Sustainable Cities in Developing Countries

Cedric Pugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134191611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This text addresses the difficulties of balancing the imperatives of sustainability with the pressing challenges facing some of the world's most underdeveloped areas. Various perspectives are brought to bear on issues from economics and theories of health through to the foundations of sustainability. All the key contemporary developments are dealt with; the growth in international law and agreements on controlling greenhouse gases; the effect of reforms in finance, governance and methods of appraisal on the areas of waste management; and the theoretical advances in the community development aspects of health and the neighbourhood environment guided by the experiences of the World Bank, WHO and UNEP. The text is intended as a guidebook for those responsible for re-shaping cities in the 21st century.

Introduction

Cedric Pugh

Introduction

The idea of sustainable urban development has been seminal and highly significant among intellectuals and policy makers in the 1990s. It is seminal in the sense that it is capable of development in its historical context, and it has become international, national and local in its policy significance. The impacts upon the urban social science literature have been profound and inventive. Before sustainability took a hold, urban social science tended to be separated into the confines of subject boundaries. Urban sociologists were interested in social structure, class, segregation, and various aspects of inequality and poverty. These interests could be applied to housing, the allocation of land, relativities in incomes and access to various urban services. Economists had similar interests, but studied them in terms of theoretical explanation, technical appraisal, measurement, and the costs and benefits of policy reform. Architect-planners had regard to macro-spatial form, building technologies, and with relevance to developing countries, some pioneers such as John F C Turner brought self-help housing into relevance for low-income housing policies. Urban geographers, as guided by the conventions and scope of their subject, had eclectic interests, often undertaking household questionnaire surveys and adding commentaries on housing, social conditions and urban development. Political scientists concentrated on issues of urban government, with those in public administration specialization providing evaluations of infrastructural services and urban management. Other subjects – for example, law in development studies – were in only their first phases of influence in the urban social sciences.

By the late 1990s, much was changing, and changing rapidly, in the character and orientation of new books. The examples are many and varied, but the general thrust of change can be established from a few selected books. Fernandes and Varley (1998) brought together a collection of contributed chapters under the title of Illegal Cities. This book has great relevance for developmental and environmental issues in cities and towns in developing countries. The scope and aims include transitions in property rights from the ‘illegal’ to the ‘regularized’, customary law, tenure and the impact of law on the quality of life of the masses in poverty. In his concluding chapter, which gives commentary on the future of law and urban management, de Azevedo (1998, p269) writes:

The fact is that in developing countries law serves to distance the ‘legal from the ‘illegal’ city, increasing the value of the former. The areas in which the law is implemented effectively are those that house the machinery of the government, modern economic activities, and the homes of the middle and upper classes. By contrast the unregulated parts of the city suffer from low levels of infrastructural investment and poor access to the means of collective consumption, and they house the poor and marginalized sectors of society.

In context, ‘collective consumption’ includes the social costs and benefits of environmental conditions, including air and water quality, along with price-access to essential services. But the words from de Azevedo say more than this. The issues surrounding ‘sustainable cities’ have elevated sociolegal studies and transitions in property rights in the changing urban literature. Studies of sustainable urban development become more than tabulating conditions of household living: they beckon towards the role of institutions in development, towards social inclusion and the exclusion of environmental benefits on a city wide basis, and the necessity to make the understanding of the ‘urban’ something more than geographical space. The ‘urban’ is clearly economic, social, political and environmental space, dependent upon wider national and international processes.

The forerunner to this book, Sustainability, the Environment and Urbanization (Pugh, 1996), has a scope that includes macro-economics, governance, urban health reforms, the political economy of development, reforms in international aid organizations, and micro-studies of households in some insanitary local environments. Although its primary purpose was to establish a collection of ideas and to survey the environmental research initiatives of the mid-1990s, by virtue of the nature of subjects it commenced by placing meaning and definition upon a young and growing literature on sustainable cities. Most of the authors who contributed to the character of the book were overtly cross-disciplinary in their approach. In some cases the cross-disciplinary approach was quite seamless, drawing upon theories, techniques and empirical work as blended mixtures from economics, health science, sociology, public policy, property rights, the valuation of environmental assets and degradation, and social opportunities in development. The conceptual and pragmatic issues of sustainability in urban contexts led authors to necessarily write in cross-disciplinary ways. One example will convey how authors dealt with sustainable urban development. Writing on the poverty and environmental health problems in local, low-income living areas, McGranahan and his co-authors (1996, pl26) wrote:

The prevalence of local externalities and public goods, the importance of local institutions and the high level of diversity all underline the importance of local participation in designing and implementing improvements once the possibility of providing standard household-level services is ruled out. At the same time, how such institutions operate locally depends very much on how the state functions at higher levels, and the services centralized utilities do provide for the more disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The problems of these neighbourhoods are often compounded by the fact that standard utility services are oriented to well-defined households, rather than negotiating with and serving ill-defined groups of households and communities.

In three evaluative sentences McGranahan and his co-authors were saying that the problems and solutions to environmental poverty required complex, interdependent knowledge from across the social sciences. Transforming the language, the evaluations can be rewritten. First, the theory of economics in public goods (and social costs and benefits) argues that market or household individualism cannot itself resolve disease, squalor and premature death in such environments. Instead, some collective decision-making and resourcing is necessary, drawn from government provision, organized voluntary action and labour, and partnerships that set out responsibilities in resourcing, managing and implementing social/public policy solutions. In order to proceed, a new community-based and participatory approach to environmental planning and management is required. This will mean that work practices and policies will change because the priorities from among the poor and their affordability will almost certainly differ from standardized infrastructural provisions by government agencies. Also, affordability will have to be analysed technically to determine the appropriate cost, pricing, subsidization and choice of technology. Overall, it is an exercise in substantive reform, bringing together elements from economics, community development, new environmental planning and management, and socially adapted economic and technical appraisal. In practice, it is difficult to administer and in socio-political terms it has some uncertainties and risks of only partial success. This new book is both more elaborate and cautious on cross-disciplinary ways and on the implementation of public policy in environmentalism.

The Idea of Sustainable Development

The idea of sustainable development has itself been developed since the mid-1990s when it was very often associated with economic growth and social development that would not undermine environmental and developmental assets for future generations. By the late 1990s it is recognized that the scope of this is simultaneously in the economic, the social, the political and the environmental. From a perspective of historical and developmental change, this frequently means that ‘sustainable development’ is in a continuing state of flux that expresses outcomes of the dialectic between the economic, the social, the political and the environmental. The historical and the evolutionary does not necessarily and in all instances draw socio-political flux away from the intellectual tasks of building the blocks of theory and establishing concepts and principles. This is because the intellectual, although having abstractions and models, is also largely an exercise in persuasion and acceptance by public opinion and policy making. Of course, in formulating and implementing developmental policies it is often the case that trade-offs are made between the economic, the social, the political and the environmental. But, again this has significance for the way ‘sustainable development’ can be influenced and revised. Interrogative questions can be raised about the conditions which tend towards success or failure in comparative research and case studies. When failure is large and fundamental, questions arise as to whether it is appropriate to create new theory or to undertake institutionally loaded reform in order that good principles might be better utilized in practice.

In essence, the idea of sustainable development is largely about a range of different patterns of growth and social change that are environmentally and socially better than alternative patterns. Thus, the quest is not simply one of promoting environmentalism but at the same time severely inhibiting growth, or alternatively about permitting economic growth processes to do what they may and then attending in ad hoc ways to the partial destruction of some environmental assets. Put in these terms, further questions and issues become relevant. First, in an historical sweep of economic liberalism and the deregulation of markets on international scales since the early 1980s, what are the added probabilities of damage to environmental assets and some socio-economic opportunities? This is implicitly a question of distributional impact where there are winners and losers in developmental change. It is also a question about power and the way the interacting roles of states, markets, the voluntary sector and households are reconfigured in a period of greater liberalism and the internationalization of finance capital and the structural-spatial reorganization of production. As will be argued by various authors in this book, these are largely questions requiring an extensive search of ideas and evidence rather than following any preconception that ideological political economies such as neo-Marxism, dependency theory (with its assumptions of contrasting economic centrality and exploited peripherality), neo-liberalism, or even radical environmentalism provide ready-made solutions. In effect, the real world does not exhibit direct and simple teleological linkages from ideology to policy prescription, then to perfect implementation and to unambiguously good welfare. If the contrary were to be the case, the cause for environmentalism would be mostly straightforward, and evaluative social science might become redundant, or useful only outside environmental policy.

A second matter emanating from the realities of winners, losers and trade-offs in developmental change does concern intellectuals and their concepts. Along with Winch (1958) and Ayer (1993), it is reasonable to argue that the central task of social science is to bring conceptualization to complex and changing social reality, and to do this from theory, method, technique and evaluation. With relevance to agendas for sustainable development, the following can be said: sustainable development is basically about maintaining and enhancing environmental assets. Or, put in another way, consumption in the present should not reduce significant opportunities for consumption and the pursuit of lives of value in the future. However, environmental assets do not stand alone in socio-economic processes: they are interactive and sometimes dependent upon other assets. Economic assets provide the means of production, maintenance and the expansion of social opportunities, including attention to conserving and maintaining environmental assets. Of course, they can also be used in ways that degrade environmental and social qualities. Human capital is another asset that interacts with environmental assets: it provides knowledge, information and management services for environmentalism. Also, because sustainable development is partly socio-political, two further types of assets become significant. Social capital influences civic association, the quality of political processes and the character of the voluntary sector. In its positive vein it can be directed towards the public good in sustainability. But it can be negative if it is fragmented in ways that serve sectional interests that more or less reduce wider socio-economic opportunities and the economic and social value of environmental assets. Institutional capital is about the norms, rules, conventions and behaviours that influence ways of doing things. These can be formulated for assignments of responsibilities and for the resourcing of environmental common-pool resources: or, as in the case of other sorts of capital, they sometimes inhibit environmentalism. Overall, we see several interacting capital assets, having relationships of both cooperating interaction and potential conflict and substitution. The intellectual endeavour is to improve aggregate welfare in its broadest socioeconomic sense – that is, not just as social policy – but sometimes with the constraint of specified absolute levels of pro-poor resourcing and environmental maintenance. The authors in this book have much to say on all the foregoing matters on sustainable development.

The Urban

The best starting point in discussions of the urban in the context of sustainable development is to understand it as a part of the wider developmental at the national and international scale – that is to say, it is reactive to national policy making and performance in macro-economic development, in shaping economic and social policy sectors, and in reforming institutions, including private and social property rights. And, of equal or greater significance, the urban is reactive to globalized finance capital, new communications technologies, the flows from ‘real’ capital investment by transnational corporations and other firms, and to various international policy organizations with environmental or economic relevance. Seen in this reactive perspective, the urban is limited in its scope and impact. But, the urban is not simply and narrowly reactive. It is also contributory and it characterizes the national and the international. For example, agglomerated industrial activity, along with city-regional and international trade, produces the products, the savings, the investments, the technologies and many of the ideas that are national and international. In this perspective, the urban is greatly significant and, although localized, is largely national and international in character. It is the agglomerated urban activity that provides the motor force for the strength and direction of the globalized dynamic, the more so in a post-1980 world of economic and spatial restructuring. More is said about the theory and social impacts of this in the concluding chapter, and it is featured in the writing of most of the contributing authors.

The previous paragraph has various social and economic inferences and implications that have fundamental significance when attention is given to the urban. The urban becomes more dynamic and expansionary when international and regional trade grows, along with large increases in population. This is true in theoretical terms (see Chapter 10) and historically. Cities and towns were founded and developed from these causes in the 11th and 12th centuries in Italy, in later centuries in medieval Europe, in the industrial revolution, and from the 1930s in developing countries. In all cases, urbanization had important characteristics in socio-economic change. These include social and occupational stratification, wide ranges of rural-urban links in agriculture and building, and urban economies of scale and specialization. More than this, these same precipitating causes of socio-economic change – that is, trade and demographic growth – also led to a hastening of institutional and legal changes that are otherwise normally glacially slow. The reasons are the economic and social necessities for finding new ways of doing things and for reforming older institutions that are inhibitory. This also implies new methods of government and urban management. In terms of policy, the significance of maintaining infrastructure and alleviating environmental nuisances increases. The social stratification will make urban poverty conspicuous and relevant to urban economic policies, sometimes aggravated by the troughs in trade cycles. At the same time, new patterns of social inclusion will emerge. Contrasting examples of this can be found in child labour in developing countries in the 1990s, to some extent associated with economic liberalization. In Gujurat in India, child labour has increased and intensified in the diamond-cutting and ship-breaking industries. The factory conditions create unhealthy environments and require long, hard work daily for very low pay (Swaminatham, 1998). Meanwhile, in Singapore the government progressively improved the quality and performance in schools. The approach is meritocratic, with strong streaming and the encouragement of homework – that is, a form of useful child labour. Enrolment and retention rates have increased over the years, and ethnic differences in performance reduced among Malays relative to Indians and Chinese. All of this is related to the closer engagement of parents in the education of their children.¹

Economic aspects of the urban have taken on more complicated characteristics since the mid-1990s. One good example of this is the financial crisis in some Asian countries in 1997–98, coinciding with the drought aftermath effects of the El Nino phenomenon. The drought-reduced food harvests and, in urban consequences, the vast forest fires caused widespread air pollution and health problems. This led to greater attention to improved environmental policies in the World Bank’s framework for an Asian recovery programme (World Bank, 1998). The financial crisis was caused by a number of interacting factors (Pugh, 1999). These included fixed exchange rate regimes in countries such as Thailand at a time when the value of the US dollar was rising, balance of payments deficits, massive short-term borrowing in the private sector, a herd-like withdrawal of shortterm investment funds by foreign financiers, and large inadequacies in loaning by banks and financiers. The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) conditionalities on financial assistance added to macro-economic austerity and aggravated medium-term poverty and inequality. Subsequently, the IMF recognized that fiscal austerities should be reduced. However, in the meantime the financial crises had led to an economic crisis which, with its slowdown in economic growth, in its turn led to a social crisis in under-employment, poverty and an increase in child labour at the expense of school enrolments. The recovery programmes, with greater or lesser effectiveness, are addressing the issues in the financial, economic and social crises. More than this, the dialectics between th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Biographical Information on the Authors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Sustainable Urban Development: Some Millennial Reflections on Theory and Application
• 3 Sustainable Legal Mechanisms for the Protection of the Urban Environment
• 4 Environmental Health or Ecological Sustainability? Reconciling the Brown and Green Agendas in Urban Development
• 5 Inequalities in Urban Environments, Health and Power: Reflections on Theory and Practice
• 6 Health, Governance and the Environment
• 7 Sustainability in Squatter Settlements
• 8 The Localization of Agenda 21 and the Sustainable Cities Programme
• 9 Economic and Environmental Sustainability in Shanghai
• 10 A Millennial Perspective and Conclusions
• Index