Growing Up in an Urbanizing World

Louise Chawla, Louise Chawla

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134901203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica pubblica di pianificazione locale e regionale

Half the world's children live in cities and the proportion is growing. Their environment critically determines their futures and the world they will make as adults. This text, by an interdisciplinary team of international child-environment authorities, explores how crucial the relationship of the young and their surroundings is. Covering eight countries, it shows the enormous benefits - for them, for the wider society and for the future - of involving children, especially from underprivileged communities, in planning and implementing urban improvements. It continues and updates Kevin Leech's pioneering 1970s MIT project, Growing Up in Cities.

© LOUISE CHAWLA

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CHAPTER ONE

Cities for Human Development

Louise Chawla

The accelerating process of urbanization and its consequences for children are placed in the context of social, economic and environmental trends at the beginning of the 21st century. Growing Up in Cities, a project that seeks to understand the urban environment from children’s perspectives, is presented as one means to address international agreements about children’s right to a voice in environmental planning and decision-making. The project’s origins in the advocacy planning movement of the 1970s are described, along with an overview of the results of the project’s 1990s revival with children in low-income urban areas around the world, in industrialised countries of the North and in developing countries of the South.

The world is always changing; but a defining characteristic of the present is its unprecedented rate of change in an increasingly interdependent world that is undergoing profound restructuring of societies, economies, human settlements and people’s relationship with the planet. This book examines the interrelationship of five of these patterns of change: urbanisation, growing populations with high proportions of children, evolving ideas about childhood, increasing disparities between rich and poor, and intensifying pressures on the earth’s resources. Building on ideas about children’s rights, it describes processes designed to understand children’s own perspectives on the places where they live as a basis for partnerships between children and adults to improve urban conditions. These processes are relevant to all communities with children, but with growing urbanisation and the rising number of people who live in poverty, the focus here is on children from low-income families in cities. The values that these children express point to a model of development that can respond to human needs for friendship and place, and provide social support as well as physical necessities. These values are in harmony with the requirements of sustainable development.

An Urbanising World

This book focuses on cities because one of the major patterns of change at the beginning of the 21st century is urbanisation. Regionally, the history of cities may show periods of expansion and decline, but with the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century urbanisation rapidly accelerated.¹ What is new now — and a momentous change — is that most of humanity is projected to inhabit urban areas by the first decade of the 21st century.²

Nations use widely varying definitions of ‘urban’, and the scale and nature of urban growth vary from nation to nation. Taken as a whole, however, global census data show an irregular but general trend toward urbanisation. In North America, Latin America and Europe, approximately 75 percent of the population already lives in urban areas. In Africa and Asia, this figure is about 37 percent, and rising. In some Pacific Rim countries, it is more than 90 percent.³ There has been much talk about ‘mega-cities’ (10 million inhabitants or more), but only 4 percent of the world’s population currently lives in them, and their rate of growth has slowed since 1980; most growth is in smaller cities or regional centres⁴. Despite regional variations in patterns of urbanisation, it can be generalised that more and more people are moving into denser settlements as fewer and fewer make their living directly off the land.⁵

This book is motivated by a vision of engaging children in practical projects to realise the priniciples of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Agenda 21 in urban environments.

New Conceptions of Childhood

Another momentous change that human society is undergoing is that more attention is being given to children and there are new attitudes about childhood. This is not to say that parents did not recognise that their children had special capacities and vulnerabilities in the past, but this ‘discovery of childhood’, as it has been called, represents a qualitative change.⁶ With modern science and industrialisation have come new techniques in medicine and public health, and a corresponding fall in child mortality rates. The major consequence has been a proportionate increase in child populations, resulting in societies where 40 to 50 percent of the population is under 18.⁷ In Northern Europe, these two trends of urbanisation and population increase combined in the 19th century to create city streets teeming with young life, as memorialised in the London of Charles Dickens and the Paris of Victor Hugo.

When there is a rising standard of living, including rising levels of education and paid labour for women, societies enter a ‘demographic transition’ where life spans increase, birth rates fall and the proportion of the young declines. During the 20th century, the urbanised and industrialised nations of Europe, North America and the Pacific moved into balanced population structures in which the young under 15 and the old over 65 each constitute roughly one-fifth of the population.⁸ This phenomenon of proportionately fewer children, who can be expected to live long lives and support social services for the elderly, has encouraged a new degree of emotional and economic investment in children as individuals. These were the conditions that emboldened the Swedish advocate for children, Ellen Key, to proclaim the 20th century the ‘Century of the Child.’ There was a new scientific understanding of human development, she believed, that brought with it a new obligation to provide for health, education, respect, nurturance and leisure for play as basic entitlements of childhood.⁹ With the United Nations’ adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, this vision was officially endorsed by the world community.¹⁰

While the societies of the industrialised nations of the North are faced with the challenge of balancing the needs of roughly equal numbers of the elderly and the young, several nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America are in a different ‘population time zone’, characterised by early industrialisation. In Kenya, for example, 44 percent of the population is under 15, in Malaysia 37 percent, and in Ecuador 35 percent.¹¹ Globally, 40 percent of the world’s population is under 20.¹² Combined with urbanisation, this has resulted in new concentrations of the young in Third World cities, informal settlements and squatter camps.

A World of Ecological and Social Imperatives

If contemporary civilisation is to remain viable, the 21st century must become the ‘Century of Limits.’ Where the 20th century began with discussions about child development — about scientific methods of child rearing and psychoanalytic origins of the adult personality — the discourse that dominates the 21st century is economic development. Since the end of the Second World War, when the United States began to seek postwar markets for the output of its factories, the meaning of ‘development’ has been centrally associated with the increasing production and consumption of material goods and with increasing returns on business investments. By these terms, the world has been developing even faster than it has been urbanising or increasing in population. For example, the burning of fossil fuels has increased almost fivefold since 1950, the world’s marine catch fourfold, and the consumption of fresh water twofold since 1960. The result is severe stress on the planet’s capacities to absorb all of the pollution and waste produced, as well as a rapid deterioration of fresh water reserves, soil, forests, fish and biodiversity.¹³

Along with this expanding exploitation of the earth’s resources, there has come a greater awareness that human life depends on the fragile life support systems of a finite planet. One of the unifying images of late 20th century public media is a satellite view of the earth: a planet of modest size, alone in the darkness of space, unique and lovely in its blue-green, cloud-filmed shell of biosphere. In 1992, the nations of the world acknowledged the planet’s limits at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) at Rio de Janeiro, when they adopted a new definition of ‘development’ — sustainable development — that balances development with the protection of the environment ‘so as to equitably meet developmental and environmental needs of present and future generations.’¹⁴ Agenda 21, the plan of action that the assembled governments endorsed, identified children and youth as a major group who must help make this vision a reality.¹⁵ (The Convention on the Rights of the Child defines ‘children’ as all people under 18, and ‘youth’, in United Nations’ practice, refers to 15–25 year olds.) If articulating this vision has been a great achievement of the 20th century, realising it will be the great necessity of the 21st. In 2002, the world’s nations are assembling for the Rio +10 Conference in Johannesburg to renew their commitment to this goal.

If the nations of the world were evaluated on the basis of sustainable development and on how much of the earth’s resources their citizens consume, the rankings of most-developed and least-developed nations — which now emphasise gross domestic product and per capita income — would have to be reassessed. The United Nations Development Programme estimates that the richest fifth of the world’s people, who primarily inhabit the North, possess almost 86 percent of the total world wealth, with its corresponding purchasing power, compared to about one percent for the poorest fifth. On average, a child born in a high-income industrial country will consume and pollute more in his or her lifetime than 30 to 50 children born in low-income countries.¹⁶

Despite the diversity of the countries and places where they live, there is a remarkable consensus about the qualities that create places where children and adolescents can thrive, versus conditions that cause them to feel alienated and marginalised.

In response to these disparities, the governments from the North and South assembled at UNCED agreed to the opening principle of the Rio Declaration and the statement of principles underlying Agenda 21: ‘Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.’¹⁷ Other principles emphasise that social equity and the eradication of poverty, as much as the protection of the environment, must be integral dimensions of future development practices (Principle 5), and that environmental issues are best handled with the participation of all concerned citizens (Principle 10). In all the years since the first UNCED Conference in 1992, the latest global statistics show ever-rising rates of consumption of the earth’s resources and ever-widening gaps between rich and poor, while most high-income nations that promised increased aid to low- and middle-income regions have cut their overall aid budgets.¹⁸ Whether there are limits to this perpetuation of poverty by the rich, or to its endurance by the poor, has yet to be seen.

When these trends of urbanisation, growing populations with large numbers of children, environmental degradation, and intensifying disparities between rich and poor are taken together, they signify that more and mo...