inequality between countries and within those countries that adopted liberalization regimes increased very rapidly. The contrast between the rich and poor in these countries has become stark, especially in less developed countries where being in the lowest income groups is associated with starvation and misery.
The rise of neo-liberalism is associated with the growth of international trade, the privatization of goods and services, the reduction of public welfare expenditure and the reform of regulation. Each of these has substantial impacts on the urban poor â in most cases, very negative impacts. Within countries, neo-liberalism has found its major expression through Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), which have weakened the economic role of cities throughout most of the developing world and have placed emphasis on agricultural exports, working against the primary demographic direction where all new workers are locating in towns and cities. In most countries, these policies have not resulted in the promised economic growth and have led to a crippling burden of debt. These global and national policies, as much as anything else, have led to the rapid expansion of the informal sector in cities, in the face of shrinking formal urban employment opportunities.
The final part of Chapter 3 discusses the phenomenon of âbottom-upâ globalization, or the spread in scope of informal networks through cheaper travel and greater ease of communication. These international connections provide opportunities to carve out a broader spectrum of âhybrid practicesâ in economic, social and cultural spheres; but they are rather threatening to local communities and their social cohesiveness. Some networks allow cities or groups with a âcommonality of interestâ to associate; others are a series of informal business transactions that can span continents and are often mediated through the core economies. These are small in scale compared with the massive structures of formal international transactions; but they do provide a necessary âinformal infrastructureâ that later may manifest itself as more substantial linkages.
Major highlights of the first part of the report are:
⢠The world is rapidly moving towards âmaximum urbanizationâ, which has already largely been completed in Europe and North and South America...
